“Oh,” Aahz said.
“And you know that how?” I asked. “Is there some sort of mileage marker I keep missing in the blink of eye it takes to hop to a new dimension?”
Tanda laughed. “Don’t we wish.”
“When a person is dimension-hopping,” Aahz said, “and they have powers to do it, like Tanda does, you get a sense of how many dimensions away you have jumped. Not precise, but just a sense of distance.”
Tanda nodded. “And the farther away in number of dimensions, the harder the jump. And the greater the chance of missing the target and getting lost.”
“So that’s why you took us back through Vortex #1 from Bumppp?”
“Safer that way,” she said.
“And each of our jumps following this map is getting us farther and farther away from home?” I didn’t much like the idea of that happening. My job as the Royal Court Magician wasn’t much, but at the moment it was better than this place.
“So far,” Tanda said. “But this is a treasure map we’re following. It isn’t supposed to be so easy that just anyone could do it.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, either.
Aahz pulled off his gloves and took out the map, spreading it on the floor so we could all see it by the light of the fire. As expected, the map had changed again. There were now six lines leading from Vortex #4, all to points that now had names. All six lines headed in the general direction of the point marked as the treasure, but none directly. This map wasn’t making anything easy, that was for sure.
The names on each dimension this time were stranger than normal. All were combinations of the same five letters. Starting from the left, the names were Et, Cet, Era, Etc, Etc, and Ra.