before you were attacked, there were five separate disturbances of that kind in all directions around me, drawing my attention from you. The vaults are this way, if I remember aright."
Since her coming to this world in the wake of the rising of the Dark, Gil had guarded Ingold's back. The stable crypt opening into the vaults had been half torn apart by the Dark Ones, and Gil's hair prickled with the memory of those bodiless haunters as she picked her way after him through a vestibule whose mud floor was broken by a sea-wrack of looted chests, candlesticks, and vermin-scattered bones. An inner door gave onto a stairway. There was a smell of water below, a cold exhalation like a grave. "When the vigilantes started hunting the city for books-for archives, records, anything that would burn-Maia let them have what he could spare as a sop and hid the rest." Ingold's voice echoed wetly under the downward-sloping ceiling, and something below, fleeing the blue-white light that burned from the end of his staff, plopped in water.
"He bricked up some of the archives in old cells of the episcopal dungeon and sounded walls in the vaults to find other rooms that had been sealed long ago, where he might cache the oldest volumes, of which no other known copy existed. It was one of these vaults that he found the Cylinder."
Water lay five or six inches deep in the maze of cells and tunnels that constituted the palace vaults. The light from Ingold's raised staff glittered sharply on it as Gil and the old mage waded between decaying walls plastered thick with slunch, mold, and dim-glowing niter. The masonry was of a heavy pattern far older than the more finished stones of Gae. Penambra predated the northern capital at Gae; predated the first rising of the Dark thousands of years ago- long predated any memory of humankind's. Maia himself came to Gil's mind, a hollow-cheeked skeleton with arthritis crippled hands, laughing with Ingold over his own former self, a foppish dilettante whose aristocratic protector had bought the bishopric for him long before he was of sufficient years to have earned it.
Perhaps he hadn't really earned it until the night he hid the books-the night he led his people out of the haunted ruins of their city to the only safe place they knew. Renweth Vale, and the black-walled Keep of Dare.
Before a bricked-up doorway, Ingold halted. Gil remained a few paces behind him, calf- deep in freezing water, analyzing every sound, every rustle, every drip and dull moan of the wind, fighting not to shiver and not to think of the poison that might be in her veins. Still, she thought, if the thing's bite was poisoned, it didn't seem to be too serious. God knew she'd gone through sufficient exertion for it to have killed her twice if it was going to.
Ingold passed his hand across the dripping masonry and murmured a word. Gil saw no change in the mortar, but Ingold set his staff against the wall-the light still glowing steadily from its tip, as from a lantern-and pulled a knife from his belt, with which he dug the mortar as if it were putty desiccated by time. As he tugged loose the bricks, she made no move to help him, nor did he expect her to. She only watched and listened for the first signs of danger. That was what it was to wear the black uniform, the white quatrefoil emblem, of the Guards of Gae.
Ingold left the staff leaning in the corridor, to light the young woman's watch. As a mage, he saw clearly in the dark.
Light of a sort burned through the ragged hole left in the bricks, a sickly owl-glow shed by slunch that grew all over the walls of the tiny chamber beyond, illuminating nothing. The stuff stretched a little as Ingold pulled it from the trestle tables it had almost covered; it snapped with powdery little sighs, like rotted rubber, to reveal leather wrappings protecting the books. "Archives," the wizard murmured. "Maia did well."
The Cylinder was in a wooden box in a niche on the back wall. As long as Gil's hand from wrist bones to farthest fingertip, and just too thick to be circled by her fingers, it appeared to be made of glass clear as water. Those who had lived in the Times Before- before the first rising of the Dark Ones, seemed to have favored plain geometrical shapes. Ingold