Chapter 26
(Female Silhouettes)
Behind a Lock
Shaking her head, Egwene walked back to the doors she had dismissed. She had to go somewhere. Inside the first, the few furnishings were shapeless mounds under dusty cloths, and the air seemed stale, as if the door had not been opened in some time. She grimaced; there were mouse tracks in the dust on the floor. But no others. Two more doors, opened hastily, showed the same thing. It was no surprise. There were many more empty rooms than occupied in the Accepted's galleries.
When she pulled her head out of the third room, Nynaeve and Elayne were coming down the ramp behind her with no particular haste.
"Is she hiding?" Nynaeve asked in surprise. "In there?"
"I lost her." Egwene peered both ways along the curving gallery again. Where did she go? She did not mean Else.
"If I had thought Else could outrun you," Elayne said with a smile, "I'd have chased her, too, but she has always looked too plump for running to me." Her smile was worried, though.
"We will have to find her later," Nynaeve said, "and make sure she knows to keep her mouth shut. How could the Amyrlin trust that girl?"
"I thought I was right on top of her," Egwene said slowly, "but it was someone else. Nynaeve, I turned my back for a moment, and she was gone. Not Else — I never even saw her! — the woman I thought was Else at first. She was just — gone, and I don't know where."
Elayne's breath caught. "One of the Soulless?" She looked around hastily, but the gallery was still empty except for the three of them.
"Not her," Egwene said firmly. "She —" I am not going to tell them she made me feel six years old, with a torn dress, a dirty face, and a runny nose. "She was no Gray Man. She was tall and striking, with black eyes and black hair. You'd notice her in a crowd of a thousand. I have never seen her before, but I think she is Aes Sedai. She must be."
Nynaeve waited, as though for more, then said impatiently, "If you see her again, point her out to me. If you think there's cause. We've no time to stand here talking. I mean to see what is in that storeroom before Else has a chance to tell the wrong person about it. Maybe they were careless. Let's not give them a chance to correct it, if they were."
As she fell in beside Nynaeve, with Elayne on the other side, Egwene realized she still had the stone ring — Corianin Nedeal's ter'angreal — clutched in her fist. Reluctantly, she tucked it into her pouch and pulled the drawstrings tight. As long as I don't go to sleep with the bloody — But that's what I am planning, isn't it?
But that was for tonight, and no use worrying about it now. As they made their way through the Tower, she kept an eye out for the woman in silver and white. She was not sure why she was relieved not to see her. I am a grown woman, and quite capable, thank you. Still, she was just as glad that no one they encountered looked even remotely like her. The more she thought of the woman, the more she felt there was something — wrong — about her. Light, I am starting to see the Black Ajah under my bed. Only, maybe they are under the bed.
The library stood a little apart from the tall, thick shaft of the White Tower proper, its pale stone heavily streaked with blue, and it looked much like crashing waves frozen at their climax. Those waves loomed as large as a palace in the morning light, and Egwene knew they certainly contained as many rooms as one, but all those rooms — those below the odd corridors in the upper levels, where Verin had her chambers — were filled with shelves, and the shelves filled with books, manuscripts, papers, scrolls, maps, and charts, collected from every nation over the course of three thousand years. Not even the great libraries in Tear and Cairhien held so many.
The librarians — Brown sisters all — guarded those shelves, and guarded the doors as closely, to make sure not a scrap of paper left unless they knew who took it and why. But it was not to one of the guarded entrances that Nynaeve led Egwene and Elayne.
Around the foundations of the library, lying flat to the ground in the shade of tall pecan trees, were other doors, both large and small. Laborers sometimes needed access to the storerooms beneath, and the librarians did not approve of sweating men tracking through their preserve. Nynaeve pulled up one of those, no bigger than the front door of a farmhouse, and motioned the others down a steep flight of stairs descending into darkness. When she let it down behind them, all light vanished.
