"So?" Aahz said, shaking his head. "Remember the last time we were at the Bazaar at Deva? Where do you think that steak you ate came from?"

I stared at him. I had no idea steaks came from creatures called cows. I had just assumed they came from creatures called steaks. Trout came from trout, salmon came from salmon, and duck came from duck. It was logical. Besides, there were no cows in this dimension. At least, none that I had ever met.

"Well," I said, glancing at the parchment in my hand, "this is a map to a golden cow that lives in a golden palace and gives gold-laced milk."

Aahz slowly turned to stare at me, his eyes slit as if he were trying to figure out if I was actually joking or not Then, in two steps, he was in front of me, snatching the map from my grasp.

"So there really is such a golden beast?" I asked while he studied the paper.

He didn't respond, so I stood and watched him stare at the map. The writing on it was odd, actually. It didn't show roads, but more like dimensions, energy points, and vortexes. Most of it I didn't understand, and almost none of the map had any names on it, but there was a massive amount about jumping from dimension to dimension that I didn't understand.

Aahz had told me once there were so many dimensions, no one knew the total number, and it was easy to get lost and never make it back when jumping from dimension to dimension. After my shopping trip with Tanda to thirty or forty different dimensions, I was starting to believe him.

Finally he looked down at me, a frown on his ugly face. And when Aahz frowned, which was a great deal of the time, he looked like an animal snarling. His green skin and bright eyes and sharp teeth could be very intimidating if a person wasn't used to it. Luckily, I was.

"So where exactly did you get this?" He fluttered the parch