by Kate Novak
Emilo shook his head with confusion. The bard had left in such a hurry that he'd left the finder's stone lying on the carpet. The kender was just about to wake Jas when it occurred to him that the winged woman might be better off left sleeping. Instead, he scooped all the party's gear into the center of the flying carpet. Then, with the finder's stone clutched in his hands, he ordered the carpet to fly after the terrified bard and paladin.
Joel ran pell-mell down the canyon, heedless of whether Emilo and Jas were following or were left behind and equally heedless of what lay ahead. He tripped over something metallic and sprawled across the rocky ground.
Joel rose to his hands and knees and looked around, A plume of molten lava shot into the sky on the slope overhead, and by its light, Joel was able to see what had impeded his flight. Holly lay on the ground nearby, unconscious but breathing.
A moment later something pounced heavily on Joel's back and sent him sprawling again. When he looked up, he was face-to-snout with a growling wild dog with glowing red eyes and horrible breath.
"N-N-Nice doggie," the bard whispered cautiously. He debated in his mind whether he should back away slowly or flee outright. His courage returned to him, however, and he held his ground, unwilling to abandon Holly to this beast. Before his eyes, the dog transformed into a giant humanoid with a flat face, broad nose, pointed ears, and sharp teeth and fangs. It resembled some sort of overgrown goblin, except its skin had a strange purplish color. It raised a huge fist covered in a spiked gauntlet.
Joel could feel his heart racing, and a surge of energy rushed through his body. He ducked, but not fast enough. The gauntlet struck him in the side of the head with the force of a heavy club. Aware that his life depended on it, Joel spent several moments fighting against the darkness trying to claim him. In the end, he lost.
When he regained consciousness, the bard found himself lying on his stomach, his feet and his knees bound together and his hands tied behind his back. Holly lay beside him, similarly trussed with what appeared to be torn strips of blue fabric. The paladin was awake now, glaring at their captor.
About twenty feet away, seated beside a bubbling pool of lava, was the giant goblin who'd hit him. It was tearing strips of cloth from Joel's cloak and dangling them over the lava. When a strip caught fire, the barghest would shake it until it was about to burn his fingers, then drop it in the lava pool, where the cloth made a brilliant flash before finally incinerating completely.
"What's happening?" the bard whispered.
"We've been captured," Holly whispered back.
"I can see that," Joel muttered. "By what? I seem to have misplaced my Volo's guide to Gehenna."
"It's a barghest," Holly explained. "Remember? Finder mentioned them when he was telling us about Gehenna. They can shapeshift into wild dogs."
Joel recalled the last words Finder spoke in his dream. "Barghests use fear," he quoted.
"Yes," Holly said. "They can cast several different spells, including those to effect the emotions of their prey. This one must have cast magic to make us fear our own campsite. I was so afraid that I abandoned you and Jas and Emilo and fled right into a snare. Then something bashed me on the head."
"Me, too," Joel acknowledged. Even with Finder's warning, he hadn't managed to see through the barghest's trick. "Except I tripped on you before getting smashed in the head. What else do you know about barghests?" he asked the paladin, hoping to learn something that might help free them.
"They leave their young in the Realms to forage for themselves. The young tend to live with goblins. The immature barghests eat people, preferably heroes. That's how they grow in strength. There was one terrorizing travelers around Daggerdale a year or so ago. I was with the party that hunted it down. According to Elminster, when they gain enough power, barghests return to Gehenna, but sometimes they return sooner, before they're ready, if they're fireballed in their canine form. I think that's what happened to this one. It's not as tall as most of them and its skin isn't quite all blue. That's how you tell when a barghest is mature."
A great wolflike dog appeared out of the darkness and immediately transformed into another barghest. The second barghest sat down beside the first. This creature, like the first, was about seven feet tall with purplish skin. "Lucky us," the bard murmured. "There's two of them, but they're not fully grown."
The barghests made growling sounds at each other, speaking in a language Joel did not know.
Holly smiled suddenly. "Emilo took off on the carpet with Jas. They weren't captured."
