Authors: Robert Jordan
Once more a forger appeared—perhaps the same, perhaps another—and hauled the woman to her feet. Woman, babe and child began to wail, but the infant was pulled away and shoved into the girl’s arms. At last the woman found a scrap of resistance. Weeping, she kicked wildly, clawed at the forger. It paid no more mind than stone would have. The woman’s cries vanished as soon as she was inside. The hammers began ringing again, drowning the sobs of the children.
One blade made, one making, and two to come. Demandred had never before seen fewer than fifty prisoners waiting to give their mite to the Great Lord of the Dark. The Myrddraal must be gnashing their teeth, indeed.
“Do you loiter when you have been summoned by the Great Lord?” The voice sounded like rotted leather crumbling.
Demandred turned slowly—how dare a Halfman address him in that tone—but the quelling words died in his mouth. It was not the eyeless stare of its pasty-pale face; a Myrddraal’s gaze struck fear in any man, but
he had rooted fear out of himself long ago. Rather, it was the black-clad creature itself. Every Myrddraal was the height of a tall man, a sinuous imitation of a man, as alike as though cast in one mold. This one stood head and shoulders taller.
“I will take you to the Great Lord,” the Myrddraal said. “I am Shaidar Haran.” It turned away and began climbing the mountain, like a serpent in its fluid motion. Its inky cloak hung unnaturally still, without even a ripple.
Demandred hesitated before following. Halfmen’s names were always in the Trollocs’ tongue-wrenching language. “Shaidar Haran” came from what people now named the Old Tongue. It meant “Hand of the Dark.” Another surprise, and Demandred did not like surprises, especially not at Shayol Ghul.
The entry into the mountain could have been one of the scattered vents, except that it emitted no smoke or steam. It gaped enough for two men abreast, but the Myrddraal kept the lead. The way slanted down almost immediately, the tunnel floor worn smooth as polished tiles. The cold faded as Demandred followed Shaidar Haran’s broad back down and down, slowly replaced by increasing heat. Demandred was aware of it, but did not let it touch him. A pale light rose from the stone, filling the tunnel, brighter than the eternal twilight outside. Jagged spikes jutted from the ceiling, stony teeth ready to snap shut, the Great Lord’s teeth to rend the unfaithful or the traitor. Not natural, of course, but effective.
Abruptly, he noticed something. Every time he had made this journey, those spikes had all but brushed the top of his head. Now they cleared the Myrddraal’s by two hands or more. That surprised him. Not that the height of the tunnel changed—the strange was ordinary here—but the extra space the Halfman was given. The Great Lord gave his reminders to Myrddraal as well as men. That extra space was a fact to be remembered.
The tunnel opened out suddenly onto a wide ledge overlooking a lake of molten stone, red mottled with black, where man-high flames danced, died and rose again. There was no roof, only a great hole rising through the mountain to a sky that was not the sky of Thakan’dar. It made that of Thakan’dar look normal, with its wildly striated clouds streaking by as though driven by the greatest winds the world had ever seen. This, men called the Pit of Doom, and few knew how well they had named it.
Even after all his visits—and the first lay well over three thousand years in the past—Demandred felt awe. Here he could sense the Bore,
the hole drilled through so long ago to where the Great Lord had lain imprisoned since the moment of Creation. Here the Great Lord’s presence washed over him. Physically, this place was no closer to the Bore than any other in the world, but here there was a thinness in the Pattern that allowed it to be sensed.
Demandred came as close to smiling as he ever did. What fools they were who opposed the Great Lord. Oh, the Bore was still blocked, though more tenuously than when he had wakened from his long sleep and broken free of his own prison in it. Blocked, but larger than when he woke. Still not so large as when he had been cast into it with his fellows at the end of the War of Power, but at each visit since waking, a little wider. Soon the blockage would be gone, and the Great Lord would reach out across the earth again. Soon would come the Day of Return. And he would rule the world for all time. Under the Great Lord, of course. And with those of the other Chosen who survived, also of course.
“You may leave now, Halfman.” He did not want the thing here to see the ecstasy overcome him. The ecstasy, and the pain.
Shaidar Haran did not move.
Demandred opened his mouth—and a voice exploded in his head.
DEMANDRED.
To call it a voice was to call a mountain a pebble. It nearly crushed him against the inside of his own skull; it filled him with rapture. He sank to his knees. The Myrddraal stood watching impassively, but only a small part of him could even notice the thing with that voice filling his brain.
