I think I blushed from the ends of my toes to the top of my head. Luckily the only thing visible to her was my face.
Aahz snorted even louder, an ugly sound that seemed to just hang in the warm cabin like a bad smell.
“Why would your father think we need help?” Tanda asked.
Glenda went back to cutting the fresh bread as she answered. “Because no one has ever made it past this point before, and returned alive.”
“Ohhhhh,” Aahz said, “now I understand. Your father keeps selling the map over and over and your job is to get it back.”
“Actually, he’s tired of selling it,” Glenda said. “And getting it back has never been a problem. He usually just pops in here every spring and takes it off the bodies.”
The faint crackling of the fire and the wind against the eaves of the cabin were the only noises. I didn’t want to think about the fact that a map I had carried around for a week had been on dead bodies.
“Why does that happen?” Tanda asked, but I noticed that she wasn’t really putting as much anger into her voice as before.
Glenda smiled at her. “You’re the one with the ability to dimension-hop. You tell me.”
Tanda’s eyes seemed to fade out for a moment, then she looked up at Glenda and said softly, “We’re too far away from any place I know, including the last place we jumped to.”
“Exactly,” Glenda said, putting the cut bread on the table in front of us. “The Shifters have done that to six groups of treasure-seekers that my father sold the map to. Vortex #6, this place, is just too far from any known dimension, and any other dimension on the map, for almost anyone but the most traveled dimension-hopper. And until I fixed this cabin up a few weeks ago, there was nothing here but a shell of old logs.”