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The setting was the Shaht Rain druleahts shone on the wet pavement outside Two bearded bikers and a sleazy blonde were playing pool in the back Rudy Solis swigged off his second beer of the evening and watched the roo that had been taken froer remembered what it had been Only a numb ache was left

He was out of h yet

Behind the bar, Billie May lasses and bottles of beer, her reflection trailing her in the flyspeckedher black eye make-up and the red lace of her bra at the low neck of her sweater The ht crowd, people Rudy had known since high school - since childhood, soel in the world, with his old lady; Crazy Red, the karate instructor; Big Bull; and the gang froers He esture with one hand, and a beer bottle levitated from the shelf before thespace to his hand No one noticed He poured the beer and drank, hardly tasting it Frouitars backed a syrupy nasal voice hy adultery The hurt of the loss within hio of the bottle in midair a foot above the surface of the bar and made it stay there Still no one noticed, or no one cared, anyway Rudy stared past it at his own reflection in the mirror - the sharp bone structure and backswept eyebrows in their fraers were stained with car paint and grease, and his na torch on his wrist Behind hirown suddenly dark, as if all light had died outside

He turned, chilled with a horror he could not define No streetlights were visible outside, no sheen of neon, only darkness that see - darkness that stirred with a restless movement, as if creatures impossibly sinuous haunted its livid depths He tried to cry out, and his voice was only a kind of feeble rattle in his throat He tried to point, but the people in the bar ignored hiy or power from outside struck the wall of the bar like abricks Through the torn wall, darkness rolled like a wave

&039;Rudy!&039; Cold hands caught his flailing wrist &039;Rudy, wake up! What is it?&039;

He woke gasping, sweat icing him to the bone In the darkness of the rooht showed hi up in bed beside hi around her shoulders and the fear in her wide iris-dark eyes er than her nineteen years The warm, still blackness of the room smelt of beeswax and of the perfume of her tuain, her voice very low &039;Was it a dream?&039;

&039;Yeah&039; Rudy lay back beside her, shivering, as if deathly cold &039;Only a dream&039;

In the lightless barracks of the Guards on the first level, Gil Patterson woke, her dreams of quiet scholarship in another universe called California broken by an unshakable sense of i horror She lay on her narrow bunk for a ti open-eyed to the s of her own heart The Keep was safe, she told herself The one place in the world where the Dark Ones could not break in

But the terror of the drearew rather than diminished in

her heart

At last she rose, soundless ascat The diuardroom threw a feeble reflection into the cell shared by the women of the day watch It touched anonyled hair, the black cloaks with the sileaht, she pulled on a shirt and breeches, wrapped herself in her cloak, and slipped from the room The floor was icy to her bare feet as she uessed it to be ht and , but time was different in the less Keep

She pushed aside the curtain at the far end of that rooold the wizard was not in his so-called quarters Actually, the wizard slept in a sort of cubbyhole that the Guards used to store part of the food supplies they&039;d scrounged, salvaged, and defended against all coht frorain piled in the back of the closet, a couple of rubby patchwork quilt, but no wizard His staff was gone, too

She h the outer cha weapons and casks of Blue Ruin and bathtub gin, and out into the cavernous depths of the Aisle The great central hall of the Keep stretched nearly a thousand feet froates at the west end to the dark, turreted wall of the adht almost have been outside, for the featureless black walls that bounded the Aisle on either side stretched up out of sight, supporting a ceiling whose shadows had never been dispelled Across the broad floor murmured the deep, black water channels, spanned by their tiny bridges; around her the stillness was like the great silence of the snowbound mountains outside But instead of hted by torches that flickered on either side of the dark steel of the

gates The die flame defined a small double circle on the smooth blackness of the polished floor and touched fiery echoes in bolt, brace, and locking ring

Where the two halos of red flaed by the fire in a line of burning gold

She called out softly, &039;Ingold!&039;

He turned and lifted an inquiring eyebrow Gil pulled her cloak htly around her shoulders and pattered up the broad steps to the gate Since she had crossed the Void in his coly to this other universe, she couldn&039;t remember a time when she had been warm

&039;Yes, my dear?&039; he asked, in a voice like rahiskey and velvet The face revealed by the restless light had never been iven it an extremely lived-in look, seamed and wrinkled and mostly hidden behind a close-clipped, rather scrubby white beard When she stood beside him, her eyes were level with his

&039;What is it?" she asked him quietly

He only said, &039;I think you know&039;

She glanced nervously over her shoulder at the dark steel of the gates Here the horror was stronger, a sense of brooding e, chill terror, the irrational sensation of being watched fron and incoence They&039;ve coold rested a hand gently on her shoulder &039;I think you had better go arht, Minalde watched Rudy dress &039;What&039;s wrong?&039; she whispered

&039;I don&039;t know&039; His voice was low, so as not to wake the royal infant who slept in his gilded cradle in the shadows on the opposite wall &039;But I think I&039;d better be getting back&039; After a

was er felt self-conscious in the hoth boots, and gaily eed off a dead noblereat massacre by the Dark Ones at Karst But he still mourned the simplicity of jeans and a T-shirt He buckled on his sword and leaned across the tuirl atched hi to see us off?

