"Paul Kidd - Queen of the Demonweb Pits" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kidd Paul)

Queen of the

Demonweb

Pits

Paul Kidd

The BeginningтАж

CY583

. 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
comeтАФ demons and rotting corpses covered by vast clouds of carrion fliesтАФleaving 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 assas-sinated his scouts. Blades killed sentries in the night. Wells were poisoned and
roads strewn with traps. Soon it took entire regi-ments to escort a single messenger, and supply columns
were con-voyed 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 infi-nite 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 pro-tect their own peopleтАФand now they
paid for it with their suici- dal 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