Finder's Bane - Kate Novak [84]
"You can step through now," Grypht said.
Jedidiah picked up a knapsack and jumped through the magical portal. They could see him sliding in the sand on the other side.
Joel grabbed the other knapsack and stepped through more carefully. He stood on the top of a huge sand dune. The air was scorching and completely still. It shimmered all about him. The morning sun was blinding. To the east, the Desertsmouth Mountains were a purple haze. The dunes reached every other horizon.
The bard turned back to watch for Holly. In the ellipse, he saw the paladin hug the saurial wizard. A moment later she dropped through the portal and tumbled down the sand dune past Joel until she came to rest beside Jedidiah in a hollow on the side of the sand dune. Back in the Lost Vale, Grypht motioned with his staff, and the ellipse blinked out.
Joel slid down the slope on his backside until he reached the old priest and the paladin. He stood up and shook the sand from his clothing.
Below the dune on which they stood, two monuments of worn stone poked out from the sand, rising some fifty feet in the air. Three sides of each monument rose vertically, but the fourth, outer side inclined like a pyramid. The monuments stood about fifty feet apart, with their inner sides parallel to one another. Their surfaces were covered with huge bas-reliefs of great cats-lions, tigers, leopards, panthers.
"Behold the pillars of Cat's Gate," Jedidiah said, motioning to the two stone towers. "Or rather, the tops of the pillars of Cat's Gate. The majority of the gate is buried in the sand. According to old texts, the pillars rose higher than the Flaming Tower. When the kingdom of Netheril was in flower, there was a floating citadel here, one that made the Temple in the Sky look like a pebble. The wizards who built the gate commanded a strip of land along the Desertsmouth Mountains five hundred miles long and a hundred miles across. The Lost Vale was one of their outlying colonies. Not satisfied with what they had, the wizards set their sights on the Outlands. They bore into that plane with their magic, built the pillars to hold open the gate, then marched their armies through to conquer the lands beyond in their name."
"What happened?" Holly asked, shielding her eyes with her hand to observe the pillars.
"Other beings, more powerful than the wizards, marched their armies out of the gate into Netheril to conquer it in their name," Jedidiah replied. After a century or so of warfare, the encroaching desert sand became a blessing-covering the surrounding city, making the land useless to conquering armies, and sealing the gate from detection on either side."
"If the pillars are taller than the Flaming Tower, it's going to take a lot of digging to clear them. They must be buried under fifty feet of sand," Joel estimated.
"More like a hundred feet," Jedidiah corrected.
Joel whistled softly. "How are we going to dig it out? Magic?"
"We're not going to lift a finger," Jedidiah declared "Clearing the gate is the banelich's problem."
Holly nodded and grinned. "Good strategy," she complimented Jedidiah.
"How so?" Joel asked.
"It will test the powers of the banelich, maybe even wear him out some before we pass through the gate," the paladin explained.
They pitched a tarp over the hollow in the sand dune. Joel and Holly slid down to the base of the dune, leaving Jedidiah reclining beneath the tarp, blowing melodies with his glaur. The horn sounded for miles around in the clear air, serving as an anchor for the two young adventurers as they explored the surrounding desert.
After nearly an hour, having discovered nothing but sand, the bard and paladin practiced at swordplay. Holly was more skilled with a blade and offered Joel several pointers. She drilled him until he'd corrected his most glaring errors.
As the sun climbed higher, the air grew baking hot. Jedidiah called Joel and Holly out of the sun. Parched and exhausted, the