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At the top was the palace. Only this wasn't like anything on this
planet. It was made of stone and inlaid with gold that shimmered in the
afternoon sun. It was like a second sun, only golden.
"Oh, my," Tanda said softly.
"No wonder there's a treasure map to this place," Aahz said. "I've
never seen anything like that."
"Neither have I," Tanda said.
Well, if the two experienced dimension travelers in the group had never
seen anything like the golden palace we were staring at, I sure hadn't
either.
After a moment I asked what I thought was the obvious next question.
"So now what do we do?"
"We go take a closer look," Aah2 said, laughing. "See what we can see."
I glanced at my mentor. He was always happy when there was a chance we
might end up with a lot of money. I didn't want to ask him how he thought we
were going to get any of the gold we could see from here, but clearly he had
ideas, and the ideas were enough to make him smile.
All his smile did was worry me.
I flew us two more small hills closer to the city before Aahz said we
had better walk the rest of the way. There was so much energy in this area
that I didn't even feel tired from the effort of flying. It had come easy,
which meant that all magik was easy in this place. That was both good and
bad.
Ahead of us on the road were some walkers, plus a wagon full of
vegetables being pulled by two horses. Cows filled the fields, paying no
attention to anything.
Up closer, the town of Donner was even bigger than I had first thought,
with a very wide, boulevard-like main road heading straight through
everything. The golden castle on the top of the hill was massive. It looked
like it could swallow the entire royal palace and courtyard of Possiltum and
not even burp. I wonder if this place had a royal magician. Maybe I could
apply for the job, but I doubted I would pass the cow physical.
We had just crested the last small hill and were starting down toward
the edge of the city when a dozen men on horseback came galloping out of the
city, kicking up a cloud of dust behind them. A few people ahead of us on
the road stepped out of the way. And the wagonload of veggies had to move
almost off the road and into a small ditch.
The thundering horses came on, riding hard, the men's black hats pulled
down tight on their heads. I didn't have a good feeling about this, but at
the same time there was no reason to think they were after us.
We moved to the side of the road as they neared, but instead of riding
past, then stopped, sort of forming a circle around us, pinning us against a
pasture full of cows. I clearly should have trusted my bad feeling.
"You are under arrest," a man sitting on a big black horse said.
"Please come with us into the city."
"It's a posse," Tanda said, the surprise in her voice clear. "Never
thought I'd ever see one."
"A what?" I asked.
"Never mind," she said.
"Under arrest for what?" Aahz demanded of the guy on the big horse.
The guy, whose face looked very similar to the guy who had been the
bartender in Audry's, smiled. I didn't like the look of his little teeth at
all.
"You have been charged with not complying with round-up procedures," he
said, "and the unlawful use of magik."
I glanced at Aahz, then at Tanda. Now we knew for sure that this
dimension knew about magik. As far as I was concerned, right about now would
be a great time to beat a hasty retreat to the wonderful dust of Vortex #6.
But it seemed Aahz had other ideas.
"We demand to be taken to your leader," Aahz said, stepping toward the
man. "We are powerful magicians from another dimension with important
information your leader will want."
The guy actually laughed, which rocked Aahz back on his heels. Not too
many people actually laughed at my mentor and got away with it.
"Drop my disguise," Aahz said, whispering to me.
I shrugged. At this point, it couldn't get any worse, so I did as he
asked.
Not a one of the men on the horses even seemed to notice that there was
now a green-scaled ugly Pervect standing in front of them. Not even their
horses cared.
That was not what Aahz was expecting.
The guy again just laughed.
"You can drop the act," he said. "Our leader knows exactly why you are
here."
Then the guy did something that just flat scared me to death. He
pointed a finger at Aahz and a moment later the map came floating out of
Aahz's belt pouch, unfolded in midair, and fluttered there. Then it refolded
and returned to the pouch.
"Now please come with us," he said.
He turned his horse and started at a slow pace toward the city.
I glanced at Aahz, who was looking almost stunned, then at Tanda.
"Don't you think this might be a good time to head for home?" I asked.
"I wish we could," Tanda said.
Sweat dripped off her forehead as we all stepped back onto the road to
follow the guy who had done the talking. The rest of his group of riders
waited and fell in behind us.
"Excuse me?" I said. "How about jumping us to the dust storm?"
"Trust me," she said, "I tried."
"You what?" I couldn't believe she couldn't get us out of this mess.
"We're blocked?" Aahz asked.
"Tighter than a vault," she said. "Best block I've ever run up
against."
"How about I try to fly us out of here?"
"Won't work either," Tanda said. "At the moment there's a block over
all our magik."
"Oh," was all I could say.
Ahead, just over the head of the horse in front of me I could see the
golden palace. It was the place, the treasure, we had been working and
fighting so hard to reach. Right now it was the last place in any dimension
I wanted to go.
"Who are those guys?"
B. CASSIDY
No one in the city seemed to pay us any attention at all as we were
marched into Donner and right up the wide Main Street of the city toward the
golden palace on the hill. I saw at least a dozen Audry's-like places along
the road, and this town had three guys in white hats and shovels cleaning up
after the hundreds of horses. As we passed, all three of them tipped their
hats and said, "Howdy."
What really made this town different from all the others we had gone
through, besides the golden palace towering over it, were the pastures
between the buildings. About halfway up to the palace, on the right side of
the road, was a beautiful, green pasture about the size of one building.
It had one lone cow in it, grazing on the perfectly tended grass.
A little farther up the hill there were more small pastures between
buildings on both sides of the street, each with just one cow. And the
higher we went, the more beautiful the pastures became, with ornate
decorations and well-trimmed grass.
Just under the palace were five pastures on both sides of the main
boulevard, and in each of those manicured and ornately decorated lawns was
one cow, and off to one side a guy wearing a white hat and carrying a
shovel. Waiting. Now I knew what all the other shovel-carrying guys working
the streets of all the towns were trying to advance their way up to.
The guys on horses dismounted at a massive gate made of stone pillars
and gold bars. The palace itself was surrounded by a tall stone wall that
looked too high to even try to climb.
The stone was highly polished and there looked to be gold lining the
top.
The guy in charge pointed us at the gate, but didn't follow us in.
Instead, five other men in white robes with gold trim met us just inside the
gate and indicated we should follow. Each carried a golden shovel like a
cane, using it to walk. It was clear that a person who worked outside the
palace and didn't have a golden shovel couldn't get into the palace. Why
were we so lucky?
"Would you look at all the gold!" Aahz said, his head whipping back and
forth as he tried to take it all in.
"Amazing," Tananda said, her voice soft and carrying the awe she felt.
I couldn't say anything. The sight that greeted us inside that gate was
beyond anything I had ever imagined. There was nothing but beautiful-trimmed
lawns, gold ornaments, strangely shaped shrubs, and guys in white robes and
white hats with golden shovels. Maybe a dozen different cows grazed on the
beautiful lawns, clearly without a care in the world, all tended by guys in
white robes with golden shovels.
Our robed jailers herded us up the stone staircase, climbing through
manicured lawn after manicured lawn, all surrounded by gold statues of
different animals and gold artwork. The walls of the castle itself towered
over us, the white stone and shining gold walls higher than anything I had
ever seen before.
We were finally taken through a big double door and headed down flights
of stone steps. From there I got completely lost as we went through tunnels,
down steps, around corners, down more tunnels, down more steps, all the time
going deeper and farther under the castle. I didn't much like the idea of
being trapped down under such a massive building, but the idea that we were
being held prisoner by cows controlling guys with golden shovels bothered me
even more. Especially since they were vampire cows.
Finally we were herded into a big room with stone walls and left, a
golden-barred door slamming closed behind us. There were five others in the
big room, all looking tattered and exhausted. Ten beds were spaced around
the walls and all the previous prisoners were lying on the beds, sleeping.
"Glenda," Aahz said.
It took me a second to recognize the figure on the bed across the room.
It was Glenda all right, but not the alive, beautiful, and powerful woman I
had remembered from just a few days before. This woman wore tattered
clothing, had dirt and deep circles under her eyes, and a huge red mark on
her neck.
All three of us moved over to her. As we did her eyes fluttered open
and she saw Aahz, then Tanda and me.
"Found the treasure, I see," she said, her voice barely a whisper.
Then she was back asleep, her breathing heavy, and her mouth hanging
open. The red marks on her neck pulsed with the beat of her heart.
"I don't like the looks of this," I said.
"Any chance we can get out of here?" Aahz asked, glancing around the
room.
I did the same. None of the other prisoners in the place looked to be
in any better shape than Glenda. And all of them had the red marks on their
necks and were sleeping heavily, almost dead.
Tanda shook her head.
"Not a chance at all. The energy is back flowing to us, but the
dimension hopping is still blocked completely. I've been trying to D-hop
ever since we were captured."
"Well," Aahz said, "we're just going to have to find another way out,
and grab a little gold along the way."
"How about the D-Hopper?" I asked. "They didn't search us. Maybe it
would work."
Aahz pulled the D-Hopper out, made sure the setting was right, then
triggered it.
We stayed right where we were.
"Worth a try," I said as he put it back in his shirt.
"I think we need some answers," Aahz said.
He sat down on the edge of Glenda's bunk and then not so gently shook
her awake.
"No! No!" she said as she woke.
