No one said a word, so Harold went on. "As we went, on our army got bigger and bigger, and more and more cows died. Every skull of every cow we brought back here to make us stronger. It was a heady time."
Harold looked like an old man, thinking back to his party days.
"When did Count Bovine show up?"
"Oh, about four months into our little war. He and five of his most powerful vampires walked in here one night and killed every one of my men without so much as a fight."
"Bet you thought you had it shielded, didn't you?" Aahz said.
"I did," Harold said. "I was so confident of the shielding that I didn't even have guards posted."
"Wouldn't have done any good," Aahz said. Tanda nodded. I didn't have a clue why he said that, but Harold seemed to agree as well.
"Needless to say, Count Bovine was angry. He imprisoned me up here, and put a spell on me so that every month, when he and his people are dining on my people, I'm a cow eating grass."
"How long ago was that?" I asked.
"I don't know exactly," Harold said. "No real reason to keep track. At least thirty years, maybe more."
"And Bovine and his people have been killing your people ever since?" Aahz asked, looking puzzled.
"Actually, no," Harold said. "That just started a few years back, when Count Bovine was killed and his second-in-command, Ubald, took over."
"Ubald's not one for keeping things in balance, is he?" Tanda asked.
"Not worried about it at all," Harold said. "He told me that there were enough of my kind around for his people to party for centuries."
"At least he didn't undo the cow spell," I said.
"Neither he nor Count Bovine could," Harold said. "Ubald keeps trying, though. He's using the cow skulls in the other room there to funnel energy into breaking it."
"Makes sense," Aahz said. "A spell that major, in place for that long, would be almost impossible to remove. But not completely impossible."
"He's got time," Harold said.
"So how did the map come about?" I asked.
"When Count Bovine was still alive, and had me locked up here, none of them lived anywhere near here. One day, this cartographer showed up. I wanted him to help me escape and he said he couldn't."
"He can't," Tanda said.
"Why?" I asked.
"He told me that, as long as he didn't involve himself in any activity in any dimension," Harold said, "he was free to use his magik to move anywhere he wanted, map anything he wanted, including through the magik that Count Bovine had put up to hold me here in this castle."
"I'm puzzled," Aahz said, "How did you get him to lie that there was a cow here who gave gold milk and draw a treasure map to it?"
"It never says anything about a cow giving gold milk," Harold said, laughing. "I'm the cow the map leads to, and I was willing to give anyone a lot of gold if they found me."
"Makes sense to me," Tanda said, laughing.
I was enjoying the different emotions playing over my mentor's face. We had deciphered the map, found the cow, and were entitled to the gold. That made Aahz's mouth water, I could tell. But, at the same time, getting the gold out of here, with all our blood still inside our bodies, was going to be another matter.
Harold noticed Aahz's face. "You're a Pervert, right?"
"Pervect," Aahz said, showing all his teeth.
He hated being called a Pervert, and often was, since that was the reputation of the demons from his dimension.
"Sorry," Harold said. "But you love money and gold, don't you?"
Now it was Tanda's and my turn to laugh. Aahz just gave us both a dirty look and then said, "Of course."
"You are welcome to all the treasure-gold if you want- you can carry from here," Harold said. "There's tons of the stuff in the back. The rocks of this mountain are full of it. All you have to do is help me escape."
I knew there wasn't a sunbeam's chance on Vortex #6 that Aahz would turn down that offer. But I didn't really mind. I sort of liked Harold. And besides, I'd lost a mentor once myself, and we apprentices needed to stick together.
"You know of a way to escape from here?" Tanda asked Harold, staring at how Aahz's eyes had glazed over at just the idea of a lot of gold.
"If I did, would I still be here?" he said, his voice sad.
Aahz looked at me and I shrugged. "Why not?"
Aahz looked at Tanda. Tanda sighed. "Sure. As you've been saying all along, we've come this far."
"Great," Aahz said. "We'll help you."
I knew for a fact that Aahz didn't have a clue how we were going to help Harold escape, but the promise sure cheered up our host.
After another hour of talking with Harold to make sure we hadn't missed anything important, I knew enough about this Ubald vampire guy to make me want another shot of carrot juice. The guy was just plain mean, almost as old as Count Bovine had been, and not at all happy with the situation as it stood.
On top of that, he liked to party, and party hard. By the time the sun was ready to come up on the last morning of the full moon, Harold said, Ubald and his group were stumbling idiots. Still very dangerous, but stumbling, and it often took the men with the golden shovels days to round up all the cattle from the different rooms of the castle and take them back to their private pastures.
The idea of coming into a huge bedroom suite to find two cows standing on a rumpled bed was too much for me. Tonight was that night, the most dangerous night of the full moon according to Harold. I could hardly wait.
Finally Aahz decided we had talked enough and we all headed back into the library area. Aahz wanted to have Harold show us the books about the spells put over this castle, the spells put on everyone by Count Bovine, and what Harold knew of the magik energy surrounding this castle.
But first we had to wake up Glenda. Snoring, drooling Glenda. As far as I was concerned, she could just stay right there, sleeping for the next hundred years, or until she died of hunger in her sleep, whichever came first.
But it seemed that Harold and Aahz had other ideas for her which they were not sharing with me.
"Are you confident she's cured?" I asked Harold as we stood staring at her.
"Completely," Harold said. "The magik rope there does the trick."
"Well, just to be sure," I said, "can we put the rope around her again tonight, before the sun sets?"
Aahz laughed. "Trust me, she'll have the rope on tonight. You can count on it."
I stared at him as he moved to her and untied the knot in the golden rope, then pulled it free, wrapping it in his hand.
After what Glenda had done to us, I figured it would have served her right to become a cow for most of every month for the rest of her life. She was already a self-centered bloodsucker; why shouldn't she have the entire cow package?
After Aahz pulled the rope off of her, she awoke, groaned and somehow managed to sit up, her face pale and her eyes glazed. "What happened?"
"You slept through the night just fine," Aahz said.
"Snoring like a horse," Tanda said.
I wanted to ask her how she knew horses snored, but fig ured this wasn't the time to push too much into her personal life.
Glenda's hand went to her neck, where there was now no sign of the vampire bites. I could tell that she was surprised when she touched her neck and it didn't hurt. Surprised and confused. Then she noticed the gold laced rope Aahz was holding. For a moment she looked into his eyes. Then she asked, "Was I going to turn?"