Joel gave a sigh of relief. He'd been feeling guilty about abandoning the pair, but they were probably safer than he. "You can understand the barghests?" he asked the paladin.
Holly nodded. "A little," she said. "They're arguing about who gets which one of us."
"This might be a good time to break the harps Finder gave us and go back to Fermata," Joel said.
"Probably," Holly agreed. "Can you reach your harp?"
Joel wriggled in his bindings. "Um… no."
"Me either," Holly said.
Suddenly, from the outer ridge of the canyon, someone shouted, "Hey, dog-breath!"
"It's Emilo!" Joel whispered excitedly. He craned his neck, trying to get a glimpse of the kender, hoping to warn him away.
Emilo stood alone on the ridge, the finder's stone shining at his feet. He held his thumbs up to his temples and wriggled his fingers at the barghests. "Why don't you go back to your doggie shapes? Then you could round up some sheep."
The barghests rose to their feet. One moved farther down the canyon, while the other began to move toward Emilo.
"Isn't mutton your favorite meat?" the kender shouted. "But tough to catch, I bet. Those sheep are smart. Why, their brains must be two, three times larger than the ones in your thick skulls."
The barghest moving toward Emilo growled.
"I sure hope he knows what he's doing," Holly muttered. "That second one is sneaking off to come up behind him."
"Don't forget, Jas is out there somewhere, too," the bard said. He rolled over, sat up, and began wriggling toward the pool of lava.
"Joel, be careful," Holly whispered. "What are you doing?"
"Most monsters agree that there's no meat sweeter than kender," Emilo said chattily. "Unfortunately kender are just about the cleverest game around, so there's no chance you two will ever be able to judge for yourselves. Unless you find a dead one lying around somewhere. Not above eating carrion, are you?"
The barghest howled and began scrambling up the slope toward Emilo.
Joel sat with his back to the pool of lava and wriggled his hands and fingers until the knot in the bindings covered his left wrist. Then he leaned backward carefully. If he lost his balance, he'd be parboiled, ring of fire protection or no. Very slowly, he began lowering his wrists toward the molten rock a quarter of an inch at a time.
The heat was almost more than he could stand, but the bard did not withdraw. He continued to lower his hands until he heard a sizzling sound. Not until a searing pain shot up his arms did Joel jerk forward away from the lava pool. He began tugging on his bindings, struggling wildly.
The pain was excruciating.
Suddenly he felt the bindings snap, and Joel jerked his hands forward. His left wrist was free, but flaming fabric still encased his right wrist. The bard grabbed the remains of his cloak, which the barghest had left by the pool, and used it to smother the fire. Whimpering from the pain, Joel used his teeth to tear the last bit of the blackened fabric from his burnt flesh.
"You know, there's a nice dead slasrath around here somewhere," Emilo was saying to the barghest as it clawed its way up the steep slope. "It looks like a giant winged worm. A real gully dwarf treat, worms, and easy to catch, too. You might like it for breakfast."
With an enraged bellow, the barghest clamored up the last few feet of slope and lunged at the kender.
Emilo glided backward, riding on the magic carpet, until he disappeared from view. The barghes
t teetered on the edge of the ridge, growling and snarling. At that moment, Jas soared out of the darkness, coming up behind the barghest with one of Winnie's backpacks swaying beneath her. The pack hit the creature in the head with a thunk. The barghest stumbled, then tumbled down the other side of the ridge.
For several long seconds, they could hear the monster's anguished cries. Then the screams ceased abruptly.
Emilo brought the flying carpet swooping down near Joel and Holly.
"Hurry!'' the paladin cried. "The other one could return any moment."
There was a shimmer in the air beside the pool of lava as a magical doorway opened onto the barghests' campsite. The second barghest stepped out from the shining portal. Joel tossed his tattered cloak in the barghest's face and raced toward the carpet.
From the sky plummeted another backpack, which struck the barghest square in the head. Rocks spilled out of the pack as the creature fell to its knees, howling and clutching its head.
Joel hurled himself onto the carpet, pulling Holly behind him. The paladin was armored in heavy plate mail, but the bard managed to drag her over the edge and onto the carpet. Joel could feel his injured wrists and hands throbbing. Holly rolled into the middle of the carpet, and Joel shouted, "Go! Go!"