Her hands went to her neck and then flinched away. Again it took a
moment for her to recognize us. She blinked, then said, "Go away," and
closed her eyes again.
"We need some answers," Aahz said.
He grabbed her by the shoulders, twisted her around, and sat her
upright on the bed, her back against the wall.
"Easy there, big fella," Glenda said, her voice hoarse. "We're all in
this together."
"I'm not in anything with you," Aahz said.
Looking at the wreck she had become, it was hard for me to even
remember why I had been interested in her in the first place. Could I be
that superficial that she had to remain beautiful for me to care? Or did I
no longer find her attractive or have any interest in her because she had
betrayed us? It was an interesting question I'd have to talk to Aahz about
once we were safely back home.
"Oh," Glenda said, "trust me. If you're here, in this cell, then we're
all in this together."
"How'd you end up here?" Aahz asked. "How'd you find the place without
the map?"
She laughed. "I went to Dodge City, didn't find anything, so I asked
this guy running a bar where the golden cow was, and he told me here."
I shook my head. How simple that would have been. Why hadn't we thought
of it?
"Then what happened?" Tanda asked.
"Didn't even make it into town," she said. "Got picked up by a bunch of
guys on horses yesterday and tossed in here. Then last night I got hauled
out to be a snack at the big party upstairs."
Her hand again went to her neck and she flinched. The red marks there
didn't look like they were healing very well. And I didn't much like the
sound of being a snack like those people lined up on the road had been.
"It was like a bad dream," Glenda said, her eyes distant. "They kept
forcing glass after glass of carrot juice down me while taking turns sucking
oh my neck. By morning I couldn't even walk. I don't remember how I got back
down here."
The thought of carrot juice ripped my stomach into a knot.
"Who were they?" Tanda asked.
Glenda shrugged. "Hundreds of beautiful naked people in this
gold-covered ballroom way up in the castle somewhere."
Aahz nodded. "Vampire cows."
"What?" Glenda asked.
"We saw a field of cows change into beautiful naked people last night,"
I said, "and snack on the townspeople who were waiting to be used."
She looked at me, then at Aahz. "The kid's not kidding, is he?"
Aahz shook his head.
Glenda shook her head and then closed her eyes.
"Drunk dry by bovine vampires. How ironic."
She didn't say anything else, and Aahz didn't push her. She looked as
if she had lost twenty pounds in one night. She had managed to outsmart us,
find her way to the castle, and still get captured. If she couldn't get
away, how were we going to do it before we became a full-moon snack?
"We've got to get out of here before the sun goes down," Aahz said,
standing and moving to the door.
He gave it a couple hard hits, but it didn't move, and no one came
because of the noise. Clearly none of the golden-shoveled guards were
worried about a prisoner escape.
"Even if we did get out," Tanda said, "it would take a map to find our
way back through the castle."
"Map," I said. "That's the key."
Aahz turned and looked at me, giving me one of those
I-don't-understand-how-you-can-be-so-stupid looks.
I moved over to him and stuck out my hand.
"Can I have the map, please?"
"Why would you want it?" Aahz asked.
I didn't want to tell him my idea without first seeing if I was right.
"Just give it to him," Tanda said.
Aahz shrugged and took out the map, handing it to me still folded.
I opened it up, laying it flat on the nearest empty bunk so that we
could all look at it. The map looked as I had expected. It had gained its
magik back once we got inside the castle. It showed where we were, fifteen
levels down and under a lot of rock and gold. It also showed the room where
the golden cow was, far above us.
And better yet, it showed us a path from where we were being held to
what the map called a large ballroom. Clearly the map's designers had
planned on continuing the game right to the very last room. It sort of made
sense. Dimension to dimension until we found the right one, then town to
town until we found the right one, now room to room until we found the right
one. I didn't much like the game, but I understood the thinking.
"Well, would you look at that?" Aahz said, stunned.
Tanda studied the map, then looked at the wall near Glenda's bunk, then
studied the map again.
It didn't take me long to see what she was doing. The map showed a way
out of this room that wasn't the main door. Maybe, just maybe, we had a
chance. If we could escape the cell, then avoid hundreds of men with white
robes and golden shovels, and then outrun the posse on horseback, we might
be able to get far enough away from the castle to dimension-hop back to
Vortex #6.
It sounded impossible, but it was more than we'd had a moment ago.
I folded up the map and put it in my pouch, then headed for the wall
where Glenda was still sitting on a bunk. Her eyes were closed, and if her
chest hadn't been moving I would have thought she was dead.
"Wait," Tanda said as I started to get down on my knees to look for an
opening in the wall under the bunk beside Glenda's, where the map indicated
it would be. "We need to protect ourselves, not let anyone know what we're
doing."
"And how do you suggest we do that?" I asked.
Aahz glanced around at the bunks and the blankets on them.
"Skeeve, when Tanda gives the word, I want you to make the blankets on
those three bunks look like the three of us."
"Four of us," Glenda said, opening her eyes and looking clearly at
Aahz. "If you've found a way to leave, I'm leaving with you."
"Yeah," Aahz said, laughing, "like you took us with you on Vortex #6? I
don't think so."
"I don't go, I alert the guards," she said, staring at him. "And I've
got enough power left to easily break an apprentice's disguise spell."
For a moment I thought Aahz was going to strangle her, and I wanted to
help. Then Tanda stepped between them, facing Aahz.
"She's powerful and can help. Let her, or we might never get out of
here."
My mentor looked like he was about to explode. He hated doing anything
he didn't want to do, and taking Glenda along was something he really didn't
want to do. But Tanda was right; maybe Glenda could help.
"All right," Aahz said, taking a deep breath and letting it slowly out.
He stepped past Tanda and looked down at Glenda.
"You work with us or we dump you faster than you dumped my apprentice
in that bar. Understand?"
She nodded, clearly very weak. "Let me help Tanda with the cover
spell," she said. "I'm good at them."
"I'm an ex-assassin," Tanda shot back. "I'm better."
"I know you are," Glenda said. "I can just add some depth on the cover.
And help support Skeeve's disguises. We're dealing with some good magicians
here. Let's make sure they don't see us coming, or leaving as the case may
be."
For a moment Tanda stared at Glenda, then she nodded. "Follow my lead."
"Completely," Glenda said. She took a deep, shuddering breath and
braced herself against the wall, her eyes closed.
I glanced around. The other three prisoners hadn't woken up. They
looked to be in much worse shape than Glenda.
Aahz turned to me. "Get ready. On Tanda's count, one at a time,
disguise the four bunks."
I took a deep breath and reached out for the energy it was going to
take.
Energy here wasn't a problem. It flowed all around us like a massive
river, wider and stronger than I had ever experienced. I let it flow inside
me, giving me strength.
"Aahz first," Tanda said. "Now."
On the farthest empty bunk I pictured Aahz lying there, sleeping, his
mouth open.
On the bunk Aahz appeared, just as I had pictured.
I gathered more energy.
"Glenda now," Tanda said.
I imagined Glenda on the second bunk, sleeping in the same way we had
seen her sleeping when we came in, red mark on her neck and all.
Glenda appeared there.
"Now me," Tanda said.
I reached out and took the energy and put the image of Tanda sleeping
in the next bunk
"Now you," Tanda said.
I did the same, although I had never seen myself asleep, I had an image
of what I must look like, and I used that.
It was strange to see myself sleeping there. Really strange.
"All shielded," Tanda said.
Glenda nodded. "Very strong. It should hold. And good job, Skeeve."
I just nodded. I didn't need compliments from a woman who left me to
rot in a town full of cow food.
"Okay, Skeeve," Tanda said, "see if you can find that opening."
I got down on my stomach and crawled partway under the bunk next to
where Glenda sat. It looked like a stone wall, just like all the rest of the
room. But when I went to touch the wall, my hand went through as if nothing
was there.
"A disguised opening," I said.
I crawled under the bunk and right on through the wall, coming out on
the other side. It was pitch black, so I tore a little piece off the bottom
of my shirt and used a magik spell to light it. I was in a tunnel that had
been cut out of stone. It was just tall enough for me to stand, and not much
wider than my shoulders. It clearly hadn't been used in a long time, if
ever. There was an unused torch stuck in a crack in the rocks, so I lit it,
tossing to one side my burning piece of shirt.
A moment later Aahz followed, coming through what looked to be solid
stone near the floor of the tunnel. Then Glenda, breathing hard, pulled
herself into the tunnel and sat with her back against the sidewall, followed
almost instantly by Tanda.
"This tunnel is shielded as well," Tanda said, looking around as she
stood. "A shield so old, it might have been here before the castle."
"I'm impressed," Glenda said, still sitting on the floor. "How'd you
know this was here?"
I pulled the map out of my pouch and held it up in the faint
torchlight. She saw it and nodded. "Of course."
I opened the map and Aahz, Tanda, and I stood under the torch studying
it.
It now showed the tunnel we were in as center, and the location of the
golden cow had changed. Now it was in a dining room ten floors above us. I
didn't believe it for a moment.
The map showed that we had to follow the tunnel for as far as we could,
then climb up a ladder and through the floor of what was called a morgue.
"Seems we don't have much choice," Aahz said, staring at the map. He
pointed to the fact that the map didn't show a way back into the room we had
just left.
I moved over and touched the wall we had just crawled through. It was
solid rock. Weird.
