by Kate Novak
Holly eyed the third cultist, who lay unconscious by the wall. As a paladin, she believed that vanquished foes should be spared. As an escaping prisoner, she realized he was an alarm waiting to go off and an evil foe who would have handed her to back to Xvim’s people for sacrifice. She watched uneasily as Jas slit his throat, but said nothing.
Jas wiped her blade off on a cultist’s leather tunic.
Holly retrieved a weapon for herself, though she had to use it in her left hand. Her right arm was already bruised and swollen around the mark left by the cultist’s teeth. One tooth had broken the skin, which might have alarmed Holly, but she knew her god would preserve her from any disease the cultist carried.
After grabbing up her cloak, Jas snapped, “Let’s go!”
Jas took the lead, but since she’d been unconscious when the cultists had brought her to the cell, she had to take directions from Holly. As they moved down the corridor, they were assailed by the sickly sweet stench of decaying flesh. Holly remembered it came from a large room through which her captives had dragged her on the way to the cell. At the first intersection, Holly pointed in the direction of the awful smell.
Jas wrinkled her nose and raised her eyebrows. Then she spun about the corner, her sword at the ready. She motioned to the paladin that the way was clear and the two continued on. The passage opened out into a vast room.
Holly and Jas stood on either side of the corridor, peering into the room for any foes. Piles of bones littered the room, some with flesh still clinging to them. Not all of them were animal bones, and Holly felt her stomach churn yet again.
Someone was holding a whispered conversation in the room. Neither woman could spot the speakers, but they could hear them as they approached. With a quick beating of her wings, Jas leapt up to the stone ledge over the passageway exit. Holly was just about to back away when she recognized Joel creeping along the wall just around the corner.
The paladin whispered the bard’s name and rushed toward him. The bard smiled broadly and threw his arms about the paladin.
“I guess you don’t need me to rescue you, do you?” Joel asked, noting the paladin had already managed to arm herself.
Holly pulled away from the bard, suddenly uneasy. She peered at the cloaked figure behind him and glared at her. “Who is this?” she hissed.
“Um, this is Walinda of Bane,” the bard said, grabbing at the paladin’s arm before she tried anything rash. “She’s helping us escape. We’ve made a truce—just until we get out of here.”
“Joel, how could you?” the paladin growled, raising her sword before the priestess. “This woman is a monster.”
“Holly, she helped me find you,” the bard explained. “I promised her you would honor the truce.”
Holly drew back, never taking her eyes off the priestess.
“We have found your friend. Now we must hurry if we are to escape before dawn,” Walinda whispered. “The griffon stables are that way,” she said, pointing to a staircase.
Joel started moving toward the stairs, pulling Holly with him. He turned to watch Walinda’s progress behind them.
“Joel, listen,” the paladin hissed, jerking away from the bard. “There is another—”
Joel never heard the rest of Holly’s words. He watched in horror as a harpy with a drawn sword came swooping down on the party.
The bard threw himself at Walinda, knocking her to the ground before she was skewered by their attacker.
Joel scrambled back to his feet and drew his sword. In the large, high-ceilinged room, the harpy had just enough space to swoop around in a circle and make a second attack run on them. Joel raised his weapon, but then he recognized the attacker. It was the winged woman Walinda had offered to the Banites.
Behind him, he could hear Walinda muttering a spell. Confused and uncertain, Joel nonetheless kept his vow and stood guard over the priestess. Blue lines of power streaked from Walinda’s palms and arced about the winged woman’s sword.
The winged woman cried out in rage and dropped her weapon. The blade made an alarming ringing sound on the stone floor. Joel lowered his own weapon, but the winged woman kept on coming, swooping past the bard and landing on the priestess. In an instant, she had wrapped her hands about Walinda’s small throat.
With one hand, Walinda grabbed at her attacker’s thumbs while the other hand clawed at her face, drawing blood.
Joel was about to put a sword to the winged woman’s throat when Holly slammed into him.
