The Fires of Heaven by Robert Jordan
If only he knew who to trust; to the extent it was possible to trust any of his fellow Darkfriends. The last of his drivers who had sworn the oaths had vanished two days ago, very likely on one of the grain barges. He still did not know which Aiel woman had slipped that note under his wagon door—“You are not alone among strangers. A way has been chosen”— though he had several possibilities in mind. The docks held almost as many Aiel as they did workmen, come to stare at the river; he had seen a few of those faces more often than seemed reasonable, and some had looked at him consideringly. A few Cairhienin had as well, and a Tairen lord. That meant nothing by itself, of course, but if he could find a few men to work with . . .
A mounted party appeared in one of the gateways, Moiraine and Rand al’Thor leading the way with the Aes Sedai’s Warder as they threaded though the carts hauling grainsacks away. A wave of cheers rode with them.
“All glory to the Lord Dragon!” and “Hail the Lord Dragon!” and now and again “Glory to Lord Matrim! Glory to the Red Hand!”
For once the Aes Sedai turned down toward the tail end of the line of wagons without so much as a glance at Kadere. He was just as glad. Even if she had not been Aes Sedai, even if she had not looked at him as if she knew every black corner of his mind, he would as soon not have looked too closely at some of the things she had filled his wagons with. Yesterday evening she had made him strip the canvas off that oddly twisted redstone doorframe in the wagon just behind his. She seemed to take a perverse delight in making him help her himself with whatever she wanted to study. He would have covered the thing up again if he could bear to go near it, or could make any of his drivers do so. None with him now had seen Herid fall half through it in Rhuidean and half disappear—Herid had been the first to run away once they cleared the Jangai; the man had not been entirely right in the head after the Warder hauled him back—but they could look at it, see the way the corners did not meet properly, how you could not follow it around with your eyes without blinking and growing dizzy.
Kadere ignored the first three riders as much as the Aes Sedai had ignored him, and Mat Cauthon almost as much. The man was wearing his hat; he had never been able to find a replacement. The Aiel wench, Aviendha, rode up behind the young Aes Sedai’s saddle, both with their skirts pushed up to show their legs. If he needed any confirmation that the Aiel woman was bedding al’Thor, he only had to see the way she looked at him; a woman who had taken a man to her bed always looked at him with that light of ownership in her eyes after. More importantly, Natael was with them. This was the first time Kadere had been this close to him since crossing the Spine of the Wall. Natael, who stood high in the Darkfriends. If he could get past the Maidens to reach Natael . . .
Suddenly Kadere blinked. Where were the Maidens? Al’Thor always had an escort of spear-wielding women. Frowning, he realized he could not see a single Maiden among the Aiel on the quay or the docks.
“Aren’t you going to look at an old friend, Hadnan?”
That melodious voice jerked Kadere around, gaping at a hatchet-nosed face, dark eyes almost hidden by rolls of fat. “Keille?” It was impossible. No one survived alone in the Waste except Aiel. She had to be dead. But there she stood, white silk straining over her bulk, ivory combs standing tall in her dark curls.
A faint smile on her lips, she turned with a grace that still surprised him in a woman so large and lightly climbed the steps into his wagon.
For a moment he hesitated, then hurried after her. He would as soon Keille Shaogi really had died in the Waste—the woman was bossy and obnoxious; she need not think she was getting a penny of the little he had managed to salvage—but she stood as high as Jasin Natael. Perhaps she would answer a few questions. At the least, he would have someone to work with. At the worst, someone to put blame on. Power went with standing high, but so did blame for the failures of those beneath you. More than once he had fed his superiors to those still higher up in order to cover himself.
Carefully closing the door, he turned—and would have screamed if his throat had not clenched too tight for sound.
The woman who stood there wore white silk, but she was not fat. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, eyes like dark, bottomless mountain pools, woven silver belting her narrow waist, silver crescents in her shimmering black hair. Kadere knew that face from his dreams.
