Irritably she placed another domino, and the tower collapsed with a clatter, spilling ivory tiles onto the floor. With a click of her tongue, she turned from the table, folding her arms beneath her breasts. “Where is Demandred? Seventeen days since he went to Shayol Ghul, but he waits until now to inform us of a message, then does not appear.” She had been to the Pit of Doom twice in that time herself, made that nerve-racking walk with the stone fangs brushing her hair. To find nothing except a strange too-tall Myrddraal that would not speak. The Bore had been there, certainly, but the Great Lord had not answered. She did not remain long either time. She had thought herself beyond fear, at least the sort a Halfman’s gaze brought, but twice the Myrddraal’s silent eyeless stare had sent her away with quickening steps that only tight self-control kept from becoming a run. Had channeling there not been a sure way to die, she would have destroyed the Halfman, or Traveled from the Pit itself. “Where is he?”
Semirhage raised her eyes from her stitchery, unblinking dark eyes in a smooth dark face, then put aside the needlework and stood gracefully. “He will come when he comes,” she said calmly. She was always calm, just as she was always graceful. “If you do not want to wait, then go.”
Unconsciously Mesaana raised herself a little on her toes, but she still had to look up. Semirhage stood taller than most men, though so perfectly proportioned that you did not realize it until she stood over you, looking down. “Go? I will go. And he can — ”
There was no warning, of course. There never was, when a man channeled. A bright vertical line appeared in the air, then widened as the gateway turned sideways to open long enough for Demandred to step through, giving them each a small bow. He was all in dark gray today, with a little pale lace at his neck. He adapted easily to the fashions and fabrics of this Age.
His hawk-nosed profile was handsome enough, though not quite the sort to make every woman’s heart beat faster. In a way, “almost” and “not quite” had been the story of Demandred’s life. He had had the misfortune to be born one day after Lews Therin Telamon, who would become the Dragon, while Barid Bel Medar, as he was then, spent years almost matching Lews Therin’s accomplishments, not quite matching Lews Therin’s fame. Without Lews Therin, he would have been the most acclaimed man of the Age. Had he been appointed to lead instead of the man he considered his intellectual inferior, an overcautious fool who too often managed to scrape up luck, would he stand here today? Now, that was idle speculation, though she had made it before. No, the important point was that Demandred despised the Dragon, and now that the Dragon had been Reborn, he had transferred that contempt whole.
“Why —?”
Demandred raised a hand. “Let us wait until we are all here, Mesaana, and I will not have to repeat myself.”
She felt the first spinning of saidar a moment before the glowing line appeared and became a gateway. Graendal stepped out, for once unaccompanied by half-clad servants, and let the opening vanish as quickly as Demandred had. She was a fleshy woman with elaborately curled red-gold hair Somewhere she had actually managed to find streith for her high-necked gown. High-necked, but mirroring her mood — the fabric was transparent mist. At times Mesaana wondered whether Graendal really took note of anything beyond her sensual pleasures.
“I wondered whether you would be here,” the new arrival said lightly. “You three have been so secretive.” She gave a gay, slightly foolish laugh. No, it would be a dire mistake to take Graendal at surface value. Most who had taken her for a fool were long since dead, victims of the woman they disregarded.
“Is Sammael coming?” he asked.
Graendal waved a beringed hand dismissively. “Oh, he doesn’t trust you. I don’t think the man trusts himself anymore.” The streith darkened; a concealing fog. “He’s marshaling his armies in Illian, moaning over not having shocklances to arm them. When he isn’t doing that, he’s searching for a usable angreal or sa’angreal. Something of decent strength, of course.”
Their eyes all went to Mesaana, and she drew a deep breath. Any of them would have given — well, almost anything, for a suitable angreal or sa’angreal. Each was stronger than any of these half-trained children who called themselves Aes Sedai today, but enough half-trained children linked together could crush them all. Except, of course, that they no longer knew how, and no longer had the means in any case. Men were needed to take a link beyond thirteen, more than one to go beyond twenty-seven. In truth, those girls — the oldest seemed girls to her; she had lived over three hundred years, quite aside from her time sealed in the Bore, and had only been considered just into her middle years — those girls were no real danger, but that did not lessen the desire of anyone here for angreal, or better yet the more powerful sa’angreal. With those remnants from their own time, they could channel amounts of the Power that would have burned them to ash without. Any of them would risk much for one of those prizes. But not everything. Not with no real need. That lack did not still the desire, though.
Automatically Mesaana dropped into a lecturing tone. “The White Tower now has guards and wards on their strongrooms, inside and out, plus they count everything four times each day. The Great Hold in the Stone of Tear is also warded, with a nasty thing that would have held me fast had I tried to pass through or untie it. I don’t think it can be untied except by whoever wove it, and until then it is a trap for any other woman who can channel.”
“A dusty jumble of useless rubbish, so I’ve heard,” Demandred said in dismissal. “The Tairens gathered anything with even a rumored connection to the Power.”
Mesaana suspected he had more than hearsay to go on. She also suspected there was a trap for men woven around the Great Hold, too, or Demandred would have had his sa’angreal and launched himself at Rand al’Thor long since. “No doubt there are some in Cairhien and Rhuidean, but even if you do not walk right into al’Thor, both are full of women who can channel.”
