The Walls of Air Page 0,6

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