MA11-12 Myth-ion Improbable Something Myth-Inc

by Robert Asprin

  “Think, then act,” I said, repeating what Aahz had said a hundred times. “It’s time to act.”

  With one last look at the town of Evade down in the valley, I took a deep breath and triggered the D-Hopper.

  The storm slammed into me like a hammer. I tucked the D-Hopper into my shirt and focused on how Tananda had led us the other three times to the cabin. The dust didn’t let me see anything around me, but I knew there were some scattered trees. We had passed them the last two times.

  Tananda had gone slightly downhill and to the right, so I figured out what I thought was directly downhill, and then angled a little to the right, counting my steps to make sure that if I was on the wrong path, I could get back. After twenty steps I could see the faint shape of a tree. I was sure that had been there the last time, so I kept going.

  Another thirty slogging steps and another tree loomed out of the blowing dust. I thought that had been there as well. So far so good.

  I kept moving for fifty more steps before I saw the faint light in the window of the cabin below me. I had almost missed it, walking too high along the hillside.

  I eased my way down to the cabin and tried to look in the window, but the dirt and shades made it so that I couldn’t see anything.

  It looked as if I was going to have to go in, hard and fast, like a soldier going after a dangerous outlaw.

  I got to the door, braced myself, and eased open the door latch then shoved hard, the rock from Kowtow ready in my hand as I stumbled in.

  My momentum pushed me three steps into the room before I caught my balance and stopped. I had the rock raised to hit at Glenda, who I expected to be standing there, ready to fight me.

  She wasn’t there.

  The cabin was warm and comfortable, just like the last time I had seen it.

  Tananda and Aahz were sitting at the table, eating what smelled like beef stew with slices of homemade bread.

  “Nice entrance,” Tananda said, smiling at me. “What took you so long?”

  Aahz just shook his head.

  “Shut the door, would you?”

  I stood there with the rock in the air over my head, not really believing what I was seeing. I had so convinced myself that Aahz and Tananda were in trouble that I couldn’t believe that they were simply having lunch and waiting for me. Why had they let me stay the entire day and night in Kowtow?

  Why had they chanced that I would even find the D-Hopper where they had left it?

  “Door!” Aahz said. “You born in a barn or something?”

  Behind me the storm was raging, blowing dust into the cabin. I lowered the rock, tossed it out into the dust, and then closed the door.

  Tananda stood and came up to me, smiling.

  “Aahz, I told you he’d make it just fine,” she said, giving me a hug that convinced me that she was just fine, and I wasn’t dreaming all this.

  Aahz snorted. “After all the mooning over our friend Glenda, I didn’t think his brain would ever work again.”

  I asked the one question I wanted to know most of all.

  “Why didn’t you come back?”

  “We couldn’t,” Tananda said, patting me on the back and leading me to the table, where she slid some bread toward me as I sat down.

  I stared at my mentor, who was just eating and not paying much attention to me at the moment. He did that when he was very angry or very happy, and at the moment I honestly didn’t know which it was.

  “Stew?” she asked, holding up a pot of what was making the room smell so good. “Glenda left us enough food to last for a few weeks at least.”

  “Nice of her,” Aahz said, the anger clearly there.

  “When you didn’t come back for me I thought you were both dead.”

  “We would have been dead in four or five weeks,” Aahz said. “When the food ran out.”

  Tananda served me up a dish of the stew and then sat down next to me after patting my shoulder.

  “So why couldn’t you come back?” I asked, not wanting to eat until I had some answers. “What happened?”

  “Well,” Aahz said, still not looking at me, “we both knew Glenda was up to something, and was going to try to double-cross us.”

  “And we expected her to leave you on Kowtow,” Tananda said.

  “You expected that?” I was stunned and suddenly angry. “Why didn’t you at least warn me?”

  Aahz looked me directly in the eye. “Would you have listened, apprentice?”

  “Yes,” I said defensively.

  Now they both laughed.

  Clearly they thought I had been too much under Glenda’s spell. And the more I thought about it, the more I saw that they were right, at least to a point. When Glenda started her act on the bartender, I started to get suspicious, but not enough to think it through.

  “You were the closest to her, apprentice,” Aahz said, his voice stern and in lecture mode. “You should have been warning us about her, not the other way around.”

  As normal, Aahz was right.

  “So what happened here?” I asked, trying to not admit I had been wrong, even though we all knew I had been.

  “We headed up to the rocks and left the D-Hopper and the map,” Tananda said, “then I jumped us here.”

  “And right into Glenda’s waiting arms,” Aahz said. “Just as she had been planning.”

  “She used a dimension-blocking spell on me,” Tananda said. “She searched us for the D-Hopper, wished us both luck when she couldn’t find it or the map, and hopped out.”

  “I assume she’s going after the treasure,” Aahz said. “And now she’s got a full day’s start on us.” So what I had been feeling from Aahz was anger, both at me and at the fact that we might lose the treasure, after getting so close.

  “So what’s a dimension-block?”

  “A spell that keeps another person from jumping out of a dimension,” Aahz said. “Some cultures use it to imprison people. It’s a pretty basic spell.”

