Ingold sighed. 'Perhaps it were better had you kept your belly to the ground, serpentmage.'
A single line, as fine as a pen-scratch in the corner of the long, wry mouth, briefly indicated a smile. 'It is easier to live off the land so,' Thoth replied, 'but the company becomes boring. Nevertheless, I shall carry to my grave a horror of the road runner bird.'
'Yes,' Ingold agreed reminiscently. 'I recall I had nightmares about dogs for many years.'
'Eh,'a thin voice creaked, Nan the witchwife appeared suddenly in the circle, her pale eyes sparking with malice. 'So, shall I get you some nice cricket soup, serpentmage? Or you some fat mice, Sir Tomcat? Or will you stand here talking until you fall down from hunger?
'Mother!' Kara said, shocked. 'That's -*
'I know who it is, girl,' the old lady snapped sharply. 'And I'm saying, let thepoor men eat, beforethey goto tradingwar stories about how brave they all were.' Her bent back forced her to twist her neck to look up at them, and Rudy found himself thinking that all she needed was a peaked black hat and a broomstick.
'Thank you,' Ingold said gravely. 'Your care for our comfort touches my heart.'
'Huh!' she grumbled and bustled away toward the cubbyhole that Rudy guessed must be the communal kitchen. In the doorway she swung around again, shaking her wooden spoon at them, her thick cobwebs of greyish-white hair falling down over her bony shoulders and her eyes glittering in her haglike face. 'Heart indeed!' she cackled. 'Wizards have no heart. And I tell you true, for I'm one and I haven't any more heart than a shrike.' With that she flounced out of sight.
'She's right,' Ingold said mildly. Thoth looked shocked, but Kta laughed.
'Alwir subsidizes the Wizards' Corps, the same way he does the Guards,' Gil explained as Kara, her mother, and a thin little red-haired girl served them oatbread and stewfrom a common pot. 'Bektis still dines up at the high table - I suppose because the food's better - but I expect both he and Alwir will be along later.' She grinned across the room at Aide, who sat cross-legged on a pile of bison and mammoth hides between Rudy and the sleeping Prince Tir, sharing the wizards' rough-and-ready feast. Fire flickered onthehearth, the room's only illumination, brightening over the assorted features of the very odd crew assembled there.
At Aide's side, Rudy felt that, with very little more provocation, he'd start purring like a cat. It was the first time in over two months that he'd faced the prospect of a night's sleep without four hours of guard duty first; he was bathed, shaved, and stationary, and the novelty of that was pleasant enough. He was with the woman he loved and among his own kind at last, after a journey he had never thought he'd survive. It would be odd, he mused, to sleep under a roof.
His hand sought Aide's under the furs. She glanced sideways at him and smiled.
Profiled against the dim light, Aide looked different, more sure of herself - less pretty but more beautiful, Rudy thought illogically. Gil had changed, too,hedecided,glancingoverat the thin girl sitting like some scrawny teenage boy on the floor
beside Ingold's chair. She was softer, somehow, though physically she was like a leather strap. Her eyes were gentler, but there was a firm line to her mouth that spoke of bitter experience and knowledge that she could never unknow.
Well, what the hell, he thought. We've all changed. Even old Ingold.
Maybe one day the old man would regain the amused serenity with which he had once viewed the world. Quo had broken something inside him that Rudy sensed was only partially healed. After his first flood of greetings and information, Ingold had relapsed into silence; throughout supper, he had spoken very little. This was not to say the room was quiet; once the initial chorus of chomping noises had died down, there had been news to exchange, stories to tell, and adventures to recount, most of these among Rudy, Gil, and Aide.
Now and then the old man's eyes travelled from face to face -not judging what this strange rabble was good for, though that would come. Now Ingold was only getting to know them - the goody wives and tea leaf readers, the two-and-thirty second-raters who had happened to miss the destruction of Quo, plus its single austere survivor, one wizened old hermit, and one punk airbrush-jockey who'd stumbled into the middle of his destiny by mistake. This was all the force Ingold would have to work with, all the magic left in the world for his command.
No wonder he looks like death warmed over, Rudy thought.
'Now,' Ingold said finally, in the meal's comfortable afterglow, tightening his hand, which had come to rest easily on Gil's shoulder. 'Show me these marvels you have found.'
As if on cue, Gil and Aide leaped to their feet. 'We've got them in the back here,' Gil said, showing the way. 'That door there leads into the room where we found the stairway down to the labs; we usually keep it bolted. We put our things in here...' Most of the other wizards had already seen their trawlings from the laboratories and storerooms and so remained in the common room. Some of them - Thoth, Kta, and Kara - followed
Rudy, Ingold, and the girls through a dusty little cubbyhole scarcely wider than a hallway and into a kind of storeroom, where a plank table had been set up, laden with the mysteries from below. As they entered, a bluish drift of witchlight bloomed around them - the rooms of the Wizards' Corps were the only ones in the Keep to have decent lighting. Scattered across the table were vessels, boxes, chains of bubbled glass, apparatus of glass balls and gold rods, twining knots of metal tubes, sinuous pieces of meaningless sculpture, and slick, unexplainable polyhedrons, white and smoked.
'These were what blew us away the most,' Gil said, picking up one of the white shapes and tossing it to Ingold. 'They were everywhere under the machinery in the pump rooms, in piles in the storerooms, and strung in nets over the tanks in the hydroponic gardens. So far, the only thing they're good for is that Tir likes to play with them.'
'Indeed.' Ingold turned the polyhedron in his fingers for a moment, as if testing its weight or proportions. Then, quite suddenly, it glowed to life in his hands, the soft, white radiance of it warming the angles of his wind-darkened face. He tossed it to Gil, who caught it ineptly on cringingpalms. It was quite cool.
'Lamps,' he said.
'Oh...' Gil breathed, entranced. 'Oh, how beautiful! But how did the ancients turn them on and off? How do the things work?' She looked up at him, the light glowing brightly out of her cupped hands, illuminating her thin face.
'I should imagine they simply covered them when they wanted darkness,' Ingold said. The material itself is spelled to hold the light for a long time and can be kindled by a very simple means. Someone on the lowest echelons of wizardry, like a firebringer or a finder, could do it.'
'Hmmm.' Rudy picked up one of the white crystals on the table and studied the bottom facet. 'You should have figured
that out, Gil. It says "one hundred watts" right here.'
'Hit him for me, Aide. But I really should have figured it out, because I always did wonder about how the Keep was originally lighted. And there are hydroponic gardens down in the subvaults, room after room of them, with no light source at all -'
'You ever grow marijuana in a closet?' Rudy inquired, apropos of nothing.
'Hey, around my place the only things that grew in closets were mushrooms. But, Ingold, with this kind of light we could get the gardens going again. With hydroponics, we could grow carloads of stuff in almost no space; and down there it's warm enough to do it.'
'You could draw off power from the pumps to heat the tanks,' Rudy added. 'And to heat water, for that matter.'
'Yes, but we never did manage to find the main power source.'
'It would have been magically hidden and sealed,' Ingold said, interrupting a discussion that threatened to become increasingly technical. 'At a guess, the pumps operate on the same principle as the lamps. The wizards of old times could probably alter the essence of materials and enable them to hold something - light, or some other force for incredible periods of time.'