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, Tanda, 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 map. 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,” Tanda 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.