Naked Empire

Chapter 17

Zedd thought he heard something.

The spoonful of stew he was about to put into his waiting mouth paused.

He remained motionless, listening.

The Keep often had sounded alive to him, as if it were breathing. Once in a while it even sounded as if it were letting out a small sigh. Ever since he was a boy, Zedd had, on occasion, heard loud snaps that he never could trace. He suspected such sounds were most likely the massive stone blocks moving just a tad, popping as they yielded ground against a neighbor.

There were stone blocks down in the foundations of the Keep that were the size of small palaces.

Once, when Zedd was no more than ten or twelve, a loud crack had rung through the entire Keep as if the place had been struck with a giant hammer.

He ran out of the library, where he’d been studying, to see other people coming out of rooms all up and down the hall, looking about, whispering their worries to one another. Zedd’s father had later told him that it was found to be nothing more than one of the huge foundation blocks cracking suddenly, and while it posed no structural problem, the abrupt snap of such an enormous piece of granite had been heard throughout the Keep. Although such occurrences were rare, it was not the last time he heard such a harmless, but frightening, sound in the Keep.

And then there were the animals. Bats flew unrestricted through parts of the Keep. There were towers that soared to dizzying heights, some empty inside but for stone stairs curving up around the inside of the outer wall on their way up to a small room at the top, or an observation deck. In the dusty streamers of sunlight penetrating the dark interiors of those towers there could be seen myriad bugs flitting about. The bats loved the towers.

Rats, too, lived in parts of the Keep. They scurried and squeaked, sometimes causing a fright. Mice were common in places, making noise scratching and gnawing at things. And then there were the cats, offspring of former mousers and pets, but now all wild, that lived off the rats and the mice. The cats also hunted the birds that flew in and out of uncovered openings to feed on bugs, or to build nests up in high recesses.

There were sometimes awful sounds when a bat, a mouse, a bird, or even a cat went somewhere they weren’t permitted. The shields were meant to keep people away from dangerous or restricted areas, but they were also placed to prevent unauthorized access to many of the items stored and preserved in the Keep. The shields guarded against life; they made no distinction between human and nonhuman life.

Otherwise, after all, a pet dog that innocently wandered into a restricted area could theoretically retrieve a dangerous talisman and proudly take it to a child master who could be put in peril by it. Those who placed the shields were aware that it was also possible for unscrupulous people to train animals to go to restricted areas, snatch whatever they might be able to carry, and bring it to them. Not knowing what animal might potentially be trained for such a task, the shields were made to ward all life. If a bat flew into the wrong shield, it was incinerated.

There were shields in the Keep that even Zedd could not get through because they required both sides of the gift and he had only the Additive.

Some of the shields took the form of a barrier of magic that physically prevented passage in some way, either by restricting movement or by inducing a sensation so unpleasant that one wouldn’t force oneself beyond. Those shields were meant to prevent ungifted people or children from entering certain areas, not to prevent entrance to the gifted, so it was not necessary for those shields to kill.

But such shields only worked for those who were ungifted.

In other places, entrance was strictly forbidden to anyone but those with not only the appropriate ability, but proper authority. Without both the appropriate ability and authority granted by spells keyed to the particular defenses in that area, such as metal plates that had to be touched by an authorized wizard, the shields killed whatever entered them.

The shields killed animals as infallibly, as effectively, as they would kill any intruder.

Such dangerous shields gave warnings of heat, light, or tingling as a warning so as to prevent people from unintentionally going near them—after all, with the size of the place, it was easy enough to become lost. Such warnings worked for the animals, too, but occasionally a cat chased a panicked mouse into a lethal shield, and sometimes the cat, racing after, would run right into it as well.

As Zedd waited, listening, the silence stretched on, unbroken. If he really had heard something, it could have been the Keep moving, or an animal squeaking when it approached a shield, or even a gust of wind coming through one of the hundreds of openings. Whatever it was, it was silent, now. The wooden spoonful of stew finally completed its journey.

“Umm . . .” Zedd declared to no one in particular. “Good!”

To his great disappointment when he’d first tasted it, he had found that the stew wasn’t done. Rather than hurry the process with a bit of magic, and possibly incur Adie’s wrath for meddling with her cooking, Zedd had sat down on the couch and resigned himself to doing a bit of reading.

There was no end to the reading. Books offered the potential of valuable information that could aid them in ways they couldn’t foretell.

From time to time, as he read, he checked the progress of the stew, rather patiently, he thought.

