“Oh, my,” Tanda said, coming up out of the tunnel and taking big gulping breaths of air. I gulped right along with her.
Aahz came over and took the map from Tanda, studying it as we caught our breath. After a moment he moved around the room, staying to the outside.
I knew why he stayed to the outside. In the center of the room was a massive energy flow coming up through the floor and going out through the ceiling. It wouldn’t hurt him to walk through it, but Aahz was taking no chances.
About halfway around the room he stopped, studied the map again, and then came back toward us a few steps.
“Right here,” he said, pointing into the empty air. “Right here is where the energy flow is diverted.”
He pointed in the direction of the empty wall beside him, indicating how the energy flow moved off the main one.
I took a deep breath and let my mind open slightly to see the flow.
“Wow!” I said, staggering backwards from the sight.
Beside me Tanda did the same.
“It’s huge!” she said.
Not more than a few paces in front of me was a torrent of pure blue energy, flowing like a fast-moving river up out of the ground and through the ceiling. It was a good forty or more paces across. I could see Aahz through it, but just barely. About halfway up, in the center of the room about head high, the flow seemed to decrease in size significantly, from forty paces across to less than thirty. I could see where the other energy was going sideways and then vanishing in the direction that Aahz had pointed. That energy was powering the spell that held this dimension in the strange state it was in. How Count Bovine had managed to divert so much energy into one spell was also beyond my apprentice’s level of understanding. I glanced down at the little gold shovel I held in my hand, then back at the raging torrent of blue energy in front of me. The silliness of even thinking of trying to change that torrent with my little shovel made me laugh.