Robert Asprin - Myth-ion Improbable

I finally managed to find the words I needed to ask.

"How do you know me?"

"She knows you?" Aahz asked.

Clearly he had been too far out in the dust storm to hear her over the blowing wind.

The girl laughed and I got even more afraid of her. The laugh was perfect, sort of gentle, yet free and high, like a soft breeze on a summer's afternoon. The exact laugh I would expect from a young lady as beautiful as she was, yet never got, at least from the few I had met.

"I doesn't really know him," she said, again laughing. "At least not in the traditional sense, or any other sense for that matter. Although I must say, I wouldn't mind, if you know what I mean."

I had no idea what she meant. I wanted to ask just how many senses of 'know' there were, but figured I'd wait to do that later.

Aahz snorted and Tanda laughed.

She went on. "My father said I should expect a young, good-looking man named Skeeve to come here. I just assumed you were Skeeve, since you are the first person to visit this place in the two weeks I've been here."

I think I was staring at her, stunned. At least that was how it felt. I didn't know her and I had no idea who her father might be.

She smiled at me and then turned to Tananda.

"You must be the one Skeeve was traveling with before," she said. "Don't worry. I've taken care of the dust bunnies. You know, don't you, that they're completely invisible to guys."

Then she glanced at Aahz and frowned slightly.

"But I don't know you and your connection to this, big guy"

I was so shocked, I couldn't say anything. She had called Aahz 'big guy,' and knew I had traveled with Tanda.

No one said anything.

Clearly Tanda and Aahz were shocked as well. From what Tanda had said, we were a lot of dimensions away from our homes. Yet in the middle of a dust storm, in a strange dimension, we had found someone waiting for us. Someone who knew my name.

"Cat's got your tongues, I see," she said, laughing. She turned around and motioned that we should sit down at the table. "I bet you're getting hungry by now, after all the dimension-hopping you've been doing."

I wanted to ask why she thought a cat had my tongue, and how she knew what we had been doing, then decided against asking that, in exchange for what I thought was a better question.

"Are you a Shifter?"

Again she laughed, the wonderful sound filling the cabin and blending in with the faint crackling of the fire in the oven.

"Not hardly. But my father said you might be getting a little tired of their costs by now. How much of the treasure have you given away so far? Thirty-five percent? Forty percent?"

"Only twenty-five percent," I said.

Then it dawned on me that she knew about the treasure as well. And that we had been negotiating with the Shifters. How much did she know, and how did she know it?

Aahz gave me a stern look and I shrugged. He always thought I talked too much, and clearly this was one of those times he just might be right.

"Wow, you must be a great negotiator," she said, smiling at me.

"Not hardly," Tanda said, moving over and sitting down at the table.

Aahz and I did the same.

"So you know our friend Skeeve here," Tanda said. "Could you please tell us what your name is, and how you know him?"

The girl smiled at me, holding my gaze in her beautiful brown eyes.

"My name is Glenda. My father sold Skeeve the map you are using to search for the golden cow."

Glenda turned back to the counter and opened a cabinet that contained what looked to be a freshly baked loaf of bread.

Tanda glared and me and I just shrugged. I had told her and Aahz everything that had happened when I bought the map. This young lady had been nowhere around That much I was sure of. I would have remembered seeing her.

Now I was even more confused. Why had the guy who sold me the map sent his daughter here to meet us? For what reason?

"So the map was a scam after all," Aahz said, scowling at her, "and you've been waiting here to collect something from us. Is that it?"

Glenda laughed and smiled at Aahz. "The cynic of the group, I see."

Then she smiled at me again.

I smiled right back at her.

"He does tend to look at what could go wrong a lot."

"He would make a great lawyer," she said.

I wanted to ask what a lawyer was, but just nodded instead.

She turned to look directly at Aahz.

"No, I assure you that, as far as I know, or anyone knows, the map is real."

"So what are you doing here, then?" Tanda asked.

Glenda shrugged. "My father thought you might need some help about now. And when my father told me about Skeeve after he bought the map, I thought he might be cute. I was right."

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 get ting 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."

"We would have starved to death," I said.

"Given time, you would have starved, or jumped to some other dimension and gotten lost," Glenda said, pulling out the chair and sitting down beside me. "My father tracked two groups with the map who did that. Both met very ugly ends at the hands of creatures they never should have faced."

My memory of the snakes was clear enough to understand exactly what she was saying.

She took a piece of the wonderful-smelling fresh bread and bit into it, never taking her gaze from mine.

"And your price to rescue us is...?" Aahz asked.

I glanced at him. Typical Aahz, always leading with the pocketbook first.

Glenda smiled at my green-scaled mentor.

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Aahz," he said. "And you haven't answered my question yet."

"I want to go with you," she said. "And for helping you find the golden cow and getting us all back to a dimension near the Bazaar at Deva, I want the same share as each of you are getting, after paying off the Shifter."

It still wasn't making sense.

"So why haven't you just gone after the cow on your own, before now?"

"Honestly," she said, looking directly into my eyes while answering, "my father thought you, Skeeve, were the first one he had ever sold the map to that had a chance of actually getting to the cow."