The Walls of Air Page 0,90

Magic place - the centre-point of magic on earth. If Drago took off for Quo, no wonder everyone was upset. Was Drago a wizard, then?'

Gil shrugged. 'Beats me. But his son was the one who started the campaign against the mages of Gae, which eventually got them kicked out of the city. Why do you ask?'

'Well,' Aide said, 'I've often thought about how we found the observation room - just by closing my eyes and walking. Sometimes at night I'll lie in bed and do that, just remember walking down halls, seeing things around me. Most of the time it's nothing. But once or twice I've had the feeling that there ought to be more levels in the Keep. Do you think there might be levels beneath this one, dug out in the rock of the knoll itself?'

'It makes sense,' Gil agreed. 'Even if the power source for the pumps was magic, they had to put the machinery for it somewhere, and we haven't found it yet. But as to how we'd find the entrances you've got me there.'

They stepped through the wide, dark archway into the Aisle, where the gates were being shut for the night. The warriors of the day and evening watches were grouped around them, the soft run of their talk carrying over the general noise of that great central cavern. Melantrys was making her dispositions for the night, sharp, small, and arrogant next to Janus and the head of Alwir's troops. In the shadows of the gates, the white quatrefoils of the Guards shone like a ghostly meadow of asphodel on the faded black of their massed shoulders; black stars strewed the scarlet heavens of the uniforms of the House of Bes like an LSD vision of the Milky Way; the ranks of the Church wore deeper crimson, sombre and unrelieved.

Aide frowned in thought. The best way to explore this, I think, is for you to get the tablets on which you're making the Keep map and for us to go back to the observation room. We can start from there and go...'

'Wherever,' Gil finished. They headed for the barracks door, almost tripping over a woman who loitered in its shadow. She hurried away from them as soon as they came near, a tall, red-haired woman whom Gil found vaguely familiar, clutching a threadbare brown cloak around her broad shoulders. A few moments later, when they emerged from the barracks with Gil's maps, they saw her again, hanging around the fringes of the group by the gate. She looked about anxiously, rubbing her reddened knuckles and twisting at her cloak; but when Seya went over to speak to her, she fled again.

Starting from the corridor outside the observation room, Gil and Aide worked their way steadily back through the Keep, comparing the composition and design of walls, floors, and doorways, stopping repeatedly for Gil to scratch additions to her maps on

the wax tablets she carried and for Aide to think. Her memories were not always reliable, but weeks of research and mapping had fleshed them out. By this time, there was probably no one who knew more about the Keep than the two of them.

When they could, they stuck to the places where the original structure of the Keep remained. They descended by one of the original stairways to the first level and followed the line of the original corridors. 'We seem to be heading back toward the barracks,' Gil remarked as they turned down a narrow access corridor to find themselves in a long, deserted chamber that appeared to be the centre of its own minor maze. 'In fact, I think we're almost directly behind them, in the southwest corner of the Keep.'

'The observation room was in the southeast corner,' Aide said. 'That's where the main pump shaft seemed to connect.'

'I wonder...' Gil stepped through an obliquely set doorway and looked around her. Aide raised the lamp as high as she could for what better light they could gain. 'Well, we're close, anyway. This was part of the original design, and I think that wall there is the inside of the front wall of the Keep. You can see there's no trace of blocks of any kind. If we've come three rows in...' Gil turned and pointed with her silver hairpin. 'Through there.'

'Through there' proved to be not a cell or a closet, as she had supposed it would be, but a tiny passageway that ultimately ended in a square corner room, so jammed