The Walls of Air Page 0,91

with junk as almost to hide in shadow the wooden trapdoor in the floor. With a cry of delight and without the smallest consideration for what Frankensteinian horrors might lurk in the shadows below, Gil pulled on its rusted metal ring and was greeted by a black well of shadows, a great smell of dust, and a soft, billowing cloud of warm air.

'It's like a different world.' The great dark space took Minalde's soft voice and echoed it back to her like the sighing murmur of a million past voices. 'What kind of a place was this?'

Darkness yielded unwillingly to the feeble glow of the lamp. Shapes materialized: tables, benches, the gleam of metal, scattered polyhedrons, white or frosty grey, and the twinkle of faceted crystal. Gil stepped forward and was greeted by the leap and sparkle of the lampflame repeating itself in countless tiny mirrors. Fragments of gilding slipped over the close-curled edges of a scroll and flickered in glass vessels half-filled with ashy powders or pale dust. The black floor rose in the centre to form an altarlike platform, its hollowed top lined with charred steel.

Gil turned around, her wheeling shadow turning with her. 'At a guess,' she said, 'this isn't so much a different world as one that's more the same. I think it's still as it was when it was built, the work of the last generation born in the Times Before.' She ran her hand along the smooth, obsidian-hard edge of the workbench. This is one of the old labs.'

'Like Bektis' workshop?' Minalde asked, coming timidly into the centre of the room.

'More or less.' Gil brought the lamp closer to the workbench, touching, first with light and then with hesitant fingers, the frosted glass of the polyhedrons that lay there

in such disarray.

'But what is all this?' Aide lifted a short apparatus that looked like a barbell made of glass bubbles and gold. 'What's it for?'

'Beats me.' Gil set a smooth, meaningless sculpture of wood up endwise; the lamplight slid like water from its sinuous curves. She rolled a sort of big glass egg haltingly into the light and saw it crusted inside with whitish crystals that looked like salt. 'It's one hell of a thing to find the laboratories of the old wizards at a time when all the wizards on earth are on the other side of the continent.'

Aide laughed shakily in agreement. Her eyes in the shadows were wide and wondering, as if she remembered what she saw from another personality, another life.

'And it's warm down here,' Gil pursued thoughtfully. 'I think this is the first time since I crossed the Void that I have been warm.' She pushed gently at the steel doors at the far end of the room, and they slid back on their soundless hinges, poised like the gates of the Keep itself. In the room beyond, she heard the faint echo of machinery pumping; the light of the lamp she bore touched row after row of sunken tanks, the black stone of their sides marked with vanished water and a climbing forest of steel lattices. Gil frowned, walking the narrow paths between them. 'Could it be -hydroponics?'

'What?' Aide knelt to trace the water stain with a curious finger.

'Water- gardening. Aide, what in hell did they use for light down here? Light enough to get plants to grow?' She pushed open another door, and vistas of empty tanks mocked her from the shadows. She turned back. 'You could feed the whole damn Keep down here if you had a light source.'

'Are we going to tell Alwir?' Gil asked much later as they ascended the straight, narrow little stairway back to the hidden storeroom. Aide carried the lamp now, walking ahead. Gil's hands were full of bits and pieces of meaningless tools, half a dozen jewels of varying sizes she'd found in a lead box, and two. or three of the new polyhedrons, frosted grey instead of milky, but just as uncommunicative. She shivered as they came up from below and the colder air of ground level nipped at her rawboned hands.

'N- no,' Aide said. 'Not yet.'

They dumped their finds on the dusty trestle table that ran down the centre of the large, deserted room and set the lamp down among them in its pool of dim and wavery light. Through the door and down the corridor they could see the blurred echo of other firelight and hear a baby cry, with a man's deep, smooth, bass voice rising in