  “That you haven’t taught me yet,” I said.

  He shrugged. “There’s a lot I haven’t taught you. And after falling so easily for this Glenda’s charms and smooth talk, I’m not sure if I ever will.”

  Tananda patted Aahz’s green hand across the table.

  “Easy on your apprentice. He’s young and full of hormones. He did get back here, didn’t he?”

  I wanted to ask what a hormone was, but figured I’d get that information from Tananda later, when Aahz wasn’t around to make fun of my stupidity. He was disgusted enough with me as it was. And this time around I agreed with him. I shouldn’t have been so easily taken with Glenda. She’d given me a couple of compliments and I’d been putty in her hands.

  I looked at Tananda. “So once you jump out of here with the D-Hopper, the spell is broken?”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  “Finish up,” Aahz said. “We’ve given her enough of a head start as it is.”

  “So how do we get the treasure home once we find it?” I asked, then instantly realized just how stupid my question was. It had been Glenda who had told us we were too far from any of our known worlds to dimension-hop safely. That had been another of Glenda’s lies.

  Tananda shook her head. “I think that’s where Glenda got me. She blocked my sense of dimensions when we got near her. When we jumped back here from Kowtow, into the storm, I could sense Vortex #4 and Vortex #2. We can get home any time we want.”

  My relief at that, combined with my relief at finding Aahz and Tananda all right, was more than I could handle. I stared at my stew, trying to make myself eat as much of it as I could. Doing anything else and I just might fall apart completely.

  “So what did you do when she left you?” Tananda asked.

  I shrugged, making myself focus on what I had managed to do right.

  “Paid our
bill by doing the dishes so no one would be chasing me, then explored the town to see what I could see, then sat and waited, staying in the open so that you could find me.”

  “And slept?” Aahz said, his voice sounding disgusted.

  “Not really,” I said. “I got a hotel room because those people are deathly afraid of being outside at night. And of something called a round-up.”

  “Really?” Tananda asked.

  I glanced up from my stew. Even Aahz was now showing interest.

  “Yeah, they bolt their doors and shutter every window, every night,” I said. “I couldn’t think of a way to ask them what they were afraid of without tipping my hand that I was a demon. And at that point I had other problems to figure out, like what to do next if you two didn’t come back.”

  Aahz nodded. “So we need to be careful at night.”

  “The bartender guy said the round-up was still a few days off, since it wasn’t the full moon yet.”

  “I wonder what they’re rounding up.” Tananda asked.

  “Or who’s doing the rounding?” Aahz added. “There’s a lot to Kowtow we don’t know. You have the map?”

  “I sure do,” I said, taking it out of my pocket and handing it to him.

  As I did I had another realization. The map was magik. It hadn’t shown us the right path to Kowtow until I took the magik out of it, but back on Kowtow the magik had returned to the map.

  “Aahz,” I said, smiling at my mentor, “you know, don’t you, that the magik returned to the map when we reached Kowtow?”

  “Yeah,” he said, almost sneering at me. “So? Glenda saw it as well.”

  “Exactly,” I said, smiling at my green mentor, “Glenda looked at the map while we were in Evade. Right?”

  Suddenly Tananda burst out laughing, long and hard and so loud I thought she might hurt herself.

  I smiled at the puzzled expression on my mentor’s face. Considering how stupid I had been lately, getting back on top and giving him some good news felt good.

  “The map is a puzzle,” I said. “That basic nature of the map won’t change just because we reached Kowtow.”

  Suddenly the light in Aahz’s eyes brightened and slowly a smile crept over his green-scaled face.

  “Glenda has the wrong location.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “The map changes every time we get closer, just as it did with dimensions. I’m betting it will do that on Kowtow as well.”

  Aahz put the folded map back in his belt pouch and stood, suddenly in a hurry.

  “Great thinking, Skeeve,” he said. “Let’s get back to Kowtow. Glenda is going to come looking for us to get the map when she discovers she has wrong information. And when she does, I want to be ready for her this time.”

  I liked that idea a lot.

  WE ARRIVED BACK at the cliff face on Kowtow with less than two hours of daylight left. The day was still hot and dry, and nothing had changed in the general area since I had left a few hours before. I quickly disguised all three of us again in the standard wear of the people of this dimension.

  We had packed some food and containers of water. Aahz didn’t much like the idea of eating vegetables. Pervects were mostly meat-eaters. Aahz checked over the D-Hopper and then reset the dimension and hid it in his shirt.

  “Ahh, that feels good,” Tananda said, stretching toward the sun, her white hat tipped back, and her large belt buckle glistening in the sun.

  “The heat?” I asked.

  “Nope. The dimension block being lifted. Amazing how much you miss the ability to hop after you’ve had it and then it’s taken away.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Aahz said.

  “Oh, sorry, big guy,” she said.

  “Gotten used to it,” he said.

  I couldn’t even imagine how Aahz felt, once being a powerful magician and then having his powers taken away from him because of a practical joke by my previous mentor. My mentor had been killed before he could lift the joke. Now Aahz just had to wait for the joke to wear off and his powers to come back, which he said would take more time than I wanted to think about.