Now, as he tasted it, it finally seemed to be done. The chunks of ham were so tender they would fall apart when his tongue pressed them to the roof of his mouth. The whole delightfully bubbling pot had taken on the heady melding of onions and oils, carrots and turnips, a hint of garlic and a dizzying swirl of complementary spices, all crowded with nuggets of ham, some still with crisp fat along one edge.

To his great annoyance, Zedd had long ago noticed that Adie hadn’t made any biscuits. Stew went well with biscuits. There should be biscuits. He decided that a bowl of stew would hold him until she returned and made some.

There should be biscuits. It was only right.

He didn’t know where Adie had gone. Since he had been down in Aydindril most of the day, he reasoned that she had probably gone off to one of the libraries to search through books for anything that might be of help. She was a great help ferreting potentially relevant books out of the libraries.

Being from Nicobarese, Adie sought out books in that language. There were books all over the Keep, so there was no telling where she was.

There were also storerooms filled with racks and racks of bones. Other rooms contained rows of tall cabinets, each with hundreds of drawers. Zedd had seen bones of creatures there that he had never seen in life. Adie was an expert of sorts on bones. She had lived for a good portion of her life in seclusion in the shadow of the boundary. People living in the area had been afraid of her; they called her the bone woman because she collected bones.

They had been everywhere in her house. Some of those bones protected her from the beasts that came out of the boundary.

Zedd sighed. Books or bones, there was no telling where she was.

Besides that, there were any number of other things in the Wizard’s Keep that would be of great interest to a sorceress. She might even have simply wanted to go for a walk, or up on a rampart to gaze at the stars and think.

It was much easier to wait for her to come back to her stew than for him to go looking for her. Maybe he should have put one of the bells around her neck.

Zedd hummed a merry tune to himself as he spooned stew into a wooden bowl. No use waiting on an empty stomach, he always said; that only made a person grouchy. It was really better to have a snack and be in good humor than to wait and be miserable. He would only be bad company if he was miserable.

On the eighth spoon of stew into the bowl, he heard a sound.

His hand froze above the bubbling pot.

Zedd thought he’d heard a bell tinkle.

Zedd wasn’t given to flights of imagination or to being unreasonably jumpy, but a cold shiver tingled across his flesh as if he’d been touched by the icy fingers of a spirit reaching out from another world. He stood motionless, partly bent toward the pot in the fire, partly turned toward the hall, listening.

It could be a cat. Maybe he hadn’t tied the thin cord high enough and as a cat went under the line its tail had swished up and rung the bell.

Maybe a cat was being mischievous and as it sat on its haunches, tail swishing back and forth, it had batted a bell. It could be a cat.

Or maybe a bird had landed on the line to roost for the night. A person couldn’t get past the shields in order to trip a belled cord. Zedd had placed extra shields. It had to be an animal—a cat, or a bird.

If so, if no one could get past the regular shields and the extras he had placed, then why had he strung bells?

Despite the likely explanations, his hair was trying to stand on end.

He didn’t like the way the bell had rung; there was something about the character of the sound that told him it wasn’t an animal. The sound had been too firm, too abrupt, too quick to stop.

He realized fully, now, that a bell had in fact rung. He wasn’t imagining it. He tried to re-create the sound in his mind so that he might be able to put shape to the form that had tripped the cord.

Zedd silently set the bowl down on the side of the granite hearth. He rose up, listening with an ear turned toward the passage from where he had heard the bell. His mind raced through a map of all the bells he’d placed.

He needed to be sure.

He slipped through the door and into the passageway, the back of his shoulder brushing the plastered wall as he moved down to the first intersection on his right, watching not just ahead but behind as well.

Nothing moved in the hallway ahead. He paused, leaning ahead to take a quick glance down the hall to the right. When he found it clear, he took the turn.

Zedd moved quickly past closed doors, past a tapestry of vineyards that he had always thought was rather poorly executed, past an empty doorway to a room with a window that looked out over a deep shaft between towers on a high rampart, and past three more intersections until he reached the first stairway. He swept around the corner to the right, up the stairs that curved around to the left as they climbed up and crossed over the hall he’d just been in. In this way he could head back toward a network of halls where he’d placed a web of bells without using those same halls.

Zedd followed a mental map of a complex tangle of passages, halls, rooms, and dead ends that, over a lifetime, he had come to know intimately.

Being First Wizard, he had access to every place in the Keep except those places that required Subtractive Magic. There were a few places where he could get confused, but this was not one of them.

