"Okay," I said. "Let's do this and get on to the next life."

Aahz laughed. "That's what I like about you, apprentice. Always a good mental attitude."

"Give me something to be positive about," I said.

Aahz moved around and got under me, bracing himself solidly as I held the shovel up in position next to the side-flow of energy. When the gold got big enough for what Tanda was going to do, we were going to simply let the shovel fall to our right and cut off the side-flow to the spell. However, if we let the shovel fall forward into the main flow, there was no telling what would happen.

Aahz said he wasn't even sure what was going to happen when we cut the side-flow. He hoped nothing, but he didn't know for sure when I had asked him.

"Ready!" Aahz shouted, even though the room was empty and there were only the three of us in it.

To an outsider watching us who couldn't see the energy flow, we would have looked darned silly. Aahz crouched in front of me, holding onto the shovel I was holding in the air. Tanda beside us, her head tilted back, staring up into nothingness.

"Ready," she said.

I knew she was sending her mind out, linking gold, pull ing it in to add to our shield.

"Now!" Aahz shouted again.

Instantly the shovel started growing in size and in weight. I braced myself as Aahz did the same. I was stunned at how heavy it got so quickly.

The shovel grew and I strained against dropping it, trying to do my job of just holding it steady.

"About half!" Aahz said, his voice strained from holding up the ever-heavier shovel. Aahz was one of the strongest demons I knew, and he was having problems. I did my best to help lift at the same time as holding the shovel in position. I doubted I was doing much good, but I knew for a fact the effort was going to cost me later.

The shovel was getting bigger and bigger, growing quicker and quicker.

"Almost!" Aahz said, his voice barely a croak under the weight. Above me the shovel looked like a massive gold coin.

"Now!" Aahz said.

I pushed sideways, letting the shovel fall toward the side- flow of energy as Tanda kept adding more and more gold to it.

Like a gold knife, the shovel cut through the blue energy.

At that moment everything in the room seemed to explode.

I was smashed back against the stone, banging my head hard.

Tanda tumbled across the floor toward the door, coming to rest pressed against the wood. Her eyes were closed and I couldn't tell if she was hurt or not.

Aahz was pressed against the stone wall beside me.

Forces like I had never felt before held me in position as the gold cut through the flow just as we had planned. So far it was working. I couldn't believe it.

But then the shovel kept growing and growing as more and more gold poured into it. Something was wrong. Tanda should have unlinked the gold in the shield we built from the other gold around the area when the shield hit the energy. But there was clearly still more and more gold pouring into that shield. It had cut the side-flow, but now it was falling slowly toward the main flow, cutting into it as well as it kept growing.

Then the room seemed to expand outward and the pressure of my head against the stone sent me down into a blackness I didn't much like.

"Skeeve!"

"Skeeve! Can you hear me?"

The voice sounded far off, like it was coming from over a hill. I didn't care. It was still dark out and I wanted to sleep some more.

"Skeeve!"

The voice was getting closer, or so it seemed. I was in blackness. Pitch-black blackness. I tried to open my eyes, but everything still remained black. Every muscle in my body ached, and somehow I seemed to have fallen out of bed.

"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 sit ting 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 en ergy 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.

Tanda moaned on Aahz's lap and tried to sit up.

"Take it easy," Aahz said. "You got a nasty bump on the head."

"I can feel that," Tanda said. Then she looked around and smiled at me. "Good to see you made it as well."

"I'll tell you in the morning if I made it," I said as more memories flooded back in.

She laughed and then clutched her head from the pain.

"I told you to go slow," Aahz said.

"Well," Tanda said after a moment. "Did we succeed?"

"I don't know," Aahz said. "Skeeve, did we succeed?"

It took me a moment of sitting there with my back against the wall and the cloth burning in my hand to understand what he wanted me to do. Then it dawned on me. Look to see if the energy flow to the Bovine spell had stopped.

I could do that. Or at least I thought I could do that. I opened up my mind, searching for the blue energy stream that had filled this room just a short time ago. Nothing. The side stream and the main stream were now gone completely. The room was as empty energy-wise as it was furniture-wise.

"Oh, yeah," I said. "We succeeded. Maybe a little too well."

"All gone?" Tanda asked, not moving her head.

"All gone, main stream and all."

"Well, that's going to be interesting," Aahz said.

The cloth was starting to get close to burning my fingers, so I scooted slowly over on the floor to where the torch lay and lit it. Then I held it up and looked around. On the other side of the room, where I was fairly sure there hadn't been a door before, was now an open archway. A breeze blew in from the archway, through the room, and into the tunnel we had come out of.

"I think we'd better go see what we've done," Aahz said. "Can you both walk?"

I tested my legs as Tanda tested hers. It seemed that, besides a lot of bumps and bruises, we had all come out of everything pretty well. It was going to be interesting to see how the rest of the inhabitants of this castle fared.

"Do we have to go back up the tunnel?" I asked, trying to imagine making that climb in the condition I was in.

Aahz shook his head. "If this didn't work to stop Bovine's spell, nothing is going to, and that means we're never getting out of here, so why bother continuing to hide?"

"I thought I had the positive attitude," I said.

"I can learn from an apprentice," Aahz said.

We limped our way toward the door with the wonderful fresh breeze blowing in. It led us into a corridor that turned after about fifty paces. After the turn there was a flight of stairs. Painful stairs, but at least stairs that had fresh air blowing down them.