And that, and the siege stores, nagged at him. What of the walk between the worlds? Not just escape, but attack as well. Stepping into an unknown space was dangerous as hell, but so was assaulting a castle. If your enemy hated you deeply enough to risk his own life, he could just walk through nothing into your bedroom and kill you as you slept. Damned few Old Ones were willing to take such a risk. Most preferred to kill their enemies in safer ways. This whole picture, though . . .
Did something ward this keep against trespass? Jo and David had stepped out of the keep, but that was a different thing, with no one trying to stop them or track them through the void. Another puzzle.
He liked puzzles, as long as they didn't bite.
He flashed his light across the exposed stone wall, dusting with the brush, searching for any other inscription, Ogham or otherwise. Nothing showed, but the surface on the hinge side seemed darker. Darker, he noticed, from hip to shoulder height, as if hands or bodies had brushed up against it for countless years and left a thin smear of oil and sweat behind. He probed the woodpile with his flashlight beam. Close along the wall, the light found black hollows instead of log after log, bark face after split face after bark face.
Brian smiled and started stacking firewood, shifting sticks from the one side to the other. Now he knew why they'd left as much empty space as they had around the door. He sneezed, and blinked, and sneezed again, stirring up centuries of dust. And he opened up a hole and a passage along the side wall that slipped away into darkness.
The way was narrow, a single body wide, and he moved cautiously. This sort of thing was made for traps, where you could force an enemy to place his foot on a single particular stone. Ten paces, then a turn to the right. His flashlight beam picked out motes of dust and bored on into darkness, past still more ranks of wood.
A shadow along the wall turned into a niche and then into another door set into the thick uncut stone. If he hadn't gotten confused by the twists and turns, it led under the oldest tower of all, the simple stonework that predated any of Dougal's changes. The chill of Power flowed over Brian's skin, raising hairs on the back of his neck.
He licked his lips. Damnfool thing, doing this alone. He ought to go back, find Maureen and a couple of those smithy boys whose biceps were bigger than their brains, and figure out just what he was getting into before he got into it. Call for backup before poking his nose into an IRA arms cache.
But he liked puzzles.
What the hell. He shrugged. He'd been doing that a lot, lately. Sharing a bed with Maureen must be giving him a new perspective on the relative risks of life. Anyway, he reached out and touched the latch with the back of his hand. Nothing bit him.
He tripped the latch and pushed. Hinges groaned again, and the door shuddered away from him. The air that flowed out of the darkness seemed warmer and somewhat fresher, with a tang of forest and something odd, almost brine and seaweed. Brian could feel Power beating on his skin like sunshine. Whatever had drawn people to this hill through the ages, star-stone or sacred circle or magic well, lived in that darkness. And it was angry.
His flashlight beam probed here and there. It lit a smooth stone wall, then poked to right and left to draw form out of the gloom. A large room, circular and maybe forty feet across, centering on a stone pillar as an axis. A crucifix hanging on the pillar, crude work but powerful, old and dusty, and some long-dead hand had chiseled a flat for it. That was the only evidence of finishing on the rough-shaped stone, and Brian had seen its like in Wales and Ireland and Brittany. Menhir. This room had once been open to the sun and stars.
As in so many places, the Christians had worshipped in a space already sacred to the old Powers of the land. He circled the room, feeling that Power swell and ebb. It seemed strongest just in front of the crucifix, and he didn't think that was coincidence. With this much Power flowing from the land, even humans could have felt the presence of their God.
He stopped and closed his eyes, feeling the air around him. The anger still throbbed, low and slow and with the patience of a thousand years. Dies Irae, the Day of Wrath and an angry God casting the damned into hell. That atmosphere would have suited the old brimstone Christians. But the sense of hiding had faded, had left him at one door or the other. Two separate puzzles?
And now that he thought about it and separated it out, the hiding had a flavor he'd tasted more than once before, the same dark tingle as the oldest wardings on the secrets of the Pendragons. Those dated back to Merlin.
Brian shuddered at the thought. He'd never much cared for Merlin. To hell with the pretty legends -- that man had been a dangerous paranoid. His spells had teeth.
Brian looked the room over with fresh eyes. His footprints had stirred the dust, uncovering a design on the floor. It seemed irregular, perhaps part of a single larger figure rather than repeated patterns. Odd. He knelt down and cleared more of it.
This paving looked old, buff