“No! Jas is an ally!” the paladin declared.
Joel looked down at the two women brawling on the floor. Now he realized that it must have been Holly who had repaired the damage done to the winged woman. They needed to reach a compromise quickly.
“Then help me pull her off Walinda, and I’ll keep Walinda away,” he said.
Together the paladin and the bard managed to pull Jas from the priestess’s throat. Joel shoved himself between the two, holding back Walinda, trusting Holly to keep the winged woman from attacking him.
“I take it you two have met,” the bard said. He kept his voice calm, despite his worry that the noise of the battle might have awakened other cultists, or worse, alerted the eye tyrant.
“Murderess!” Jas hissed once Holly had helped her to her feet.
“Ah, Pigeon Girl,” Walinda taunted. She stood up and rubbed the bruises about her throat. To Joel, she said, “Is this the measure of your protection, Poppin?”
“Enough,” Joel snapped. “I made a pact with Walinda,” he explained to the winged woman.
“You’re a fool to trust her!” Jas growled. “You should kill her before she betrays us to the cultists.”
“She won’t do that,” Joel argued. “She was a prisoner, too. She helped me find Holly.”
“How?” Holly asked suspiciously.
“I used a spell to detect goodness,” Walinda replied, addressing only Holly, ignoring Jas completely. “In this place, your quaint purity stands out like an ogre at a halfling picnic.”
“It’s some trick,” Holly insisted. “Bane is dead. She can’t call on him for spells.”
“For my part,” Walinda said, now speaking only to Joel, “I am prepared to include this winged deformity in our bargain, if only for expediency’s sake, even though I know I cannot trust her with my life.”
“You have no one but yourself to blame,” Holly retorted angrily. “You murdered her friends.”
“Cut it out!” Joel cried, and his voice echoed through the large room, startling all three women. “If you all don’t stop arguing, I’ll just go back to my cell, where at least there was some peace and quiet.” Joel couldn’t tell which made him more nervous, the glare of hatred Jas gave him or the mocking, chastened bow of Walinda’s head. “We are all going the same way,” he said. “We need to stick together for safety.”
Holly sighed and nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Walinda began climbing the stairs and the bard followed.
“You will have your chance to bring her to justice as soon as we escape,” Holly whispered to Jas.
Jas breathed out heavily, as if venting her fury and frustration. She gave the paladin a curt nod and motioned for her to go next. The winged woman took up the rear guard, her fists still clenched in rage.
The landing at the top of the stairs led to three other sets of stairs. An especially steep set led down into the darkness. A breeze wafted upward, laden with the odor of a menagerie.
“The griffons are stabled below,” Walinda explained.
“Yes, I’ve got my bearings now,” Joel replied.
“I can’t believe they haven’t posted any guards,” Holly muttered.
“They feel too secure in the unassailability of their flying fortress with their Zhentarim allies below,” Walinda noted. She pulled out her magical light gem and started down the steps. Joel pulled out his own magically lit stone and followed, careful to keep himself between the priestess and Jas. A push down these step
s could result in more than a serious injury.
In the stable below, four griffons lay sleeping with their heads tucked beneath their wings. Each one was shackled by a chain running from a ring in the floor to a heavy iron band about one of its front legs.
Joel tiptoed past the beasts over to the hole in the floor that the griffon riders used as a doorway to the Temple in the Sky. He peered down. A few torches twinkled on the roof of the Flaming Tower, but it took his eyes some time to adjust to the rest of the dark landscape below. Far to the south, a dark ribbon glittered in the moonlight.
“That should be the River Tesh,” Holly said, pointing out the body of water to Jas. “We’ll want to head upstream, toward Daggerdale,” she explained.
An awful squawk rose from behind them, and they whirled around. Walinda had approached the griffons and awakened them. She held a bucket of chopped meat in her hands, but the creatures were too alarmed by her strangeness to accept food from her. They snapped at the priestess’s face with their beaks. Walinda backed away hurriedly. Were it not for the chains on their legs, the griffons might have torn her apart in moments.
