Tymora's Luck - Kate Novak [67]
"There's one other thing that might help you," Finder said. "As Selune mentioned, when you arrived at the Blood Tor, Beshaba was listening to a report about the activities of the Sensates of Sigil. The report was given by Beshaba's newest priestess… someone you already know."
"Oh, no," Holly whispered. "Not Walinda?"
Finder nodded.
Jas cursed softly under her breath.
"When Beshaba teleported away, she took Walinda with her," Finder explained. "Since you know Walinda, you could use the finder's stone to track her and, presumably, to discover the whereabouts of her new mistress."
Jas's eyes narrowed. Walinda had tortured and murdered her spacejamming crew. Jas had sworn vengeance on the priestess, but Walinda had been under the protection of a banelich. Now she was under the protection of a goddess. It didn't matter. Jas would look for some way to get at the evil priestess.
"Let's go," the winged woman said in a gruff voice.
The adventurers seated themselves on the magic carpet, their backpacks beside them. Selune motioned with her hand and another portal opened up.
The stench of sulfur and a smell like burnt human hair wafted from the planar opening. Inside the portal, it was very dark. Then suddenly a fountain of burning rock sprayed upward, lighting a barren slope. The Abyss seemed almost cheery compared to Gehenna.
"Airheart," Emilo announced as if the command word had been trying to burst from his lips all this while. The flying carpet rose several feet off the ground. "Forward," the kender ordered.
"Slowly," Joel prompted.
"Slowly," Emilo added with a sigh.
The flying carpet passed from Brightwater through the portal into the darkness of Gehenna.
Joel turned for one last look through the portal at Tymora's garden. The light from the opening shone like a star, then winked out suddenly as the portal closed.
"Back away from the slope five feet," Emilo ordered the carpet, "and remain in place."
The carpet hovered, not actually above the ground, but beside a steep mountain slope glowing with hot magma. It felt as if they were standing beside an open oven. No doubt it would have felt worse were they not wearing the rings Winnie had given them to protect them from fire.
As always in a new plane, Jas's wings had taken on a new form, the most unusual Joel had seen so far. Her wings had joined into a triangular sheet of black flesh, with the apex of the triangle hovering over her head while the other two corners fell downward in loose folds like a bridal train. When Jas stiffened the single wing, it fanned out to either side some ten feet. The flesh glittered with an oozy secretion. Jas let the wing droop about her ankles, then looked at it with disgust and sighed.
Joel pulled out the finder's stone and thought of Walinda. He had no trouble recalling her admittedly attractive features. Joel suspected she was far older than he, but some magic kept her looking young. She had long, silky black hair and dark eyes. Blood-red tattoos decorated her high cheekbones. She wasn't particularly tall, but very slender and very graceful. It was the way Walinda made Joel feel, however, that came more readily to mind.
The evil priestess had made no secret of her attraction to Joel. More than once she'd offered him a place at her side. But there were things that Joel found repulsive and frightening about Walinda beyond her worship of a cruel and evil god. Walinda took sick delight in humiliating and physically harming people, even as she was attempting to seduce them. When Joel had insulted her by calling her a slave, the priestess had been perversely excited by his attitude.
The finder's stone sent out a beam of light that arched upward and around the slope. Walinda was on another face of Mount Chamada, somewhere much higher up.
"That's all the direction we need," Holly said to Joel. "You'd better put it away for now. We don't