The Walls of Air Page 0,59

a maze only barely to be glimpsed by that inward remembering look in Minalde's eyes.

'That's interesting,' Gil said as she and Minalde emerged from the back entrance of a boarded-up cell crammed to the ceiling with old furniture and dozens of those useless, enigmatic white polyhedrons. Clouds of dust clung to their clothes; Aide sneezed in it, fanning it away from her face. Both of them were grey with it, like urchins playing in the construction yards. 'From the furniture we found in there, it looks as if this area was growing increasingly crowded at the same time the fifth level was being abandoned.'

'That doesn't make sense,' Aide said, puzzled, trying to wipe the dust from her arms and only succeeding in putting huge, blackish smudges on her white sleeves. 'If they were having such a space problem, why not move on to the fifth level?'

Gil shrugged and marked another arrow on the wall. 'It takes forever to get up and back there,' she said. The second level was just more popular. In cities of my homeland, people will live in worse crowding than this, just to be in a fashionable part of town.' She looked around. 'So where the hell are we?'

Aide held the lamp up high. A short neck of corridor dead-ended twenty feet away in a blank wall - by its composition, part of the Keep's original design. Shadows shifted around them with the movement of the lamp, and Gil shivered a little in the draught.

A warmer breath of air from somewhere nearby brought the voices of monks chanting. 'Close to the Royal Sector, I think,' she answered her own question. There should be a stair...'

'No, Gil, wait a minute.' Aide stood very still, pale and small in the impenetrable shadows. 'I know this place, I'm positive. I've been here before.' Gil was silent, watching the struggle on her face. Aide groped helplessly for a moment at the memory, then shook her head in despair. 'I can't bring it back,' she

whispered. 'But it's so close. I feel I've passed this way before, so many times. It was part of my life, going to do something... something I did so often I could go there with my eyes closed.'

Then close your eyes,' Gil suggested softly, 'and go there.'

Aide handed her the lamp and stood, eyes closed, with the darkness hemming her in. She took a hesitant step and another. Then abruptly she changed her direction, her stride lengthening smoothly as her thin blue and purple skirts brushed the ancient dust of the floor. For a moment Gil thought she was going to walk slap into the wall. But the angle thrown by shadow and lamplight was deceiving; just as Gil cried, 'Whoa! Watch it!' the shadow seemed to swallow Aide. She tripped and cursed in a mild and ladylike fashion. Coming to her side, Gil saw that, instead of the wall, she had met with a short flight of black steps that mounted to a dark door with a rusted and broken lock.

'Is this it?'

Gil looked up from angling the lamp, trying to see down into the cloudy crystal inset into the table. 'Of course,' she said. This is the observation room Rudy found the night before he left; this is what Ingold asked me to look for. And you found it.' She hesitated, seeing the puzzled doubt still on Aide's face. 'Isn't it what you were looking for?

Aide walked slowly along the workbench against the wall, running idle fingers over its smooth edge. She picked up a white polyhedron that perched there, the reflected lucency of the lamp making it glow faintly pink where her fingers touched. 'No,' she said quietly.

'Don't you recognize this?' Gil swivelled around, sitting on the edge of the dark table.

Aide looked up from the small faceted thing she was examining, her dusty hair hanging in tendrils around her face. 'Oh, yes,' she said matter-of-factly. 'But I have the impression of having walked through here on my way to -somewhere else.'

Gil glanced around the room. There was only the single door. Their eyes met again, and Aide shook her head helplessly. The silence lengthened between them, and Gil shivered with the sudden sense of coming close to the unknown. In that silence she became slowly conscious of something else, a faint, barely perceptible humming or throbbing that seemed to come from the dark stone of the walls themselves. Gil frowned as it gradually worked its way into her perceptions. It was familiar, as