Myth-ion Improbable

by Robert Asprin

  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.

  Chapter Twelve

  "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 t
hat 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 He 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 watted 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, iow-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 fee! 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."