'This place is abysmal,' Jedidiah declared. 'Believe me, I know.' He kicked at the piece of raw meat on the floor. 'The food is terrible, and the room doesn't even have a view.'
When Joel finally managed to speak, his voice sounded remote even to himself. 'I'm sorry, Jedidiah,' he said, 'but I've failed. I'm not going to be able to complete my pilgrimage to the Lost Vale. I've been captured by priests of Iyachtu Xvim, and they're going to sacrifice me to their god. They're going to sacrifice Holly, too. She's a paladin of Lathander.'
'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 cell? Why add a hallway? Unless…
Jedidiah had said something about it not being such a dead end.
Joel knelt in the straw and examined the wall where Jedidiah had created a window. The stone was oily and quite roughly hewn. A chunk broke off in his hand. Curious, Joel tossed the rock in the air. Although it came from the floating rock fortress, it did not float of its own accord. The cell was well lit by the same magical light that illuminated everything, but it was still hard to examine the blackness of the wall. The rough surface cast shadows over each crack and niche. Joel ran a piece of straw horizontally across the stone. It stuck in a shadowed crevice. Joel ran the straw up vertically. There was definitely a crack there. Just at the edge of his reach, the crack took a sharp ninety-degree turn.
Ultimately the crack formed a perfect rectangle exactly where the window had been in Joel's dream. Had the dream actually been a vision? the bard wondered.
Joel cast a glance back down the corridor, but it was empty. His jailers, trusting the strength of the cell, hadn't posted a guard.
Joel pushed gently along the seam, but the rock didn't move. The opening could be mortared shut, secured with some secret mechanism, or merely stiff from disuse.
The Rebel Bard placed his shoulder against the stone and pushed with all his weight. Something made a rusty, grinding noise, and the wall shifted, just a fraction. The seam was now a clear divot, an inch deep, with a similar-sized rise on the far edge of the doorway. The section of wall pivoted about a central post.
Joel pushed harder, and now the wall moved more easily. Black dust showered down from the top of the door, creating a dirty waterfall that billowed in clouds near the floor before settling. Joel brushed the black dust off his tunic before poking his head into the space he'd just discovered.
Behind the door, the air was fresh and cool, which could indicate there was another exit. It was dark, though, pitch-black, and full of cobwebs, which could mean no one else used the door or even knew about its existence. Wrapping his cloak around his hand and sweeping the air before him, Joel half stepped, half crawled into the passage beyond.
Something glittered on the floor just beyond the door. Joel bent over and picked it up. Black dust had drifted into the finely carved lines, delineating each tiny feather. It was a tiny set of golden wings, no bigger than his palm-the same talisman Jedidiah had held in Joel's vision!
Joel considered the source of the vision. Could it really have been Finder who sent him the dream of Jedidiah? With a sense of embarrassment, the bard recalled how he had questioned whether his god could get him out of this predicament. A sense of awe crept over him to think that the Nameless Bard might actually be paying attention to him, a priest who doubted his own calling and hadn't the sense to avoid being kidnapped by Xvimists.
'Thank you, Finder. Thank you very much,' Joel whispered, hoping fervently that his god heard his gratitude as readily as he'd listened to his doubts.
The Rebel Bard blew the dust from the talisman and slipped it into an inner pocket of his tunic. Then he began to feel his way through the darkness behind his cell.
Beyond the secret door was a corridor going off in the same direction as the one that led to Joel's cell. The priestess, Walinda of Bane, had declared that the Temple in the Sky had once been a temple of Bane. Apparently when the floating rock had changed owners, many of the old passages had been closed off and forgotten.
The illumination from the cell extended only a few yards into the passageway. Beyond that, darkness reigned. Joel was forced to hug the wall, brushing away cobwebs, testing each footstep carefully before moving forward. He reached a corner in the corridor. It formed a T branching off to the right and left. Joel chose the direction in which the cultists had dragged Holly. Then the corridor turned again, and ebon blackness, like a velvet hood, fell over his eyes. His movement slowed. Then his foot sensed a void.
Joel knelt and reached down with his hand. The floor dropped only a few inches. It was a step down. Beyond the step, Joel felt another step. But how many were there? And what was at the bottom of the steps? These corridors could be a maze, the bard thought, with traps and pits. Maybe there were rats and giant spiders.
Despite the cool breeze moving through the tunnel, Joel began to sweat, perspiration beading on his