Egwene opened herself to saidar — it came so smoothly that she barely realized what she was doing — and channeled a trickle of the Power that flooded through her. For a moment the mere feel of that rush surging within her threatened to overwhelm other sensations. A small ball of bluish-white light appeared, balanced in the air above her hand. She took a deep breath and reminded herself of why she was walking stiffly. It was a link to the rest of the world. The feel of her linen shift against her skin returned, of woolen stockings, and her dress. With a small pang of regret, she banished the desire to pull in more, to let saidar absorb her.
Elayne made a glowing sphere for herself at the same time, and the pair provided more light than two lanterns would have. "It feels so — wonderful, doesn't it?" she murmured.
"Be careful," Egwene said.
"I am." Elayne sighed. "It just feels… I will be careful."
"This way," Nynaeve told them sharply and brushed by to lead them down. She did not go too far ahead. She was not angry, and had to use the light the other two provided.
The dusty side corridor by which they had entered, lined with wooden doors set in gray stone walls, took nearly a hundred paces to reach the much wider main hall that ran the length of the library. Their lights showed footprints overlaying footprints in the dust, most from the large boots men would wear and most themselves faded by dust. The ceiling was higher here, and some of the doors nearly large enough for a barn. The main stairs at the end, half the width of the hall, were where large things were brought down. Another flight beside them led deeper. Nynaeve took it without a pause.
Egwene followed quickly. The bluish light washed out Elayne's face, but Egwene thought it still looked paler than it should. We could scream our lungs out down here, and no one would hear a whimper.
She felt a lightning bolt form, or the potential for one, and nearly stumbled. She had never before channeled two flows at once; it did not seem difficult at all.
The main hall of the second basement was much like the first level, wide and dusty but with a lower ceiling. Nynaeve hurried to the third door on the right and stopped.
The door was not large, but its rough wooden planks somehow gave an impression of thickness. A round iron lock hung from a length of stout chain that was drawn tight through two thick staples, one in the door, the other cemented into the wall. Lock and chain alike had the look of newness; there was almost no dust on them.
"A lock!" Nynaeve jerked at it; the chain had no give, and neither did the lock. "Did either of you see a lock anywhere else?" She pulled it again, then flung it against the door hard enough to bounce. The bang echoed down the hall. "I did not see one other locked door!" She pounded a fist on the rough wood. "Not one!"
"Calm yourself," Elayne said. "There is no need to throw a tantrum. I could open the lock myself, if I could see how the inside of it works. We will open it some way."
"I do not want to calm myself," Nynaeve snapped. "I want to be furious! I want…!"
Letting the rest of the tirade fade from her awareness, Egwene touched the chain. She had learned more things than how to make lightning bolts since leaving Tar Valon. One was an affinity for metal. That came from Earth, one of the Five Powers few women had much strength in — the other was Fire — but she had it, and she could feel the chain, feel inside the chain, feel the tiniest bits of the cold metal, the patterns they made. The Power within her quivered in time to the vibrations of those patterns.
"Move out of my way, Egwene."
She looked around and saw Nynaeve wrapped in the glow of saidar and holding a prybar so close in color to the blue-white of the light that it was nearly invis
ible. Nynaeve frowned at the chain, muttered something about leverage, and the prybar was suddenly twice as long.
"Move, Egwene."
Egwene moved.
Thrusting the end of the prybar through the chain, Nynaeve braced it, then heaved with all her strength. The chain snapped like thread, Nynaeve gasped and stumbled halfway across the hall in surprise, and the prybar clattered to the floor. Straightening, Nynaeve stared from the bar to the chain in amazement. The prybar vanished.
"I think I did something to the chain," Egwene said. And I with I knew what.
"You could have said something," Nynaeve muttered. She pulled the rest of the chain from the staples and threw open the door. "Well? Are you going to stand there all day?"
The dusty room inside was perhaps ten paces square, but it held only a heap of large bags made of heavy brown cloth, each stuffed full, tagged, and sealed with the Flame of Tar Valon. Egwene did not have to count them to know there were thirteen.