Quickly Emilo ordered the carpet to rise twenty feet.
"Backward, quickly!" Holly shouted as the barghest took a leap into the air and levitated upward toward them.
The barghest clawed at the carpet, managed to grab at the fringe, and found itself being pulled along by the retreating carpet. Jas swooped out of the darkness, flying alongside the creature. She hacked at the monster's hand with her sword, and the barghest instinctively released his hold on the carpet.
The barghest hung motionless in the air, growling at them.
"It can levitate, but it can't fly," Holly said. "Better move away before it tries something else."
A howl echoed in the canyon as the first barghest also stepped from a magical door beside the pool of lava.
"I wasn't planning on hanging around, I assure you," Emilo retorted. He slowed the carpet just enough for Jas to settle down beside them, then continued the ascent up the mountain.
Once Jas had cut Holly free, the paladin laid her hands gently on Joel's burned wrist and used her gift of healing to soothe the pain. The scars were terrible to look at, but at least the bard hadn't lost the mobility of his wrists.
"Your ring of fire protection didn't do much good," Jas noted.
"The rings can only protect you from so much heat," Holly said. "Joel nearly dipped his wrists in molten lava. If it weren't for that ring, he wouldn't have any hands left."
"The important thing is we're all right," Joel said. He looked at Jas and Emilo. "Thanks to you two."
Jas shook her head. "Thank Emilo. He's the one who had the foresight to fly off before I could wake up and get scared, too."
"Finder tried to warn me," Joel said. "I wasn't paying enough attention." "Finder warned you? How?" Holly asked., "In a vision, when I was sleeping. He said the barghests use fear. And before that, he said we had to find Beshaba and take her to the Spire."
"Oh, great," Jas muttered. "First Holly has visions. Now Joel's getting them. How do you know it wasn't just a dream?" the winged woman demanded.
"He knew about the barghests," Joel pointed out. Unable to argue with that fact, Jas threw up her hands. "Fine. We go find Beshaba, even if it takes us a century to find her in this hellhole. Then we take her to the Spire, presumably not against her will, since that's a little hard to do with goddesses."
"What's the Spire?" Emilo asked curiously. 'The Spire is the mount in the center of the Outlands," Holly explained. It lies just beneath the ring that holds the city of Sigil."
"Why do you think we're supposed to take her to the Spire?" the kender asked.
Joel shrugged. "It wasn't really clear in my dream. 1 asked, but Finder didn't have time to answer before Holly ran off and you woke me up."
"The Spire is a neutral ground for the gods to parley," Holly explained. "Rumor has it that even the most powerful of the gods are unable to cast magic there."
"Why do we have to take Beshaba there?" Jas wondered.
"Perhaps Selune has sensed that Iyachtu's magic has finally made Beshaba unconscious, like Tymora," Joel speculated. "Finder wouldn't have asked us to do something he knew would be impossible," the bard reasoned.
"Is this Finder, the god of reckless fools, we're talking about here?" Jas asked sarcastically.
"So we have to keep searching for Walinda," Holly said with a grim look.
Joel nodded. He took up the finder's stone from the jumble of gear on the carpet and thought once again of the evil priestess.
Once again the light arced upward, but now its beam curved back down to earth closer to their location.
"Not more than a few miles," Emilo judged. "Your friend Walinda isn't far off now." "She's not our friend," Jas snapped.
"Sorry," Emilo replied, chastened.
"We're lucky, though," Holly said. "While Chamada isn't infinite like most Outer Planes, scholars believe that it's still hundreds of miles high. We could have been traveling and searching for Walinda for days if Selune's portal hadn't transported us to where it did."
"Oddly enough, I don't feel lucky," Jas murmured.
Feeling more alert since he'd had some sleep, Joel was prepared to take over flying the carpet so Holly and Emilo could get some rest. Emilo had no trouble whatsoever falling asleep on the flying carpet, but Holly couldn't seem to get comfortable. She lay awake, staring up into the darkness, until she reminded Joel of an owl. "I'm so hot, she sighed.
