Rudy traced the stains and scratches along the wall. It was clear that quite a bit of machinery had been stored here. "You know what's funny?" he remarked, turning back to where Ingold. Aide, and Gil remained grouped around Gil's cache. "There's not so much as a scrap of paper."
"Hardly funny," Ingold commented. "It would have taken them a while to get the door built. There was smoke blackening in the fissures of that first cave's roof."
"And what wasn't burned for protection," Minalde added diffidently, "would have been burned later in the winter for warmth."
"With people crowded together like cows in a byre?"
"And besides," Gil tossed out over her shoulder, "didn't you say. Aide, that the records were taken to some kind of Central Library? That means that they weren't all destroyed."
"Not then," Rudy agreed. "But even your toughest paper isn't going to last three thousand years without special treatment, or spells, or something."
Gil sat back on her heels suddenly, speculation sharpening in those frost-gray, crystalline eyes. "Are we talking about paper?"
Rudy paused, frowning, his hands hooked loosely through his gun belt. "What, then? Parchment? Cloth? Plastic?"
"Videotape?" Gil queried softly.
"Videotape?"
"What's videotape?" Alde asked.
Ingold said suddenly, his voice charged with excitement, "Isn't that the-the substance your people record things on and which you put into another machine that calls forth the images from it? You told me about that, Rudy..."
Gil turned, still folded together on her heels, holding the gray glass polyhedrons balanced in the palm of her outstretched hand. Her voice was careless, but in the witchlight her face flamed with the brightening ecstasy of purely intellectual delight. "Yeah," she said casually. "Videotape."
Ingold let out a very un-Archmagelike whoop of delight and fell upon her, folding her, polyhedrons and all, into his arms. Rudy said, "Hunh?" Then, as his mind tardily made the connection, he nodded. "Sweet Holy Mother!"
The wizard hauled Gil to her feet. They were hugging each other and laughing like idiots with delight and scholarly triumph. Gil jabbed a gloved and bony finger at Rudy. "And that's why there are those little crystal tables in those observation rooms near where there are labs or machinery. They put them there so they could read the manuals!"
"You're right!" Rudy yelled, swept away by the blaze of their enthusiasm. "Christ, Gil, you're a genius!" He threw his arms around her and kissed her heartily on the mouth. Carried away by delight, he repeated the process on the mystified Aide. "Hell, with all the wizards in the Keep, there's got to be somebody who can figure out how to get them working!"
Then they were all talking at once, as if a time limit had been placed upon their words. In gabbling chorus, Rudy and Gil explained the theory behind videotape to Minalde, Ingold speculated upon the connection between the tables and the crystals, and Gil cursed her own stupidity for not having come to her conclusions sooner. In the dual radiance of the wizards' staffs, her sharp, sensitive face seemed to glow, the glacial reserve breaking to reveal the curious, eager beauty that lurked beneath its deceptive surface. Minalde, catching the fever from the others, was already drawing up plans for assembling and sorting the crystals from the far corners of the Keep and for categorizing them, her white, slender hands sweeping the air as if she would summon them all before her by gesture alone. For a moment it was as if the future's darkness had been wiped away, as if no parting, no danger, no loss, existed beside the triumph and hope they shared. Arms linked around one another's necks in a kind of mutual hug, they trooped, laughing, into the pale grayness of the outer cave.
Then they stopped short, as if they had been stunned. Silhouetted against the latticed light in the cave's mouth, silent as the shadow that, for the moment, was all he seemed, was a White Raider.
Ingold's staff moved to check Gil's sword arm in the same instant that his other hand closed on Rudy's wrist. "No," he told them softly. "If the Raiders had wanted us dead, we would never have seen them."
For a long moment the Raider did not move, an enigmatic blue shape against the matte brightness beyond. The shadows hid his expression, but a cold gleam of reflected daylight slid along the ivory braids as he tilted his head, like a leopard at leisure on a branch, making up its mind about an approaching deer. A little knife of wind rattled the tangled trees outside and ruffled at the wolf pelts he wore.
Then he said, "My people are right," in a light, breathless voice that shocked Gil by its familiarity. "They say that it takes a brave man to befriend a Wise Man; and so it seems."
Gil cried, " Icefalcon !"
"Your people are right," Ingold said formally, though a deep delight had begun to dance in his eyes. "It seems that the talisman I gave you, the Rune of the Veil, brought danger rather than safety with it, since Stiarth of Alketch contrived to murder you for it. I am pleased to see that his efforts were attended by the usual degree of success that one has in trying to kill Raiders."
The Icefalcon stepped into the cave. He was as thin as a starved wolf, wind-bronzed, yet that same aloof, faintly arrogant captain of the Guards whom Alwir had sent to bear the messages to the Empire of Alketch.
He looked down his cool nose at Gil. "Do I take this delight to mean that there was money in the barracks on my survival?" he inquired.
She grinned. "Not a copper. We'd given you up."
Feigned concern widened the colorless eyes. "Not reassigned my bunk to someone else?"
Gil shook her head regretfully. "No one would take it. Even after Janus swore by all that's holy that it had been fumigated."
Anyone less haughty would have grinned, but Gil could tell by his eyes that he was pleased to see her. "And what is this thing?" he asked, indicating the flame thrower with a flick of his fingers.
With a flourish, Rudy drew, aimed at the far wall, and let loose a leaping column of fire that splattered from the stone and left a great charred patch.
"Random," was all the Icefalcon said. He turned back to Ingold, leaving Rudy stuttering with indignation.
The wind had turned icy when they emerged from the cave, stinging their faces and blowing brief, hard flurries of sleet down from the darkening sky. It clattered in the small bones that the Icefalcon had braided into his long hair. Boiled and picked clean, Gil thought, but disconcertingly like...
"Are those human handbones?"
His enigmatic eyes looked almost silver against the gold windburn of his face. "When I became a Guard," he said inconsequentially, "I vowed that I would become a civilized person and learn to fight honorably in a civilized fashion. These are the bones of a man who came upon me when I lay near death, after our civilized friend Stiarth of Alketch- parted company from me, I begged this man for water and he stole my boots and my cloak." The Icefalcon shrugged. 'Later my sisters and brothers, the barbarians of the White Lakes People, found me and healed me, and I rode with them for a time, though their people and mine were enemies in the plains. They helped me to-recover my cloak and boots."