Others had evidently been rigged millennia ago 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 marched into darkness in rigid rectilinear order, while in others makeshift chaos prevailed. Passages 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's laboratories.

Optimistically, Rudy set off into the maze.

'I feel nothing,' Janus of Weg said quietly. The big Commander of the Guards of Gae sat on the edge of a bunk near the guardroom hearth, his face grave in the loose frame of coppery-red hair that surrounded it. He glanced across the hearth at Ingold. 'But I trust you. If you say the Dark are outside, I would believe you, even if the sun were high in the sky.'

There was a stirring among the other captains and a murmur of assent. The Icefalcon, like a foreigner among the Guards with his long white viking braids, said softly, The very smell of the night is evil.' Melantrys, a diminutive girl with the eyes of a ninja, glanced nervously over her shoulder.

'Smell, hell,' rumbled Tomec Tirkenson, landchief of Gettlesand, a big craggy plainsman whose domains lay on the other side of the mountains. 'It's like the nights when the cattle stampede for no reason.'

The Icefalcon glanced coolly across at Ingold. 'Can they break in?' 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 small sum.