lights or evil eyes can penetrate.'
'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 want the light to attract any unwanted attention.'
Joel slid the crystal into the top of his boot as Emilo gave orders to steer the flying carpet in the general direction indicated by the finder's stone. The sky overhead was completely black, without a sign of sun, moon or stars. Noxious vapors and steam rose from the mountain, but the mists disappeared into the darkness; there were no clouds to be seen. Conversely, the mountainside below glowed with streams, pools, and fountains of lava, creating just enough illumination for them to travel without running into the ground or getting lost in the void.
They flew for some time in silence, staring ahead into the darkness or down at the glowering mountain, keeping watch for any of the evil creatures who dwelt in this plane. Joel glanced at his companions. Emilo wore an expression of wonder, but Holly and Jas both looked grim. Joel wondered if both women were thinking of Walinda and her treachery. When they'd last met, the evil priestess had abducted Holly and threatened to kill her if Joel didn't turn the Hand of Bane over to her. Joel had been prepared to pay the ransom for the paladin, but Jas had appeared suddenly and rescued Holly. Ultimately Walinda had refused to resurrect Bane, but not for any noble reason. At Joel's desperate urging, the priestess had chosen instead to be the woman who denied Bane power, proving herself stronger than the dead god.
After a while Joel began to feel weary. With no way to measure the passage of time, the bard wasn't sure if he was tired from lack of sleep, heat exhaustion, the noxious vapors, or just boredom, but when he noticed Emilo's head jerk up suddenly, he knew they had to sleep.
Uncomfortable with the notion of sleeping in the air, he said to the others, 'Look for somewhere safe and solid to land. We need a rest.'
Emilo spotted a canyon and maneuvered the flying carpet between the rocky slopes on either side. Joel pulled out the finder's stone and searched for a patch of ground that might be cool. Spying a touch of green on one slope, he directed Emilo to head for it.
As the flying carpet closed in on the slope, Holly furrowed her brow. The green was an odd triangular shape, and it seemed to reflect the light from the finder's stone. Something snaked about the apex of the triangle and raised itself in the direction of the adventurers.
'Eyestalks! That green thing is alive!' Holly gasped.
'Pull up! Fly backward!' Jas ordered.
The green thing suddenly rose from the ground to its full height, revealing itself to be a giant slimy worm with razorlike fins along its back, large triangular wings attached along the length of its body, and a deadly-looking barbed tail. It soared forward, then arched back in their direction. The creature's wings spanned nearly fifteen feet. A gaping maw full of needle-sharp teeth opened on the lower part of the creature's head.
Jas assessed the creature as it fluttered toward them. It was swift and maneuverable. 'We can't fight this thing in the air,' she said to Joel. 'You'll have to land. I'll distract it while you find a defensible position.' She took off from the carpet, carrying only her sword. As she soared toward the creature, Joel noticed that Jas's wings and the creature's were very similar.
Emilo maneuvered the carpet straight down and commanded it to hover a foot from the ground. Joel poked experimentally at the rock with his sword to be sure it wasn't merely a thin crust over a magma flow.
In the sky above, Jas flew straight toward the creature. Both began to rise upward to try to gain the advantage. Seeing she would lose the struggle for superior altitude, Jas leveled off. She'd hoped to soar untouched beneath the beast, but it dropped suddenly, trying to force her to the ground.
Jas jabbed her sword upward as the creature glided over her body, tearing at its belly. At the same time, the creature jabbed at her with its tail. Both Jas and the creature screeched in pain. But while the creature continued to soar in the direction of the hovering carpet, Jas dived to the ground.
Holly leapt off the carpet and whirled around with her sword drawn. The sword glowed with a brilliant gold radiance that seemed to frighten the creature. It veered to its right in an attempt to avoid the paladin's blade, but before Holly could slice downward on the beast, the leading edge of its wing caught her in the chest. Holly gasped and fell backward. The creature soared on.
When Holly pulled herself to her feet, Joel noted that the paladin's breastplate had a gaping hole in it. The creature's wing had sliced right through the metal armor. He remembered Finder had warned them of a razor- winged slasrath. That must be what they battled now. Joel ordered Emilo, 'Go find Jas!' The kender took off down the canyon in the direction they'd last seen Jas, carefully weaving his way through the pools of lava that dotted the
