Queen of the Demonweb Pits

arse red, and chucking her in a cage of crazed baboons! Then I'm gonna sink her neck-deep in a pond full of those little tropical fish that have a thing for the urethral tract!' Escalla tugged her long black gloves. 'No one touches the faerie!'

Everyone was staring at her. Escalla gave a big wave of her hands.

'Oh, come on! What? Just because I'm a little blonde faerie, I have to be nice?'

She jumped down, took a quick look at the horizon, and unshipped her frost wand from her back. Using it as a stick, she began drawing glowing symbols in mid air.

'Right. Scrying shield coming up! Any sign of Tielle or our skeletal friend?'

Cinders waggled his ears and replied, No sniff! No hear!

'Well, when Tielle sees this spell, she'll come running!'

Jus stood with his sword drawn, the blade turning between his fingers as he stared intently at the scrub. He was not watching for chain monks and a faerie but for something far more deadly. Escalla, circling slowly, worked quickly and professionally behind him. She opened her hands, the spell molding between her palms, and the glyphs she had drawn into the empty air flashed with power. Magic rippled away from her like a breeze, and Escalla opened her eyes and clapped her hands.

'Right! Go!'

Jus, Polk, and Henry dived into the portable hole. Escalla folded up the hole and stuffed the parcel under one arm as she swung up behind Enid's neck. She held on tight to Enid as the big sphinx flipped open her wings, gathered, and sprang powerfully up into the sky. Enid flew with big heavy beats of her wings, shoving through the air with astounding speed. Escalla clung on tight and whooped for joy. Enid was always wonderful fun to take for a fly.

Enid stayed low, weaving below the treetops as she flew for miles and miles. Any pursuers would have lost sight of her in a second. Escalla fought back Enid's billowing nest of hair braids. She managed to gain a forward view just as Enid folded sideways and dived like a falcon straight down into a river chasm. The faerie cried, half cheer and half screech of fright as Enid plummeted three hundred feet, caught herself mere inches above a river torrent, and then shot like an arrow above river rapids that jetted, foamed, and raged.

Choosing her landing place carefully, Enid landed on a rocky island in the middle of violent rapids, with twenty yards of savage white water to every side. There was timber for a fire, brush and boulders to hide in, and a clear view for miles both upstream and down. Ten miles from where she had first taken to the air, the sphinx settled down on all four big furry feet, then folded up her wings. Escalla flew up and shook out the portable hole, then threw it down onto the ground.

Peeking from the hole came Jus, who flowed out of the depths like a vast black panther with Cinders grinning from his helm. Polk was boosted up by Henry. The group nested amongst the boulders and heaved a collective sigh. Surrounded by wild rapids and by yards of thick, hard stone, there was a small sense of security.

They had no rations-no food other than a bag of flour that had been sealed up inside the equipment box in the portable hole. Cinders set a fire going, and thin pancakes were made. While they cooked, Jus found a pine tree that was leaking sap, and he brought branches of it for Cinders to suck. The hell hound lay on a rock, stuffing pinecones in his mouth and complaining bitterly about the taste, while Henry fried pancakes carefully one by one.

They ate, with the lion's share going to Enid. Still with most of his attention on keeping guard, the Justicar finally broke the silence.

'We got our arses kicked.'

It was an uncomfortable thought. Tielle had put them on the run with a single blow. The Justicar would have been killed without the fast rescue work performed by Henry, Polk, and Cinders.

The group sat, tearing at the unpalatable pancakes, while the river rapids threw up a numbing shield of noise.

Jus levered up the soil beneath their little fire and placed sticks where they could bake into charcoal: Cinders needed feeding, and his fire-breath was vital. Henry passed Jus a bundle of firewood then squatted at his side.

'Sir? Who was that… that thing?' Henry nervously fiddled with his hands. 'You knew it. You'd fought against it before…'

'I fought for it before.'

Jus knocked out Cinders's brush and curry-comb. Escalla sat on his knee, resting her face against his shoulder as the big man began brushing Cinders. The Justicar stared at Cinders's jet-black pelt as he worked.

'His name was Recca.'

Pinecones in the fire popped and crackled. Escalla took a tighter grip upon Jus's shoulder and listened in silence. The fur brush hissed as the Justicar brushed Cinders to a shine. He watched the hell hound's pelt and stared at the gleaming surface as he spoke.

'They were a good people, the Grass Runners. Elves. They lived on the plains, gathered and hunted. Good fighters-fast, clever. I was raised in a village on the borders near the Bandit Kingdoms. I used to sneak off with the Grass Runners to learn.

Their chief was old, clever, careful. He taught me how to hide and trail, track and hunt. He had a son-three hundred years old, but still his son: Recca the Swordmaster. High elves came to him-even a prince. He taught only a few of them, only the ones he saw something in, but he taught me. Took me right from the very start. I don't know why.'

The big man had let his brush glide to a halt.

'There was a brotherhood, back then, a network of rangers who patrolled the borderlands, kept the bandits in check, gathered to defend villages from raids. A noble band.' Jus's voice held a ghost of cynicism as he remembered ideals long gone. 'I wanted to be one. He put me on the path and showed me how. Even gave me the letters and the gold I needed so I could do the journey and learn.'

Jus finished his grooming. He took the loose hairs from the hell hound and put them in a little bag. It was pointless tossing them on the fire. Escalla claimed she was going to use the fur to knit flameproof underwear.

'I went south to the forest elves, learned my spells from the hermits there. Studied hand fighting when I met the monks, learned my fieldcraft from the Oleads. Went to the dwarves to learn more swordcraft, to Greyhawk to read my letters. Came back to be a ranger, but I'd been away too long. I only had-what? — a month? Only a month before the invasion came.

'First I knew of it was a fight-a pack of some kind of giant skeletal birds. I trailed them back to their base and found a whole army of Iuz rolling over the villages, then the towns. They killed everything-horses, cows, dogs, sheep in the fields, every deer in the woods, every squirrel in the trees… Cut the villagers' throats so they could animate the corpses. I started trailing the army, killing them in ones as twos best as I could. Kept at it for three months. Got in trouble, and then there was Recca, flying into them with his sword.'

The Justicar carefully tore his pancake in two and passed the largest piece to Escalla.

'He gathered about a dozen folk-rangers, Grass Runners… The Grass Runner tribes were gone, the villages dead, so we took the war to Iuz. Killed his couriers. Killed his foragers and his reinforcements. Went deep and far, right into the guts of Iuz lands. There were about a hundred of us all told, different groups, all working together.

'Iuz started to hurt. They pulled troops back from the front lines to deal with us. Set ambushes and began wearing us down. We killed a lot of them, though. Hundreds. We'd break into a camp at night and just butcher them in their sleep-slit a hundred throats and fade away…

'They got frightened of us. They'd only move in huge, marching columns-big squares with varrangoin flying overhead, or tanar'ri or a wyvern. Nothing we could do but watch and follow. Then Recca got wind of an Iuz general who was traveling with only a few zombies as guards. He wanted a general. In all the war so far, no one had ever managed to kill one of Iuz's warlords.'

Shifting his sword, Jus shrugged his huge shoulders.

'Didn't work. It was a trap. They had wights shape-shifted to look like infantry. We got cut up. Recca and I covered the retreat, but a tanar'ri got him, killed him while I was caught in a fight. I killed the tanar'ri, buried Recca, and met the survivors. There were only five of us left. They went to join another group. I stayed back and