His knees thudding to the floor shook breath loose. “Great Mistress,” he said hoarsely, “how may I serve?”
Lanfear might have been looking at an insect, one she might crush beneath her slipper or might not. “By showing your obedience to my commands. I have been too busy to watch Rand al’Thor myself. Tell me what he has done, aside from conquering Cairhien, what he plans to do.”
“It is difficult, Great Mistress. One such as myself cannot come close to such as he.” An insect, those cool eyes said, allowed to live so long as it was useful. Kadere racked his brain for everything he had seen or heard or imagined. “He is sending Aiel south in huge numbers, Great Mistress, though I do not know why. The Tairens and Cairhienin do not seem to notice, but I don’t think they can tell one Aiel from another.” Neither could he. He would not dare lie to her, but if she thought he had more use than he did . . . “He has founded a school of some sort, in a city palace that belonged to a House with no survivors. . . .” At first there was no way to tell whether she liked what she was hearing, but as he went on, her face began to darken.
“What is it you want me to see, Moiraine?” Rand said impatiently, tying Jeade’en’s reins to one wheel of the last wagon in line.
She was standing on tiptoe to peer over the side of the wagon bed at a pair of casks that seemed familiar. Unless he was mistaken, they held the two cuendillar seals, packed in wool for protection now that they were no longer unbreakable. He felt the Dark One’s taint strongly here; it almost seemed to come from the casks, a faint miasma as from something rotting in a hidden place.
“It will be safe here,” Moiraine murmured. Lifting her skirts gracefully, she started up the line of wagons. Lan heeled her, a half-tame wolf, the cloak hanging down his back all disturbing ripples of color and nothingness.
Rand glared. “Did she tell you what it was, Egwene?”
“Just that you had to see something. That you had to come here, anyway.”
“You must trust Aes Sedai,” Aviendha said, almost as levelly, but with a hint of doubt. Mat snorted.
“Well, I mean to find out now. Natael, go tell Bael I’ll be with him in—”
At the other end of the line, the side of Kadere’s wagon exploded, splinters scything down Aiel and townsfolk. Rand knew; he did not need goose bumps prickling his skin to know. He raced toward the wagon, after Moiraine and Lan. Time seemed to slow, everything happening at once, as if the air were jelly clinging to each moment.
Lanfear stepped out into stunned silence except for the moans and screams of the injured, something limp and pale and red-streaked hanging from her hand, dragging behind her as she walked down invisible steps. Her face was a mask carved of ice. “He told me, Lews Therin,” she almost screamed, flinging the pale thing into the air. Something caught it, inflated it for a moment into a bloody, transparent statue of Hadnan Kadere; his skin, removed whole. The figure collapsed and fell as Lanfear’s voice rose to a screech. “You let another woman touch you! Again!”
Moments clinging, all happening at once.
Before Lanfear reached the stones of the quay, Moiraine lifted her skirts higher and began running straight toward her. Quick as she was, Lan was quicker, ignoring her shout of, “No, Lan!” Sword coming out, long legs carried him ahead of her, color-shifting cloak waving behind as he charged. Suddenly he seemed to run into an invisible stone wall, bounce back, try to stagger forward again. One step, and as if a giant hand had smashed him aside, he flew ten paces through the air, crashing to the stones.
While he was in midair, Moiraine jerked forward, feet skidding along the pavement, until she was face to face with Lanfear. It was
The quayside was in turmoil. Just moments since Kadere’s wagon erupted, yet only the blind could not know the One Power was being wielded by the woman in white. Along the docks axes flashed, cutting ropes, freeing barges as their crews desperately fended the craft toward open water and flight. Bare-chested dockmen and dark-clothed townsfolk struggled to jump aboard. In the other direction men and women milled and screamed as they fought to pass through the gates into the city. And among them, cadin’sor-clad figures veiled themselves and rushed at Lanfear with spears or knives or bare hands. There could be no doubt she was the source of the attack, no doubt she fought with the Power. They ran to dance the spears regardless.
