Finder's Bane - Kate Novak [29]
"There," the old man said, pointing at a spot on the solid wall behind Joel. Joel wondered in confusion whether the priest didn't hear him or he was ignoring him.
Jedidiah lit his pipe and tossed it at the wall where he'd just pointed. There was a great flash of light and an explosive boom, and when the smoke cleared, a large, perfectly shaped window had appeared in the rock. On the other side, there were blue skies, white clouds, and bright sunshine.
Jedidiah sprang across the room to the far wall and leapt up onto the windowsill. With hands on either side of the window, he leaned out over the void. "Much better," he said. "It's not such a dead end now."
Joel marveled as he always did at Jedidiah's spryness and daring. The innumerable creases on his brow, about his eyes, and in the corners of his mouth marked the old priest as ancient, yet he was as strong and energetic as a boy.
Jedidiah sat down on the windowsill and pulled out a second pipe from his tunic and tapped the bowl on the sill until a huge chunk of tobacco spilled out. In the tobacco was a white egg.
"They're going to kill me," Joel reiterated.
"Only if you let them," Jedidiah said. He tapped on the egg. Something within tapped back.
"I haven't a chance of escaping," Joel argued.
Jedidiah laughed. It was the same laugh he used for overly self-important musicians. "You have to look for chances," he said, tapping on the eggshell again.
The shell cracked open, and a tiny golden warbler popped out of the shell. The bird grew at an impossible rate until it had reached full adult size. Then it peeped and flew up to Jedidiah's hand.
"I'm locked in a cell, in a floating rock filled with beast cultists, a half mile off the ground!" Joel complained.
Jedidiah looked out the window. "A quarter mile," he retorted. He whistled at the warbler, and the bird sang back seven notes.
"So even if I break out of this cell, how do I get down off this rock?" Joel asked, beginning to feel quite irritated at Jedidiah's casual air in the face of Joel's impending doom.
"You don't get down off a rock; you get down off a goose," the old priest teased.
With an amazing sleight of hand that Joel had seen the priest use before, Jedidiah passed one hand over the golden bird and transformed it into a piece of golden jewelry, no larger than his palm, shaped like a pair of wings. When the priest passed his hand back over the talisman, it transformed back into the golden warbler. The bird sang one more time, then launched itself out the window.
As the bird flew off, Joel felt his heart lighten. Jedidiah laughed, and Joel felt his exhaustion draining away, replaced with a youthful energy. Of course he would escape, he thought. Of course he would rescue Holly. Of course he would reach the Lost Vale.
"Of course," Jedidiah said, "you're never going to get anything done sleeping your life away." The priest bent down and poked Joel on the forehead for emphasis. Joel felt a jolt pass through his body.
Joel awoke with a start, sitting up immediately in the straw bedding. He blinked and looked around. Jedidiah wasn't there, of course, and the cell looked just as it had before his dream.
He sat and thought about the dream for a few minutes. It could just have been his heart playing tricks on his mind, offering escape in sleep when there was none in life. Yet the dream had seemed so real. For one thing, he recalled it vividly… the exploding pipe, the window, the newly hatched bird, the winged talisman. Of course, Jedidiah had been annoyingly vague, but he was that way in real life as well. The view from the window though hadn't been quite right. The cell was far too deep inside the rock to command an outside view.
There was something rather peculiar about the way the hallway dead-ended on nothing but a prison cell. Why not just excavate a