“Ignorant girls.” Graendal sniffed.
“If a kitchen girl puts a knife in your back,” Semirhage said coolly, “are you less dead than if you fall in a sha’je duel at Qal?”
Mesaana nodded. “That leaves whatever might lie buried in ancient ruins or forgotten in an attic. If you want to count on finding something by chance, do so. I will not. Unless someone knows the location of a stasis box?” There was a certain dryness to that last. The stasis boxes should have survived the Breaking of the World, but that upheaval had likely as not left them on the bottom of an ocean or buried beneath mountains. Little remained of the world they had known beyond a few names and legends.
Graendal’s smile was all sweetness. “I always thought you should be a teacher. Oh. I am sorry. I forgot.”
Mesaana’s face darkened. Her road to the Great Lord began when she was denied a place in the Collam Daan all those years ago. Unsuited for research, they had told her, but she could still teach. Well, she had taught, until she found how to teach them all!
“I am still waiting to hear what the Great Lord said,” Semirhage murmured.
“Yes. Are we to kill al’Thor?” Mesaana realized she was gripping her skirt with both hands and let go. Strange. She never let anyone get under her skin. “If all goes well, in two months, three at most, he will be where I can safely reach him, and helpless.”
“Where you can safely reach him?” Graendal arched an eyebrow quizzically. “Where have you made your lair? No matter. Bare as it is, it’s as good a plan as I’ve heard lately.”
Still Demandred kept silent, stood there studying them. No, not Graendal. Semirhage and her. And when he did speak, half to himself, it was to they two. “When I think where you two have placed yourselves, I wonder. How much has the Great Lord known, for how long? How much of what has happened has been at his design all along?” There was no answer to that. Finally, he said, “You want to know what the Great Lord told me? Very well. But it stays here, held close. Since Sammael chose to stay away, he learns nothing. Nor do the others, whether alive or dead. The first part of
the Great Lord’s message was simple. ‘Let the Lord of Chaos rule.’ His words, exact.” The corners of his mouth twitched, as close to a smile as Mesaana had ever seen from him. Then he told them the rest.
Mesaana found herself shivering and did not know whether she did so from excitement or fear. It could work; it could hand them everything. But it required luck, and gambling made her uncomfortable. Demandred was the gambler. He was right about one thing; Lews Therin had made his own luck as a mint made coin. In her opinion it seemed that so far Rand al’Thor did the same.
Unless . . . Unless the Great Lord had a plan beyond the one he had revealed. And that frightened her more than any other possibility.
The gilt-framed mirror reflected the room, the disturbingly patterned mosaics on the walls, the gilded furnishings and fine carpets, the other mirrors and the tapestries. A palace room without a window — or a door. The mirror reflected a woman striding up and down in a dark blood-red gown, her beautiful face a combination of rage and disbelief. Still, disbelief. It reflected his own face, too and that interested him far more than the woman. He could not resist touching his nose and mouth and cheeks for the hundredth time to make sure they were real. Not young, but younger than the face he had worn on first waking from the long sleep, with all its endless nightmares. An ordinary face, and he had always hated being ordinary. He recognized the sound in his throat as a budding laugh, a giggle, and stifled it. He was not mad. Despite everything, he was not that.
A name had been given to him during this second, far more horrific sleep, before he woke to this face and body. Osan’gar. A name given by a voice he knew and dared not disobey. His old name, given in scorn and adopted in pride, was gone forever. The voice of his master had spoken and made it so. The woman was Aran’gar; who she had been, was no more.
Interesting choices, those names. Osan’gar and aran’gar were the left and right-hand daggers in a form of dueling briefly popular early in that long building from the day the Bore had been made to the actual beginning of the War of Power. His memories were spotty — too much had been lost in the long sleep, and the short — but he remembered that. The popularity had been brief because almost inevitably both duelists died. The daggers’ blades were coated with slow poison.
Something blurred in the mirror, and he turned, not too quickly. He had to remember who he was, and make sure others remembered. There still was no door, but a Myrddraal shared the room with them. Neither thing was strange in this place, but the Myrddraal stood taller than any Osan’gar had seen before.
He took his time, letting the Halfman wait to be acknowledged, and before he could open his mouth, Aran’gar spat, “Why has this been done to me? Why have I been put into this body? Why?” The last was almost a shriek.
Osan’gar would have thought the Myrddraal’s bloodless lips twitched in a smile, except that was impossible, here or anywhere. Even Trollocs had a sense of humor, if a vile and violent one, but not Myrddraal. “You were both given the best that could be taken in the Borderlands.” Its voice was a viper rustling in dry grass, “It is a fine body, strong and healthy. And better than the alternative.”
Both things were true. It was a fine body, suitable for a daien dancer in the old days, sleekly lush, with a green-eyed ivory oval of a face to match, framed by glossy black hair. And anything bettered the alternative.