Fire rolled over them in waves. Arrows of it pierced those who came on with their clothes in flames. It was not as if Lanfear battled them, or even paid them any real mind. She might have been brushing aside gnats or bitemes. Those who fled burned as well as those who tried to fight. She moved toward Rand as if nothing else existed.
Heartbeats only.
Three steps she had taken when Rand seized the male half of the True Source, molten steel and steel-shattering ice, sweet honey and midden heap. Deep in the Void, the fight for survival was distant, the battle before him scarely less. As Moiraine vanished beneath the wagon, he channeled, pulling the heat from Lanfear’s fires, sinking it into the river. Flames that a moment before engulfed human forms, vanished. In the same instant he wove the flows again, and a misty gray dome came into being, a long oval enclosing him and Lanfear and most of the wagons, an almost transparent wall that shut out all not already within. Even as he tied the weave, he was not sure what it was or where it had come from—some memory of Lews Therin’s perhaps—but Lanfear’s fires struck it and stopped. He could see people outside dimly, too many thrashing and flailing—he had taken the flames, not the searing of flesh; that stench still hung in the air—but none would burn now that had not already. Bodies lay inside, too, mounds of charred cloth, some stirring feebly, moaning. She did not care; her channeled flames winked out; the gnats were dispelled; she never glanced aside.
Heartbeats. He was cold in the emptiness of the Void, and if he felt sorrow for the dead and dying and scarred, the feeling was so far off it might not have been. He was cold itself. Emptiness itself. Only the rage of saidin filled him.
Movement to either side. Aviendha and Egwene, eyes concentrated on Lanfear. He had meant to shut them out from this. They must have raced with him. Mat and Asmodean; outside; the wall missed the final few wagons. In icy calm he channeled Air to snare Lanfear; Egwene and Aviendha could shield her while he distracted her.
Something severed his flows; they snapped back so hard that he grunted.
“One of them?” Lanfear snarled. “Which is Aviendha?” Egwene threw her head back and wailed, eyes bulging, the world’s agony shrieking from her mouth. “Which?” Aviendha rose on tiptoes, shuddering, howls chasing Egwene’s as they climbed higher and higher.
The thought was suddenly there in the emptiness. Spirit woven so, with Fire and Earth. There. Rand felt something being cut, something he could not see, and Egwene collapsed in a motionless heap, Aviendha to hands and knees, head down and swaying.
Lanfear staggered, her eyes going from the women to him, dark pools of black fire. “You are mine, Lews Therin! Mine!”
“No.” Rand’s voice seemed to come to his ears down a mile-long tunnel. Distract her from the girls. He kept moving forward, did not look back. “I was never yours, Mierin. I will always belong to Ilyena.” The Void quivered with sorrow and loss. And with desperation, as he fought something besides the scouring of saidin. For a moment he hung balanced. I am Rand al’Thor. And, Ilyena, ever and always my heart. Balanced on a razor edge. I am Rand al’Thor! Other thoughts tried to well up, a fountain of them, of Ilyena, of Mierin, of what he could do to defeat her. He forced them down, even the last. If he came down on the wrong side . . . I am Rand al’Thor! “Your name is Lanfear, and I’ll die before I love one of the Forsaken.”
Something that might have been anguish crossed her face; then it was a marble mask once more. “If you are not mine,” she said coldly, “then you are dead.”
Agony in his chest, as if his heart was about to explode, in his head, white-hot nails driving into his brain, pain so strong that inside the Void he wanted to scream. Death was there, and he knew it. Frantically—even in the Void, frantic; emptiness shimmered, dwindled—he wove Spirit and Fire and Earth, flailing it wildly. His heart was no longer beating. Fingers of dark pain crushing the Void. Gray veil falling over his eyes. He felt his weave slice raggedly through hers. The burn of breath in empty lungs, lurch of heart beginning to pump again. He could see again, silver and black flecks floated between him and a stone-faced Lanfear still catching her balance from the rebound of her flows. The pain was there in head and chest like wounds, but the Void firmed, and bodily pain was remote.