She moved her ball of light to the wall and fastened it there; she was not certain how she did it, but when she took her hand away, the light remained. I keep learning how to do things without knowing what they are, she thought nervously.
Elayne frowned at her as if considering, then hung her light on the wall, too. Watching, Egwene thought she saw what it was she had done. She learned it from me, but I just learned it from her. She shivered.
Nynaeve went straight to tumbling the bags apart and reading the tags. "Rianna. Joiya Byir. These are what we are after." She examined the seal on one bag, then broke the wax and unwound the binding cords. "At least we know no one's been here before us."
Egwene chose a bag and broke the seal without reading the name on the tag. She did not really want to know whose possessions she was searching. When she upended them onto the dusty floor, they proved to be mainly old clothes and shoes, with a few ripped and crumpled papers of the sort that might hide under the wardrobe of a woman who was not too assiduous in seeing her rooms cleaned. "I don't see anything useful here. A cloak that would not do for rags. A torn half of a map of some city. Tear, it says in the corner. Three stockings that need darning." She stuck her finger through the hole in a velvet slipper that had no mate and waggled it at the others. "This one left no clues behind."
"Amico did not leave anything, either," Elayne said glumly, tossing clothes aside with both hands. "It might as well be rags. Wait, here's a book. Whoever bundled these up must have been in a hurry to toss in a book. Customs and Ceremonies of the Tairen Court. The cover is torn off, but the librarians will want it anyway." The librarians certainly would. No one threw away books, no matter how badly damaged.
"Tear," Nynaeve said in flat voice. Kneeling amid the clutter from the bag she was searching, she retrieved a scrap of paper she had already thrown away. "A list of trading ships on the Erinin, with the dates they sailed from Tar Valon and the dates they were expected to arrive in Tear."
"It could be coincidence," Egwene said slowly.
"Perhaps," Nynaeve said. She folded the paper and tucked it up her sleeve, then broke the seal on another bag.
When they finally finished, every bag searched twice and discarded rubbish heaped around the edges of the room, Egwene sat down on one of the empty bags, so engrossed that she barely noticed her own wince. Drawing up her knees, she studied the little collection they had made, all laid in a row.
"It is too much," Elayne said. "There is too much of it."
"Too much," Nynaeve agreed.
There was a second book, a tattered, leather-bound volume entitled Observations on a Visit to Tear, with half its pages falling out. Caught in the lining of a badly torn cloak in Chesmal Emry's bag, where it might have slipped through a rip in one of the pockets of the cloak, had been another list of trading vessels. It said no more than the names, but they were all on the other list, too, and according to that, those vessels all had sailed in the early morning after the night Liandrin and the others left the Tower. There was a hastily sketched plan of some large building, with one room faintly noted as "Heart of the Stone," and a page with the names of five inns, the word "Tear" heading the page badly smudged but barely readable. There was…
"There's something from everyone," Egwene muttered. "Every one of them left something pointing to a journey to Tear. How could anyone miss seeing it, if they looked? Why did the Amyrlin say nothing of this?"
"The Amyrlin," Nynaeve said bitterly, "keeps her own counsel, and what matter if we burn for it!" She drew a deep breath, and sneezed from the dust they had stirred up. "What worries me is that I am looking at bait."
"Bait?" Egwene said. But she saw it as soon as she spoke.
Nynaeve nodded. "Bait. A trap. Or maybe a diversion. But trap or diversion, it's so obvious no one could be taken in by it."
"Unless they do not care whether whoever found this saw the trap or not." Uncertainty tinged Elayne's voice. "Or perhaps they meant it to be so obvious that whoever found it would dismiss Tear immediately."
Egwene wished she could not believe that the Black Ajah could be as sure of themselves as that. She realized she was gripping her pouch in her fingers, running her thumb along the twisted curve of the stone ring inside. "Perhaps they meant to taunt whoever found it," she said softly. "Perhaps they thought whoever found this would rush headlong after them, in anger and pride." Did they know we would find it? Do they see us that way?
