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 shoul ders 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 far ther 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 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."