Sitting with Gil, like a couple of silent watchdogs by the door, Rudy thought how fragile Alde looked and how helpless. Ingold's power seemed to engulf her -the power of the Archmage that Rudy himself had felt through the strength of the Master-spell, bone-shaking for all its quietness. That terrible magic seemed to isolate the two figures, the old man in his patched robe and the girl whose face was like a lily against the smoke of her unbound hair, in a world where the only reality was Ingold's voice and the enchantment that seemed to shiver in the air like a bright cloud about them.
No wonder the Church fears him , Rudy thought. There are times when I fear him myself .
"Minalde?" the wizard said softly. "Where are you?"
"Here," she answered him, her eyes staring unseeingly into the circumscribed shadows that pressed so closely upon them. "In this room."
It had been Ingold's idea to undertake the gnodyrr in the old observation chamber, hidden in the depths of the subterranean labs. It was as safe a place as could be found within the crowded Keep, and Ingold said that not even a mage with a crystal could spy upon them there.
"You sure about that?" Rudy had asked him as they made their way through the dusty reaches of the abandoned hydroponics chambers.
"Of course," the wizard replied. "Every civilization which involves magic has its countermeasures. It is a relatively easy matter to weave shielding-spells into the stone and mortar of walls, so that what passes within them is hidden from divination. Rudy, you yourself know of the existence of rooms in which no magic can be worked at all- in fact, there are said to be several within the Keep."
Rudy had shivered at the memory of the vaults of Karst and the doorless cell with its queerly null, sterile smell... Nervously, he had drawn Alde closer to him, and she had returned the pressure of his arm gratefully, for she walked just then with her own fears. The heavy darkness of the lab levels seemed to press somehow more thickly about them.
"Why is that?" Rudy had asked. "Why would they make rooms like that? I mean, wizards built the Keep, for Chris-sake."
Gil, pacing along on Ingold's other side, had said, "It stands to reason. Govannin told me about-about renegade mages, wizards who used their powers for evil. You'd have to have some way to hold them in check. Even the Council of Wizards would have to agree to that."
Rudy thought about that now, watching the old man and the girl who was held in such absolute power. He understood now why gnodyrr was a forbidden spell, its teaching ringed around with the most terrible of penalties. The only thing that protected Alde from utter enslavement to Ingold was Ingold himself-his reverence for the freedom of others and his innate kindliness. What would Alwir be , Rudy wondered suddenly, if he had that kind of power? Or Govannin ?
"Minalde," Ingold's warm, scratchy voice said. "Look beyond the walls of this room. Tell me what you see."
She blinked, her slender brows puckering over those inward-looking cornflower eyes. Then her lips parted and her face flooded with joy, as if at a vision of startling delight. She whispered, "Gardens."
Beside him, Rudy heard the swift hiss of Gil's intaken breath.
"Tell me about these gardens."
In the blue, glimmering light, her eyes were wide, luminous with wonderment. "They're-they're like a floating jungle," she stammered. "Fields planted on the waters. Room after room, filled with leaves-dark leaves, fuzzy like gray-green velvet, or bright and hard and shiny. Everywhere you can smell the growing." Her face tilted upward, as if her eyes followed the thick, trailing vines over walls and ceilings that had for ages been as dry as a rock-cut tomb. "There are nets of glowstones strung over the tanks, and the room glitters with leaf shadows on the water. Vegetables-corn and peas and lentils, squash and melons-climbing up trellises and suspended in nets and on wires. Everything is green, warm, and bright, though the blizzards are raging outside, and the Pass is buried in snow."
"Ah," Ingold said softly. "And how do they grow, these gardens?"
She frowned into the distance, and Rudy had the sudden, uncanny feeling that the expression on her face was no longer her own. It was that of another woman, older than Aide, he thought. The timbre and pitch of her voice altered subtly. "It is-all in the records. I-it was all recorded. How to operate the pumps, how to make the fluid that feeds the plants..."
"And where are these records?"
She tried to gesture, but Ingold would not release her hands. Her eyes were still fixed upon vacancy, hundreds of lifetimes distant. "They-people take them, of course. The Central Library is at the east end of the second level, behind the open spaces of the Assembly Room. Mostly the mages in the labs use them, but you need not be a mage to do so. The words alone unlock them."
"What words?"
She repeated them; a short spell in a burring, liquid language to which Ingold listened with the precision of a trained philologist. "The unlocking is the same for all," she added. "There is no secret to it."
Gil murmured, "The east end of the second level is all part of the Royal Sector. The biggest room that's still in its original shape there is behind the upper pan of the Sanctuary, which I guess was the old Assembly Room. Alwir uses it these days for his justice hall. There wasn't a thing in it resembling a book when we came to the Keep."
"Not after so long there wouldn't be, of course," Ingold replied softly. "Even if there were not periods of anathemas for the wizards, the records would have been moved as the Keep grew more crowded in the passing centuries."
"Might the wizards themselves have hidden them?" Rudy asked. "If there was some kind of attack against the wizards, could they have stashed them someplace in the labs?"
"They could have done so," Gil agreed. "Except we haven't found a stitch of anything written down here yet."
Rudy sighed. "This reminds me of when I was a little kid, and I'd have something that was really precious to me, and I'd put it in a safe place."
"That was so safe you never found it again," Gil concluded with regret. "I did the same thing."
"Well," Rudy said gloomily, "mine was organic... and we found it eventually."
"They said-they said that the records might be lost," Minalde whispered, her forehead suddenly tightening, as if with pain. "Or that the secret of them would be hidden. That was why Dare said that we must remember."
" Dare said?" Ingold's white eyebrows went up. "Is it not from Dare, then, that you have these memories?"
She shook her head, and her hands tightened over his. "There were twenty of us. They-the wizards-did not want women to bear the memories. They said that women carry griefs enough of their own; that they bear too many losses, of husbands, of children. My baby died, that first winter. So cold," she whispered hopelessly. "So cold. But many of the men who could have done it refused. Some called it evil; others said only that it was too heavy a thing to bind to the shoulders of their children. But it was a chancy thing, and there were so few of us whose bloodlines the wizards could tie this to." Her voice had changed, stammering, as if seeking words, blurred with an accent at times, like the soft, rolling lilt of the spell that would unlock the vanished records of the Keep.
"Time is so deep," she murmured. "So many things are lost in its well. Dare said that we must remember." The pallid chill of the magelight glinted on a tear that trickled down, for griefs not her own. Ingold's scarred finger brushed it gently aside.
"What must you remember?" he asked gently.
She began to speak, hesitantly at first, then gaining strength and sureness as grief, fear, and wonderment colored her stammering voice. Now and then she stopped, struggling with concepts and memories that she did not understand- machines that operated by magic and spells that drew the lightning from the sky and ground to fuse the separate stones of the Keep's mighty walls. She spoke of battles fought by the mages against the Dark, who would come sweeping down from the Nest in the Vale to the north, of freezing nights torn by the fire and lightning of these combats, of hopelessness and terror, and of cold.