As the carpet soared ever higher up the mountain slope, Joel started singing a silly lullaby about goblins who put ice on the toes of sleeping girls in the middle of winter.
"Are you crazy?" Jas asked. "Do you want everyone to hear us coming?"
"Why not?" Joel retorted. "I'm tired of creeping around like a mouse. A little whistling in the graveyard might do us good."
"Actually, that may not be a bad idea," the paladin said. They say a lot of creatures in Gehenna bluff their way to power. You just have to bluff better than they do."
"Bluffing," Jas gasped in mock shock. "Isn't that like lying? Are paladins allowed to do that?"
"Really, Jas, your notions of paladins are so old-fashioned," Holly said. "We're honest, not stupid. If some evil creature is prepared to believe I'm more powerful than he is, why should I disabuse him of the notion?"
"Especially when you're traveling in the company of the awesomely powerful, favored priest of the god of reckless fools," Joel said.
"Exactly," Holly agreed.
Jas snorted with amusement. "I'm tempted to say, You'll learn better when you're older,' but with that attitude, you aren't likely to get much older."
Joel began singing "The Circle Song," a folk song about a boy who grows to be a man who woos and wins his true love, then has lots of children who all grow up to woo and win their true loves. He sang just loudly enough to entertain Holly, but quietly enough so as not to disturb Emilo. When he began the lullaby again, Holly finally drifted off to sleep.
Jas took over flying the carpet while Joel prayed for new spells. When the bard was finished praying, he read through the new scrolls Winnie had packed for them. Since they'd lost a backpack during Jas's attack on the barghest, Joel repacked their equipment, leaving out some of the equipment they would be less likely to use, such as blankets and tarps. He wrapped all the scrolls in a scarf, which he fastened to his belt. The healing potions he slipped into a vest pocket.
They began to fly over more violent sections of the slope. Steam and rock and ash, even molten lava, spewed up from secondary cones on the mountain slope. They had to stay especially vigilant to avoid these hazards. While dodging one eruption, the carpet jerked upward suddenly, and Holly sat bolt upright. At first Joel thought she'd been wakened by the jolt, but then he saw she was drenched in sweat and shaking uncontrolla
bly. "Another vision?" he asked her softly. The paladin nodded, but she didn't look happy. She stared out over the violent land beneath them without speaking.
"What's wrong, Holly?" the bard whispered anxiously. "What did Lathander say? Is Tymora worse? Is it about Beshaba? What?"
"No," the paladin said shaking her head. Tears ran down her cheeks. "Lord Lathander said that in order to bring Beshaba to him, I'm supposed to offer my aid to that… that woman," she spat.
"You mean Walinda?" Joel asked. Holly nodded wordlessly.
"Oh." Joel put an arm around Holly's shoulders and held her gently.
"I don't understand," the paladin sobbed. "I've always served Lathander well. Why do I have to work with that awful woman? She makes me sick. She's horrid. I should have let Jas kill her when she had the chance. She betrayed her people. She betrayed us. She betrayed the Sensates."
Joel sighed. "Well, fortunately, she also betrayed Bane."
Holly sniffed. "Do you think she might betray Beshaba?"
Joel shrugged. "When she was a priestess of Bane, she pursued power with a vengeance. That was her religion. If she's still in that frame of mind, she could just be using Beshaba. It's food for thought anyway," he said.
As if the mention of food had disturbed his sleep, Emilo rolled over, yawned, and asked, "What's for breakfast?"
Everything in the pack was warm-the water, the bread, the fruit-which would have been fine were the adventurers not already sweltering. Joel tried to conjure an image in his mind of a crisp, cool apple plucked from a tree on a frosty fall morning, but the apples in the pack were closer to becoming apple sauce. Even the magical berries had become the consistency of jam, though they still left one feeling nourished.
Joel held out the finder's stone again and thought of Walinda. The beam of light shot into a canyon somewhere above them. Joel estimated they would reach it within the hour. He slid the stone back inside his shirt.
They were all nervous now except for Emilo, who hung his head over the carpet, wide-eyed at the sight of towering sprays of lava and boulders being tumbled about in rivers of magma.