Paul Kidd - Queen of the Demonweb Pits

CY 583

This time, it had all gone wrong.

Deep in the heart of conquered territory, a resistance war raged. Harsh, pitiless, and savage, a war without rest, without honor, without glory. A war where small bands of men made the minions of Iuz pay for their deeds in blood.

The hordes of Iuz had swept over villages, towns, and cities, obliterating those who fled from them. Men, women, children, and animals had been butchered, then raised as rotting, shambling legions of the damned. Iuz had stormed forward with his undead monsters, slaughtering everything in his path, but in the lands behind him, he had unknowingly left a cancer that gnawed at his heart.

The roving bands of freedom fighters were good at slaughter. They had been formed from the hard, silent men of the wilds, the rangers who had failed to protect the borders and the sacred wilderness, the men who had been guardians but who had been helpless against the demon hordes. The armies of Iuz had come-demons and rotting corpses covered by vast clouds of carrion flies-leaving the once-fertile lands covered in slime and ash. The armies had moved on, and behind them a scattered handful of rangers rose to fight.

They were few, and they were terrible. The homeless warriors tore into Iuz's supply columns, slaughtered his couriers, and assassinated his scouts. Blades killed sentries in the night. Wells were poisoned and roads strewn with traps. Soon it took entire regiments to escort a single messenger, and supply columns were convoyed by legions of guards. Iuz stripped troops from the conquering armies to try to stamp out the enemies within, and still the killers struck. They fought endlessly, viciously, with infinite cunning and utterly without mercy. Leaving nothing but corpses in their wake, they mutilated even their own dead to render them useless to Iuz's necromancers. They had failed to protect their own people-and now they paid for it with their suicidal struggle.

The tide had finally turned against them. Iuz had abandoned his plans of conquest to hunt for the roving bands of freedom fighters. Half their numbers had died in a few short weeks. The rest fought with ten times the fury, morning, noon, and night.

Iuz turned inward, pruning his conquering armies of men, and the humans, elves, and dwarves from the surrounding nations began to hammer the demons back, step by step. Iuz had lost the war. Exhausted, harried, and dying man by man, the freedom fighters continued to fight, knowing they had won. They had paid their debt.

These were the last days of the war, a time when a man could lay low and know that the horror soon would pass. But for some, the fight and slaughter had been sweet. There was a power that came with action, an intensity that became a drug, intoxicating and addictive.

Of all the war band leaders, the most savage, the most daring, was Recca-swordmaster and last lord of the grass elves. He had taught the art of the blade for three hundred years, taking only the most dedicated, most cunning, and most perfect students. His blade struck faster than thought, and he moved through a fight as if it were a dance. His sword, jet black with a wolf skull pommel, was sharp enough to carve a war-horse in two.

As Iuz's war ground to an end, Recca had eleven followers remaining-rangers and battle-mages hardened in this thankless war. He also had a single student, an apprentice as unlike him as iron was to silk: brooding, massive, humorless, a man who no longer had a name.

Recca was charismatic, a cavalier, dapper and sly, cunning and adored. He had taken on this apprentice because the boy looked like he had the devotion to listen and learn. Recca had taught the boy to fight, to track, to hunt, and above all to think. They had been companions through many long, silent missions-teacher and student, leader and learner. The apprentice's devotion was based on a strange sense of honor that he cherished deep inside his soul. Recca despaired of ever teaching the boy proper practicality.

Master and apprentice lay in the heather, side by side. Recca's armor, though bearing scrapes and scratches from many battles, still had a worn flamboyance about it, and his steel helmet was fashioned like a screaming eagle. Next to his master, the apprentice was in gear rugged, tested, and unadorned. Where Recca was thin and rakishly handsome with amber eyes and golden hair as soft as silk, his apprentice, almost invisible in the weeds beside him, was huge and unappealing. When they'd first met, Recca had thought the boy too big and too powerful to move in stealth, yet the human was always somehow silent as a cat. No, not a cat, a bear-dark, terrifying, and immense.

The war had taught the boy failure, hate, and emptiness. He had a stark brilliance with the sword, which Recca found annoying. No flamboyance, no style-merely a brutal, unforgiving efficiency. Recca's reputation had been founded on his brilliance, his merciless speed, and his raffish charisma. But in dark times, men looked to tireless, efficient men for comfort. Men like Recca's apprentice.

With the turning of the war, decent targets had become fewer and fewer. The only troops of Iuz to be seen were armies in retreat, and the small band of freedom fighters could do little but harry their scouts.

But here, all of a sudden, a mistake had been made. A general was bringing troops to build field fortifications. Besides the general, there would be officers and officials-and they were guarded only by shambling, rotting zombies armed with shovels and stakes. There were no abyssal bats, no demons. A general of Iuz would fall, the greatest coup achieved by any band through the entire war. Recca's reputation would be immortalized.

The war was ending, and it was time to look to the future. A new generation would be searching for heroes-for kings. As the hero of the resistance, Recca's name would ring upon a hundred thousand tongues

Recca thought the new attack would be easy, but his apprentice failed to agree. The big human studied the scattered parties of zombies digging ditches and hauling rocks. He looked at the general's tents and the few guards set on hills and ridgelines, and he drew back into cover.

"Withdraw." His voice was bass-quiet, grim, definite. "It's a trap."

The elf rolled to look at his apprentice and raised one brow. "And we know this how?"

"It smells wrong."

"What? Have you become part man, part hell hound?" Recca slid an amused sidewise glance at his apprentice. "The problem with humans is that they cannot accept being clever! There is a superiority that comes with intelligence and training. I have trained you superbly. Every movement you make is properly honed." Recca smiled. "Remember-evil may have cunning, but it never has wit or style."

It the apprentice had been a bear, he would have growled. The big man made to speak, but Recca had already slithered back down from the ridge to give orders to his men.

They collected there under cover-painted men, camouflaged and almost invisible. Eleven of them sat and listened, trusting their leader to give shape to their lives. Recca looked about the empty wilderness and filled his mind with images of his victory-his glory.

"They're coming! More Iuz vermin to kill! A general, and without an escort in sight!" The elven warlord infected his men with his confidence. "We'll slaughter a general!"

An Iuz general. The only demonic warlord to be slain in this war, and his head would fall to Recca! Recca parted the weeds and showed his men his plan for victory.

"They're fortifying this valley. That means their army is coming, so we must work fast." Recca looked the scene over with all the care of a true artist at work. "They'll survey this ridge. This is the obvious point to use as the crest of their line. So we hide, and when the general comes, we fight. I want you all to attack the workers in one group. This will draw attention to your position. I will then slay their general. We flee down the gully, here into the trees, so lay traps to kill the pursuit-usual mix. Rendezvous at broken pine an hour after dusk." He slapped his men on the shoulders and bade them go. "Good hunting!"