He walked in the darkness without light. This was another ability which had surprised him, like being able to call fire from cold wood, or light to the end of his staff. Ingold had told him that this wizard's sight had been born in him, like his other talents, the seeds of a magedom that could bear no possible fruit in the warm, lazy world of Southern California.
And still he felt it - the building of tension, like water mounting behind a weakening dam, the brooding horror that seemed to fill the dark mazes through which he walked. His step quickened with his heartbeat. The conviction grew in him that the Dark were outside, focusing inhuman lusts and will upon the smooth, impenetrable walls of the Keep. Beyond human magic or even human comprehension, their numbers and power were so great that their presence could be felt through the ten-foot walls wrought of time and stone and magic. He had to find Ingold, had to find his way somehow out of this maze...
He found himself in a short neck of corridor that bore every sign of having been part of the original Keep. A flow of warmer air indicated a stairway somewhere nearby, leading down to the first level. Rudy paused, trying to get his bearings. Directly in front of him loomed the end of the passage, black and seamless, as if poured from a single sheet of dark glass. That would be the back wall, he realized in surprise, of the Keep itself,
Fantastic, he thought. I've come in a bloody circle and, after all that wandering around, I still get to come down in the middle of Church territory anyway. He shrugged. But it beats hell out of wandering around up here all night.
He did not go forward, however. A short stairway of a few
steps branched up to his right, with a door at the top. The mirror-smooth blackness of the stone proclaimed steps and wall as part of the Keep's original design, but the setting of the door caught his attention. It was so placed as to be absolutely shadowed, thrown into virtual invisibility, from any light carried in the corridor itself. Only a wizard, walking like Rudy without light, could have seen it at all.
Fascinated, Rudy moved forward. His sense of the mounting peril and terror of the Dark grew no less. They would strike, and strike soon - he felt that much in his bones. But he knew that, provided they survived the night, he and Ingold would be setting out on their journey in the morning, travelling hundreds of miles through the barren plains and desert to seek the City of Quo where it lay hidden on the Western Ocean. Concealed as this room was, he was not altogether sure that he'd be able to find it when he returned.
But above all, pure curiosity drew him as a string might draw a cat, the unslakable curiosity that was the leading trait of any wizard.
The door was shut, the ironwork of the lock so rusted as to be almost unworkable. But it was no worse than the oil pans of some cars Rudy had wrestled with in his time. The chamber within was circular, unlike the uniformly rectangular cells elsewhere in the Keep. A bare workbench ran halfway around the walls; under the bench, wooden boxes proved to contain miscellaneous rusted junk.
But in the centre of the room stood a table, rising from the floor itself and built of the same hard, black, glassy stone. It was about four feet across, and inset in its centre was a plug of heavy crystal, like the glass covering of a display case. But when Rudy perched himself on the table's edge and called a ball of witchlight over his shoulder to look, the white gleam glared back into his eyes, for the crystal was cloudy, showing only a kind of angular glitter underneath. First with his nails and then with the tip of his dagger, he tried to pry the cover off, without results. But there was something under there, of that he was
sure. Elusive glimpses of angles and surfaces whispered in those frosted depths. An observer, watching him as he examined the impenetrable stone, would have been reminded of a large and gaudy cat frustrated by a mirror.
To hell with it, he thought in disgust and made as if to rise. This is no time to be messing with toys.
But he was drawn back again. His shadow lay hard and dark over the grey glass, sharp-edged in the cool, steady light of the ball of phosphorus that hung behind his shoulder. After a moment's thought, he dimmed and diffused the light, trying to peer past the flickering crystal, but the thing still denied his gaze. Gradually he let the witchlight die entirely and sat looking at the thing in the dark.
Around him the room had fallen utterly silent. He knew that he should go but did not. He sensed that the thing was magic, of a deep and mechanistic sorcery far beyond his natural talents. Was this the magic, he wondered, that he would learn at the school at Quo?
His fingers probed at the crystal again, finding no seam between glass and rock.
Another thought came to him. Hesitantly, he projected a thin sliver of light into the crystal itself.
White and blue and lavender reflections blossomed forth around him like the three-dimensional tail of a celestial peacock. He shied back, shielding his eyes from that bursting fountain of light, then dimmed it, working awkwardly with the few light-spells he had been taught, like an artist's child with his first crayons. He suffused the crystal with a dim light and leaned over again to look inside, to the glittering bed of coloured rock salts that lay at the bottom of their crystal cylinder.
A toy? A trip-light? An enchanted kaleidoscope?
Or the magic tool to further magics?
Staring down into those bright depths, he relaxed his mind, slowly emptying his soul of all concerns for the Dark, for Ingold, for Aide, and for the answer to this riddle itself. He let the soft, bright glitter of the gems below have its way with him, to do whatever it did.
For a time the images confused him. He did not understand what they were -incoherent scenes of blowing sand, rock hills on which nothing grew, rolling seas of brown grass invisible in the overcast night. He sensed rather than saw a dark place take shape, roofed with clouds and drifted deep in snow, walled in by high cliffs of black rock crowned with twisted pines. Beyond the black clouds he sensed gorge-riven peaks, knife-edged heights, and the endless miles of glaciers where the ice
winds skated, screaming... Sarda Pass ? he wondered. Tomorrow's road? The images grew clearer ragged foothills and then an endless brown plain, with tawny grasses waving under the lash of the wind. A black sky was sheeted with cloud. A pale thread of road stretched out of sight into pitiless distance.
Frozen and bitter vastness swallowed his soul.
And, as if the images moved with his heart, he saw the soft glow of reflected candlelight and the starred embroidery on the changeable colours of a silken quilt. The colours shifted, aqua to teal to river-reed green, as they were shaken by the sobbing of the woman who lay there, her black hair thrown about her like scattered silk.
I can't leave her, he thought in despair. I've known her such a short time.
And miss Quo? the other half of his mind asked. And not speak with the A rchmage? Not have Ingold teach you the ways of power?
He closed his eyes. Like a tingling through his skin, he became aware again of the Dark and the building fury of them, riddling the night like the coming of an electrical storm. / have to go, he thought, with a sudden chill of panic. But still he stayed, paralyzed between his choices -Minalde on the one hand, Ingold and the Archmage Lohiro on the other.
He opened his eyes, and the image in the crystal changed again.
Small and distant, the stars were visible - more stars than he had ever imagined, filling a luminous sky that hung low and glittering over the endless roll of the blue-black sea. Their piercing brightness touched the curl of foam on the silver curve of the beach. Outlined against that burning sky, he thought he could make out the shape of a tower, looming storey on turreted storey from the trees that crowded an angular point of land thrusting out into the ocean. But the tower seemed strangely elusive, slipping his eyes past it, turning them again to the stars. He tried to look inland, but found his gaze eluded there, too. Half-guessed shapes of buildings clustered there, twining patterns of colour on stone columns muted by darkness, briefly visible and then swallowed by mists. Try as he would to focus on the land, he found his eyes coming back to the sand, the sea, and the midnight sky, as if in a gentle refusal to answer his questioning.