Gil turned around, her wheeling shadow turning with her. 'At a guess,' she said, 'this isn't so much a different world as one that's more the same. I think it's still as it was when it was built, the work of the last generation born in the Times Before.' She ran her hand along the smooth, obsidian-hard edge of the workbench. This is one of the old labs.'
'Like Bektis' workshop?' Minalde asked, coming timidly into the centre of the room.
'More or less.' Gil brought the lamp closer to the workbench, touching, first with light and then with hesitant fingers, the frosted glass of the polyhedrons that lay there
in such disarray.
'But what is all this?' Aide lifted a short apparatus that looked like a barbell made of glass bubbles and gold. 'What's it for?'
'Beats me.' Gil set a smooth, meaningless sculpture of wood up endwise; the lamplight slid like water from its sinuous curves. She rolled a sort of big glass egg haltingly into the light and saw it crusted inside with whitish crystals that looked like salt. 'It's one hell of a thing to find the laboratories of the old wizards at a time when all the wizards on earth are on the other side of the continent.'
Aide laughed shakily in agreement. Her eyes in the shadows were wide and wondering, as if she remembered what she saw from another personality, another life.
'And it's warm down here,' Gil pursued thoughtfully. 'I think this is the first time since I crossed the Void that I have been warm.' She pushed gently at the steel doors at the far end of the room, and they slid back on their soundless hinges, poised like the gates of the Keep itself. In the room beyond, she heard the faint echo of machinery pumping; the light of the lamp she bore touched row after row of sunken tanks, the black stone of their sides marked with vanished water and a climbing forest of steel lattices. Gil frowned, walking the narrow paths between them. 'Could it be -hydroponics?'
'What?' Aide knelt to trace the water stain with a curious finger.
'Water- gardening. Aide, what in hell did they use for light down here? Light enough to get plants to grow?' She pushed open another door, and vistas of empty tanks mocked her from the shadows. She turned back. 'You could feed the whole damn Keep down here if you had a light source.'
'Are we going to tell Alwir?' Gil asked much later as they ascended the straight, narrow little stairway back to the hidden storeroom. Aide carried the lamp now, walking ahead. Gil's hands were full of bits and pieces of meaningless tools, half a dozen jewels of varying sizes she'd found in a lead box, and two. or three of the new polyhedrons, frosted grey instead of milky, but just as uncommunicative. She shivered as they came up from below and the colder air of ground level nipped at her rawboned hands.
'N- no,' Aide said. 'Not yet.'
They dumped their finds on the dusty trestle table that ran down the centre of the large, deserted room and set the lamp down among them in its pool of dim and wavery light. Through the door and down the corridor they could see the blurred echo of other firelight and hear a baby cry, with a man's deep, smooth, bass voice rising in the snatch of a lullaby. The smell of food cooking came to them there, together with the odour of dirty clothes. All the sounds and smells of the Keep were there, telling of life safe from the Dark. Here in this small complex of cells was only shadow, and dust, and time.
'Gil,' Aide said slowly, 'I - I don't think I trust Alwir.' The confession of disloyalty seemed to stick in her throat. 'He - he uses things. This ' She rested her hand on a frosty crystal before her, joined spheres of glass and a meaningless tangle
of interwinding tubes. 'This is part of something that could be very important when the mages come back. But Alwir might destroy it or lock it up if he thought he could get some kind of concession from Stiarth by doing so. He's like that, Gil. Everything is like cards in his hands.'
Her voice trembled suddenly with misery. Embarrassed, Gil spoke more gruffly than she'd meant to. 'Hell, you're not the only person in the Keep who doesn't think he's God's gift to the Realm.'
'No,' Aide agreed, her lips quirking in an involuntary smile that was instantly gone. 'But I should. He's been very good to me.'
'He ought to be,' Gil commented. 'You're the source of his power. He has no legal power of his own.'
Aide shook her head. 'Only the real power,' she assented. 'Sometimes I think even his friendship with with Eldor was part of his games. But Elder was strong enough himself to keep him down, strong enough to make Alwir work for him, like a strong man riding a half-wild horse.' She sighed and rubbed at her eyes with one long, white hand. 'Maybe Eldor knew it,' she went on tiredly. 'Maybe that's why he always kept so distant from me. I don't know, Gil. I look back and I see things that happened then and I start to doubt everything. Sometimes I think Rudy's the only person who ever loved me for who I am and not for what I could be used for.'
Gil reached out and rested a comforting hand on the slender shoulder. That's what happens when you mess with power,' she said softly. 'We are what we are, God help us.'
Aide laughed suddenly, tears still filming her eyes. 'So why must I have all the disadvantages of power and none of its rewards?' She picked up the lamp, her expression wryly philosophic. 'But you see,' she said as she led the way back toward the corridor, 'why I don't think Alwir should know of all this just yet.'
They stepped into the Aisle again, into a confusion of lights and voices. There was a little group ahead in the shadows of the gates. Even from here, they could hear a woman crying. A quick glance passed between them, and they hurried up the steps.
By this time of night, not many civilians were in the Aisle. It was, Gil guessed, a few hours before the deep-night watch came on. Her own watch began at eight the following morning, but training was at six; she was uncomfortably reminded that she ought to get to sleep.
It was the red-haired woman she had seen earlier who was crying, huddled against the wall with a small group of Guards around her, the torchlight like fire over the thick, tangled rope of her hair.
Janus was saying, 'Dammit, are we going to have to post a watch to keep the people inside at night? You'd think the Dark would do that.'
'It's the food,' Gnift said simply, and those elf-bright eyes flickered toward the closed gates. 'Things are thin now. With the troops coming up from Alketch -
'Surely the Emperor can't expect us to feed his armies!' one of Alwir's lesser
captains protested.
Melantrys gave him a snort of derision. 'Hide and watch him.'
'What is it?' Aide asked. 'What's happening?'
The woman raised a face smeared with tears in the yellow torchlight. 'Oh, my lady,' she whispered. 'Oh, God help me, I never thought he'd do it. He said he would, but I didn't believe.'
'Her husband,' Janus explained briefly. 'Man named Snelgrin. He hid himself outside the Keep when the gates shut to steal food and cache it in the woods.'
'I never thought he would,' the woman moaned. 'I never thought...'
'Obviously he never thought, either,' Melantrys retorted softly. Gil remembered the couple now - Lolli was the woman's name. They were the first instance of an old-time Keep dweller marrying a Penambran newcomer. Maia had performed the ceremony less than three weeks ago.
Lolli was speaking again, her voice low and muffled, an animal moaning. Aide knelt beside her and took her gently by the shoulders for comfort, but she scarcely seemed to notice. 'He didn't mean any harm,' she groaned. 'I tried to tell him, but he only said there was a full moon and a clear sky and no harm would come of it. I prayed and prayed he'd change his mind...*
Gil turned silently on her heel and left them there. There was nothing she or anyone else could do, and privately she agreed with Melantrys. The man's stupidity was his own business and he had evidently not given much weight to the possible sufferings of his wife.