DEMANDRED. HOW FARES THIS WORLD?
He was never sure how much the Great Lord knew of the world. He had been as startled by ignorance as by knowledge. But he had no doubt what the Great Lord wanted to hear.
“Rahvin is dead, Great Lord. Yesterday.” There was pain. Euphoria too strong became pain quickly. His arms and legs twitched. He was sweating, now. “Lanfear has vanished without a trace, just as Asmodean did. And Graendal says Moghedien failed to meet her as they had agreed. Also yesterday, Great Lord. I do not believe in coincidence.”
THE CHOSEN DWINDLE, DEMANDRED. THE WEAK FALL AWAY. WHO BETRAYS ME SHALL DIE THE FINAL DEATH. ASMODEAN, TWISTED BY HIS WEAKNESS. RAHVIN DEAD IN HIS PRIDE. HE SERVED WELL, YET EVEN I CANNOT SAVE HIM FROM BALEFIRE. EVEN I CANNOT STEP OUTSIDE OF TIME. For an instant terrible anger filled that awful voice, and—could it be frustration?
An instant only. DONE BY MY ANCIENT ENEMY, THE ONE CALLED DRAGON. WOULD YOU UNLEASH THE BALEFIRE IN MY SERVICE, DEMANDRED?
Demandred hesitated. A bead of sweat slid half an inch on his cheek; it seemed to take an hour. For a year during the War of Power, both sides had used balefire. Until they learned the consequences. Without agreement, or truce—there had never been a truce any more than there had been quarter—each side simply stopped. Entire cities died in balefire that year, hundreds of thousands of threads burned from the Pattern; reality itself almost unraveled, world and universe evaporating like mist. If balefire was unleashed once more, there might be no world to rule.
Another point pricked him. The Great Lord already knew how Rahvin had died. And seemed to know more of Asmodean than he. “As you command, Great Lord, so shall I obey.” His muscles might be jerking, but his voice was rock steady. His knees began to blister from the hot stone, yet the flesh might as well have been someone else’s.
SO YOU SHALL.
“Great Lord, the Dragon can be destroyed.” A dead man could not wield balefire again, and perhaps then the Great Lord would see no need for it. “He is ignorant and weak, scattering his attentions in a dozen directions. Rahvin was a vain fool. I—”
WOULD YOU BE NAE’BLIS?
Demandred’s tongue froze. Nae’blis. The one who would stand only a step below the Great Lord, commanding all others. “I wish only to serve you, Great Lord, however I may.” Nae’blis.
THEN LISTEN, AND SERVE. HEAR WHO WILL DIE AND WHO LIVE.
Demandred screamed as the voice crashed home. Tears of joy rolled down his face.
Unmoving, the Myrddraal watched him.
“Stop fidgeting.” Nynaeve testily flipped her long braid over her shoulder. “This won’t work if you twitch around like children with an itch.”
Neither of the women across the rickety table appeared any older than she, though they were by twenty years or more, and neither was really fidgeting, but the heat had Nynaeve on edge. The small windowless room seemed airless. She dripped sweat; they appeared cool and dry. Leane, in a Domani dress of too-thin blue silk, merely shrugged; the tall coppery-skinned woman
possessed an apparently infinite store of patience. Usually. Siuan, fair and sturdy, seldom had any.
Now Siuan grunted and resettled her skirts irritably; she used to wear fairly plain clothes, but this morning she was in fine yellow linen embroidered with a Tairen maze around a neckline that barely missed being too low. Her blue eyes were cold as deep well water. As cold as deep well water would have been if the weather had not gone mad. Her dresses might have changed, but not her eyes. “It won’t work in any case,” she snapped. Her manner of speaking was the same, too. “You can’t patch a hull when the whole boat’s burned. Well, it’s a waste of time, but I promised, so get on with it. Leane and I have work to do.” The pair of them ran the networks of eyes-and-ears for the Aes Sedai here in Salidar, the agents who sent in reports and rumors of what was going on in the world.
Nynaeve smoothed her own skirts to soothe herself. Her dress was plain white wool, with seven bands of color at the hem, one for each Ajah. An Accepted’s dress. It annoyed her more than she could ever have imagined. She would much rather have been in the green silk she had packed away. She was willing to admit her acquired taste for fine clothes, privately at least, but her choice of that particular dress was only for comfort—it was thin, light—not because green seemed one of Lan’s favorite colors. Not at all. Idle dreaming of the worst sort. An Accepted who put on anything except the banded white would soon learn she was a
long
step below Aes Sedai. Firmly she put all that out of her head. She was not here to fret over fripperies. He liked blue, too. No!
