“What’s wrong?” Danny asked.
“Malkin opened the door by turning the bolt clockwise.”
“Just the opposite of what you’d expect. It was a trap.”
“How many bolts have you seen since you got here with right-hand threads, like the ones in our world?”
The younger programmer stopped and looked at him. “I can’t remember seeing any bolts—except for the stuff we’ve made. Here they use pins or wedges.”
“Exactly. They don’t use bobs, right-hand or left-hand. But that door was gimmicked to trap someone who expected a right-handed thread. What we’d expect.”
“You mean this place is full of traps designed just for us?”
“Either that or the traps were designed by people who think like us. People from our world.”
Danny let out a low whistle. “Jeez, I don’t know which is worse.”
“Let me know when you decide,” Wiz told him. “Because chances are whichever one is worse, that’s the one it is.”
The evening came on dark and full of dirty fog. There was no sunset that day at the Wizards’ Keep, only the dank fog and the wind keening about the towers where lamps burned late as wizards labored over their spells. Here and there a guardsman paced the battlements, cloak drawn tight against the growing chill.
“What is the time?” Bal-Simba asked as he stared out the window, straining to make out the castle curtain wall.
Arianne glanced at the magic sundial sitting on her work table. “Barely the seventh day-tenth.” She paused. “Dark, is it not?”
“Too dark,” Bal-Simba agreed. “Unnaturally so, I think.”
Arianne’s eyes flicked to the window but saw only Bal-Simba’s reflection against the darkness. “Our enemy’s work?”
“Perhaps.” He turned from the window. “Ask Juvian to examine this fog for signs of magic.”
His assistant nodded and spoke into a communications crystal.
So cold, Shauna thought, even for winter. She picked up the wrought iron poker and stirred up the fire. Listen to yourself. Like someone’s old grandmother. Still she stirred the fire, seeking comfort from the renewed flames.
Normally the apartment in the guardsmens’ quarters was snug enough, with whitewashed walls and comfortable furniture enlivened with polished copper pots and examples of Shauna’s needlework But tonight it seemed chill and dank, oppressed by the air that had settled over the Wizards’ Keep.
She returned to the high-backed bench and Ian and Caitlin pressed back against her, seeking their own comfort. This deep in the castle they could not hear the keen of the wind, but they felt it just the same.
As she settled her bulk onto the bench she sighed and the children pressed closer. She put an arm around each and pulled them closer yet.
Shauna was a guardsman’s daughter and a guardsman’s wife and she had lived through the evil days of the Dark League’s ascendancy when human magic was puny and the Council of the North had faced constant ruin at the hands of foes human and non-human. For all that, she could not remember a more bleak evening.
Malcolm, her husband, was eating soldier’s stew, taking the common meal in the guard room. Supper was done, the dishes washed and put away. Normally she would be gently hinting about bedtime by now, but no one was sleepy and, truth to tell, Shauna preferred their company.
“I wish daddy was here,” Caitlin said without raising her head.
“Your daddy’s got duty,” Shauna told her daughter, “special duty like half of ’em tonight.”
“I want my daddy too,” Ian added.
She stroked the boy’s ash-blond hair. “Hush. It will be all right. You’ll see. The Sparrow and your daddy and mommy have gone off to fix everything.”
Neither child said anything, but both seemed to snuggle even closer.
For a bit they watched the flames in silence. “I wish Fluffy was here,” Ian said finally.
“You’ll see him soon enough,” she said. “Moira promised to stop by later.”
Ian looked up at her as if he would cry. “We can’t see Fluffy.”
“He’s not Fluffy any more,” Caitlin explained sadly into her mother’s bosom. “He’s Moira.”
“You were right, My Lord,” the middle-aged man in the crystal sphere said to Bal-Simba. “The fog is not natural and it bears the mark of the Enemy’s magic.”