Rudy looked down at Tir, sitting rapt at Minalde's feet. "Any of this sound familiar to you, Ace?"

The boy shook his head, eyes shining. "What kind of things?" he wanted to know. "Machines?"

For the past two winters he had been enthralled by the mazes of levers and pulleys, belts and steam turbines, that Ingold was constructing in his laboratories in the heart of the Keep crypts next to the hydroponics gardens that fed the population.

The few fragments of ancient machines that had been found provided only tantalizing scraps of information, hints and clues and the tiniest seeds of speculation, which, the Icefalcon knew, drove ingold and Gil insane.

The Icefalcon himself had little opinion of machines. They could not be made to work and took up a deal of space, and, upon two or three occasions, trials of their virtues had resulted in nearly killing everyone in the room.

Gil and Rudy had both attempted to explain to him why it was necessary that such machines as Gil saw in the record crystals from the Times Before should be made to work again, but the Icefalcon still distrusted them.

It was said among his people that it took a brave man to befriend a Wise Man, and after eleven years' friendship with Ingold Inglorion, greatest of the wizards of the West, the Icefalcon had concluded that one had to be slightly mad as well.

Hethya was still speaking, telling Tir and Rudy and the Lady Alde about machines that would draw water from deep in the earth or generate heat and operate the pumps that circulated air and water through the unseen black ducts and pipes of the Keep.

Though Maia was shaking his head in disapproval, she spoke of apparatus that would melt snow and cause plants to fruit and put forth crops twice and sometimes thrice in a year-the sort of things the more foolish of the people of the Real World west of the mountains attributed to their Ancestors, as if anyone's Ancestors would be interested in such matters. The Talking Stars People had more sense.