But, she reflected, she was hardly alone in that. In her light, tuneless voice she began singing'A Policeman's Lot Is Not a Happy One,' and the Gilbert and Sullivan melody floated on the drift of an alien breeze through the dark, stony woods of another universe.

The road circled a stand of pines, and the smells of the Keep reached her from afar, the stinging woodsmoke, as women rendered used fat and ash into soap, and the warm reek of cattle. Children's laughter mingled with the confused bleating of sheep and goats, with the ringing of an axe in the woods, and with the sound of a deep bass voice lifted, like Gil's, in song. Half-frozen mud squished under her boots as she picked her way around that last turning of the path. And there it lay before her, its sleek walls sheened by the pallor of the dull sky.

It wasn't as big, maybe, as the monster high-rises Gil was familiar with as a child of the twentieth century. But the Keep was well over half a mile in length, hundreds of feet in breadth, and close to a hundred feet in height. Enormous doors were dwarfed by the monolith in which they were set. Its teeming inhabitants swarmed the broad steps and trampled snow at its base. Black and enigmatic, tVveKeep of Dare guarded its secrets.

What secrets? Gil wondered. Who built it, andhow?She was aware that it lay far beyond the technology of the present age, with its constant soft currents of air and dark, ever-flowing streams of water. Was it raised by magic or only by superb engineering?

And her infinitely distractible scholar's mind scouted the thought: Who would know?

Eldor, maybe. In a long-ago dream she had overheard the dead King speak of the memories he had inherited from the House of Dare, whose founder, Dare of Renweth, had raised those midnight walls.