'At a guess,' Gil replied in tones equally soft, as if she feared to break the silence that lay on those stygian metal jungles, 'I'd say we're at the top of the Keep, up above the fifth level. That ladder in the shaft seemed to go on forever. And as for what it is...' She held up the lamp and sniffed at the faint oily smell of the place. There was no dust here, she noticed, and no rats. Only darkness and the soft, steady beating of the Keep's secret heart. 'It's got to be the pumps.' 'The what?'
Gil stood up and walked along the perimeter of the little
clearing by the trapdoor. The light in her hand played over sleek, shining surfaces, and the warm drafts stirred her coarse, straggling hair. 'Pumps to circulate air and water,' she said thoughtfully. 'I knew they had to exist somewhere.'
'Why?' Aide asked, puzzled.
'As I said, the air and water don't move themselves.' She stopped and bent down to pick up another white glass polyhedron from where it lay half-hidden in the shadows of a braided mass of coils as big around as her waist.
'But why wasn't any of this mentioned in the records?' Aide asked, from her perch on the edge of the trapdoor. 'That, as a very great man of my own world would say, is the sixty-four-dollar question.' Gil slipped around a massive pipe of smooth, black, uncorrupted metal and passed her hand across the mouth of a huge duct. Deep within its shadows she could see a grid of fine-mesh wire. Evidently she wasn't the only person who'd worried about the Dark Ones getting into the air conditioning. 'And here's another one. What's the power source?' The what?'
'The power source, the - what makes it all move.' 'Maybe it just moves by itself because it is its nature to move.' Which, Gil reminded herself, was a perfectly rational explanation, given a medieval view of the universe.
'Nothing lower than the moon does that,' she explained, falling back on Aristotle and sublunary physics. 'Every thing else has to have something to cause it to move.'
'Oh,' Aide said, accepting this. The unseen walls picked up the murmur of their voices and repeated them over and over again, behind the sonorous whooshing of the pipes. 'Aide, do you realize...' Gil turned back, grubby and dusty in her black uniform, the lamplight glowing across her face. There could be other places in the Keep like this, other rooms, laboratories, defences, anything! Hidden away and forgotten. If we could find them... God, I wish Ingold were here. He'd be able to help us.'
Aide looked up abruptly. 'Yes,' she said. 'Yes, he would. Because - Gil, listen, tell me if this makes sense. Could the - the power source be magic?'
Gil paused, thinking about it, then nodded. 'It must be.' After three thousand years, she thought, // was an easier solution than a hidden nuclear reactor.
'Because that would explain why none of this was mentioned in the records.' Aide leaned forward, her dark braids falling over her shoulders, her eyes wide and, Gil thought, a little frightened. 'You say the Keep was built by - by wizards who were also engineers. But the Scriptures of the Church date from long before the Time of the Dark. The Church was very powerful even then.' Her voice was low and intense. 'It's so easy to fear wizards, Gil. If they held the secret of the Keep's building - once the secret was lost, there would be no finding it again. And that could happen so easily. A handful of people... If something -something happened to them - before they could train their successors -'
Gil was silent, remembering Ingold before the spell-woven doors of the Keep and the fanatic hatred in Govannin's serpent eyes.
Aide looked up, the lamplight shining in her eyes. 'I was raised all my life to distrust them and to fear them,' she went on. 'So I know how people feel about them. I know Rudy has power, Gil, but still I'm afraid for him. And he's out there somewhere, I don't know where. I love him, Gil,' she said quietly. 'It may be unlawful and it may be foolish and hopeless and all the rest of it, but I can't help it. There used to be a saying: A wizard's wife is a widow. I always thought it was because they were excommunicates.' She put her feet on the descending rungs of the long ladder back to the second level. Her eyes met Gil's. 'Now I see what it does mean. Any woman who falls in love with a wizard is only asking for heartache.'
Gil turned her face away, blinded by a sudden flood of self-realization and tears. 'You're telling me, sweetheart,' she
muttered. Aide, who had already started her descent, looked up. 'What?' 'Nothing,' Gil lied.
Chapter 8
The smothering sense of impending horror woke Rudy from a sound sleep. Wind screamed overhead, but the arroyo in which they'd made camp was protected and relatively still. He sat up, the rock against which he'd leaned to take his turn at guard duty digging sharply into his back, his breath coming fast, his hands damp and cold. His heart chilled with the knowledge that Ingold was gone. A hasty look around confirmed it. He could see nothing of the wizard in the shifting darkness of the fire.
Rudy scrambled hastily to his feet, the terror of being left to his own devices in the midst of the wind-seared desert night fighting the horror born of guilt for falling asleep on duty. A thin shiver of wind lashed down on him from above, but it wasn't that which made himshudder. He knew himself incapable of surviving without the wizard. And - who or what could have snatched Ingold so silently? Panic seized him. He caught up his bow and quiver and scrambled up the steep, rocky bank. At the top, the seething turmoil of the winds struck him, his wizard's vision showing him nothing but the wild movement of tossing sagebrush and cloud. Despairing, he cried against the winds, 'INGOLD!' The winds threw his voice back upon him again.
The cold up here was incredible, burning like a sword of ice run through his lungs. Raging winds ripped the sound of his cry from his lips, throwing it at random into the darkness. He yelled again, 'INGOLD!' His voice was drowned in the maelstrom of the night.
What was he to do? Return to the camp to wait? For what? Beat his way back to the road a few dozen yards away to look for some sign of the old man? Wait for morning? But he might as well give up hope then, for tonight's storm would scour all sign of Ingold from the face of the earth. A kind of frenzy took
him - the terror of being alone in the dark. He knew he was helpless without Ingold, unable to go on and probably unable to return to Renweth either, set down in the midst of a hostile and terrible place. He fought off the overwhelming urge to run, to flee somewhere, anywhere. The wind shrieked curses in his ears and tore at his face with claws of frozen iron. Ingold was gone -and Rudy knew he could never survive without him.
Then he heard the wizard's harsh, powerful voice, torn and twisted on the deceiving fury of the winds, calling his name. Rudy swung around, facing what he thought was the direction of the sound. He strained his eyes, but could see nothing in the utter darkness of the howling desert night. The winds were screaming so fiercely that he could barely have heard himself shout, but he heard the call again.
Leaning against the force of the wind, he struck off into the darkness.
It took him less than half an hour to realize he had been a total fool. Wherever Ingold was, whatever had become of him, searching for him in the wild blackness of the storm was tantamount to suicide. Staggering blindly under the flail of the elements, frozen to the bone and gasping with the mere effort of remaining upright, Rudy cursed the panic that had sent him away from the hidden camp in the arroyo. He had utterly lost sight of it, wandering helplessly, chasing every will-o'-the-wisp of movement he fancied he'd seen or a sound on the wind that he took for his name...