I moved back over to where they were standing under the light.
"We're going to be chasing the cow until we find an exit," Aahz said.
"We could always kill the magik in the map one more time," I said.
"No," Tanda said. "We may end up in a room that we need the map to help
us get out of."
"She's right," Glenda said. "For all we know, the map may be the magik
source that created this tunnel. From the looks of how that wall turned back
to stone, it just might be."
I stared at the paper in my hand, then at Glenda sitting on the floor.
If she was right, and I had killed the magik in the map again, we might have
ended up trapped in stone. I didn't want to think about that at all.
"So we follow the magik," Aahz said.
I folded the map and put it away in my pouch, then took the torch out
of the crack and held it in front of me so that I could see where I was
going. Then, doing my brave routine, I started off down a tunnel so old, or
so magical, that it didn't look as if anyone had ever been in here.
The tunnel sloped upward like a fairly steep ramp. I moved at a steady
pace, making sure that each step was on solid ground. I didn't trust my eyes
at this point, after crawling through solid rock.
After about a hundred paces I looked back. Tanda was right behind me,
Aahz behind her, and Glenda was managing to stay up with us, only because I
was moving so slowly. I didn't feel the slightest bit sorry for her. She had
left me to die, and gotten herself into the mess she faced last night. And
without us, she wouldn't have this chance to escape. As far as I was
concerned, she would either keep up or go out on her own again.
I went back to working my way up the tunnel, testing each step, until
finally I reached the end. A rock ladder had been carved into the stone,
leading straight up through a very narrow hole.
As Aahz stopped beside me I pointed up at the hole.
"Can you squeeze through there?"
"Do I have a choice?"
"I suppose not," I said. I handed him the torch. "Let me get up through
the opening so I can brace my back against the wall, then hand me the
torch."
Without waiting for another idea from my mentor, I started up. The hole
in the roof of the tunnel was big enough that my shoulders touched on both
sides, but not so small that I had to squeeze. Aahz might be able to make
it, but it was going to take some work.
Once I got through the hole, the space got bigger. I stopped and Aahz
handed me the torch, passing it up past me quickly so I wouldn't get burned.
Above I could see the ladder climbing at least twenty or so of my body
lengths before reaching what looked to be a wooden trapdoor in a floor.
"Send Tanda up second," I whispered down to Aahz below me. "We need to
make sure no one is in the room above the trap door up here."
"Good thinking," Tanda said, climbing up under me as I went higher. She
got up just under me, paused, and then nodded. "No one up there at the
moment."
"Good," I said.
"You go next," I heard Aahz say to Glenda down in the tunnel.
"No," Glenda said, her voice firm. "You get stuck in that opening it's
going to take both Tanda pulling and me shoving to get you through."
I couldn't hear what Aahz said, but a moment later his green-scaled
head came through the hole below Tanda.
"No, both arms ahead of you," Tanda said.
Aahz backed down a step, put both his arms over his head, and climbed
back up into the hole. From what I could see, his shoulders were wedged
pretty good in the rock.
Tanda braced herself, grabbed one of his hands, and then said, "Ready
to push, Glenda?"
"Ready," Glenda said, her voice muffled as if she were a long ways
away.
"Now," Tanda said, pulling on Aahz's arm as he pulled on the rock
surface with the other.
With a rip of his shirt, he came through.
Tanda let go and moved up under me. Aahz had his shoulders through the
hole, but he wasn't climbing any higher at the moment.
"Glenda," he said. "Grab a hold of my leg and I'll pull you up."
"I think I can make it," she said.
"Just do it and quit arguing with me," Aahz said.
I stared down at the top of my mentor's head. The old green-scaled guy
had a soft spot after all. Always knew it was there, just hadn't seen it
that often.
As Aahz helped Glenda up the stone ladder, Tanda and I went on up to
the trap door. Since Aahz hadn't taught me a spell yet that could sense if
something was on the other side of a wall, or a floor in this case, I was
leaving that up to Tanda.
"We still in the clear?" I asked.
"We are," Tanda said.
I eased up to the wooden trapdoor and pushed slowly. The wood scraped
as it went up, then the door seemed to catch on something. It took me a
moment to realize it was a rug. From the looks of it, a very old rug.
I pushed even harder, and the rug lifted and pulled aside enough so
that I could get through. I went halfway up through the trapdoor and stood,
torch in the air, lighting the dark room.
Tanda had been right. From what I could see, no one was around. Just a
bunch of tables and a wooden door leading off to the left. But the minute I
stepped up and stood, I knew that Tanda and I had both been wrong. No one
alive was around.
But the place was filled with dead people. Tables full of them.
"There's gotta be a way out of this dungeon."
G. GYGAX
Okay, this was another first for me. I had never had the luck,
opportunity, or bad timing to be in a room full of dead people. And these
weren't just any dead people, but people who had clearly had the life sucked
out of them through their necks just the night before. There had to be at
least fifteen or twenty bodies, all naked, with ugly marks on their necks,
and eyes staring at the ceiling.
I stood, holding the torch in the air, not really wanting to move in
any direction until the others were beside me. Not that I thought the dead
could do anything to me, or that I was superstitious about dead spirits. I
wasn't, I was sure. I just didn't want to make a wrong move until I had
someone beside me, or at least that was what I told myself.
"Looks like you were lucky to survive last night," Aahz said to Glenda
as helped her through the trap door and onto her feet.
"Does seem that way, doesn't it," she said, leaning against a table
with a dead guy on it.
The guy looked a lot like the guy who ran Audry's. I was starting to
think that most of the men on this planet looked like him.
"So much for thinking they didn't kill their food source," Tanda said.
"I don't think most do," Aahz said. "But this is the castle, the
royalty of the planet. I would imagine in here all rules are off."
"Wonderful," I said. "Now we have naked killer vampire cows, one of
which is rumored to give golden milk."
"Strange place, isn't it?" Aahz said.
"You could say that, but you just did."
"We need to put that rug back and close the trap," Tanda said. "Make
sure we cover our tracks as best we can."
I handed Tanda the torch and Aahz and I sat to work. In a few seconds
the room looked like it had before we came up out of the floor.
"Now where?" Glenda asked.
I pulled out the map and opened it, holding it up to the light for Aahz
and Tanda to see. The morgue, the room we were in, was now central on the
map. The golden cow had moved to the kitchen. And our path out of here was
through a panel in the back of the room, not the door. The map showed the
panel leading to a secret passageway that led for a long ways up through the
castle.
"You know," I said, pointing at where the passageway led, "that we are
getting deeper and deeper into the castle and farther from an escape exit."
"Looks that way, doesn't it?" Aahz said, staring at the map.
"That doesn't matter and you know it, Aahz," Glenda said. "At least you
could tell your apprentice the truth."
We all turned and looked at where she was leaning on a table with a
naked dead guy right behind her.
"How's that?" Aahz asked, clearly not happy at Glenda's tone.
"We can't escape this place without beating this map," she said. "And
beating the map means capturing the golden cow, who I assume, is the leader
of this entire dimension. That golden cow is the only one who is going to
let us go, and you know it."
At that point I was convinced that all the blood loss had gotten to her
mind. The only thing I wanted to do was find a way out and run or fly as
fast as we could until we were far enough away that we could hop dimensions
and get away from this insane place.
"Come on," I said, smiling at her. "That would be crazy. Going after
the head of all the cow vampires would be suicide. We'd end up like all
these fine food products around us. Glenda, it's clear you need to rest."
No one said anything. Glenda just kept staring at me and slowly I
realized that neither Aahz or Tanda were telling her how crazy she was
either.
I turned to my mentor, who had a sheepish look on his face.
"She's right," he said. "We wouldn't stand a chance of getting out of
here, against the kind of magik we are facing, without the help of the map."
I looked at Tanda.
She smiled at me. "They're right. I can barely, with Glenda's
assistance, keep us hidden. The magik around here is so powerful, we
wouldn't stand a chance without help from the top. And the map is leading us
to that help."
At that moment I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I was as dead
as any of the bodies in the room with us. I just wasn't smart enough yet to
lie down and stop breathing like they had all done.
With one more look at my mentor, then at Glenda, I shrugged and tried
to put on my best death-mask face.
"Why not? Let's get moving before someone comes in and stops our fun
treasure hunt before it really gets started."
With one more look at the map, I folded it and put it back in my pouch.
Then I headed through the tables of bodies to the back wall. As I went
I wanted to talk to the bodies, tell them I'd be right back, tell them to
wait, to reserve a table for me. But I kept my morbid thoughts to myself.
There was a large cabinet of medical supplies filling the back wall and
no hidden panel that I could see. From what the map had shown, the panel was
right behind the cabinet.
I took hold of the back edge of the cabinet and pulled outward. I
expected it to be too heavy for me to move, but it swung easily and
silently, opening up into a passageway behind the panel.
I glanced back at Tanda and Aahz and Glenda, who were silently watching
me.
"Give me the torch and follow me," I said. "We'll check the map again
when we get a ways inside. And pull this closed behind you."
Aahz nodded.
It felt good to be leading, even if I wasn't going in a direction I
wanted to go. At least I'd get to the wrong place first, and more than
likely be killed first.
Tanda handed me the torch and I slipped behind the cabinet.