Delicately she probed with the One Power, first at Siuan, then Leane. In a manner of speaking, she was not channeling at all. She could not channel a scrap unless angry, could not even sense the True Source. Yet it came to the same thing. Fine filaments of
saidar
, the female half of the True Source, sifted through the two women at her weaving. They just did not originate with her.
On her left wrist Nynaeve wore a slender bracelet, a simple segmented silver band. Mainly silver, anyway, and from a special source, though that made no difference. It was the only piece of jewelry she wore aside from the Great Serpent ring; Accepted were firmly discouraged from wearing much jewelry. A matching necklace snugged around the neck of the fourth woman, on a stool against the rough-plastered wall with her hands folded in her lap. Clad in a farmer’s rough brown wool, with a farmer’s worn sturdy face, she did not sweat a drop. She did not move a muscle either, but her dark eyes watched everything. To Nynaeve, the radiance of
saidar
surrounded
her, but it was Nynaeve who directed the channeling. Bracelet and necklace created a link between them, much in the way Aes Sedai could link to combine their power. Something about “absolutely identical matrices” was involved, according to Elayne, after which the explanation truly became incomprehensible. In truth, Nynaeve did not think Elayne understood half as much as she pretended. For herself, Nynaeve did not understand at all, except that she could feel the other woman’s every emotion, feel the woman herself, but tucked away in a corner of her head, and that all the other woman’s grasp of
saidar
was in her control. Sometimes she thought it would have been better if the woman on the stool were dead. Simpler, certainly. Cleaner.
“There’s something torn, or cut,” Nynaeve muttered, wiping absently at the sweat on her face. It was just a vague impression, barely there at all, but it was also the first time she had sensed more than emptiness. It could be imagination, and the desperate wanting to find something, anything.
“Severing,” the woman on the stool said. “That was what it was called, what you name stilling for women and gentling for men.”
Three heads swiveled toward her; three sets of eyes glared with fury. Siuan and Leane had been Aes Sedai until they were stilled during the coup in the White Tower that put Elaida on the Amyrlin Seat. Stilled. A word to cause shudders. Never to channel again. But always to remember, and know the loss. Always to sense the True Source and know you could never touch it again. Stilling could not be Healed any more than death.
That was what everyone believed, anyway, but in Nynaeve’s opinion the One Power should be able to Heal anything short of death. “If you have something useful to add, Marigan,” she said sharply, “then say it. If not, keep quiet.”
Marigan shrank back against the wall, eyes glittering and fixed on Nynaeve. Fear and hate rolled through the bracelet, but they always did to one degree or another. Captives seldom loved their captors, even—perhaps especially—when they knew they deserved captivity and worse. The problem was that Marigan also said severing—stilling—could not be Healed. Oh, she was full of claims that anything else except death could be Healed in the Age of Legends, that what the Yellow Ajah called Healing now was only the crudest hasty battlefield work. But try to pin her down on specifics, on even a hint of how, and you found nothing there. Marigan knew as much about Healing as Nynaeve did about blacksmithing, which was that you stuck metal in hot coals and hit it with a hammer. Certainly not enough to make a horseshoe. Or Heal much beyond a bruise.
Twisting around in her chair, Nynaeve studied Siuan and Leane. Days of this, whenever she could pry them away from their other work, and so far she had learned nothing. Suddenly she realized she was turning the bracelet on her wrist. Whatever the gain, she hated being linked to the woman. The intimacy made her skin crawl.
At least I might learn something
, she thought.
And it couldn’t fail any worse than everything else has
.
Carefully she undid the bracelet—the clasp was impossible to find unless you knew how—and handed it to Siuan. “Put this on.” Losing the Power was bitter, but this had to be done. And losing the waves of emotion was like taking a bath. Marigan’s eyes followed the narrow length of silver as if hypnotized.
“Why?” Siuan demanded. “You tell me this thing only works—”
“Just put it on, Siuan.”
Siuan eyed her stubbornly for a moment—Light, but the woman could be obstinate!—before closing the bracelet around her wrist. A look of wonder came onto her face immediately, then her eyes narrowed at Marigan. “She hates us, but I knew that. And there’s fear, and . . . Shock. Not a glimmer on her face, but she’s shocked to her toes. I don’t think she believed I could use this thing, either.”