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 Tananda 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.
Tananda 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.
Tananda 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 Tananda 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 Tananda 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,” Tananda 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.”
Tananda 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 Tananda 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,” Tananda 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, and 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.
Tananda 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,” Tananda 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 famil
y?” 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 Tananda.
“Can you feel anything odd in here?”
“Power,” she said.
“An energy focus?” Aahz asked.
“Sure seems that way,” Tananda 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.
Tananda and Glenda came up beside me, each carefully reaching out and touching a skull.
“He’s right,” Tananda 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,” Tananda 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,” Tananda 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,” Tananda 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, Tananda, 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 living room area, except that there was only one chair. He looked over at us, and 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,” Tananda 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!”
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 looked a lot like him in all the Audry’s-like places we had been in. Harold pulled his one kitchen chair away from the small table and set it out, then indicated that one of us should take it and another should take his recliner. It was beyond clear that he never got guests of any kind—at least the type of guests he wanted to sit down with. I think at that point we were all so stunned by what he had said, we really weren’t reacting well. I know I wasn’t. I have no real idea what I thought I was going to find when we got to the “treasure,” but a guy waiting to be rescued sure wasn’t it. And a guy who had used the map to bring his rescuers would have never occurred to me. Only Glenda took his offer of the recliner and settled into it with a deep sigh. The guy looked at her, worried.
“You were captured and taken last night, were you not?”
“I was,” she said.
Harold looked sincerely upset. “I’m so sorry. You’re so lucky you survived it.”
“We saw a room full of people who didn’t,” Aahz said.
The poor guy looked like he might just faint away right there. He was wringing his hands, shaking his head, and pacing.
“It’s all my fault, you know. All my fault.”
“Okay,” Aahz said, trying to calm the guy a little. “You want to explain to us what’s going on?”
“Actually start from the beginning,” I said, leaning against the kitchen counter.
From where I stood I could see out the two-story-tall windows that flanked one side of the big room. The valley below was in complete shadow, but the sun still covered the mountains and streamed in through the window onto the grass. If this was a prison, it was the nicest jail cell I had seen in a long time.
Harold nodded. “I’m sorry, I am just so shocked you are here, that the map worked.”
“The beginning,” Aahz reminded him.
“Please?” Tananda said. “Right now you are looking at four of the most confused people you have ever seen.”
“Okay,” Harold said, his head nodding like it was on a spring. He glanced at the window and then took a deep breath. “I’ve only got a half-hour until sunset and this is a long story. I might have to continue it in the morning.”
“No problem,” Aahz said, clearly doing his green-scaled best to calm the guy. “Just start and we’ll go from there.”
Again Harold did the nodding routine, his head going up and down so hard I was sure he was going to have a neck ache. “First off, you’re standing in what centuries ago used to be called Count Bovine’s Castle.”
Okay, I have to say that I wasn’t the one who started the snickering. Tananda was, with her snort. Then Aahz started shaking his head, clearly trying to contain himself, and I just couldn’t keep the laugh inside anymore. Thank heavens the guy was so lost in trying to tell us the story he didn’t notice.
&nb
sp; “For as long as history recorded,” Harold said, gathering speed on his tale, “Bovine’s type and our people lived in an uneasy balance. They fed off of us; we killed them when we discovered them. Everything was in balance. The legends go that Count Bovine, a very long-lived and smart vampire, found this area and took it over. He enslaved the people of Donner and built this castle.”
Harold waved his arms in both directions to make sure, I guess, that we knew he meant the castle we were sitting in.
“Then Count Bovine led his people in a revolt against my people, using the power that came from this castle. Over a period of a hundred years he swept out over everything and was on the verge of wiping my kind from the face of this planet.”
The guy glanced at the window. The sun was on the tops of the mountains. Sunset was close.
Harold went on. “Of course, during that time Bovine’s people also wiped out almost all other living creatures here as well with their blood thirsty ways. Day in and day out, they just couldn’t get enough blood to satisfy themselves.”
It suddenly dawned on me, that except for horses, we hadn’t seen any other creatures since we had gotten here. No dogs or wild animals. Nothing but cows, horses, and people.
“Okay, a quick question,” I said. Harold nodded with a glance at the window. “You’re saying that Bovine’s people were not cows at that point, but were people like you, just vampires?”
“Yes,” Harold said. “In fact, it is rumored that vampires originally came from our species, but that fact is lost in time, if true.”
“It’s that way on other dimensions,” Aahz said. “So it is more than likely it was that way here as well.”
Harold nodded. “I had heard that as well.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“Count Bovine, who was not a stupid individual, understood that something had to be changed or his people would wipe out my people, who were his people’s only remaining food source.”
“Makes sense,” Tananda said. “You lose your food, you die as well.”
“Exactly,” Harold said. “So he struck a deal with the few remaining of my people to take his people away for all but the nights of the full moon, if my people would serve his kind during that time as food.”
MA11-12 Myth-ion Improbable Something Myth-Inc Page 13