He knew that unless someone was following in his footsteps, they would have to either go back or pass a place where he had set traps of elaborate magic as well as simple string. Then, if they didn’t see the cord, they would ring another bell. Then he would be sure.

Maybe it was Adie. Maybe she simply hadn’t seen the inky cord stretched across a doorway. Maybe she had been annoyed that he’d strung bells and maybe she’d rung one just to vex him.

No, Adie wasn’t like that. She might shake her finger at him and deliver a scathing lecture on why she didn’t agree with him that stringing bells was an effective thing to do, but she wouldn’t pull a trick about something she would recognize as intended to warn of danger. No, Adie might possibly have accidentally rung the bell, but she wouldn’t have rung it deliberately.

Another bell rang. Zedd spun to the sound and then froze.

The bell had come from the wrong direction—from where he’d set a bell on the other side of a conservatory. It was too far from the first for anyone to have made it this soon. They would have had to go up a tower stairway, across a bridge to a rampart, along a narrow walkway in the dark, past several intersections to the correct turn that would descend a spiral ramp and make it down through a snarl of passageways in order to break the cord.

Unless there was more than one person.

The bell had chimed with a quick jerk and then clattered as it skittered across stone. It had to be a person tripping over the cord and sending the bell skipping across the stone floor.

Zedd changed his plan. He turned and raced down a narrow passageway to the left, climbing the first stairwell, running up the oak treads three at a time. He took the right fork at the landing, raced to the second circular stairwell of cut stone and climbed as fast as his legs would carry him. His foot slipped on the narrow wedges of spiraling steps and he banged his shin.

He paused to wince only for a second. He used the time to consult his mental map of the Keep, and then he was moving again.

At the top, he dashed down a short paneled hall, sliding to a stop on the polished maple floor. He shouldered open a small, round-topped oak door.

A starry sky greeted him. He sucked deep draughts of cool night air as he raced along the narrow rampart. He paused twice along the way to peer down through the slots in the crenellated battlements. He didn’t see anyone. That was a good sign—he knew where they had to be if they weren’t moving by an outer route.

He ran on across the swaying span between towers, robes flying behind, crossing over the entire section of the Keep where both bells had rung far below, going over the top of the area in order to get behind whoever had tripped the cords. While they had tripped bells on opposite sides of the conservatory, they had to have come in through the same wing—he knew that much. He wanted to get behind them, bottle them in before they could get to an unprotected section where they would encounter a bewildering variety of passageways. If they were to make it there and hide in that area, he could have a time of rooting them out.

His mind raced as fast as his feet as he tried to think, tried to recall all the shields, tried to figure how someone could have gotten past the defenses to get to that specific wing where the bells that had rung were placed. There were shields that should have made it impossible. He had to consider thousands of corridors and passageways in the Keep, trying to come up with all the potential routes. It was like a complex multilevel puzzle, and despite how thorough he’d been, it was possible he’d missed something.

He had to have missed something.

There were rooms or even entire sections that were shielded and could not be entered, but often they could be circumvented. Even if a hall was shielded at both ends, so as to prevent anyone from getting to the rooms in that hall, you could still usually get around to the other end of the hall and make your way to whatever lay beyond. That was deliberate; while the rooms might have held dangerous items of magic that had to be kept contained, there needed to be ways to get to them, and get beyond to other rooms that might, from time to time, also have to be restricted. Most of the Keep was like that—a three-dimensional maze with almost endless possible routes.

For the unwary, it could also be a killing field of traps. There were places layered with warning barriers and other devices that would keep any innocent person away. Beyond those protective layers, the shields gave no warning before they killed. Trespassers would not know there were shields embedded beyond, and that they were stepping into a trap. Such shields were designed that way in order to kill invaders who penetrated that deep; the lack of warning was deliberate.

Zedd supposed it was possible for someone to bypass all the shields and work their way into the depths of the place in order to ring those particular bells, but for the life of him, he couldn’t trace all the steps necessary. But whoever it was, no matter how lucky they were, they would soon get themselves stuck in the labyrinth and then, if they weren’t killed by a shield, he could deal with them.

Zedd gazed out past towers, ramparts, bridges, and open stairs to rooms projecting from soaring walls, out on the city of Aydindril far below, now all dark and dead-looking. How had someone gotten past the stone bridge up to the Keep?

