gates. The dim orange flame defined a small double circle on the smooth blackness of the polished floor and touched fiery echoes in bolt, brace, and locking ring.
Where the two halos of red flame merged, a man stood, his rough white hair fringed by the fire in a line of burning gold.
She called out softly, 'Ingold!'
He turned and lifted an inquiring eyebrow. Gil pulled her cloak more tightly around her shoulders and pattered up the broad steps to the gate. Since she had crossed the Void in his company, to come unwillingly to this other universe, she couldn't remember a time when she had been warm.
'Yes, my dear?' he asked, in a voice like raw whiskey and velvet. The face revealed by the restless light had never been more than nondescript, but sixty-odd years of existence had given it an extremely lived-in look, seamed and wrinkled and mostly hidden behind a close-clipped, rather scrubby white beard. When she stood beside him, her eyes were level with his.
'What is it?" she asked him quietly.
He only said, 'I think you know.'
She glanced nervously over her shoulder at the dark steel of the gates. Here the horror was stronger, a sense of brooding malevolence in the night. Here she felt the strange, chill terror, the irrational sensation of being watched from across unknowable gulfs of time by a malign and incomprehensible intelligence. They've come,' she whispered, 'haven't they?
Ingold rested a hand gently on her shoulder. 'I think you had better go arm.'
Her eyes dark in the wan bluish witchlight, Minalde watched Rudy dress. 'What's wrong?' she whispered.
'I don't know.' His voice was low, so as not to wake the royal infant who slept in his gilded cradle in the shadows on the opposite wall. 'But I think I'd better be getting back.' After a
month in this world, the alien clothing was more or less familiar to him, and he no longer felt self-conscious in the homespun breeches and full-sleeved shirt, tunic, knee-length boots, and gaily embroidered surcoat he'd scrounged off a dead nobleman after the great massacre by the Dark Ones at Karst. But he still mourned the simplicity of jeans and a T-shirt. He buckled on his sword and leaned across the tumble of variegated silks to kiss the girl who watched him so silently. 'Will you be at the gate in the morning to see us off?
His hands framed her face. She caught his wrists, as if to hold him to her for a few minutes longer. 'No,' she said quietly. 'I can't, Rudy. It's a long way to Quo and a dangerous road. Who knows if you'll even find the Hidden City or the Archmage, once you reach the end?' Her blue eyes shimmered suddenly in the pale phosphorescence of the witchlight. 'I never could stand goodbyes.'
'Hey!' Rudy leaned-over her again, his hands gripping her neck and shoulders, the dark hair spilling heavily down over his fingers as he drew her mouth to his. 'Hey, Ingold's gonna be with me. We'll be okay. I can't imagine anyone or anything crazy enough to take on that old geezer. It won't be goodbye.'
She smiled crookedly up at him. 'Then there's no point in making much of it, is there?" Their lips met again, gently this time, the loose strands of her hair tickling his face. 'Go with God, Rudy, though the Bishop would die in her tracks if she heard me say that to a wizard.'
Through their next kiss Rudy mumbled something about the Bishop. 'Which probably wouldn't do her any harm,' he added as their mouths parted. He reached up tenderly and brushed the tear from her cheek. In all his twenty-five years, he couldn't remember anyone, man or woman, who had ever been concerned about what he was going to do. Why did it have to be a girl in another universe? he wondered. Why did it have to be a Queen? Another tear stole down her cheek, so he whispered, 'Hey, you look after Pugsley while I'm gone.' His way of referring to Prince Tir, the last heir of the House of Dare, made
her laugh in spite of herself. 'All right.' She smiled shakily.
'We'll find the Archmage and his Council,' Rudy whispered encouragingly. 'See if we don't.' He kissed her once more quickly and turned and fled, the bluish feather of light dying behind him.
In darkness he hurried through the mazes of the Royal Sector, misery in his heart.
She was afraid for him, and more than that, he was all she had - he and her baby son. In the past month she had lost the husband she had worshipped, the Realm she had ruled, and the world she had grown up in. Yet she had never said, 'Don't go.'
And what's more, you selfish bastard, he cursed himself, // never crossed your mind not to go.
She had never questioned that his need to be a wizard took precedence over his love for her. Wretched as the truth made him, he understood it for what it was; he was first and foremost a wizard. Given a choice of what to do with the limited time remaining to him in this universe, he would rather seek the sources of his own power and the teachings that Ingold and the other wizards could give him than remain with the woman he sincerely loved.
Why did I have to find them both at the same time? he wondered miserably. Why did I have to choose?
Even her understanding of his choice was like gall in the raw wound of his guilt.
Yet there had been no possibility of another choice. He stopped at the head of the main east stairway, leading down to the first level.
The sensation of wrongness, of unnamed horror lurking in the black mazes of the Keep, was stronger now, teasing at him like a half-heard sound. He shivered like a dog before the thunder, the hair at the nape of his neck prickling. All around him silence seemed to move through the branching corridors. Glancing
nervously behind him, he started down the stairs. Somewhere below him, a door must have been opened.
Faint as a drift of incense, he caught the sound of chanting, the sweet murmurous richness of monks' voices singing the offices of the deep-night. Rudy paused on the stairs, remembering that the Church headquarters lay directly below the Royal Sector and that, to the fanatic Bishop of Gae, wizards were anathema.
As far as he knew, his love for Aide was unknown to any, except perhaps his fellow exile Gil. He doubted anything serious could happen to Aide because of it ~ she was, after all, Queen of what was left of Darwath, and the King had perished in the holocaust of the burning Palace at Gae. But he knew too little of the mores and taboos of this place to want to risk discovery. And hell, he thought, maybe there's some kind of noninterference directive in force, since Frnfrom another universe and really shouldn't be here at all.
But if there was, he did not want to know.
At the moment it wasn't critical - there were plenty of other stairways down. Some of them had been part of the original design of the Keep, built like the walls of black, massive, obsidian-hard stone. Others had evidently been rigged millennia ago by ancient inhabitants who had simply knocked holes in the floors of the corridors where it suited them and let down jerry-built steps of wood. The same process had clearly been in force with the walls and cells of the Keep, for in places the black walls marched into darkness in rigid rectilinear order, while in others makeshift chaos prevailed. Passages had been blocked to build cells across the right of way, access routes had subdivided other cells, and partitions of brick, stone, and wood had chopped the original plan into literally thousands of self-contained units whose forms had shifted with their functions, with a result, over three thousand years, that would have challenged the most worldly rat in all of B. F. Skinner's laboratories.