His hands fraht his wrists, as if to hold hier &039;No,&039; she said quietly &039;I can&039;t, Rudy It&039;s a long way to Quo and a dangerous road Who knows if you&039;ll even find the Hidden City or the Arche, once you reach the end?&039; Her blue eyes shiht &039;I never could stand goodbyes&039;

&039;Hey!&039; Rudy leaned-over her again, his hands gripping her neck and shoulders, the dark hair spilling heavily down over his fingers as he drew her onna be with ine anyone or anything crazy enough to take on that old geezer It won&039;t be goodbye&039;

She smiled crookedly up at hi ently this ti his face &039;Go with God, Rudy, though the Bishop would die in her tracks if she heard h their next kiss Rudyabout the Bishop &039;Which probably wouldn&039;t do her any harm,&039; he added as their mouths parted He reached up tenderly and brushed the tear from her cheek In all his twenty-five years, he couldn&039;t remember anyone, oing to do Why did it have to be a girl in another universe? he wondered Why did it have to be a Queen? Another tear stole down her cheek, so he whispered, &039;Hey, you look after Pugsley while I&039; to Prince Tir, the last heir of the House of Dare, ht&039; She se and his Council,&039; Rudy whispered encouragingly &039;See if we don&039;t&039; He kissed her once ht dying behind hih the mazes of the Royal Sector, misery in his heart

She was afraid for him, and more than that, he was all she had - he and her baby son In the past month she had lost the husband she had worshipped, the Realrown up in Yet she had never said, &039;Don&039;t go&039;

And what&039;s more, you selfish bastard, he cursed hio

She had never questioned that his need to be a wizard took precedence over his love for her Wretched as the truth made him, he understood it for what it was; he was first and foremost a wizard Given a choice of what to do with the li to him in this universe, he would rather seek the sources of his oer and the teachings that Ingold and the other wizards could give him than remain with the woman he sincerely loved

Why did I have to find them both at the same time? he wonderedof his choice was like gall in the raound of his guilt

Yet there had been no possibility of another choice He stopped at the head of thedown to the first level

The sensation of wrongness, of unnaer now, teasing at hi before the thunder, the hair at the nape of his neck prickling All around hi corridors Glancing

nervously behind him, he started down the stairs Somewhere below him, a door ht the sound of chanting, the sweetthe offices of the deep-night Rudy paused on the stairs, re that the Church headquarters lay directly below the Royal Sector and that, to the fanatic Bishop of Gae, wizards were anathema

As far as he knew, his love for Aide was unknown to any, except perhaps his fellow exile Gil He doubted anything serious could happen to Aide because of it ~ she was, after all, Queen of as left of Darwath, and the King had perished in the holocaust of the burning Palace at Gae But he knew too little of the mores and taboos of this place to want to risk discovery And hell, he thought, maybe there&039;s some kind of noninterference directive in force, since Frnfrom another universe and really shouldn&039;t be here at all

But if there was, he did not want to know

At the moment it wasn&039;t critical - there were plenty of other stairways down Son of the Keep, built like the walls of black, ed o by ancient inhabitants who had simply knocked holes in the floors of the corridors where it suited them and let down jerry-built steps of wood The same process had clearly been in force with the walls and cells of the Keep, for in places the black walls id rectilinear order, while in others es had been blocked to build cells across the right of way, access routes had subdivided other cells, and partitions of brick, stone, and wood had chopped the original plan into literally thousands of self-contained units whose forms had shifted with their functions, with a result, over three thousand years, that would have challenged the most worldly rat in all of B F Skinner&039;s laboratories

Opti,&039; Janus of Weg said quietly The big Coe of a bunk near the guardroorave in the loose fralanced across the hearth at Ingold &039;But I trust you If you say the Dark are outside, I would believe you, even if the sun were high in the sky&039;

There was a stirring a the other captains and athe Guards with his long white viking braids, said softly, The very sirl with the eyes of a ninja, glanced nervously over her shoulder

&039;Smell, hell,&039; ruy plainsman whose domains lay on the other side of the hts when the cattle stalanced coolly across at Ingold &039;Can they break in?&039; he asked, as if it were a matter of no more moment than the outcome of a race on which he had bet only a sold shifted his weight on his perch by the hearth and folded sword-scarred hands on his knee &039;But we can be certain that they will try Janus, Toest that the corridors be patrolled, on all levels, to every corner of the Keep That way&039;

&039;But we haven&039;t the h for a patrol of sorts,&039; Janus admitted &039;But if the Dark effect an entrance, it&039;s sure we&039;ve not enough to fight at any one place, spread so thin&039;

The Icefalcon cocked a pale eyebrow at the wizard &039;Are we going to fight?&039;

&039;If we can,&039; Ingold said &039;Your patrols can be eked out with

volunteers, Janus Get the Keep orphans as your scouts They&039;re always into everything anyway; they ht as well be put to use We need to patrol the corridors, simply to know if and where the Dark break in It isn&039;t likely that they can,&039; he went on gravely, &039;for the walls of the Keep have the most powerful spells of the ancient world woven into their fabric But whether the spells have weakened, or whether the Dark have grown stronger in the intervening years, I do not know&039; Despite the calriht &039;But I do know that if the Dark Ones enter the Keep, we shall have to abandon it entirely, and then ill surely be lost&039;

&039;Abandon the Keep!&039; Janus cried

&039;It stands to reason,&039; the Icefalcon agreed, leaning back against the wall behind hiht and rather breathless voice that sounded disinterested even when discussing the loss of the last sanctuary left to humankind &039;AH those little stairways, miles of empty corridors We could never drive the the truth of his words

&039;It&039;s not only that,&039; Gil put in quietly Their eyes turned to her, a quick glitter in the roo system?&039; she went on The air in here has to travel somehow The whole Keep must be honeycoh But the Dark can change their size as well as their shape They could fit through a hole no bigger than a rat&039;s, and, God knoe have rats in the Keep All it would need would be for one of the could attack at will, and ould never be able to find it&039;

&039;Curse it,&039; Janus whispered, &039;that the Dark should rise at the start of the worst winter in human memory If we quit the Keep, those as aren&039;t taken at first nightfall would freeze before they came to shelter These mountains are buried in snow&039;