The passageway was as wide as a small hallway back in the Possiltum
palace. It was mostly made of wood, with some stone walls along the way.
Unlike the passageway cut out of the rock below the morgue, this looked like
it had had regular traffic over the years.
I stayed in the faint path in the dust and moved ten steps down the
secret passageway, then stopped. Aahz pulled the cabinet closed and motioned
that he was ready. I wondered if we could go back that way if we had to, but
I didn't want Aahz to check, simply for the fear of finding out we couldn't.
About a hundred paces along the secret passageway branched into two.
One went to the right and up slightly, while the other went seemingly
straight as far as the light from our torch would show.
Tanda was behind me and I handed her the light, again pulling out the
map.
It had changed again, showing the passageway we were in and the
intersection. The map now wanted us to go right. And up.
I remembered being in front of this castle and looking up as it towered
over us. I had never seen anything so big before. Now it seemed that if this
map had its way, which Aahz and Tanda were determined to give it, we would
end up at the top.
Maybe up there I'd have a good view when all the life was sucked out of
me.
The passageway sloped upwards, sometimes stairs, sometimes just a ramp.
It bent to the right, then in twenty paces to the right again, as if going
around a room. From that point on it just kept turning and twisting and
climbing. After twenty minutes I was so turned around and lost, I couldn't
even begin to tell you what part of the castle we were in. All I knew was
that we had gone up a great deal. Finally the corridor ended at the top of a
short flight of stairs.
I stopped and waited as Tanda caught up. Then, ten steps behind her,
came Aahz helping Glenda. He sure was being nice, for some reason, to a
woman who had betrayed him. That wasn't like Aahz at all. Clearly he needed
her for something, and I was never far enough away from Glenda to ask what
it was.
When they caught up, Glenda slumped to the ground and closed her eyes
and I pulled out the map and looked at where it was taking us. It showed the
end of the secret passageway where we were standing, and a secret door into
a giant ballroom was right in front of me. I glanced at the wall. I couldn't
see where it was, but I assumed that when I needed it, it would be there.
I went back to studying the map again. We had to go into the ballroom
and to the far wall where there was another panel into another passageway.
The golden cow treasure was now marked as being in the throne room a number
of floors above us.
"Looks like we get to go out in the open for the first time," Aahz
said, studying the map.
"There's no one out there at the moment," Tanda said.
"So we need to do it and quickly," I said, folding up the map.
"Keep the map handy," Aahz said. "When we get into the ballroom, you
need to check it again."
"Of course," I said, nodding and acting as if I had known that, even
though I hadn't yet thought of it.
"Can you make it a little farther, Glenda?" Aahz asked.
Glenda jerked and pushed herself to her feet, leaning against the wall.
"I can make it as far as I need to make it."
Aahz just nodded. "Then let's go."
Tanda had the torch, so I went to the wall and pushed where the secret
panel was supposed to be and surprise, surprise, the wall opened. I slid
through. At first I thought there was nothing on the other side of the
panel, that the map had lied to us. Then I realized that the secret door was
pushing out a massive drape or tapestry of some type.
I ducked to the right under the cloth and out into the open, with Tanda
and the torch right behind me.
At the moment we didn't need the light. The room had massive,
two-story-high windows along one side that let in the natural sunlight. The
hills in the distance were like old friends calling to me. I so much wanted
to be out there instead of in here. The sun, from what I could tell, was
within an hour of setting on the other side of the castle. We needed to pick
up speed if we were going to find the golden cow before it became the golden
vampire.
"Wow," Tanda said, looking around at the gold-inlaid panels and golden
ceilings of the massive ballroom.
The floor was a highly polished white stone with streaks of gold
running through it. In my wildest imaginings I could have never come up with
a ballroom as fancy or beautiful as this one.
Aahz and Glenda stopped beside us in the huge room. I bet at least five
hundred people could've danced in this room without even bumping into one
another.
"I remember being in this room last night," Glenda said softly.
The thought of her being here with a bunch of naked vampires chewing on
her neck made me shudder.
"Then let's not wait for the music to start," I said.
I opened up the map and looked at it. Again, just coming through the
secret door had caused the map to change. Now the way out of here wasn't
across the room, but up on what looked like a stage near the back of the
room, directly across from the windows.
"This way," I said, leading the way up a short staircase and onto a
massive wooden stage.
On the back wall was nothing but wood slats. I glanced at the
still-open map in my hand, then moved to what looked to be about the right
area, putting the map back into my pouch as
I went. After just a few seconds of trying, I found the loose boards,
pulled them aside, and we were back out of the light and into what I thought
was another dark passageway.
Tanda came in behind me, holding the torch up so that we could both see
what was ahead.
I froze like a statue at what I saw.
"Well I'll be a grave-digger's monkey," Tanda said.
Ahead of us wasn't another passageway, but a massive, low-ceilinged
room. Rows and rows and rows of shelves lined the walls, and down the middle
of the room, side-by-side, packed close on every inch of every shelf, were
skulls.
Cow skulls.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of white, empty-eyed cow skulls.
Aahz finished making sure the slats were back in place behind us, then
turned and stopped cold beside me. I was glad to see he had the same
reaction I did. It was always good to know my mentor could be shocked.
"Someone want to explain this to me?" Glenda asked, her voice echoing
through the remains of an entire herd.
"Maybe it's a thousand years of former royal family?" Aahz said. "Look
at that one."
He pointed at one skull hung on the wall, ornately decorated with gems.
I knew that wasn't exactly right. I could feel it in the energy in this
place. After a moment I turned to Tanda.
"Can you feel anything odd in here?"
"Power," she said.
"An energy focus?" Aahz asked.
"Sure seems that way," Tanda said. "Or maybe there's something special
about these skulls, something in them that magnifies the magikal power of
this area and turns it into something different."
I found myself, to my own amazement, moving forward toward the closest
shelf of skulls. I reached out and lightly touched the smooth, cool surface
of one. It did have energy, but not energy like I had been taught by Aahz to
use. There was different energy in it, used for something more than just
magik.
"Vampire energy," I said.
Tanda and Glenda came up beside me, each carefully reaching out and
touching a skull.
"He's right," Tanda said. "These skulls seem to take magical energy and
change it, radiating the new energy needed to turn cows into vampires."
"Are you kidding me?" Aahz asked, standing off to one side.
"No, she's not," Glenda said. She waved her hand at the thousands and
thousands of skulls. "Welcome to the energy source of the vampire rulers of
this world."
"And the energy is starting to get stronger," Tanda said. "I can feel
it."
"The sun is going down," I said. "We need to get out of here."
I opened up the map and looked at it. Through the room, against the far
wall, was the door we needed to go through. And on the other side of that
door was something I hadn't expected us to get so close to this fast.
The golden cow.
The treasure we had come so far to find. It was one secret door away,
in a room called the Meadow.
"Take a look at this," I said, spreading the map out for everyone to
see.
"Now what do we do?"
Aahz looked at the map and smiled.
"We go capture us a leader as a hostage and make sure we get our
freedom."
"Sounds good to me," Tanda said.
"Why don't I think it's going to be that easy?" I said.
"Because it never is." Glenda said.
Around me the empty-eyed cow skulls started to hum faintly and vibrate
a little, filling the room with a noise that ate at my very soul.
"Whatever we're going to do," Tanda said, her hands over her ears,
"let's do it fast."
Again I stuffed the map in my pouch and, with my hands over my ears as
well, I headed through the middle of thousands of humming skulls toward the
secret panel in the far wall.
By the time I got there the sound from the skulls in my head was so
painful I didn't even stop. I just went right on through and out onto a
thick carpet of beautiful grass.
Aahz, Tanda, and Glenda followed me, with Aahz shutting the secret
panel behind us, instantly stopping the painful energy pounding at my head.
I would have been relieved if I hadn't been so stunned at what faced me.
There was a guy, sitting in a lounge chair on the other side of the
field of grass, reading a newspaper. If he had had on a white apron, he
would have looked almost exactly like the guy who had waited on us in
Audry's.
The setting sun was pouring through one of the room's giant windows and
turning the nearby hills to a wonderful shade of gold and pink and red.
I glanced around. Except for the patch of grass we were standing on,
the room looked like a large suite, with a big bed, a kitchen against one
wall, and a private bathroom area off to one side.
The guy was sitting in what looked like a livingroom area, except that
there was only one chair. He looked over at us, then shook his head as if
not believing what he was seeing. Then he looked at us again and jumped to
his feet, an expression of sheer joy and happiness on his face.
"My wonderful heavens!" he shouted. "You've finally come!"
"I think he's happy to see us," Tanda whispered.
The guy came toward us, his face almost breaking from the smile filling
it.
"Really happy," I whispered back.
"My friends, my friends, come in," he said, motioning us to come toward
his living area. "Don't be afraid. I'm just so happy you have arrived."
"You are?" Aahz asked.
The guy laughed.
"I am. I honestly am. I can't believe after all this time the map has
finally brought someone to rescue me!"
"You can't always get what you want."
M. JAGGER
The guy led us off the grass and into what was clearly his home.
"Sorry for the mess," he said, scampering about picking up a book here,
a notebook there, some dishes which he quickly put in the sink. We all just
sort of stood in a group watching him. "My name is Harold. I'm sorry I don't
have enough chairs for you all." "
He looked like a Harold. The name fit him, and all the other guys who
planet. It was made of stone and inlaid with gold that shimmered in the
afternoon sun. It was like a second sun, only golden.
