furs. She glanced sideways at him and smiled.
Profiled against the dim light, Aide looked different, more sure of herself - less pretty but more beautiful, Rudy thought illogically. Gil had changed, too,hedecided,glancingoverat the thin girl sitting like some scrawny teenage boy on the floor
beside Ingold's chair. She was softer, somehow, though physically she was like a leather strap. Her eyes were gentler, but there was a firm line to her mouth that spoke of bitter experience and knowledge that she could never unknow.
Well, what the hell, he thought. We've all changed. Even old Ingold.
Maybe one day the old man would regain the amused serenity with which he had once viewed the world. Quo had broken something inside him that Rudy sensed was only partially healed. After his first flood of greetings and information, Ingold had relapsed into silence; throughout supper, he had spoken very little. This was not to say the room was quiet; once the initial chorus of chomping noises had died down, there had been news to exchange, stories to tell, and adventures to recount, most of these among Rudy, Gil, and Aide.
Now and then the old man's eyes travelled from face to face -not judging what this strange rabble was good for, though that would come. Now Ingold was only getting to know them - the goody wives and tea leaf readers, the two-and-thirty second-raters who had happened to miss the destruction of Quo, plus its single austere survivor, one wizened old hermit, and one punk airbrush-jockey who'd stumbled into the middle of his destiny by mistake. This was all the force Ingold would have to work with, all the magic left in the world for his command.
No wonder he looks like death warmed over, Rudy thought.
'Now,' Ingold said finally, in the meal's comfortable afterglow, tightening his hand, which had come to rest easily on Gil's shoulder. 'Show me these marvels you have found.'
As if on cue, Gil and Aide leaped to their feet. 'We've got them in the back here,' Gil said, showing the way. 'That door there leads into the room where we found the stairway down to the labs; we usually keep it bolted. We put our things in here...' Most of the other wizards had already seen their trawlings from the laboratories and storerooms and so remained in the common room. Some of them - Thoth, Kta, and Kara - followed
Rudy, Ingold, and the girls through a dusty little cubbyhole scarcely wider than a hallway and into a kind of storeroom, where a plank table had been set up, laden with the mysteries from below. As they entered, a bluish drift of witchlight bloomed around them - the rooms of the Wizards' Corps were the only ones in the Keep to have decent lighting. Scattered across the table were vessels, boxes, chains of bubbled glass, apparatus of glass balls and gold rods, twining knots of metal tubes, sinuous pieces of meaningless sculpture, and slick, unexplainable polyhedrons, white and smoked.
'These were what blew us away the most,' Gil said, picking up one of the white shapes and tossing it to Ingold. 'They were everywhere under the machinery in the pump rooms, in piles in the storerooms, and strung in nets over the tanks in the hydroponic gardens. So far, the only thing they're good for is that Tir likes to play with them.'
'Indeed.' Ingold turned the polyhedron in his fingers for a moment, as if testing its weight or proportions. Then, quite suddenly, it glowed to life in his hands, the soft, white radiance of it warming the angles of his wind-darkened face. He tossed it to Gil, who caught it ineptly on cringingpalms. It was quite cool.
'Lamps,' he said.
'Oh...' Gil breathed, entranced. 'Oh, how beautiful! But how did the ancients turn them on and off? How do the things work?' She looked up at him, the light glowing brightly out of her cupped hands, illuminating her thin face.
'I should imagine they simply covered them when they wanted darkness,' Ingold said. The material itself is spelled to hold the light for a long time and can be kindled by a very simple means. Someone on the lowest echelons of wizardry, like a firebringer or a finder, could do it.'
'Hmmm.' Rudy picked up one of the white crystals on the table and studied the bottom facet. 'You should have figured
that out, Gil. It says "one hundred watts" right here.'
'Hit him for me, Aide. But I really should have figured it out, because I always did