The creatures’ shrieks and cries echoed through the chamber, and no doubt rose up the staircase. Walinda held up an iron symbol of Bane’s hand and intoned some unknown words, but the griffons’ clamoring only increased. The priestess looked annoyed, but she continued chanting her spell just out of reach of the creatures’ beaks.
Holly rushed to Walinda’s side and yanked her away from the griffons. “Stop it,” she ordered. “You’re going to bring the whole house down on us!”
Walinda spun angrily on the paladin. “We need to subdue these creatures to escape,” she retorted.
“No we don’t,” Holly argued. “Jas can carry us one at a time.”
“She would drop me the first chance she had,” Walinda said, tossing the bucket of meat at the griffons.
“Like that,” Jas agreed, snapping her fingers.
Joel approached the winged beasts, singing the calming spell that had worked so well on Butternut, but to no avail. The griffons were immune to any magic that affected ordinary beasts. They continued shrieking. Joel stepped back. “We’ve got to get out of here fast,” he murmured, “before they send someone to check on the griffons.”
Walinda tugged at his sleeve. “I cannot trust Pigeon Girl with my life. You vowed to help me escape from here,” she reminded him.
“Poor Banebitch,” Jas taunted. “She can’t get down from this rock.”
“You don’t get down from a rock, you get down from a goose,” Joel retorted automatically. Then he remembered his vision and the wings he’d found. He drew the golden talisman out of his tunic pocket and held it up for the others to see.
“Ahh … a feather token,” Jas said. “Haven’t seen one of those in a while.”
“What does it do?” Holly asked.
“You throw it to the ground,” Jas explained, “and you grow wings. You can use it only once.”
“I can carry you,” Joel said to Walinda, “and Jas can carry Holly.”
From somewhere above them came human shouts.
“To the hole! Hurry!” Jas shouted, grabbing Holly’s arm and pulling her in that direction.
Joel followed, with Walinda right behind. At the edge of the hole, he hesitated. “I just throw it to the ground?”
“The floor will do,” Jas explained. “It would take a little too long to get to the ground.
Joel threw the talisman to the floor. The wings shattered with a tiny flash. Then a golden light blossomed from the broken magic item, bathing Joel’s body in a rich radiance. When the glow had faded, Joel had a pair of great butterfly wings jutting from his back. They were yellow, with black striations, fully three times the size of Jas’s.
“There’s something else I should explain about these magical wings,” Jas said as she shouldered Walinda aside to stand before Joel.
“What?” the bard asked.
Jas put her hands on the bard’s chest. “You can use them to glide downward, but you can’t fly back up with them. Once you start down, there’s no coming back,” she said, and then she gave Joel a hard shove backward.
The bard fell through the hole and plummeted downward into the dark sky.
Joel started to scream, but the wings spread out from his body, controlled by some subconscious instinct. The magical appendages checked the speed of his descent, and he began drifting like a dandelion seed. After taking a deep breath and letting his air out, he regained his self-control.
The bard discovered that, by twitching his shoulders, he could control his direction, but just as Jas had said, he could not regain lost altitude. The winged woman had prevented him from honoring his vow to help the priestess of Bane escape.
He craned his neck to see the hole in the floor of the Temple in the Sky. By the feeble light of the waning moon, he soon saw what he’d expected to see—Jas soaring away from the flying rock, carrying Holly. There was no sign of Walinda.
Joel wondered if the giants on the tower would spot them, and if the cultists would mount the griffons and pursue the prisoners. He also began to worry that he might just end up landing on top of the tower, or so near it that he would be quickly recaptured.
Able to control her flight, Jas soon caught up to the bard. Holly’s arms and legs were wrapped around the winged woman’s neck and waist. Jas wasn’t able to hover beside Joel, but she flew under him and then up, trailing her legs.
“Grab hold,” Holly shouted.