"Oh, my," Tanda said softly.
"No wonder there's a treasure map to this place," Aahz said. "I've
never seen anything like that."
"Neither have I," Tanda said.
Well, if the two experienced dimension travelers in the group had never
seen anything like the golden palace we were staring at, I sure hadn't
either.
After a moment I asked what I thought was the obvious next question.
"So now what do we do?"
"We go take a closer look," Aah2 said, laughing. "See what we can see."
I glanced at my mentor. He was always happy when there was a chance we
might end up with a lot of money. I didn't want to ask him how he thought we
were going to get any of the gold we could see from here, but clearly he had
ideas, and the ideas were enough to make him smile.
All his smile did was worry me.
I flew us two more small hills closer to the city before Aahz said we
had better walk the rest of the way. There was so much energy in this area
that I didn't even feel tired from the effort of flying. It had come easy,
which meant that all magik was easy in this place. That was both good and
bad.
Ahead of us on the road were some walkers, plus a wagon full of
vegetables being pulled by two horses. Cows filled the fields, paying no
attention to anything.
Up closer, the town of Donner was even bigger than I had first thought,
with a very wide, boulevard-like main road heading straight through
everything. The golden castle on the top of the hill was massive. It looked
like it could swallow the entire royal palace and courtyard of Possiltum and
not even burp. I wonder if this place had a royal magician. Maybe I could
apply for the job, but I doubted I would pass the cow physical.
We had just crested the last small hill and were starting down toward
the edge of the city when a dozen men on horseback came galloping out of the
city, kicking up a cloud of dust behind them. A few people ahead of us on
the road stepped out of the way. And the wagonload of veggies had to move
almost off the road and into a small ditch.
The thundering horses came on, riding hard, the men's black hats pulled
down tight on their heads. I didn't have a good feeling about this, but at
the same time there was no reason to think they were after us.
We moved to the side of the road as they neared, but instead of riding
past, then stopped, sort of forming a circle around us, pinning us against a
pasture full of cows. I clearly should have trusted my bad feeling.
"You are under arrest," a man sitting on a big black horse said.
"Please come with us into the city."
"It's a posse," Tanda said, the surprise in her voice clear. "Never
thought I'd ever see one."
"A what?" I asked.
"Never mind," she said.
"Under arrest for what?" Aahz demanded of the guy on the big horse.
The guy, whose face looked very similar to the guy who had been the
bartender in Audry's, smiled. I didn't like the look of his little teeth at
all.
"You have been charged with not complying with round-up procedures," he
said, "and the unlawful use of magik."
I glanced at Aahz, then at Tanda. Now we knew for sure that this
dimension knew about magik. As far as I was concerned, right about now would
be a great time to beat a hasty retreat to the wonderful dust of Vortex #6.
But it seemed Aahz had other ideas.
"We demand to be taken to your leader," Aahz said, stepping toward the
man. "We are powerful magicians from another dimension with important
information your leader will want."
The guy actually laughed, which rocked Aahz back on his heels. Not too
many people actually laughed at my mentor and got away with it.
"Drop my disguise," Aahz said, whispering to me.
I shrugged. At this point, it couldn't get any worse, so I did as he
asked.
Not a one of the men on the horses even seemed to notice that there was
now a green-scaled ugly Pervect standing in front of them. Not even their
horses cared.
That was not what Aahz was expecting.
The guy again just laughed.
"You can drop the act," he said. "Our leader knows exactly why you are
here."
Then the guy did something that just flat scared me to death. He
pointed a finger at Aahz and a moment later the map came floating out of
Aahz's belt pouch, unfolded in midair, and fluttered there. Then it refolded
and returned to the pouch.
"Now please come with us," he said.
He turned his horse and started at a slow pace toward the city.
I glanced at Aahz, who was looking almost stunned, then at Tanda.
"Don't you think this might be a good time to head for home?" I asked.
"I wish we could," Tanda said.
Sweat dripped off her forehead as we all stepped back onto the road to
follow the guy who had done the talking. The rest of his group of riders
waited and fell in behind us.
"Excuse me?" I said. "How about jumping us to the dust storm?"
"Trust me," she said, "I tried."
"You what?" I couldn't believe she couldn't get us out of this mess.
"We're blocked?" Aahz asked.
"Tighter than a vault," she said. "Best block I've ever run up
against."
"How about I try to fly us out of here?"
"Won't work either," Tanda said. "At the moment there's a block over
all our magik."
"Oh," was all I could say.
Ahead, just over the head of the horse in front of me I could see the
golden palace. It was the place, the treasure, we had been working and
fighting so hard to reach. Right now it was the last place in any dimension
I wanted to go.
"Who are those guys?"
B. CASSIDY
No one in the city seemed to pay us any attention at all as we were
marched into Donner and right up the wide Main Street of the city toward the
golden palace on the hill. I saw at least a dozen Audry's-like places along
the road, and this town had three guys in white hats and shovels cleaning up
after the hundreds of horses. As we passed, all three of them tipped their
hats and said, "Howdy."
What really made this town different from all the others we had gone
through, besides the golden palace towering over it, were the pastures
between the buildings. About halfway up to the palace, on the right side of
the road, was a beautiful, green pasture about the size of one building.
It had one lone cow in it, grazing on the perfectly tended grass.
A little farther up the hill there were more small pastures between
buildings on both sides of the street, each with just one cow. And the
higher we went, the more beautiful the pastures became, with ornate
decorations and well-trimmed grass.
Just under the palace were five pastures on both sides of the main
boulevard, and in each of those manicured and ornately decorated lawns was
one cow, and off to one side a guy wearing a white hat and carrying a
shovel. Waiting. Now I knew what all the other shovel-carrying guys working
the streets of all the towns were trying to advance their way up to.
The guys on horses dismounted at a massive gate made of stone pillars
and gold bars. The palace itself was surrounded by a tall stone wall that
looked too high to even try to climb.
The stone was highly polished and there looked to be gold lining the
top.
The guy in charge pointed us at the gate, but didn't follow us in.
Instead, five other men in white robes with gold trim met us just inside the
gate and indicated we should follow. Each carried a golden shovel like a
cane, using it to walk. It was clear that a person who worked outside the
palace and didn't have a golden shovel couldn't get into the palace. Why
were we so lucky?
"Would you look at all the gold!" Aahz said, his head whipping back and
forth as he tried to take it all in.
"Amazing," Tananda said, her voice soft and carrying the awe she felt.
I couldn't say anything. The sight that greeted us inside that gate was
beyond anything I had ever imagined. There was nothing but beautiful-trimmed
lawns, gold ornaments, strangely shaped shrubs, and guys in white robes and
white hats with golden shovels. Maybe a dozen different cows grazed on the
beautiful lawns, clearly without a care in the world, all tended by guys in
white robes with golden shovels.
Our robed jailers herded us up the stone staircase, climbing through
manicured lawn after manicured lawn, all surrounded by gold statues of
different animals and gold artwork. The walls of the castle itself towered
over us, the white stone and shining gold walls higher than anything I had
ever seen before.
We were finally taken through a big double door and headed down flights
of stone steps. From there I got completely lost as we went through tunnels,
down steps, around corners, down more tunnels, down more steps, all the time
going deeper and farther under the castle. I didn't much like the idea of
being trapped down under such a massive building, but the idea that we were
being held prisoner by cows controlling guys with golden shovels bothered me
even more. Especially since they were vampire cows.
Finally we were herded into a big room with stone walls and left, a
golden-barred door slamming closed behind us. There were five others in the
big room, all looking tattered and exhausted. Ten beds were spaced around
the walls and all the previous prisoners were lying on the beds, sleeping.
"Glenda," Aahz said.
It took me a second to recognize the figure on the bed across the room.
It was Glenda all right, but not the alive, beautiful, and powerful woman I
had remembered from just a few days before. This woman wore tattered
clothing, had dirt and deep circles under her eyes, and a huge red mark on
her neck.
All three of us moved over to her. As we did her eyes fluttered open
and she saw Aahz, then Tanda and me.
"Found the treasure, I see," she said, her voice barely a whisper.
Then she was back asleep, her breathing heavy, and her mouth hanging
open. The red marks on her neck pulsed with the beat of her heart.
"I don't like the looks of this," I said.
"Any chance we can get out of here?" Aahz asked, glancing around the
room.
I did the same. None of the other prisoners in the place looked to be
in any better shape than Glenda. And all of them had the red marks on their
necks and were sleeping heavily, almost dead.
Tanda shook her head.
"Not a chance at all. The energy is back flowing to us, but the
dimension hopping is still blocked completely. I've been trying to D-hop
ever since we were captured."
"Well," Aahz said, "we're just going to have to find another way out,
and grab a little gold along the way."
"How about the D-Hopper?" I asked. "They didn't search us. Maybe it
would work."
Aahz pulled the D-Hopper out, made sure the setting was right, then
triggered it.
We stayed right where we were.
"Worth a try," I said as he put it back in his shirt.
"I think we need some answers," Aahz said.
He sat down on the edge of Glenda's bunk and then not so gently shook
her awake.
"No! No!" she said as she woke.
