But Rudy had cudgeled his brains over all possible answers and had found himself faced with only that question.

Maybe Tir would remember how. Maybe his father Eldor would have remembered eventually, had he not perished in the blazing ruin of the Palace at Gae. Though Tir was yet too young to speak, the baby prince gave evidence of having inherited that terrible and mysterious legacy common among the descendants of Dare of Renweth, not only from his father, but-by carrier, as it were-from Minalde as well. Her memories were vague-recognition rather than recall- but if the flame throwers were the answer, wouldn't she have known it?

And if not the flame throwers, what?

White light gleamed palely before Rudy, reflecting against the slick, black stone of the walls. He passed the head of one of the main stairways of the Keep, its smooth construction announcing that it had been built at the time of the founding of that colossal maze itself. In a cage over it hung a single glowstone. a warning to the unwary.

How else had humankind defeated the Dark? Had the wizard-engineers stood at the top of those hellish stairways that led down to their hideous domains and dumped barrels of glowstones into that chasm?

Unlikely. Early experiment had shown that sufficient numbers of the Dark Ones could damp the light of glow-stones, just as they killed fires or sucked the strength from a wizard's spell of light.

Some other weapon, buried in the deeps of time? Something Ingold might have learned of in his years of study and wandering? Some piece of knowledge that lay like an unexploded bomb in the depths of that complex mind?

Rudy would have swapped several of his younger siblings for the answer to that one.

A drift of warmer air rose from the stairway, stirring his long hair. It bore on it the soft, musical chanting of the night offices of the Church, and Rudy turned away, uneasy at the thought of the minor empire that filled the first-level warrens around that fluted Sanctuary.