Joel reached out and snagged the strap of one of Jas’s boots. He felt his stomach lurch backward, but his wings held and the rest of his body remained intact. Jas pulled him along as easily as a child played a kite on a string. The winged woman headed southwestward along the edge of the Border Forest, keeping the River Tesh to her left as Holly had instructed.
Joel looked back, scanning the sky for pursuit from the Temple in the Sky. He thought he saw dark specks issuing from beneath the great flying rock, but in the blackness, it was hard to be sure. Then the bard spotted something much larger, something he recognized without any trouble.
It was Walinda’s floating ship, the one in which she’d traveled to the tower. Now, however, the ship was flying, moving upward toward the Temple in the Sky. Just as it drew near the base of the flying rock, Jas flew into a low bank of clouds, obscuring the bard’s view.
Joel puzzled over what he had just witnessed. Had Walinda summoned the vessel somehow? But if she could do that, then why make a pact with him, and why had she seemed willing to risk flying on the griffons?
Unless she hadn’t realized the ship would come for her. Was it possible, Joel wondered, that Bane had found another way to rescue her?
Seven
HUNTED
Joel had no notion how far they traveled, but by the time Jas began to descend, the sky was beginning to lighten. Below them was a meadow adjacent to the Border Forest. Upon Jas’s instructions, Joel released his hold on the winged woman’s bootstrap when they were still a good twenty feet above the ground. Jas landed, dropped Holly, and sank to the ground. Between carrying Holly’s weight and towing me, she has to be exhausted, the bard realized. He was worn out merely from hanging on and being buffeted by the wind.
He drifted downward. The instant his feet touched the earth, the magical wings on his back dissolved, leaving only aching shoulder muscles as a reminder of their previous existence. From here on, he and Holly would have to walk. What Jas would do was up to her.
The bard strode up to the winged woman. “Look,” he said, looming over her, “I’m grateful for the help you’ve given us, but you shouldn’t have done that.”
“Done what?” Jas asked, not even looking up at him.
“Pushed me out of the Temple in the Sky,” Joel retorted.
Jas looked up at the bard as if he were a fool. She yawned.
“Well?” Joel prompted, expecting a reply.
“If you’re expecting an apology,” Jas said
with a laugh, “you’re going to be disappointed.”
“You abandoned Walinda,” Joel growled. “You left her there to die.”
“What makes you think I didn’t run her through before I left?” Jas asked.
Joel’s eyes widened in shock.
“We didn’t harm her, Joel,” Holly reassured the bard. “We just shoved her aside and flew off without her.”
“And somehow that’s supposed to be better?” Joel argued.
“Depends how much the cultists make her suffer,” Jas said with a smirk. “A quick death would be too good for her.”
“We had a pact,” Joel snapped angrily.
Jas rose to her feet and stood no more than a foot from the bard. She was no taller than Walinda, but her body was tough and muscular. She’d seen some hard times—there were scars on her shoulders, her throat, her jaw. She was Joel’s senior by a few years, at least, and the annoyance on her face made her appear even older.
Everything about her—her strength, her toughness, her age—intimidated Joel. He thought of the priestess of Bane, who appeared so young and delicate and vulnerable, although he knew she was none of those things. “I promised Walinda my protection,” he added.
“I don’t give a damn what you promised,” Jas replied slowly and coolly. “She tortured and murdered the members of my crew one by one. She made me watch. There was nothing I could do or say to stop her. Then she began torturing me. If she thought it would please her god, she’d do the same to you. Your paladin friend saved my life. I owed her a rescue, and I pay my debts. If not for that, I might have stayed behind and risked being recaptured just for the chance to finish off your precious Walinda.”
Joel hesitated, considering Jas’s words.
“Look, kid,” the winged woman added, “it was a stupid promise. You’re lucky I made it impossible for you to keep it. You’re welcome.”
Joel bristled at the woman’s patronizing tone. “She helped me find a way out of there, helped me find Holly,” he said. “I owed her a debt, too.”