Her hands went to her neck and then flinched away. Again it took a
moment for her to recognize us. She blinked, then said, "Go away," and
closed her eyes again.
"We need some answers," Aahz said.
He grabbed her by the shoulders, twisted her around, and sat her
upright on the bed, her back against the wall.
"Easy there, big fella," Glenda said, her voice hoarse. "We're all in
this together."
"I'm not in anything with you," Aahz said.
Looking at the wreck she had become, it was hard for me to even
remember why I had been interested in her in the first place. Could I be
that superficial that she had to remain beautiful for me to care? Or did I
no longer find her attractive or have any interest in her because she had
betrayed us? It was an interesting question I'd have to talk to Aahz about
once we were safely back home.
"Oh," Glenda said, "trust me. If you're here, in this cell, then we're
all in this together."
"How'd you end up here?" Aahz asked. "How'd you find the place without
the map?"
She laughed. "I went to Dodge City, didn't find anything, so I asked
this guy running a bar where the golden cow was, and he told me here."
I shook my head. How simple that would have been. Why hadn't we thought
of it?
"Then what happened?" Tanda asked.
"Didn't even make it into town," she said. "Got picked up by a bunch of
guys on horses yesterday and tossed in here. Then last night I got hauled
out to be a snack at the big party upstairs."
Her hand again went to her neck and she flinched. The red marks there
didn't look like they were healing very well. And I didn't much like the
sound of being a snack like those people lined up on the road had been.
"It was like a bad dream," Glenda said, her eyes distant. "They kept
forcing glass after glass of carrot juice down me while taking turns sucking
oh my neck. By morning I couldn't even walk. I don't remember how I got back
down here."
The thought of carrot juice ripped my stomach into a knot.
"Who were they?" Tanda asked.
Glenda shrugged. "Hundreds of beautiful naked people in this
gold-covered ballroom way up in the castle somewhere."
Aahz nodded. "Vampire cows."
"What?" Glenda asked.
"We saw a field of cows change into beautiful naked people last night,"
I said, "and snack on the townspeople who were waiting to be used."
She looked at me, then at Aahz. "The kid's not kidding, is he?"
Aahz shook his head.
Glenda shook her head and then closed her eyes.
"Drunk dry by bovine vampires. How ironic."
She didn't say anything else, and Aahz didn't push her. She looked as
if she had lost twenty pounds in one night. She had managed to outsmart us,
find her way to the castle, and still get captured. If she couldn't get
away, how were we going to do it before we became a full-moon snack?
"We've got to get out of here before the sun goes down," Aahz said,
standing and moving to the door.
He gave it a couple hard hits, but it didn't move, and no one came
because of the noise. Clearly none of the golden-shoveled guards were
worried about a prisoner escape.
"Even if we did get out," Tanda said, "it would take a map to find our
way back through the castle."
"Map," I said. "That's the key."
Aahz turned and looked at me, giving me one of those
I-don't-understand-how-you-can-be-so-stupid looks.
I moved over to him and stuck out my hand.
"Can I have the map, please?"
"Why would you want it?" Aahz asked.
I didn't want to tell him my idea without first seeing if I was right.
"Just give it to him," Tanda said.
Aahz shrugged and took out the map, handing it to me still folded.
I opened it up, laying it flat on the nearest empty bunk so that we
could all look at it. The map looked as I had expected. It had gained its
magik back once we got inside the castle. It showed where we were, fifteen
levels down and under a lot of rock and gold. It also showed the room where
the golden cow was, far above us.
And better yet, it showed us a path from where we were being held to
what the map called a large ballroom. Clearly the map's designers had
planned on continuing the game right to the very last room. It sort of made
sense. Dimension to dimension until we found the right one, then town to
town until we found the right one, now room to room until we found the right
one. I didn't much like the game, but I understood the thinking.
"Well, would you look at that?" Aahz said, stunned.
Tanda studied the map, then looked at the wall near Glenda's bunk, then
studied the map again.
It didn't take me long to see what she was doing. The map showed a way
out of this room that wasn't the main door. Maybe, just maybe, we had a
chance. If we could escape the cell, then avoid hundreds of men with white
robes and golden shovels, and then outrun the posse on horseback, we might
be able to get far enough away from the castle to dimension-hop back to
Vortex #6.
It sounded impossible, but it was more than we'd had a moment ago.
I folded up the map and put it in my pouch, then headed for the wall
where Glenda was still sitting on a bunk. Her eyes were closed, and if her
chest hadn't been moving I would have thought she was dead.
"Wait," Tanda said as I started to get down on my knees to look for an
opening in the wall under the bunk beside Glenda's, where the map indicated
it would be. "We need to protect ourselves, not let anyone know what we're
doing."
"And how do you suggest we do that?" I asked.
Aahz glanced around at the bunks and the blankets on them.
"Skeeve, when Tanda gives the word, I want you to make the blankets on
those three bunks look like the three of us."
"Four of us," Glenda said, opening her eyes and looking clearly at
Aahz. "If you've found a way to leave, I'm leaving with you."
"Yeah," Aahz said, laughing, "like you took us with you on Vortex #6? I
don't think so."
"I don't go, I alert the guards," she said, staring at him. "And I've
got enough power left to easily break an apprentice's disguise spell."
For a moment I thought Aahz was going to strangle her, and I wanted to
help. Then Tanda stepped between them, facing Aahz.
"She's powerful and can help. Let her, or we might never get out of
here."
My mentor looked like he was about to explode. He hated doing anything
he didn't want to do, and taking Glenda along was something he really didn't
want to do. But Tanda was right; maybe Glenda could help.
"All right," Aahz said, taking a deep breath and letting it slowly out.
He stepped past Tanda and looked down at Glenda.
"You work with us or we dump you faster than you dumped my apprentice
in that bar. Understand?"
She nodded, clearly very weak. "Let me help Tanda with the cover
spell," she said. "I'm good at them."
"I'm an ex-assassin," Tanda shot back. "I'm better."
"I know you are," Glenda said. "I can just add some depth on the cover.
And help support Skeeve's disguises. We're dealing with some good magicians
here. Let's make sure they don't see us coming, or leaving as the case may
be."
For a moment Tanda stared at Glenda, then she nodded. "Follow my lead."
"Completely," Glenda said. She took a deep, shuddering breath and
braced herself against the wall, her eyes closed.
I glanced around. The other three prisoners hadn't woken up. They
looked to be in much worse shape than Glenda.
Aahz turned to me. "Get ready. On Tanda's count, one at a time,
disguise the four bunks."
I took a deep breath and reached out for the energy it was going to
take.
Energy here wasn't a problem. It flowed all around us like a massive
river, wider and stronger than I had ever experienced. I let it flow inside
me, giving me strength.
"Aahz first," Tanda said. "Now."
On the farthest empty bunk I pictured Aahz lying there, sleeping, his
mouth open.
On the bunk Aahz appeared, just as I had pictured.
I gathered more energy.
"Glenda now," Tanda said.
I imagined Glenda on the second bunk, sleeping in the same way we had
seen her sleeping when we came in, red mark on her neck and all.
Glenda appeared there.
"Now me," Tanda said.
I reached out and took the energy and put the image of Tanda sleeping
in the next bunk
"Now you," Tanda said.
I did the same, although I had never seen myself asleep, I had an image
of what I must look like, and I used that.
It was strange to see myself sleeping there. Really strange.
"All shielded," Tanda said.
Glenda nodded. "Very strong. It should hold. And good job, Skeeve."
I just nodded. I didn't need compliments from a woman who left me to
rot in a town full of cow food.
"Okay, Skeeve," Tanda said, "see if you can find that opening."
I got down on my stomach and crawled partway under the bunk next to
where Glenda sat. It looked like a stone wall, just like all the rest of the
room. But when I went to touch the wall, my hand went through as if nothing
was there.
"A disguised opening," I said.
I crawled under the bunk and right on through the wall, coming out on
the other side. It was pitch black, so I tore a little piece off the bottom
of my shirt and used a magik spell to light it. I was in a tunnel that had
been cut out of stone. It was just tall enough for me to stand, and not much
wider than my shoulders. It clearly hadn't been used in a long time, if
ever. There was an unused torch stuck in a crack in the rocks, so I lit it,
tossing to one side my burning piece of shirt.
A moment later Aahz followed, coming through what looked to be solid
stone near the floor of the tunnel. Then Glenda, breathing hard, pulled
herself into the tunnel and sat with her back against the sidewall, followed
almost instantly by Tanda.
"This tunnel is shielded as well," Tanda said, looking around as she
stood. "A shield so old, it might have been here before the castle."
"I'm impressed," Glenda said, still sitting on the floor. "How'd you
know this was here?"
I pulled the map out of my pouch and held it up in the faint
torchlight. She saw it and nodded. "Of course."
I opened the map and Aahz, Tanda, and I stood under the torch studying
it.
It now showed the tunnel we were in as center, and the location of the
golden cow had changed. Now it was in a dining room ten floors above us. I
didn't believe it for a moment.
The map showed that we had to follow the tunnel for as far as we could,
then climb up a ladder and through the floor of what was called a morgue.
"Seems we don't have much choice," Aahz said, staring at the map. He
pointed to the fact that the map didn't show a way back into the room we had
just left.
I moved over and touched the wall we had just crawled through. It was
solid rock. Weird.
