Finder's Bane - Kate Novak [11]
Holly nodded.
"I take it you don't want the Banites to spot us leaving the road and entering the dell," Joel guessed.
"That's right," Holly replied. "The trail leading there is hidden. If you know where to look, it's not hard to find, so we try not to draw attention to it."
When the last pilgrim Banite had crested the far hi and disappeared, Holly began walking Butternut down the trail. Joel followed with the Zhentarim mount. Holly kept her gaze fixed on the far hill, not taking any chances in case the followers of Bane had kept a watch behind them.
At the bottom of the hill, alongside the road, was a field of poppies and daisies. In the center of the field stood a small stone shrine. A sheaf of wheat was engraved on the stone over the shrine's entrance-an ancient symbol of the goddess Chauntea, the earth-mother. Like many shrines to Chauntea, this one housed a natural spring, and a stream flowed from the shrine across the field to the trail and then through a stone culvert beneath the trail. At the moment there was nothing more than a trickle of water in the streambed.
"Something's wrong," Holly murmured.
"What?" Joel asked.
"It's the shrine spring," she explained. She tied Butternut's lead rope to a sapling, and Joel did likewise with his mount. He followed Holly up the streambed toward the shrine, wishing she weren't in the lead. He didn't have to know a lot about Banites to know they held a lot of animosity for Chauntea and weren't above desecrating her shrines.
Something large and black lay across the doorway to the shrine, and water was pooling up behind it. There was something vaguely familiar about the shape, which made Joel uncomfortable.
Holly drew her sword and approached the shape cautiously, but some inner sense told Joel whatever the thing was, it was dead, and the bard strode up ahead of the paladin. He set his hands on the corpse's shoulder and rolled it toward them. Water gushed out from the shrine, pouring over the dead thing and Joel's boots. The creature was naked and quite evidently male.
"This is the thing I saw on the Banites' ship," Joel explained. "They had it bound to the bow, and since it wasn't moving, I thought it was a figurehead, a statue. I guess it was just dead. I hope it was just dead."
Holly reached down and touched the creature's neck. "He's been dead a long time," she said. "Unless-" Her voice trailed off.
"Unless what?" Joel demanded.
"Priests of Bane cast all sorts of chilling spells to torture their sacrifices. They say that during their evil ceremonies, Bane himself used to reach out and kill the victims with his chilling touch. Then again, this might not even be a warm-blooded creature. Is he a saurial, do you think?" Holly asked the bard.
Joel shook his head. "I doubt it. They're supposed to resemble large lizards. This looks like-well, certainly not like a lizard. I've never seen or heard of anything like this in all my readings and travels."
"Well, we can't leave him blocking the spring. Help me move him aside," Holly insisted.
The creature was over nine feet long, and it took a great deal of energy to roll him away from the shrine's entrance, Fortunately Holly seemed satisfied to stop moving the corpse once the spring-fed stream was no longer blocked
As Joel pulled his hands away, he realized they were covered with blood. At first he thought the creature was oozing blood from his pores, but closer inspection revealed that every inch of his thick, black hide had been punctured by something long and needlelike. The blood had been what had made his skin seem to shine when Joel had seen him tied to the Banites' ship. Joel recalled the pointed goad he'd seen in the hand of the priestess of Bane, and he felt his stomach churn in disgust.
"I wonder if they saved his corpse just to desecrate the shrine, or if the shrine was just a convenient drop site," Joel growled angrily.