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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 anyo
ne 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.