I moved back over to where they were standing under the light.
"We're going to be chasing the cow until we find an exit," Aahz said.
"We could always kill the magik in the map one more time," I said.
"No," Tanda said. "We may end up in a room that we need the map to help
us get out of."
"She's right," Glenda said. "For all we know, the map may be the magik
source that created this tunnel. From the looks of how that wall turned back
to stone, it just might be."
I stared at the paper in my hand, then at Glenda sitting on the floor.
If she was right, and I had killed the magik in the map again, we might have
ended up trapped in stone. I didn't want to think about that at all.
"So we follow the magik," Aahz said.
I folded the map and put it away in my pouch, then took the torch out
of the crack and held it in front of me so that I could see where I was
going. Then, doing my brave routine, I started off down a tunnel so old, or
so magical, that it didn't look as if anyone had ever been in here.
The tunnel sloped upward like a fairly steep ramp. I moved at a steady
pace, making sure that each step was on solid ground. I didn't trust my eyes
at this point, after crawling through solid rock.
After about a hundred paces I looked back. Tanda was right behind me,
Aahz behind her, and Glenda was managing to stay up with us, only because I
was moving so slowly. I didn't feel the slightest bit sorry for her. She had
left me to die, and gotten herself into the mess she faced last night. And
without us, she wouldn't have this chance to escape. As far as I was
concerned, she would either keep up or go out on her own again.
I went back to working my way up the tunnel, testing each step, until
finally I reached the end. A rock ladder had been carved into the stone,
leading straight up through a very narrow hole.
As Aahz stopped beside me I pointed up at the hole.
"Can you squeeze through there?"
"Do I have a choice?"
"I suppose not," I said. I handed him the torch. "Let me get up through
the opening so I can brace my back against the wall, then hand me the
torch."
Without waiting for another idea from my mentor, I started up. The hole
in the roof of the tunnel was big enough that my shoulders touched on both
sides, but not so small that I had to squeeze. Aahz might be able to make
it, but it was going to take some work.
Once I got through the hole, the space got bigger. I stopped and Aahz
handed me the torch, passing it up past me quickly so I wouldn't get burned.
Above I could see the ladder climbing at least twenty or so of my body
lengths before reaching what looked to be a wooden trapdoor in a floor.
"Send Tanda up second," I whispered down to Aahz below me. "We need to
make sure no one is in the room above the trap door up here."
"Good thinking," Tanda said, climbing up under me as I went higher. She
got up just under me, paused, and then nodded. "No one up there at the
moment."
"Good," I said.
"You go next," I heard Aahz say to Glenda down in the tunnel.
"No," Glenda said, her voice firm. "You get stuck in that opening it's
going to take both Tanda pulling and me shoving to get you through."
I couldn't hear what Aahz said, but a moment later his green-scaled
head came through the hole below Tanda.
"No, both arms ahead of you," Tanda said.
Aahz backed down a step, put both his arms over his head, and climbed
back up into the hole. From what I could see, his shoulders were wedged
pretty good in the rock.
Tanda braced herself, grabbed one of his hands, and then said, "Ready
to push, Glenda?"
"Ready," Glenda said, her voice muffled as if she were a long ways
away.
"Now," Tanda said, pulling on Aahz's arm as he pulled on the rock
surface with the other.
With a rip of his shirt, he came through.
Tanda let go and moved up under me. Aahz had his shoulders through the
hole, but he wasn't climbing any higher at the moment.
"Glenda," he said. "Grab a hold of my leg and I'll pull you up."
"I think I can make it," she said.
"Just do it and quit arguing with me," Aahz said.
I stared down at the top of my mentor's head. The old green-scaled guy
had a soft spot after all. Always knew it was there, just hadn't seen it
that often.
As Aahz helped Glenda up the stone ladder, Tanda and I went on up to
the trap door. Since Aahz hadn't taught me a spell yet that could sense if
something was on the other side of a wall, or a floor in this case, I was
leaving that up to Tanda.
"We still in the clear?" I asked.
"We are," Tanda said.
I eased up to the wooden trapdoor and pushed slowly. The wood scraped
as it went up, then the door seemed to catch on something. It took me a
moment to realize it was a rug. From the looks of it, a very old rug.
I pushed even harder, and the rug lifted and pulled aside enough so
that I could get through. I went halfway up through the trapdoor and stood,
torch in the air, lighting the dark room.
Tanda had been right. From what I could see, no one was around. Just a
bunch of tables and a wooden door leading off to the left. But the minute I
stepped up and stood, I knew that Tanda and I had both been wrong. No one
alive was around.
But the place was filled with dead people. Tables full of them.
"There's gotta be a way out of this dungeon."
G. GYGAX
Okay, this was another first for me. I had never had the luck,
opportunity, or bad timing to be in a room full of dead people. And these
weren't just any dead people, but people who had clearly had the life sucked
out of them through their necks just the night before. There had to be at
least fifteen or twenty bodies, all naked, with ugly marks on their necks,
and eyes staring at the ceiling.
I stood, holding the torch in the air, not really wanting to move in
any direction until the others were beside me. Not that I thought the dead
could do anything to me, or that I was superstitious about dead spirits. I
wasn't, I was sure. I just didn't want to make a wrong move until I had
someone beside me, or at least that was what I told myself.
"Looks like you were lucky to survive last night," Aahz said to Glenda
as helped her through the trap door and onto her feet.
"Does seem that way, doesn't it," she said, leaning against a table
with a dead guy on it.
The guy looked a lot like the guy who ran Audry's. I was starting to
think that most of the men on this planet looked like him.
"So much for thinking they didn't kill their food source," Tanda said.
"I don't think most do," Aahz said. "But this is the castle, the
royalty of the planet. I would imagine in here all rules are off."
"Wonderful," I said. "Now we have naked killer vampire cows, one of
which is rumored to give golden milk."
"Strange place, isn't it?" Aahz said.
"You could say that, but you just did."
"We need to put that rug back and close the trap," Tanda said. "Make
sure we cover our tracks as best we can."
I handed Tanda the torch and Aahz and I sat to work. In a few seconds
the room looked like it had before we came up out of the floor.
"Now where?" Glenda asked.
I pulled out the map and opened it, holding it up to the light for Aahz
and Tanda to see. The morgue, the room we were in, was now central on the
map. The golden cow had moved to the kitchen. And our path out of here was
through a panel in the back of the room, not the door. The map showed the
panel leading to a secret passageway that led for a long ways up through the
castle.
"You know," I said, pointing at where the passageway led, "that we are
getting deeper and deeper into the castle and farther from an escape exit."
"Looks that way, doesn't it?" Aahz said, staring at the map.
"That doesn't matter and you know it, Aahz," Glenda said. "At least you
could tell your apprentice the truth."
We all turned and looked at where she was leaning on a table with a
naked dead guy right behind her.
"How's that?" Aahz asked, clearly not happy at Glenda's tone.
"We can't escape this place without beating this map," she said. "And
beating the map means capturing the golden cow, who I assume, is the leader
of this entire dimension. That golden cow is the only one who is going to
let us go, and you know it."
At that point I was convinced that all the blood loss had gotten to her
mind. The only thing I wanted to do was find a way out and run or fly as
fast as we could until we were far enough away that we could hop dimensions
and get away from this insane place.
"Come on," I said, smiling at her. "That would be crazy. Going after
the head of all the cow vampires would be suicide. We'd end up like all
these fine food products around us. Glenda, it's clear you need to rest."
No one said anything. Glenda just kept staring at me and slowly I
realized that neither Aahz or Tanda were telling her how crazy she was
either.
I turned to my mentor, who had a sheepish look on his face.
"She's right," he said. "We wouldn't stand a chance of getting out of
here, against the kind of magik we are facing, without the help of the map."
I looked at Tanda.
She smiled at me. "They're right. I can barely, with Glenda's
assistance, keep us hidden. The magik around here is so powerful, we
wouldn't stand a chance without help from the top. And the map is leading us
to that help."
At that moment I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I was as dead
as any of the bodies in the room with us. I just wasn't smart enough yet to
lie down and stop breathing like they had all done.
With one more look at my mentor, then at Glenda, I shrugged and tried
to put on my best death-mask face.
"Why not? Let's get moving before someone comes in and stops our fun
treasure hunt before it really gets started."
With one more look at the map, I folded it and put it back in my pouch.
Then I headed through the tables of bodies to the back wall. As I went
I wanted to talk to the bodies, tell them I'd be right back, tell them to
wait, to reserve a table for me. But I kept my morbid thoughts to myself.
There was a large cabinet of medical supplies filling the back wall and
no hidden panel that I could see. From what the map had shown, the panel was
right behind the cabinet.
I took hold of the back edge of the cabinet and pulled outward. I
expected it to be too heavy for me to move, but it swung easily and
silently, opening up into a passageway behind the panel.
I glanced back at Tanda and Aahz and Glenda, who were silently watching
me.
"Give me the torch and follow me," I said. "We'll check the map again
when we get a ways inside. And pull this closed behind you."
Aahz nodded.
It felt good to be leading, even if I wasn't going in a direction I
wanted to go. At least I'd get to the wrong place first, and more than
likely be killed first.
Tanda handed me the torch and I slipped behind the cabinet.
The passageway was as wide as a small hallway back in the Possiltum
palace. It was mostly made of wood, with some stone walls along the way.
