'But will it be? With Govannin and the troops of the Alketch trying to get rid of the wizards, and the Archmage, whenever he shows up, and Ingold, and with all the other leaders fighting Alwir for power? With the old-timers in the Keep resenting Maia's Penambrans and the common people accusing the
merchants of stealing grain? Aide, you have a gunnysack full of cats here, not a team of mules that's going to pull together.'
'I know,' the Queen said softly. 'And that's why I thank you for not - not making the situation worse.'
Gil paused in her steps, looking curiously over at the sweet, sensitive face on the other side of the lampflame, seeing a girl who in Gil's world would be barely out of high school, yet with all the experience of ruin, horror, and death, of judgement and the soiled meshes of political expediency, behind those tired dark-blue eyes. Gil's grievance against the Imperial Nephew seemed suddenly very personal and rather petty. 'Better thee than me, honey.' She sighed. 'But you know I'll back you all the way.' 'Thank you,' Aide said again. Their footsteps chimed together as they turned down the black hallways toward the barracks. In the dark weeks of winter, the friendship between them had grown, a friendship born of loneliness and mutual respect. Aide stood a little in awe of Gil's learning and her quick, cold intelligence; Gil envied Aide's patience and compassion, knowing them as qualities which she herself lacked. The two women recognized each other's courage, and Gil, from her own disastrous family life, understood Aide's misery and confusion at her increasing isolation from her brother in the welter of Keep politics. But if Aide understood the trouble that Gil had found growing in her own heart these dark, snowbound days, she never spoke of it.
After a time Aide asked, 'Were you going back to your research tonight?'
Gil shrugged. 'I don't think so. I've decoded most of that last chronicle, and there isn't a whole lot in it. It's late - I think Drago the Third was the last King to rule from Renweth, and that was centuries after the Time of the Dark. When he disappeared, they moved the capital back up to Gae, where the big citadel of wizards was in those days.'
'He disappeared?' Aide asked, startled. 'Well - he took off with somebody named Pnak for some place called Maijan Gian
Ko, and there was this huge fuss about it, and he never came back. Where's Maijan Gian Ko, I wonder?'
'That was the old name for Quo,' Minalde said. 'The greatest fortunate place or Great Magic place - the centre-point of magic on earth. If Drago took off for Quo, no wonder everyone was upset. Was Drago a wizard, then?'
Gil shrugged. 'Beats me. But his son was the one who started the campaign against the mages of Gae, which eventually got them kicked out of the city. Why do you ask?'
'Well,' Aide said, 'I've often thought about how we found the observation room - just by closing my eyes and walking. Sometimes at night I'll lie in bed and do that, just remember walking down halls, seeing things around me. Most of the time it's nothing. But once or twice I've had the feeling that there ought to be more levels in the Keep. Do you think there might be levels beneath this one, dug out in the rock of the knoll itself?'
'It makes sense,' Gil agreed. 'Even if the power source for the pumps was magic, they had to put the machinery for it somewhere, and we haven't found it yet. But as to how we'd find the entrances you've got me there.'
They stepped through the wide, dark archway into the Aisle, where the gates were being shut for the night. The warriors of the day and evening watches were grouped around them, the soft run of their talk carrying over the general noise of that great central cavern. Melantrys was making her dispositions for the night, sharp, small, and arrogant next to Janus and the head of Alwir's troops. In the shadows of the gates, the white quatrefoils of the Guards shone like a ghostly meadow of asphodel on the faded black of their massed shoulders; black stars strewed the scarlet heavens of the uniforms of the House of Bes like an LSD vision of the Milky Way; the ranks of the Church wore deeper crimson, sombre and unrelieved.
Aide frowned in thought. The best way to explore this, I think, is for you to get the tablets on which you're making the Keep map and for us to go back to the observation room. We can start from there and go...'
'Wherever,' Gil finished. They headed for the barracks door, almost tripping over a woman who loitered in its shadow. She hurried away from them as soon as they came near, a tall, red-haired woman whom Gil found vaguely familiar, clutching a threadbare brown cloak around her broad shoulders. A few moments later, when they emerged from the barracks with Gil's maps, they saw her again, hanging around the fringes of the group by the gate. She looked about anxiously, rubbing her reddened knuckles and twisting at her cloak; but when Seya went over to speak to her, she fled again.
Starting from the corridor outside the observation room, Gil and Aide worked their way steadily back through the Keep, comparing the composition and design of walls, floors, and doorways, stopping repeatedly for Gil to scratch additions to her maps on
the wax tablets she carried and for Aide to think. Her memories were not always reliable, but weeks of research and mapping had fleshed them out. By this time, there was probably no one who knew more about the Keep than the two of them.
When they could, they stuck to the places where the original structure of the Keep remained. They descended by one of the original stairways to the first level and followed the line of the original corridors. 'We seem to be heading back toward the barracks,' Gil remarked as they turned down a narrow access corridor to find themselves in a long, deserted chamber that appeared to be the centre of its own minor maze. 'In fact, I think we're almost directly behind them, in the southwest corner of the Keep.'
'The observation room was in the southeast corner,' Aide said. 'That's where the main pump shaft seemed to connect.'
'I wonder...' Gil stepped through an obliquely set doorway and looked around her. Aide raised the lamp as high as she could for what better light they could gain. 'Well, we're close, anyway. This was part of the original design, and I think that wall there is the inside of the front wall of the Keep. You can see there's no trace of blocks of any kind. If we've come three rows in...' Gil turned and pointed with her silver hairpin. 'Through there.'
'Through there' proved to be not a cell or a closet, as she had supposed it would be, but a tiny passageway that ultimately ended in a square corner room, so jammed with junk as almost to hide in shadow the wooden trapdoor in the floor. With a cry of delight and without the smallest consideration for what Frankensteinian horrors might lurk in the shadows below, Gil pulled on its rusted metal ring and was greeted by a black well of shadows, a great smell of dust, and a soft, billowing cloud of warm air.
'It's like a different world.' The great dark space took Minalde's soft voice and echoed it back to her like the sighing murmur of a million past voices. 'What kind of a place was this?'
Darkness yielded unwillingly to the feeble glow of the lamp. Shapes materialized: tables, benches, the gleam of metal, scattered polyhedrons, white or frosty grey, and the twinkle of faceted crystal. Gil stepped forward and was greeted by the leap and sparkle of the lampflame repeating itself in countless tiny mirrors. Fragments of gilding slipped over the close-curled edges of a scroll and flickered in glass vessels half-filled with ashy powders or pale dust. The black floor rose in the centre to form an altarlike platform, its hollowed top lined with charred steel.