Paul Kidd - Queen of the Demonweb Pits

Lolth gave Morag a pitying little sigh. "Oh, Morag, we have scouts out on the winds! The generals have all that sort of thing in hand. Surely you trust my generals?"

Morag turned away from the window with a mutter. "I wouldn't trust them to sit the right way around on a toilet."

Eventually, she uncovered a map-or part of a map, at least. Though smudged and leaked upon, it clearly showed a city a hundred miles to the northeast. Morag shook the parchment out and slithered her coils down to the street. She would summon some dark elves and have them make clean copies-in triplicate, one set of copies to each army commander.

Morag slid past a half-eaten corpse left moldering in the street. She found a ruined house that still had curtains, and she used the cloth to wipe herself clean. As she finished, she saw a figure leaning carefully over footprints in the mud, sniffing at them like a hellish dog.

It was a figure in eagle armor. One of its feet was brand new, contrasting against its withered, mummified skin. Morag watched it go, then slithered over to join Lolth's bustling entourage. Varrangoin-huge cadaverous shapes with bat wings-crouched before the goddess as they gave their reports. The creatures scattered and beat heavily into the air as Lolth dismissed them with a wave.

Morag handed over her maps and installed herself at Lolth's side. A vast ring of tanar'ri had formed-jagged creatures that hopped and flapped, monsters with claws so hard they scored the cobblestones. These were the elite of Lolth's legions-her officers and her warlords, creatures who had slaughtered innocents in their tens of thousands.

Morag leaned close to Lolth, frowning, and whispered quietly into her mistress's ear. "Magnificence, I have seen the Eagle warrior-the undead ranger. He's back inside the city walls."

Not particularly interested, Lolth stood with her demonic generals-vast, towering beings wreathed in flames. She issued imperious orders, her body gleaming from the heat of her advisors, then turned to face her secretary with a scowl.

"What? You saw it?"

"Not a hundred yards away, Magnificence."

"Absurd! What was it doing?"

Morag gave an elegant shrug of all six shoulders. "Searching for a trail, magnificence. Unsuccessfully."

Lolth fumed, reflecting that her plans for vengeance had failed. But there was an army to muster and enemies to tame. Revenge could wait until another time. Lolth allowed slaves to clasp a cloak about her neck, then she signaled for her spider palace to be brought to the city walls.

"We'll deal with it later." Lolth's eyes were silver flame, her naked skin pure liquid ebony. "Once this little world is ours, we shall pull it apart stone by stone until we have found that faerie and her Justicar."

In a sudden explosion of rage, Lolth whipped her fist back to pulp the head of a human slave. Blood geysered, and Lolth stood, flexing her fist, eyes wild as she clenched the gore.

The fit passed. Lolth moved on, turning to make sure Morag fell in behind her.

"Well? Did you find those maps or didn't you?"

"I have maps, Magnificence."

"Then bring them to the palace!" Lolth walked through howling, shrieking ranks of servitors. "Come! We're returning to the Demonweb."

Lolth marched away. Morag signed for her clerks and followers and hastened along in Lolth's wake. Behind them, chaos broke out as the towering generals drove their troops into ranks and columns, ready to crush all of the Flanaess under her heel.

A drider-part drow and part spider-lurched along the road from Keggle Bend. The centaur creature clicked along the ground on eight long legs, cradling a crossbow pistol in its hand. Behind it on the plains, thousands of giant spiders wrapped paralyzed humans into bundles of silk. The spiders chittered and screeched as they worked-vinegaroons and scorpions dragging the prey away to stack it like cordwood beside the demon hordes.

With the armies of Lolth at its back, the spider-centaur was now far beyond fear. It wanted prey. The monster sensed something in the air-something elusive, something invisible. The creature cocked its crossbow and stalked sideways off the road. Sly and sinister, it slid to a stand of bushes to lie in wait.

The invisible something hovered, hesitated, and then suddenly backed away. The drider blundered out of the bushes in pursuit, taking aim with its crossbow.

An instant later, a section of the grass burst upward and a shining white blade smacked into the monster from behind. Headless, the creature staggered forward. Streaming soil and grass, the Justicar rose up out of the mold and hacked off the creature's arm. The crossbow fell to the ground and fired uselessly into the dirt. Jus let the headless body stagger through the bushes and die. No other monsters were close enough to care. He stripped the corpse of its case of crossbow bolts and threw them to Henry, who rose from hiding in the grass. In the air between, there was a pop as Escalla became visible again.

"That eight-legged bastard could see me!" The faerie was indignant. Invisibility was a faerie's pride and joy. "How'd the creep manage that?"

"Spiders sense vibration." Jus inspected a pot of viscous green liquid he'd found on the drider's belt and threw it to Henry. "Arrow poison. Here!"

Still in a huff, Escalla fluttered with her arms folded tight. "Oh, great. How am I supposed to infiltrate and spy?"

Emerging from the portable hole, Polk and Enid crept out to stare at the ruined town in the far distance. Giant spiders crawled all over the landscape, like a scene ripped out of a nightmare. Over the town, the grotesque shapes of flying tanar'ri spread an aura of dread. Enid blinked, her face beneath her freckles turning pale.

"Oh, dear. All those poor people."

The Justicar rose, Cinders's teeth streaming sulfurous smoke and flames. "The best we can offer them is to obliterate Lolth."

The hellish legions on the mudflats below were gathering into mobs and columns. Lolth's generals were about to march, spreading the massacre and terror out into all the Flanaess. The adventurers fell flat amongst the bushes as abyssal bats swept overhead, their hunting cries chilling the very air.

There were tanar'ri in their hundreds-some thirty feet tall and wreathed in flames, others human sized and hopping like mad insects, the grass beneath them dying where they walked. The fields boiled and surged with giant spiders and scorpions. Titanic black widows and tarantulas the size of elephants thudded along beside the animated corpses of giants and writhing carpets of carnivorous worms. Somewhere in the middle of all these beings was Lolth, the mistress of the drow.

Polk wrinkled his snout in thought. "Son? Have you ever considered the advantages of issuing a heroic challenge? A duel in the sun! Man to goddess! Your blade, flesh, and bone against her mighty spells?"

Escalla kept her eyes on the shrieking, wheeling, battling mobs of monsters on the plains as she replied, "Polk, we were thinking more along the lines of stabbing her in the bladder in her sleep."

"Oh."

The spider goddess's armies were being reinforced. The magic circle made from butchered corpses acted as a planar gate, and a multitude of screeching, filthy beings were shambling out of the circle and forming into ranks. The Justicar watched from cover, lying with Escalla at his side.

"A gate to the Abyss?"

"Yeah. Those critters there are called manes." Escalla was the resident expert. Her people had lived amongst the outer planes. "Must have come straight from the Abyss. Slow and stupid. So that's our way in."

In the heart of the crushed, smoking ruins of Keggle Bend, Lolth's spider palace loomed like a behemoth. The metal of its structure looked like brass, yet it shimmered with fleeting images as though it were somehow alive. The palace crouched above shattered temples and roofs, towering a hundred feet high. The jaws formed a ramp guarded by demons-a gateway into Lolth's private home.