Unlike the passageway cut out of the rock below the morgue, this looked like
it had had regular traffic over the years.
I stayed in the faint path in the dust and moved ten steps down the
secret passageway, then stopped. Aahz pulled the cabinet closed and motioned
that he was ready. I wondered if we could go back that way if we had to, but
I didn't want Aahz to check, simply for the fear of finding out we couldn't.
About a hundred paces along the secret passageway branched into two.
One went to the right and up slightly, while the other went seemingly
straight as far as the light from our torch would show.
Tanda was behind me and I handed her the light, again pulling out the
map.
It had changed again, showing the passageway we were in and the
intersection. The map now wanted us to go right. And up.
I remembered being in front of this castle and looking up as it towered
over us. I had never seen anything so big before. Now it seemed that if this
map had its way, which Aahz and Tanda were determined to give it, we would
end up at the top.
Maybe up there I'd have a good view when all the life was sucked out of
me.
The passageway sloped upwards, sometimes stairs, sometimes just a ramp.
It bent to the right, then in twenty paces to the right again, as if going
around a room. From that point on it just kept turning and twisting and
climbing. After twenty minutes I was so turned around and lost, I couldn't
even begin to tell you what part of the castle we were in. All I knew was
that we had gone up a great deal. Finally the corridor ended at the top of a
short flight of stairs.
I stopped and waited as Tanda caught up. Then, ten steps behind her,
came Aahz helping Glenda. He sure was being nice, for some reason, to a
woman who had betrayed him. That wasn't like Aahz at all. Clearly he needed
her for something, and I was never far enough away from Glenda to ask what
it was.
When they caught up, Glenda slumped to the ground and closed her eyes
and I pulled out the map and looked at where it was taking us. It showed the
end of the secret passageway where we were standing, and a secret door into
a giant ballroom was right in front of me. I glanced at the wall. I couldn't
see where it was, but I assumed that when I needed it, it would be there.
I went back to studying the map again. We had to go into the ballroom
and to the far wall where there was another panel into another passageway.
The golden cow treasure was now marked as being in the throne room a number
of floors above us.
"Looks like we get to go out in the open for the first time," Aahz
said, studying the map.
"There's no one out there at the moment," Tanda said.
"So we need to do it and quickly," I said, folding up the map.
"Keep the map handy," Aahz said. "When we get into the ballroom, you
need to check it again."
"Of course," I said, nodding and acting as if I had known that, even
though I hadn't yet thought of it.
"Can you make it a little farther, Glenda?" Aahz asked.
Glenda jerked and pushed herself to her feet, leaning against the wall.
"I can make it as far as I need to make it."
Aahz just nodded. "Then let's go."
Tanda had the torch, so I went to the wall and pushed where the secret
panel was supposed to be and surprise, surprise, the wall opened. I slid
through. At first I thought there was nothing on the other side of the
panel, that the map had lied to us. Then I realized that the secret door was
pushing out a massive drape or tapestry of some type.
I ducked to the right under the cloth and out into the open, with Tanda
and the torch right behind me.
At the moment we didn't need the light. The room had massive,
two-story-high windows along one side that let in the natural sunlight. The
hills in the distance were like old friends calling to me. I so much wanted
to be out there instead of in here. The sun, from what I could tell, was
within an hour of setting on the other side of the castle. We needed to pick
up speed if we were going to find the golden cow before it became the golden
vampire.
"Wow," Tanda said, looking around at the gold-inlaid panels and golden
ceilings of the massive ballroom.
The floor was a highly polished white stone with streaks of gold
running through it. In my wildest imaginings I could have never come up with
a ballroom as fancy or beautiful as this one.
Aahz and Glenda stopped beside us in the huge room. I bet at least five
hundred people could've danced in this room without even bumping into one
another.
"I remember being in this room last night," Glenda said softly.
The thought of her being here with a bunch of naked vampires chewing on
her neck made me shudder.
"Then let's not wait for the music to start," I said.
I opened up the map and looked at it. Again, just coming through the
secret door had caused the map to change. Now the way out of here wasn't
across the room, but up on what looked like a stage near the back of the
room, directly across from the windows.
"This way," I said, leading the way up a short staircase and onto a
massive wooden stage.
On the back wall was nothing but wood slats. I glanced at the
still-open map in my hand, then moved to what looked to be about the right
area, putting the map back into my pouch as
I went. After just a few seconds of trying, I found the loose boards,
pulled them aside, and we were back out of the light and into what I thought
was another dark passageway.
Tanda came in behind me, holding the torch up so that we could both see
what was ahead.
I froze like a statue at what I saw.
"Well I'll be a grave-digger's monkey," Tanda said.
Ahead of us wasn't another passageway, but a massive, low-ceilinged
room. Rows and rows and rows of shelves lined the walls, and down the middle
of the room, side-by-side, packed close on every inch of every shelf, were
skulls.
Cow skulls.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of white, empty-eyed cow skulls.
Aahz finished making sure the slats were back in place behind us, then
turned and stopped cold beside me. I was glad to see he had the same
reaction I did. It was always good to know my mentor could be shocked.
"Someone want to explain this to me?" Glenda asked, her voice echoing
through the remains of an entire herd.
"Maybe it's a thousand years of former royal family?" Aahz said. "Look
at that one."
He pointed at one skull hung on the wall, ornately decorated with gems.
I knew that wasn't exactly right. I could feel it in the energy in this
place. After a moment I turned to Tanda.
"Can you feel anything odd in here?"
"Power," she said.
"An energy focus?" Aahz asked.
"Sure seems that way," Tanda said. "Or maybe there's something special
about these skulls, something in them that magnifies the magikal power of
this area and turns it into something different."
I found myself, to my own amazement, moving forward toward the closest
shelf of skulls. I reached out and lightly touched the smooth, cool surface
of one. It did have energy, but not energy like I had been taught by Aahz to
use. There was different energy in it, used for something more than just
magik.
"Vampire energy," I said.
Tanda and Glenda came up beside me, each carefully reaching out and
touching a skull.
"He's right," Tanda said. "These skulls seem to take magical energy and
change it, radiating the new energy needed to turn cows into vampires."
"Are you kidding me?" Aahz asked, standing off to one side.
"No, she's not," Glenda said. She waved her hand at the thousands and
thousands of skulls. "Welcome to the energy source of the vampire rulers of
this world."
"And the energy is starting to get stronger," Tanda said. "I can feel
it."
"The sun is going down," I said. "We need to get out of here."
I opened up the map and looked at it. Through the room, against the far
wall, was the door we needed to go through. And on the other side of that
door was something I hadn't expected us to get so close to this fast.
The golden cow.
The treasure we had come so far to find. It was one secret door away,
in a room called the Meadow.
"Take a look at this," I said, spreading the map out for everyone to
see.
"Now what do we do?"
Aahz looked at the map and smiled.
"We go capture us a leader as a hostage and make sure we get our
freedom."
"Sounds good to me," Tanda said.
"Why don't I think it's going to be that easy?" I said.
"Because it never is." Glenda said.
Around me the empty-eyed cow skulls started to hum faintly and vibrate
a little, filling the room with a noise that ate at my very soul.
"Whatever we're going to do," Tanda said, her hands over her ears,
"let's do it fast."
Again I stuffed the map in my pouch and, with my hands over my ears as
well, I headed through the middle of thousands of humming skulls toward the
secret panel in the far wall.
By the time I got there the sound from the skulls in my head was so
painful I didn't even stop. I just went right on through and out onto a
thick carpet of beautiful grass.
Aahz, Tanda, and Glenda followed me, with Aahz shutting the secret
panel behind us, instantly stopping the painful energy pounding at my head.
I would have been relieved if I hadn't been so stunned at what faced me.
There was a guy, sitting in a lounge chair on the other side of the
field of grass, reading a newspaper. If he had had on a white apron, he
would have looked almost exactly like the guy who had waited on us in
Audry's.
The setting sun was pouring through one of the room's giant windows and
turning the nearby hills to a wonderful shade of gold and pink and red.
I glanced around. Except for the patch of grass we were standing on,
the room looked like a large suite, with a big bed, a kitchen against one
wall, and a private bathroom area off to one side.
The guy was sitting in what looked like a livingroom area, except that
there was only one chair. He looked over at us, then shook his head as if
not believing what he was seeing. Then he looked at us again and jumped to
his feet, an expression of sheer joy and happiness on his face.
"My wonderful heavens!" he shouted. "You've finally come!"
"I think he's happy to see us," Tanda whispered.
The guy came toward us, his face almost breaking from the smile filling
it.
"Really happy," I whispered back.
"My friends, my friends, come in," he said, motioning us to come toward
his living area. "Don't be afraid. I'm just so happy you have arrived."
"You are?" Aahz asked.
The guy laughed.
"I am. I honestly am. I can't believe after all this time the map has
finally brought someone to rescue me!"
"You can't always get what you want."
M. JAGGER
The guy led us off the grass and into what was clearly his home.
"Sorry for the mess," he said, scampering about picking up a book here,
a notebook there, some dishes which he quickly put in the sink. We all just
sort of stood in a group watching him. "My name is Harold. I'm sorry I don't
have enough chairs for you all." "
He looked like a Harold. The name fit him, and all the other guys who