  Aahz unfolded the magik map and laid it on the top of a rock so we could all study it.

  The town of Evade was clearly marked as our starting point, with a road leading from it to a town called Baker. In Baker two roads split off to two other towns, then two roads left each of those towns. Eventually a few of the roads led to Dodge, where it was marked that the treasure was.

  Where Glenda was heading.

  But was the golden-milk-giving cow there? I was betting it wasn’t. I was betting the map would change when we reached Baker. And then keep on changing with every city after that until we finally found the right city.

  Glenda was going to be angry, and it served her right. I didn’t want to see what Aahz would do to her the next time he saw her. Pervects are not to be messed with, and she had left him to die on a frozen planet. What he would do to her wasn’t going to be pretty.

  “So we’re back to needing horses,” Aahz said, tracing along the distances between the towns. Then he looked at me. “Unless you think your flying spell is good enough here to work for us.”

  Flying wasn’t the strongest of my magik, but it was one of the things Aahz had trained me to do first. It had saved us from a hanging and a few other tight spots in our last few adventures. But I wasn’t sure if I could lift all three of us and carry us any distance.

  “I can try,” I said, wishing I hadn’t said those words the moment I heard them come out of my mouth.

  “Concentrate,” Aahz said, going into teacher mode. “Search for your lines of power and use them, pull them in, let them flow through you.”

  “You can do it, Skeeve,” Tananda said.

  I wasn’t so sure. Each place had power lines, invisible things that all magicians got their energy from. Some places, like the area of the cabin in Vortex #6 were jam-packed with power. Back at the cabin I could have flown fifty people, but here there wasn’t much magik power. In fact, it seemed almost empty.

  I stretched out my mind, holding onto the power that I could feel, and then concentrating on bringing it in and using it to lift all three of us. A moment later we all were off the ground and into the hot air.

  “Not too high,” Aahz warned. “Keep us just three or four paces off the ground.”

  I was glad to do that, because it was easier. And much safer to boot. I lowered all three of us back to a position just above the top of the boulders and held us there for a few moments to make sure I could do it, and then I lowered us back to where we had started.

  When I let us go I could feel the energy drain away. I was sweating and short of breath and needed a drink of water, but at least I had done it.

  “Nice job,” Tananda said, handing me a canister of water.

  “How long do you think you could keep that up?” Aahz asked, watching me with a look that I knew meant he could see through any extra bragging I might try.

  “Honestly, I don’t know,” I said after I took a long drink of the wonderfully cold liquid. “With rests, and touching each of you as I do it, maybe fifteen minutes at a time. The lines of power are weak in this area. They may be stronger in other areas and then I could last longer.”

  Aahz nodded, seemingly satisfied with my answer. He turned to Tananda.

  “Can you do a cushion spell, in case he drops us?”

  “Not a problem,” Tananda said.

  “What do we do if someone sees us?” I asked. “I’m not sure that I can do a bird disguise spell as well as keeping us flying.”

  “We’re not going to worry about that,” Aahz said. Clearly he didn’t think I could either.

  “We’ll walk when we see someone,” Tananda said, staring at the town below us in the valley. “Just keep us close to the ground and over a road.”

  I nodded
. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  “Good,” Aahz said. “Take us down to Evade; we’ll walk through town and out the other side.”

  I nodded, glancing at how low the sun was getting in the sky. We’d have to deal with where we were going to stay later. I doubted that Aahz would want to stay in Evade. With luck we’d reach Baker, and they’d have a hotel there as well.

  I moved over and stood between Aahz and Tananda, putting a hand on each of their arms. Then I concentrated on taking in what power I could find and lifting us about a pace off the ground.

  “Hold on to your hats,” I said as we lifted into the air.

  I floated us down to the road and then picked up speed, skimming us toward Evade a lot faster than even a running horse could take us. To an outsider we must have looked very strange. Three strangers seeming to be just standing, but moving along the road at a very fast clip.

  After only two minutes I was starting to feel the wear, but before I had to stop Aahz said, “I think we’re close enough now.”

  What had cost me an hour of walking earlier had only taken two or three minutes of flying. Why hadn’t I thought of that this morning?

  I slowed and put us down at a normal walking pace. The moment I let go of the power I stumbled, but Tananda kept me from falling on my face. It was as if every bit of energy had been drained from my muscles, leaving them weak and noodle-like. “You’ll be fine in a moment,” Aahz said, keeping us walking at a good pace toward the now close edge of town.

  He was right. A few more steps and I was sweating like a dam had broken, but I was able to walk.

  Tananda gave me some more water, and that brought even more of my energy back. I was starting to believe that I could do this. And flying, even though it tired me out, was a lot better than riding horses, let alone doing the job it would take to pay for one.

  We got into town as people were starting to close up their businesses and shutter the windows.

  “You weren’t kidding, were you?” Tananda said as we walked down the now mostly deserted sidewalk.

  “They’re afraid of something that comes out at night,” I said. “I have no idea what it might be.”