Zedd moved quickly past closed doors, past a tapestry of vineyards that he had always thought was rather poorly executed, past an empty doorway to a room with a window that looked out over a deep shaft between towers on a high rampart, and past three more intersections until he reached the first stairway. He swept around the corner to the right, up the stairs that curved around to the left as they climbed up and crossed over the hall he'd just been in. In this way he could head back toward a network of halls where he'd placed a web of bells without using those same halls.

Zedd followed a mental map of a complex tangle of passages, halls, rooms, and dead ends that, over a lifetime, he had come to know intimately.

Being First Wizard, he had access to every place in the Keep except those places that required Subtractive Magic. There were a few places where he could get confused, but this was not one of them.

He knew that unless someone was following in his footsteps, they would have to either go back or pass a place where he had set traps of elaborate magic as well as simple string. Then, if they didn't see the cord, they would ring another bell. Then he would be sure.

Maybe it was Adie. Maybe she simply hadn't seen the inky cord stretched across a doorway. Maybe she had been annoyed that he'd strung bells and maybe she'd rung one just to vex him.

No, Adie wasn't like that. She might shake her finger at him and deliver a scathing lecture on why she didn't agree with him that stringing bells was an effective thing to do, but she wouldn't pull a trick about something she would recognize as intended to warn of danger. No, Adie might possibly have accidentally rung the bell, but she wouldn't have rung it deliberately.

Another bell rang. Zedd spun to the sound and then froze.

The bell had come from the wrong direction-from where he'd set a bell on the other side of a conservatory. It was too far from the first for anyone to have made it this soon. They would have had to go up a tower stairway, across a bridge to a rampart, along a narrow walkway in the dark, past several intersections to the correct turn that would descend a spiral ramp and make it down through a snarl of passageways in order to break the cord.

Unless there was more than one person.

The bell had chimed with a quick jerk and then clattered as it skittered across stone. It had to be a person tripping over the cord and sending the bell skipping across the stone floor.

Zedd changed his plan. He turned and raced down a narrow passageway to the left, climbing the first stairwell, running up the oak treads three at a time. He took the right fork at the landing, raced to the second circular stairwell of cut stone and climbed as fast as his legs would carry him. His foot slipped on the narrow wedges of spiraling steps and he banged his shin.

He paused to wince only for a second. He used the time to consult his mental map of the Keep, and then he was moving again.

At the top, he dashed down a short paneled hall, sliding to a stop on the polished maple floor. He shouldered open a small, round-topped oak door.

A starry sky greeted him. He sucked deep draughts of cool night air as he raced along the narrow rampart. He paused twice along the way to peer down through the slots in the crenellated battlements. He didn't see anyone. That was a good sign-he knew where they had to be if they weren't moving by an outer route.

He ran on across the swaying span between towers, robes flying behind, crossing over the entire section of the Keep where both bells had rung far below, going over the top of the area in order to get behind whoever had tripped the cords. While they had tripped bells on opposite sides of the conservatory, they had to have come in through the same wing-he knew that much. He wanted to get behind them, bottle them in before they could get to an unprotected section where they would encounter a bewildering variety of passageways. If they were to make it there and hide in that area, he could have a time of rooting them out.

His mind raced as fast as his feet as he tried to think, tried to recall all the shields, tried to figure how someone could have gotten past the defenses to get to that specific wing where the bells that had rung were placed. There were shields that should have made it impossible. He had to consider thousands of corridors and passageways in the Keep, trying to come up with all the potential routes. It was like a complex multilevel puzzle, and despite how thorough he'd been, it was possible he'd missed something.

He had to have missed something.

There were rooms or even entire sections that were shielded and could not be entered, but often they could be circumvented. Even if a hall was shielded at both ends, so as to prevent anyone from getting to the rooms in that hall, you could still usually get around to the other end of the hall and make your way to whatever lay beyond. That was deliberate; while the rooms might have held dangerous items of magic that had to be kept contained, there needed to be ways to get to them, and get beyond to other rooms that might, from time to time, also have to be restricted. Most of the Keep was like that-a three-dimensional maze with almost endless possible routes.

For the unwary, it could also be a killing field of traps. There were places layered with warning barriers and other devices that would keep any innocent person away. Beyond those protective layers, the shields gave no warning before they killed. Trespassers would not know there were shields embedded beyond, and that they were stepping into a trap. Such shields were designed that way in order to kill invaders who penetrated that deep; the lack of warning was deliberate.

Zedd supposed it was possible for someone to bypass all the shields and work their way into the depths of the place in order to ring those particular bells, but for the life of him, he couldn't trace all the steps necessary. But whoever it was, no matter how lucky they were, they would soon get themselves stuck in the labyrinth and then, if they weren't killed by a shield, he could deal with them.

Zedd gazed out past towers, ramparts, bridges, and open stairs to rooms projecting from soaring walls, out on the city of Aydindril far below, now all dark and dead-looking. How had someone gotten past the stone bridge up to the Keep?

A Sister of the Dark, maybe. Maybe one of them had figured out how to use Subtract!ve Magic to take his shield down. But even if one had, the shields in the Keep were different. Most of them had been placed by the wizards in ancient times, wizards with both sides of the gift. A Sister of the Dark would not be able to breach such shields- they had been designed to withstand enemy wizards of that time. They were far more powerful than any mere Sister of the Dark.

And where was Adie? She should have been back. He wished now that he had gone and found her. She needed to know that there was someone in the Keep. Unless she already knew. Unless they had her.

Zedd turned and raced down the rampart. At the projecting bastion, he seized the railing to the side to halt his forward rush and spin himself around the corner. He raced down the dark steps as if he were running down a hill.

With his gift, he could sense that there was no one in the vicinity.

Since there was no one near, that meant that he had managed to get behind them. He had them trapped.

At the bottom of the steps he threw open the door and flew into the hallway beyond.

He crashed into a man standing there, waiting.

Zedd's momentum knocked the big man from his feet. They fell in a tangle, sliding together along the polished green and yellow marble floor, both grappling for control.

Zedd could not have been more surprised. His gifted sense told him the man was not there. His gifted sense was obviously wrong. The disorientation of encountering a man when he had sensed that the hall was empty was more jarring than the headlong tumble.