Myth-ion Improbable by Robert Lynn Asprin

“You have any idea what that means? Or where it’s at?”

“Not a clue,” he said.

Now I was stunned. It wasn’t often that my mentor admitted he didn’t know something. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time that it had happened, if ever. I wanted to point that out to him, but this just didn’t seem to be the right time, so I went back to studying the map.

I could see that on the map Vortex #1 had six lines leading off to six unlabeled points on the paper. And lines led off of each of those points to other vortex dots. There were seven more vortexes listed, and a big “X” marking the cow in the lower right corner of the map. Only one line led from Vortex #8 to the cow.

It was clear that there was no straight line from Mini to the cow. And no right path. From the looks of it, we could go any of a dozen different ways, through different points labeled vortexes, taking different lines. If nothing else, this was going to be an interesting puzzle.

Aahz had told me that dimension-hopping was dangerous because a person could hop to an unknown dimension and never get back. I wondered now how safe it was going to be following a map through some of these dimensions, especially when even the map was confusing.

“Well,” Tanda said, turning to Aahz. “It looks like we’re going to need some more help if we’re going to find this golden beast.”

Aahz looked at her and then slowly shook his head. “You can’t be thinking what I think you’re thinking.”

“I’m thinking it,” she said.

“No!” Aahz said, his voice firm. I knew for a fact that when he said no like that there was no changing his mind.