"Burn me!" Nynaeve growled. It was a shock; Nynaeve never used such language.
For a time they simply stared in silence at the array.
"What do we do now?" Elayne asked finally.
Egwene squeezed the ring hard. Dreaming was closely linked to Foretelling; the future, and events in other places, could appear in a Dreamer's dreams. "Maybe we will know after tonight."
Nynaeve looked at her, silent and expressionless; then chose out a dark skirt that seemed not to have too many holes and rips, and began bundling in it the things they had found. "For now," she said, "we will take this back to my room and hide it. I think we just have time, if we don't want to be late to the kitchens."
Late, Egwene thought. The longer she held the ring through her pouch, the greater the urgency she felt. We're already a step behind, but maybe we won't be too late.
Chapter 27
(Dream Ring)
Tel'aran'rhiod
The room Egwene had been given, on the same gallery with Nynaeve and Elayne, was little different from Nynaeve's. Her bed was a trifle wider, her table a little smaller. Her bit of rug had flowers instead of scrolls. That was all. After the novices' quarters, it seemed like a room in a palace, but when the three of them gathered there late that night, Egwene wished she were back on the novice galleries, with no ring on her finger and no bands on her dress. The others looked as nervous as she felt.
They had worked in the kitchens for two more meals, and in between tried to puzzle out the meaning of what they had found in the storeroom. Was it a trap, or an attempt to divert the search? Did the Amyrlin know of the things, and if she did, why had she not mentioned them? Talking provided no answers, and the Amyrlin never appeared so they could ask her.
Verin had come into the kitchens after the midday meal, blinking as if she were not sure why she was there. When she saw Egwene and the other two on their knees among the cauldrons and kettles, she looked surprised for a moment, then walked over and asked, loud enough for anyone to hear, "Have you found anything?"
Elayne, with her head and shoulders inside a huge soup kettle, banged her head on the rim backing out. Her blue eyes seemed to take up her entire face.
"Nothing but grease and sweat, Aes Sedai," Nynaeve said. The tug she gave her braid left a smear of greasy soap suds on her dark hair, and she grimaced.
Verin nodded as if that were the answer she had been seeking. "Well, keep looking." She peered around the kitchen again, frowning as though puzzled to find herself there, and left.
Alanna came to the kitchens after midday, too, collecting a bowl of big gre
en gooseberries and a pitcher of wine, and Elaida, then Sheriam, appeared after supper, and Anaiya, too.
Alanna had asked Egwene if she wanted to know more of the Green Ajah, inquired when they were going to get on with their studies. Just because the Accepted chose their own lessons and pace did not mean they were not supposed to do any at all. The first few weeks would be bad, of course, but they had to choose, or the choosing would be done for them.
Elaida merely stood for a time, stern-faced and staring at them, hands on her hips, and Sheriam did the same in almost the identical pose. Anaiya stood the same way, but her look was more concerned. Until she saw them glancing at her. Then her face became a match for Elaida's and Sheriam's before her.
None of those visits meant anything that Egwene could see. The Mistress of Novices certainly had reason to check on them, as well as on the novices working in the kitchens, and Elaida had reason to keep an eye on the Daughter-Heir of Andor. Egwene tried not to think of the Aes Sedai's interest in Rand. As for Alanna, she was not the only Aes Sedai who came for a tray to take back to her rooms rather than eat with the others. Half the sisters in the Tower were too busy for meals, too busy to take the time to summon a servant to fetch a tray. And Anaiya…? Anaiya could well be concerned for her Dreamer. Not that she would do anything to ease a punishment set by the Amyrlin Seat herself. That could have been Anaiya's reason for coming. It could have been.
Hanging her dress in the wardrobe, Egwene told herself once again that even Verin's slip could have been perfectly ordinary; the Brown sister was often absentminded. If it was a slip. Sitting on the edge of her bed, she pulled up her shift and began rolling down her stockings. She was almost beginning to dislike white as much as she did gray.
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