"Hey, Jus?" Escalla clung to his knee and looked up in concern. "Hey, come on! It's just a monster with a sword. We can outdo him!"
The Justicar sheathed Benelux. Recca was alive and revealing the hatred Jus had always pretended wasn't there. Escalla held Jus's hand and looked into his face.
"We did better this time."
"He's brilliant." The Justicar felt Recca's hate still lingering in the air. "He's as good as he always was."
"Yeah, but you're better."
Suddenly Jus could see it. He could feel the change between himself and Recca.
"Recca is too proud to change." The big ranger turned to look up into the mist. "Yes. For three hundred years, he was swordmaster and a chief of the Grass Runners. He wants his victory to prove his perfection."
Jus glanced at the pathway overhead, then turned away, his hand gripping the hilt of his sword. His other hand took Escalla's, and they walked back to their friends.
Henry spared a hard glance for the overhead fog, then peered briefly into the troll-littered room as he passed. He gave a sudden frown and held up one hand.
"Justicar, sir? Look at this!"
A neat white folder lay in the middle of the ash. The group stared at it in puzzlement. Cinders gave a sniff, paused, sniffed again, then his grin brightened.
Girlie girl smell!
"Girl?" Escalla sniffed, almost choking on smoke and carbonized troll. "What? Like a little girl?"
Big girl. Nice skin!
"There speaks the connoisseur." Escalla crept toward the folder then stroked her lich staff. It grew to the size of a broomstick. "All right, people! Let a professional handle this! Heads down!"
Enid hid outside the door. "Escalla? Do you really think you should touch it?"
"Sure we should! Hey! This is my professional opinion!" The faerie displayed her tiny skirt. "So just duck and let me do my job!"
Everyone dived for cover as Escalla flipped the folder open with her staff. No spells discharged. No poisoned needles shot out. No trap doors opened or monsters appeared. Emerging cautiously from cover, the party gathered to find Escalla holding the folder and shaking it in disappointment, as though hoping some gold and jewels might fall out.
"Hey! I think it's a map!" She tossed the folder at Jus. "All right! I solved the dungeon. Here! Find me Lolth, or I'll let Cinders lick you!"
Yuck.
Escalla leaned on the hell hound and whispered, "Don't knock it till you've tried it." She leaped onto Jus's back. "Well, am I hot or am I not?"
"You're hot." The Justicar looked at the open folder. It showed a maze of interlocking lines that seemed to be the pathways in the fog. Someone had even thoughtfully penciled in neat marks to show their initial point of entry, a dot to mark the trolls' room, and a big red X at a far point of the maze. Other places were marked with discrete red numbers-two "ones," two "twos," and two "threes." Each one was marked with a "travel" rune. Traps? Ladders? Stairs?
The map was a godsend. Too much of a godsend. It had appeared as if by magic. It all smacked of an elaborate trap. The Justicar weighed the implications in his mind then cast a careful search over the room.
The ash had been disturbed. Marks lay in long strokes-diagonally parallel. The Justicar rubbed ash between his finger and thumb.
Henry squatted at his side. "Drag marks, sir?"
"Snake. A big snake." Jus showed his student how to tell the marks by shape and distance. The ash had been compacted quite hard, which meant the snake weighed at least as much as a man. "Lolth's handmaiden."
Demons could teleport. That would explain how she entered the room even while the party fought outside its door. A layer of airborne ash had not yet settled on the folder's cover. She must have left the folder only seconds before Henry peered into the room.
Henry scratched the thin stubble of his newly sprouting beard and asked, "Why would Lolth's handmaiden give us a map?"
"If Lolth knew we were here, I would expect cruder traps than these." The Justicar breathed slow and hard. He took a piece of charred troll and passed it up to Cinders, who ate it with noisy glee. "We'll use the map, but we'll be careful." The big man put a finger on Henry's shoulder. "Very, very careful."
"Morag! We have rats! Nasty, furry little rats!"
Recharging her magic, Lolth lolled with her feet in a bath filled with the blood of a few hapless sacrifices. She had been idly planning her conquests, making slaves plant pins on her maps of the Flanaess when Morag arrived in the throne room.
Her long lashes tilting in elegant surprise, Morag poised in the door. "Magnificence?"
"Intruders, Morag. In the Demonweb. I sense something different in my home."
Morag bowed gravely. "Escapees from the prison levels, Magnificence?"
"Perhaps." Lolth carefully watched her secretary. "Morag. I do hope we have had no little break-ins from outside."
Morag spoke carefully, knowing that she played for very, very high stakes. One slip, and Lolth would command her to pull her own intestines out-slowly-yard by yard.
"Magnificence, the guards at the gates have reported no trouble."
"Have they not?"
Lolth's voice, sly and acidic, dripped with irony. She shot a sidewise glance at Morag.
"Morag, how long have you been with me?"
"One hundred and one years, three months, three days, six hours, and twenty-seven minutes, Magnificence."
"Ah. Leaving eight hundred and ninety-eight years, nine months, twenty-seven-odd days, seventeen hours and thirty-three minutes until our little arrangement comes into review." Lolth paddled her feet, lounging back in her throne. "I do so hope it is a good review, Morag."
Morag rippled her long tail. "I'm sure everything will be properly dealt with, Magnificence." Her swords clattered as she shifted her weight. "Our reentry to the pits has been normal. All guard posts were changed immediately after we docked. I have unleashed a hundred extra spiders into the Demonweb." Morag flourished an order for Lolth to sign. "Here are the hatchery reports from the spider pits. Here is the oath of allegiance from the Ixitxachltl of the Flanaess's inland sea. And here is an execution order for that priestess you thought had bigger breasts than you."
"Oh, just polymorph her into something nasty for an afternoon." Lolth signed, already bored with the procedures.
"Yes, Magnificence."
"I shall be refreshed in about ten hours, Morag, so have the stokers raise a head of steam, and get my dinner. Oh, and nothing living, this time! Not if it can speak. I don't want my appetite spoiled by another idiot trying to give me three wishes if I let him go free."
Morag bowed, her six arms spreading in obeisance, then she slithered back out of the room. Lolth sniffed a vague scent of soot upon the air, scowled, and then went back to her plans for conquest and slaughter.
18
The adventurers squatted at a bend in the path as Jus, Polk, and Henry puzzled over the new map. Letting the boys pretend to navigate, Escalla amused herself with a spider leg, tossing it off the path.
"Hey, Cinders! Fetch!"
The leg bounced. Cinders lay beside her, thump-thump-thumping his tail. Escalla gave an unhappy sigh and collected the spider leg for later.
"Are you really trying, or what?"
Cinders trying. Stick moves too fast.
"Oh, all right! I'll try to roll it slower or something. Maybe we should make it smell of coal?" Escalla looked over at her friends. "Have you guys figured out what that map means yet?"
"I think these paths are all different levels. The levels never seem to link. No one level is entirely below or above any other-all except for this top level here, where the red X is marked." The Justicar looked down a pathway and scowled. "So there's no way to communicate between levels, unless that's what's been marked here in pencil. The paired numbers on the map might be link points."