Elsewhere in the Keep, other goodbys had been said.

The hour was late. Rudy thought he had heard the changing of the deep-night watch some time ago; but though he was more aware than most people of the span of time that had elapsed since then, it cost him conscious effort to translate it mentally into hours and minutes. He knew, in one sense, that it was two-thirty or so in the morning. But this was something that had lost its importance. He had lost his impulse to check the time, just as he no longer automatically felt for a light switch when he walked through a door.

The calling of light was an easy matter, like whistling. Seeing in the dark was easier still.

He trod the lightless corridors of the second level soundlessly, taking his memorized turnings as surely as he had once known that you got off the San Bernardino Freeway at Waterman Avenue, and two right turns got you to Wild David Wilde's Paint and Body Shop. He threaded his way along a black, dusty passage between the cells that housed Alwir's private guards and a storeroom where he was sure the Chancellor was illegally storing undeclared food for one of his merchant buddies. He passed through a closetlike cell that had been partitioned off an old scriptorium and turned down a cutoff through a dark, disused latrine.

Aide had shown him this route after he'd returned from Quo. It was the quickest way from the Wizards' Corps commons to her rooms, allowing for a detour to avoid Church territory. Alde and Gil had spent weeks exploring the Keep, digging out the mysteries of its building, and either of them could get through the stygian warrens of jerry-built walls, spiraling mazes of old brick and grimy plaster and up and down the drunken spiderweb stairways with the swift, unthinking ease of a second-grader getting through the Pledge of Allegiance. As for the mysteries whose answers they had sought, they had uncovered no answers, but only more mysteries.