“Skeeve, if you can hear me, light the torch.”
Now I understood the blackness, but I still couldn’t remember where I was. I could hear something moving around, but it was so dark, I couldn’t see a thing. More than likely it was Aahz trying to figure out what had happened to the lights.
I felt around on the floor beside me, but I couldn’t find a torch. There wasn’t one near me. I’m not sure why I expected there to be on the floor, but still I couldn’t find it. The floor I was on was cold, like stone, and hard as a rock.
“Skeeve, some light.”
Aahz was starting to get on my nerves. It was dark out. Why couldn’t he just let me sleep? I reached down and ripped off a little piece of my shirt. I seemed to remember that some time in the past I had done that same thing. But the memory was foggy.
Holding the piece of cloth up in front of me, I focused my mind, trying to find some energy to take and light the cloth. It was hard, but I finally found enough to catch the cloth and start a small flame.
The room around me flickered into being. Aahz was sitting against a stone wall with Tanda’s head on his lap about ten paces from me. There was nothing else in the room except a big hunk of thin, gray metal covering the center of the room.
“I was worried about you, apprentice,” Aahz said. “Glad to see you alive.”
“I was worried about me as well,” I said.
Slowly I was remembering. We were here to cut the energy from a big spell done a long time ago by a Count Bovine, and the big pancake-like gray thing in the middle of the floor was my shovel, or what was left of it.