Even silent-neither Rudy nor Ingold had figured out how to activate the soundtrack, if there was a soundtrack-they were precious beyond words. Magic was used very differently in those days, linked with machines that Ingold had tried repeatedly-and failed repeatedly-to reproduce in the laboratory he set up in the crypts. But the crystals showed spells and power-circles that were clearly analogous to the methods wizards used now. These Rudy and Ingold studied, matching similarities and differences, trying with variable success to recreate the forgotten magic, even as Gil studied the silent images in the other stones to put together some idea of that vanished culture and world.

On the whole, Rudy guessed that their conclusions were about as accurate as the spoofs written in his own world about the conclusions "scientists of the distant future" would draw about American motels, toilets, and TV Guides. But in the process, he and Gil had come to recognize by sight a bunch of people who died about the time of the Trojan War.

They had given them names; not respectful ones, perhaps, but convenient when Gil noted down the contents of each crystal. The Dwarf.

Mr. Pomfritt named less for his resemblance to a long forgotten character in a TV show than for his precise, didactic way of explaining the massive spiral of stars, light, and silverdust that funneled, Ingold said, a galaxy-wide sweep of power into something kept carefully out of sight in a small black glass dish. The Bald Lady. Mother Goose. Scarface. Black Bart. And the Guy with the Cats.

And now Tir said that the Guy with the Cats had been in the Keep. That meant whoever that old mage was, he'd been of the generation that first saw the Dark Ones come.

The generation that fought them first. The generation that built the Keep. "The little boy got lost here once," Tir confided in a whisper as they wound their way along a secondary corridor on third south.

Night was a time of anthill activity in the Keep, as suppers were cooked, business transacted, courtships furthered, and gossip hashed in the maze of interlocking cells, passageways, warrens, and bailiwicks that sometimes more resembled a succession of tight-packed villages than a single community, let alone a single building.