Finder's Bane - Kate Novak [127]
Jedidiah looked out over the void and started to drift in the direction he had pointed toward.
Joel watched him recede with a hint of nervousness. The silence that surrounded him was far more intense and thus much more eerie than the silence in the Shattered Temple. He longed to hear another voice. It took the young bard a few moments to focus on imagining himself moving toward the older man.
Suddenly Jedidiah appeared to move backwards, toward Joel, but soon Joel realized it was because he was moving toward Jedidiah. Without any landmarks, without even the hint of a breeze, movement was very deceptive.
After a few minutes following Jedidiah, Joel could see the gray spot Jedidiah had indicated. A few minutes later the gray spot became a gray statue of a potbellied, ram-horned satyr with a sullen expression on its face. As the men moved closer, the gray statue appeared to be a huge rock carving, larger than a ship.
Jedidiah settled on the satyr's shoulder, and Joel landed beside him. The young bard felt only a slight sensation of weight holding him to the statue's body.
"Is this…?" Joel let his voice trail off.
"A dead god? Yes," Jedidiah replied. "I have no idea who it is. There are a great many of them out here. Some are newly arrived, while others have floated here for millennia,"
"Why are we stopping here?" Joel asked. While he was glad to feel something solid beneath his feet, the nature of the object he stood on made him feel uneasy.
"Now that we're no longer in Sigil, I'd like to have my godhood back. Would you be so kind as to restore it?"
Joel pulled out the finder's stone and held it out to Jedidiah.
The older man smiled and shook his head. "I can't just take it back by myself. It requires a ritual that only a priest can perform."
"What sort of ritual?" Joel asked.
"Well, it's different for every god. In my case, it requires a song… one about the cycle of life."
"The tulip song," Joel said, realizing finally why Jedidiah had drilled him so assiduously in that particular song.
"Exactly," Jedidiah said. He lowered himself until he was seated cross-legged. Joel sat across from Jedidiah and held out the finder's stone. Then he sang, understanding much more about the song than he had before. As he sang, the process that had placed Finder's remaining godly power and abilities into this half of the finder's stone reversed itself. Mists of all colors of the spectrum streamed from the stone. The mists circled about Jedidiah's form, then were drawn into him, like water into parched earth. When at last Joel had finished, Jedidiah heaved a deep sigh and relaxed.
The weariness and age had disappeared from Jedidiah's face, and he once more appeared to be a man in his prime. More important was the feeling Joel had that he stood in his god's presence. The Rebel Bard hadn't recognized its existence until Jedidiah had given up his power, but now that the power was restored, Joel could feel it once again.
"Well," Jedidiah said, "what do you know? It worked. I can feel your presence again."
Joel's jaw dropped. "What do you mean, it worked?" he squeaked. "Why wouldn't it work?"
"Well, essentially, we just recreated a god, and there's other powers involved in recreating a godly presence- powers that might try to stop the process," Jedidiah explained.
"You knew that when you gave up your powers?" Joel asked, flabbergasted. Jedidiah nodded.
Joel sighed. Then he laughed. "I have a new portfolio for you, Jedidiah. God of Reckless Fools," he said.
Jedidiah laughed. "I like it. Something adventurers can relate to." He stood up, without a hint of pain or tiredness. "Time to deal with the banelich." "How do we find him out here?" Joel asked. "We just think of him, and our minds will move our bodies in his direction. Or you could think of moving toward Holly," the god instructed his priest.
Joel took Jedidiah's latter suggestion and found himself moving away from the dead satyr-god back into the void of nothingness.