A Sister of the Dark, maybe. Maybe one of them had figured out how to use Subtract!ve Magic to take his shield down. But even if one had, the shields in the Keep were different. Most of them had been placed by the wizards in ancient times, wizards with both sides of the gift. A Sister of the Dark would not be able to breach such shields—they had been designed to withstand enemy wizards of that time. They were far more powerful than any mere Sister of the Dark.

And where was Adie? She should have been back. He wished now that he had gone and found her. She needed to know that there was someone in the Keep. Unless she already knew. Unless they had her.

Zedd turned and raced down the rampart. At the projecting bastion, he seized the railing to the side to halt his forward rush and spin himself around the corner. He raced down the dark steps as if he were running down a hill.

With his gift, he could sense that there was no one in the vicinity.

Since there was no one near, that meant that he had managed to get behind them. He had them trapped.

At the bottom of the steps he threw open the door and flew into the hallway beyond.

He crashed into a man standing there, waiting.

Zedd’s momentum knocked the big man from his feet. They fell in a tangle, sliding together along the polished green and yellow marble floor, both grappling for control.

Zedd could not have been more surprised. His gifted sense told him the man was not there. His gifted sense was obviously wrong. The disorientation of encountering a man when he had sensed that the hall was empty was more jarring than the headlong tumble.

Even as he was rolling, Zedd was casting webs to tangle the man in a snare of magic. The man, in turn, lunged to tangle Zedd in meaty arms.

In desperation, despite the close range, Zedd pulled enough heat from the surrounding air to unleash a thunderous blast of lightning and cast it directly into the man. The blinding flash burned a lacing line through the stone block wall beyond him.

Only too late did Zedd realize that the discharge of deadly power had lanced through the man without effect. The hall filled with shards of stone whistling about, ricocheting from walls and ceiling, skipping along the floor.

The man landed on Zedd, driving the wind from him. Desperately yelling for help, the man wrestled Zedd on the slippery floor. Zedd concocted a weak and fumbling defense, to give the man a false sense of confidence, until he was able to suddenly land a knee sharply at the point of his attacker’s sternum. The man cried out in surprise as much as in pain as he flipped backward off Zedd, gasping to get his wind back.

Having sucked so much heat from the air had left it as frigid as a winter night. Clouds of their breath filled the cold air as both men panted with the effort of the struggle. The man again cried out for help, hoping to bring comrades to his aid.

Zedd would assume that anyone would fear to attack a wizard by muscle alone. This man, though, had no need to fear magic. Even if he hadn’t known that before, certainly the evidence was now all too clear. Yet, despite the man being at least twice the size of his opponent, less than a third his age, and having immunity from the conjuring being thrown at him, Zedd thought that he fought rather . . . squeamishly.

However timid the man was, he was determined. He scrambled to attack again. If he broke Zedd’s neck, it wouldn’t matter that he did so timidly.

As the man regained his feet and lunged, Zedd drew back his arms, elbows cocked, fingers spread, and cast more of the lightning, but this time he knew better than to waste his effort trying to cut down a man not touched by magic. Instead, Zedd sought to rake the floor with the conjured bolts of power. It slammed into the stone with unrestrained violence, ripping and splintering whole sections, throwing sharp jagged shards streaking through the air.

A fist-sized block of stone hurtling at tremendous speed crashed into the man’s shoulder. Above the boom of thunderous power, Zedd heard bones snap. The impact spun the man around and knocked him back against the wall.

Since Zedd now knew that this intruder could not directly be harmed by magic, he instead filled the hall with a deafening storm of magic designed not to assail the man directly but to tear the place apart into a cloud of deadly flying fragments.

The man, as he recoiled from striking the wall, again threw himself at Zedd. He was met by a shower of deadly shards whistling through the air toward him. Blood splattered across the wall beyond as the man was ripped to shreds. In a blink, he was killed and dropped heavily to the floor.

From beyond the smoke and dust filling the hall, two more men suddenly flew at Zedd. His gifted sense told him that, like the first man, these men were not there, either.

Zedd threw yet more lightning to rip up the floor and unleash flying stone at the men, but they were already through the flares of power, diving onto him. He crashed to his back, the men atop him. They seized his arms.

Zedd struggled frantically to let loose a blast to bring down the ceiling. He began to whirl the air above the men to tear the hall to pieces, and them with it.

A beefy hand with a filthy white rag clamped down over Zedd’s face. He gasped, only to inhale a powerful smell that made his throat want to clench shut, but too late.

With the cloth and the big hand covering his whole face, Zedd couldn’t see. The world spun sickeningly.

Soft, silent blackness pressed in around him as he fought to resist it, until he lost consciousness.