As Ingold helped her to her feet, the gleam widened and strengthened, showing the room small, black, and Spartan, the crystal plug set in the center of the table opaque and sparkling, a faint and frosted gray. The light drifted along above Ingold's head, and their shadows lumbered, black and sprawling, about their feet as they went through the narrow door. It illuminated the gray fog of dust stirred by their feet as they passed through the deserted corridors of the empty hydroponics chambers. It winked on the disassembled components of flame throwers beyond the shadowed doorway of Rudy's laboratory. Like a vagrant ball of foxfire, it preceded them up the narrow stair to the inhabited levels of the Keep and through the dark succession of closets, doorways, and interconnecting halls that made up the headquarters of the Wizards' Corps.

The Corps common room was deserted, its only light the dim apricot glow that pulsed from the embers that lay, like a heap of jewels, on the wide hearth. Their two shadows moved clumsily through the greater darkness of that long room, passing, like the shadows of clouds, over the paraphernalia of habitation there: the jewel-bound books, salvaged from the wreck of Quo or shamelessly stolen from the archives of the Church; Kara of Ippit's satin pincushion, sparkling like a diamond hedgehog among a great tumble of homespun cloth; the knuckly, knobby braids of herbs and onions hanging above the hearth; and the silver rainfall that was the strings of Rudy's harp. The round, gold eyes of the headquarters cats flashed at them from every gloomy corner.

Ingold sighed, breaking his bitter silence, and there was a note in his voice which she had never heard before. "I had never meant to put you in such peril, Gil. It is said that wizards, among their many faults, have a horrible way of endangering their friends. I only hope to get you safely away from here, back to your own world, before disaster strikes. Those who are close to me seem to have a shocking rate of mortality."