He didn't like the way the bell had rung; there was something about the character of the sound that told him it wasn't an animal. The sound had been too firm, too abrupt, too quick to stop.
He realized fully, now, that a bell had in fact rung. He wasn't imagining it. He tried to re-create the sound in his mind so that he might be able to put shape to the form that had tripped the cord.
Zedd silently set the bowl down on the side of the granite hearth. He rose up, listening with an ear turned toward the passage from where he had heard the bell. His mind raced through a map of all the bells he'd placed.
He needed to be sure.
He slipped through the door and into the passageway, the back of his shoulder brushing the plastered wall as he moved down to the first intersection on his right, watching not just ahead but behind as well.
Nothing moved in the hallway ahead. He paused, leaning ahead to take a quick glance down the hall to the right. When he found it clear, he took the turn.
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.
