The obsidian walls, like those of the densely twisted corridors, glittered dimly with squares of scattered lamplight; doors, and windows. Multifingered streams trickled dark and clear as winter midnight under railless stone bridges that cut the black expanses of floor.

At the Aisle's far end, pale daylight leaked through the Doors, the single entrance to the whole of the Keep's great inner dark: two pairs of massive metal portals separated by the twenty- or thirty-foot thickness of the outer wall itself.

Dare's Keep. The final stronghold. Unbreachable by the Dark that had shattered the world.

"Both she and that uncle of hers have been eating pretty good," said Gil, and twisted a tendril of her dark hair around one of the sharpened sticks that held it out of the way.

"And there's a limit to what you can pack on a donkey. But mostly what tips me off is that she thinks-or she says this Oale Niu bird says-that the Keep is powered by machinery. She thinks that the heart of the Keep is a machine. And that would be true for Keeps like Prandhays and the Black Rock Keep in Gettlesand. Keeps where a wizard, a mage, didn't sacrifice himself or herself to enter into the heart of the Keep as a source of magic to keep it going. If Oale Niu really were a mage from the Times Before, she'd know about that. She'd know about Brycothis."

She spoke softly the name of the wizard who had sacrificed herself: Ancestor in a way, the Icefalcon thought, of all those who lived here. When first he had been told the secret of the Keep, known only to a handful, he wondered why he had not guessed it already.

There was life here in the lamp-sprinkled midnight among the catwalks overhead, life in the flow of the moonless water along the streams of the floor, life in the breathing of the air. The life of the Keep, like the spirits that dwelled in rocks and trees, in the ocean and in each of the thousand thousand stars. It was the only time he had heard of a human being transforming herself into a spirit, the ki of a place, but it did not surprise him.