"Well," I said, glancing at the parchment in my hand, "this is a map to a golden cow that lives in a golden palace and gives gold-laced milk."
Aahz slowly turned to stare at me, his eyes slit as if he were trying to figure out if I was actually joking or not Then, in two steps, he was in front of me, snatching the map from my grasp.
"So there really is such a golden beast?" I asked while he studied the paper.
He didn't respond, so I stood and watched him stare at the map. The writing on it was odd, actually. It didn't show roads, but more like dimensions, energy points, and vortexes. Most of it I didn't understand, and almost none of the map had any names on it, but there was a massive amount about jumping from dimension to dimension that I didn't understand.
Aahz had told me once there were so many dimensions, no one knew the total number, and it was easy to get lost and never make it back when jumping from dimension to dimension. After my shopping trip with Tanda to thirty or forty different dimensions, I was starting to believe him.
Finally he looked down at me, a frown on his ugly face. And when Aahz frowned, which was a great deal of the time, he looked like an animal snarling. His green skin and bright eyes and sharp teeth could be very intimidating if a person wasn't used to it. Luckily, I was.
"So where exactly did you get this?" He fluttered the parch ment in my face as he asked the question.
"Bought it from a man on a street corner," I said. "I think it might have been some beggar."
"What dimension?"
"Not a clue." I shrugged. "One of the many Tanda and I visited. You could ask her."
Aahz frowned even more at that.
"What made you buy it?"
Again I shrugged.
"I honestly don't know. I thought you'd have fun with it for your birthday, and the guy said I was the first traveler he'd seen in a long time who might be able to use it and live to tell the tale."
"Could he see through your disguises?" Aahz asked, staring at me.
I tried to remember back to the day. I had used my stan dard disguise spell, and on that dimension, the spell had not been hard. Most of the residents stood four feet tall, and had two feet. Compared to disguising Tanda and me as slugs on one of the previous dimensions, that had been easy. But the beggar had clearly picked me out of a crowd, and he seemed out of place among the short people, being almost five feet tall.
I looked at Aahz and nodded.
"Maybe. But I don't know how he could have."
Aahz waved his hand in disgust.
"Apprentice, there are a thousand ways, especially with someone so unpracticed as you."
I said nothing. No point in even trying to defend my tal ents. Aahz always won those conversations by making me try something I couldn't yet do. And that was just about everything when it came to magik. But making disguises is my best ability.
Aahz spun around and moved back to the window, keep ing the map with him. He stood there, staring out over the courtyard, letting the silence in the room just build and build. And if there was one thing I hated more than anything, it was the sound of someone thinking, without telling me what they were thinking about.
"So, is there such a golden cow?" I asked, moving over and standing beside him in the big window so he couldn't ignore me.
In the courtyard below the window, Gleep was running in circles chasing his tail. Thank heavens he wasn't near anything, because when a dragon started chasing his tail, things got knocked down, trampled, and just flat destroyed. Especially when it was young dragon.
What was even more amazing was that Aahz didn't seem to be noticing what Gleep was doing. Clearly the map meant something to him.
"The golden cow?" I asked again, "Is it real?"
Aahz slowly turned and looked at me.
"A myth. There are a lot of them in the different dimen sions."
"You're kidding! You mean there is more than one golden-milk-giving-cow myth?" Considering that I had never heard of a cow before today, I found that a little hard to imagine. I'm not sure exactly why I thought even one golden cow was easy to imagine, but dozens of them were just too much. Maybe there was an entire dimension with a race of them.
Aahz sighed. When he sighed like that, it usually meant I was being extra stupid or dense.
"Every tenth dimension has a myth about an animal or person doing something with gold. One has a goose laying golden eggs, another has a fish touching things and turning them to gold, another has a duck with golden feathers."
"One heavy bird," I said, trying to imagine the duck cov ered in gold.
Aahz sighed again.
"The feathers become gold when they fall off."
"Got you," I said. "You ever been near or seen one of these golden animals?"
Aahz laughed, his demon-sound shaking the room.
"If I had, would I be here, in this dump of a palace, with an apprentice as stupid as you?"
I had to admit he had a good point, but I didn't really want to agree with him.
"So that is a sham map," I said.
"Most likely," Aahz said, staring out at the courtyard where Gleep had now managed to catch his tail. He bit it so hard, the poor dragon jumped and looked around, startled. Gleep was smart in many ways, but not about his own tail.
I glanced over at Aahz. When he said 'most likely,' and didn't look at me, it meant he thought there might be a slight chance the map was real.
"Why only most likely?" I asked.
"Because," Aahz said, "I saw a golden deer-dropping once."
"Deer dropping?" Again I had no idea what he meant.
"Deer poop," Aahz said, his voice showing he was getting very tired of my stupid questions. "Deer turds. Deer crap. Deer excrement. One dimension has a myth about a deer that drops gold. I saw one of the droppings. And..."
He stopped, still not looking at me. In all the time we had been together, I had never seen him like this before.
"And what?" I asked.
"And I saw part of a solid-gold elk antler at the Bazaar at Deva."
I was stunned. A deer that pooped gold and an elk that had golden antlers.
"So the map might actually be real?"
"I doubt it," Aahz said, glancing at it.
"But you don't know for sure, do you?"
He shook his head.
"Not for sure."
"So we're going to check it out?"
He looked down at the map in his hand, then folded it and stuffed it in his pocket.
"I'll be back in an hour."
He pulled out the D-Hopper and twisted it to a setting. Back before he met me and lost his powers, he used to be able to jump through the dimensions without the use of a D-Hop per. Now he needed the help and he hated it.
"Wait!" I shouted. "You can't go looking for it without me."
"I'm not," Aahz said. "And get that dragon of yours under control before he breaks something again and we have to pay for it. Be ready to go. One hour. And the dragon doesn't come with us."
With that Aahz was gone, vanished off to another dimen sion with a faint BAMF.
By the time Aahz got back I had Gleep in his stall in the stables and had arranged for someone to feed and walk him until I returned from wherever we were going.
I was standing near the foot of the bed in my room when suddenly the air next to me sort of went BAMF again. Not real loud, but startling when it happened two feet from you. I jumped. Aahz was back, and he had my favorite demon in the entire universe of demons with him.