Well that it was distant, for he had no time to recover. Forcing himself to move forward, he struck at her with Air, a club to knock her senseless. She slashed the weave, and he struck again, again, again each time that she sliced through his last weave, a furious rain of blows she somehow saw and countered, always moving closer. If he could keep her occupied for a moment more, if one of those invisible cudgels landed on her head, if he could get close enough to strike her with his fist . . . Unconscious, she would be as helpless as anyone else.
Suddenly she seemed to realize what he was doing. Still blocking his blows as easily as if she could see every one, she danced backwards until her shoulders hit the wagon behind her. And she smiled like winter’s heart. “You will die slowly, and beg me to let you love me before you die,” she said.
It was not at him directly that she struck this time. It was at his link to saidin.
Panic rang the Void like a gong at the first knife-sharp touch, the Power diminishing as it slid deeper between him and the Source. With Spirit and Fire and Earth he cut at the knife blade; he knew where to find it; he knew where his link was, could feel that first nick. Her attempted shield vanished, reappeared, returned as fast as he could cut it, but always with that momentary ebbing of saidin, moments when it almost failed, leaving his counterstroke barely enough to foil her attack. Handling two weaves at once should have been easy—he could handle ten or more—but not when one was a desperate defense against something he could not know was there until it was almost too late. Not when another man’s thoughts kept trying to surface inside the Void, trying to tell him how to defeat her. If he listened, it might be Lews Therin Telamon who walked away, with Rand al’Thor a voice sometimes floating in his head if that.
“I’ll make both of those trulls watch you beg,” Lanfear said. “But should I make them watch you die first, or you them?” When had she climbed into the open wagon bed? He had to watch her, watch for any hint that she was tiring, her concentration slipping. It was a vain hope. Standing beside the twisted doorframe ter’angreal, she looked down at him, a queen about to pass sentence, yet she could spare time for chill smiles at a dark ivory bracelet that she turned over and over in her fingers. “Which will hurt you most, Lews Therin? I want you to hurt. I want you to know pain such as no man has ever known!”
The thicker the flow to him from the Source, the harder it would be to cut. His hand tightened on his coat pocket, the fat little stone man with his sword hard against the heron branded into his palm. He drew on saidin as deeply as he could, till the taint floated in the emptiness with him like misting rain.
“Pain, Lews Therin.”
And there was pain, the world swallowed in agony. Not heart or head this time, but everywhere, every part of him, hot needles stabbing into the Void. He almost thought he could hear a quenching hiss at each thrust, and each came deeper than the last. Her attempts to shield him di
Images darted through the pain. A woman in a dark merchant’s dress, toppling from her horse, the fire-red sword light in his hands; she had come to kill him, with a fistful of other Darkfriends. Mat’s bleak eyes; I killed her. A golden-haired woman lying in a ruined hallway where, it seemed, the very walls had melted and flowed. Ilyena, forgive me! It was a despairing cry.
He could end it. Only, he could not. He was going to die, perhaps the world would die, but he could not make himself kill another woman. Somehow it seemed the richest joke the world had ever seen.
Wiping the blood from her mouth, Moiraine crawled out from beneath the tail of the wagon and rose unsteadily to her feet, the sound of a man’s laughter in her ears. In spite of herself, her eyes darted, searching for Lan, found him lying almost against the foggy gray wall of the dome that stretched overhead. He twitched, perhaps trying to find strength to rise, perhaps dying. She forced him out of her mind. He had saved her life so many times that by rights it should have belonged to him, but she had long since done what she could to see that he survived his lone war with the Shadow. Now he must live or die without her.