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road into Quo.'

'It wasn't there before.'

'No.' Ingold got stiffly to his feet, catching his breath as he tried to move. 'He -removed the illusion. Just before he died.'

'He?' Rudy echoed, confused. 'He who? The dragon? But how did the dragon have any power over the maze?'

The wizard turned wearily and led the way to the top of the slope, where Che could be heard, squealing in panic and fighting his tether. Ingold took his staff from where he'd left it propped against the scabby bark of a twisted oak and, leaning heavily on it, limped to free the burro. Rudy realized his own staff had been left down below, scorched to charcoal in the dragon's blood.

Ingold went on. 'I think the inference is obvious. You and I, Rudy, have just killed one of the makers of the maze - one of the members of the Council of Wizards. I have told you before how easy it is to forget your own nature, once you have taken on the nature of a beast.' He looked back down the slope to where the dragon lay, steaming faintly, gay colours quenched in darkening blood. 'Having taken on the being of a dragon, he forgot what it was to be a man and a wizard. He became a prisoner in his own maze. Only in death did he recognize me and remember, to do what he could for me in memory of o.ur friendship.' Under the slime of blood and dirt, his face was a

bruised mass of cuts, the blood from them leaking slowly into his beard.

'You mean - that was a friend of yours?'

'I think so,' Ingold whispered.

'But - why would he do it? Why would he change himself into a dragon in the first place?'

Ingold sighed, and the sound was like a death rattle in his throat. He wiped his eyes, and his sleeve came away fouled with red, gritty slime. 'I don't know, Rudy. The answer to that lies in Quo. And I'm beginning to fear what that answer is.'
Chapter 13
Night walked the halls of Dare's Keep, bringing darkness and the soft stirring of sleepers, through cell on cell and corridor on corridor of those ancient and storied mazes. There was stillness, except for the uneasy breath of the moving air, and silence, except where, here and there, sleepers would wake with cries from hideous and identical dreams.

The small gleam of the lamplight gilded the round globes of a sandglass and licked with tiny flames on the scrollwork at the fancy end of Gil's silver hairpin. The worn wax of her tablets glowed a creamy yellow where the light touched, and the intricate fretwork of the tablet's narrow frame gleamed mahogany red, like old claret. Around her, the study was silent.

This was the new study, to which she and Aide had carried the increasing quantities of tablets, parchments, and artifacts scrounged from the lab levels below. The lamplight picked out shapes on the table: polyhedrons, milky white or crystal grey, a scattering of faceted jewels, odd, tubular mechanisms of gold and glass, and strangely shaped entities of metal and wood, some hard and angular, others sinuous, shaped to the hand. There were stacks of wax tablets and piles of dirty, mildewed, overwritten parchments - the stuff of failed scholarship, the jigsaw puzzle whose message, Gil feared, would be delivered the hard way.

The message was now, to her, very clear. She'd tracked it like a long-forgotten spoor through her notes, tangling on old words, old spellings, changes of dialect, and the language itself. The correlation was not invariable, but it was there. Not all Nests had had the citadels of wizardry built near them in the early days when the healers and seers and loremasters had held power, in these northern realms, comparable with that of the mighty Church of the south. But all citadels of wizardry - and

the cities that had grown up around them - had been built somewhere near the Nests.

Gil threw her silver stylus aside and began to pace the room. Her shoulder ached, the muscles violently complaining of the renewed rigours of practice; her hands hurt, blistered from the sword hilt, her fingers so stiffened that it was hard to write. Her hair fell in a sweaty straggle around her face, to hang in a sloppy braid behind. And her head ached, blinded by fatigue and worry and fear. She knew how Ingold must have felt, trying desperately to contact Lohiro and unable to do so, forced