“Even if we did get out,” Tananda 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,” Tananda 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.
Tananda 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,” Tananda 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 Tananda 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 Tananda 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 Tananda was right, maybe Glenda could help.
“All right,” Aahz said, taking a deep breath and letting it slowly out.
He stepped past Tananda 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 Tananda with the cover spell,” she said. “I’m good at them.”
“I’m an ex-assassin,” Tananda 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 Tananda stared at Glenda, and 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 Tananda’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,” Tananda 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,” Tananda 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,” Tananda said.
I reached out and took the energy and put the image of Tananda sleeping in the next bunk
“Now you,” Tananda 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,” Tananda 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,” Tananda 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 Tananda.
“This tunnel is shielded as well,” Tananda 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, Tananda, 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 m
ap. 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,” Tananda 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. Tananda 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 Tananda 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,” Tananda 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 Tananda 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 Tananda.
“No, both arms ahead of you,” Tananda 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.
Tananda 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,” Tananda 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.
Tananda 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, Tananda 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 Tananda.
“We still in the clear?” I asked.
“We are,” Tananda said.
I eased up to the wooden trapdoor and pushed slowly. The wood scraped as it went up, and 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.
Tananda 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 Tananda and I had both been wrong. No one alive was around.
But the place was filled with dead people. Tables full of them.
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,” Tananda 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,” Tananda said. “Make sure we cover our tracks as best we can.”
I handed Tananda 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 Tananda 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 cas
tle.
“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 nor Tananda 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 Tananda.
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.
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