Why did I have to find them both at the same time? he wondered miserably. Why did I have to choose?

Even her understanding of his choice was like gall in the raw wound of his guilt.

Yet there had been no possibility of another choice. He stopped at the head of the main east stairway, leading down to the first level.

The sensation of wrongness, of unnamed horror lurking in the black mazes of the Keep, was stronger now, teasing at him like a half-heard sound. He shivered like a dog before the thunder, the hair at the nape of his neck prickling. All around him silence seemed to move through the branching corridors. Glancing

nervously behind him, he started down the stairs. Somewhere below him, a door must have been opened.

Faint as a drift of incense, he caught the sound of chanting, the sweet murmurous richness of monks' voices singing the offices of the deep-night. Rudy paused on the stairs, remembering 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 what was 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's some kind of noninterference directive in force, since Frnfrom another universe and really shouldn't be here at all.

But if there was, he did not want to know.

At the moment it wasn't critical - there were plenty of other stairways down. Some of them had been part of the original design of the Keep, built like the walls of black, massive, obsidian-hard stone.