Ingold sent out a desperate mental summons for any wizards of any degree of ability. Then he and Rudy began the long struggle back to the Keep.

During their absence, Gil had used her training as a scholar to investigate the old records, looking for some clue as to how the ancient Dare of Renweth had defeated the Dark. Together with Minalde, who had a touch of the mysterious memory of past events that was supposedly inherited by only a few men, she found the ancient workshops of the wizard-engineers who had built the Keep. And she found artifacts of all lands, most without apparent use.

When Ingold and Rudy returned, they found a ragtag assembly of wizards, half-trained witches, and village healers waiting to become the Wizards' Corps under them. Ingold realized that the crystals Gil had found were the ancient source of artificial light. And Rudy seized upon a collection of parts which he assembled into a flame thrower, a possible weapon against the Dark.

Alwir used the discovery as an excuse to determine that the wizards must spy out the Nest of the Dark at Gae. Ingold, knowing the folly of the plan but unable to deter Alwir, began trying to create a cloaking-spell that might protect the wizards against the Dark.

PART ONE THE QUESTION AND THE ANSWER

CHAPTER ONE

The night was still. The wind that had beaten with such violence down the ice-locked mountains to the north had fallen at about sunset to an uneasy murmuring in the dark pines that filled the twisting Vale of Renweth. By midnight, even that had ceased. The black branches hung motionless from one end of the Vale to the other, slowly furring with frost in the deepening cold. A man's breath, barely visible in the soulless glimmer of the few remote and haughty stars, would hang like a diamond cloud about his face or freeze in white hoarfrost to his lips. In that piercing cold, not even the wolves were abroad; the silence ran from cliff to lightless cliff, an almost tangible property in that frozen and desolate world.