Perhaps Aran’gar did not see it that way. Rage mottled that beautiful face. She was going to do something reckless. Osan’gar knew it; there had always been a problem in that regard. Lanfear seemed cautious by contrast. He reached for saidin. Channeling here could be dangerous, but less than allowing her to do something truly stupid. He reached for saidin — and found nothing. He had not been shielded; he would have felt it, and known how to work around or break it, given time, if it was not too strong. This was as if he had been severed. Shock petrified him where he stood.
Not so for Aran’gar. Perhaps she had made the same discovery, but it affected her differently. With a screech like a cat she launched herself at the Myrddraal, fingernails clawed.
A futile attack, of course. The Myrddraal did not even shift its stance. Casually it caught her by the throat, raised her straight-armed till her feet left the floor. The screech became a gurgle, and she grabbed the Halfman’s wrist with both hands. With her dangling in its grasp, it turned that eyeless stare to Osan’gar. “You have not been severed, but you will not channel until you are told you may. And you will never strike at me. I am Shaidar Haran.”
Osan’gar tried to swallow, but his mouth was dust. Surely the creature had nothing to do with whatever had been done to him. Myrddraal had powers of a sort, but not that. Yet it knew. He had never liked Halfmen. He had helped make the Trollocs, blending human and animal stock — he was proud of that, of the skill involved, the difficulty — but these occasional throwback offspring made him uneasy at the best of times.
Shaidar Haran turned its attention back to the woman twitching in its fist. Her face was beginning to go purple, and her feet kicked feebly. “You will adapt. The body bends to the soul, but the mind bends to the body. You are adapting already. Soon it will be as if you had never had any other. Or you may refuse. Then another will take your place, and you will be given to . . . my brothers, blocked as you are.” Those thin lips twitched again. “They miss their sport in the Borderlands.”
“She cannot speak,” Osan’gar said. “You’re killing her! Don’t you know who we are? Put her down, Halfman! Obey me!” The thing had to obey one of the Chosen.
But the Myrddraal impassively studied Aran’gar’s darkening face for a long moment more before letting her feet touch the carpet and loosening its grip. “I obey the Great Lord. No other.” She hung on, wavering, coughing and gulping air. Had it taken its hand away, she would have fallen. “Will you submit to the will of the Great Lord?” Not a demand, just a perfunctory question in that rasping voice.
“I — I will,” she managed hoarsely, and Shaidar Haran let her go.
She swayed, massaging her throat, and Osan’gar moved to help her, but she threatened him with a glare and a fist before he touched her. He backed away with raised hands. That was one enmity he did not need. But it was a fine body, and a fine joke. He had always prided himself on his sense of humor, but this was rich.
“Do you not feel gratitude?” the Myrddraal said. “You were dead, and are alive. Think of Rahvin, whose soul is beyond saving, beyond time. You have a chance to serve the Great Lord again, and absolve yourselves of your errors.”
Osan’gar hastened to assure it that he was grateful, that he wanted nothing more than to serve and gain absolution. Rahvin dead? What had happened? No matter; one fewer of the Chosen meant one more chance for true power when the Great Lord was free. It abraded, humbling himself before something that could be said to be as much his creation as the Trollocs, but he remembered death too clearly. He would grovel before a worm to avoid that again. Aran’gar was no less quick, he noted, for all the anger in her eyes. Clearly, she remembered too.
“Then it is time for you to go into the world once more in the service of the Great Lord,” Shaidar Haran said. “None but I and the Great Lord know you live. If you succeed, you will live forever and be raised above all others. If you fail . . . But you will not fail, will you?” The Halfman did smile then. It was like seeing death smile.
Chapter 1
Lion on the Hill
* * *
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose among brown-thicketed hills in Cairhien. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
Westward the wind blew over abandoned villages and farms, many only jumbles of charred timber. War had racked Cairhien, war and civil war, invasion and chaos, an
d even now that it was done, insofar as it was done, only a handful began to trickle back to their homes. The wind held no moisture, and the sun tried to sear away what little remained in the land. Where the small town of Maerone faced larger Aringill across the River Erinin, the wind crossed into Andor. Both towns baked, and if more prayers for rain rose in Aringill, where refugees from Cairhien jammed inside the walls like fish in a cask, even the soldiers packed around Maerone offered up words to the Creator, sometimes drunkenly, sometimes fervently. Winter should have been beginning to send out tendrils, the first snows long past, and those who sweated feared the reason it was not so, though few dared voice those fears.
Westward the wind blew, stirring drought-shriveled leaves on the trees, riffling the surface of shrinking streams bordered in hard-baked mud. There were no burned-out ruins in Andor, but villagers eyed the swollen sun nervously and farmers tried not to look at fields that had produced no fall crops. Westward, until the wind passed across Caemlyn, lifting two banners above the Royal Palace, in the heart of the Ogier-built Inner City. One banner floated red as blood, upon it a disc divided by a sinuous line, half white, half black as deep as the white was brilliant. The other banner slashed snow white across the sky. The figure on it, like some strange golden-maned, four-legged serpent, sun-eyed and scaled scarlet and gold, seemed to ride on the wind. It was a close question which of the two caused more fear. Sometimes, the same breast that held fear, held hope. Hope of salvation and fear of destruction, from the same source.
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