The Gathering Storm

by Robert Jordan

  “I know,” Ituralde said, standing. “But I can’t drive you back by attacking you in your fortresses. I need you to come to me.”

  “You don’t understand the numbers we have . . .” Turan said. “What you destroyed today is but a breeze compared to the storm you’ve raised. Enough of my people escaped today to tell of your tricks. They will not work again.”

  He was right. The Seanchan learned quickly. Ituralde had been forced to cut short his raids in Tarabon because of the swift Seanchan reaction.

  “You know you can’t beat us,” Turan said softly. “I see it in your eyes, Great Captain.”

  Ituralde nodded.

  “Why, then?” Turan asked.

  “Why does a crow fly?” Ituralde asked.

  Turan coughed weakly.

  Ituralde did know that he could not win his war against the Seanchan. Oddly, each of his victories made him more certain of his eventual failure. The Seanchan were smart, well equipped and well disciplined. More than that, they were persistent.

  Turan himself must have known from the moment those gates opened that he was doomed. But he had not surrendered; he had fought until his army broke, scattering in too many directions for Ituralde’s exhausted troops to catch. Turan understood. Sometimes, surrender wasn’t worth the cost. No man welcomed death, but there were far worse ends for a soldier. Abandoning one’s homeland to invaders . . . well, Ituralde couldn’t do that. Not even if the fight was impossible to win.

  He did what needed to be done, when it needed to be done. And right now, Arad Doman needed to fight. They would lose, but their children would always know that their fathers had resisted. That resistance would be important in a hundred years, when a rebellion came. If one came.

  Ituralde stood up, intending to return to his waiting soldiers.

  Turan struggled, reaching for his sword. Ituralde hesitated, turning back.

  “Will you do it?” Turan asked.

  Ituralde nodded, unsheathing his own sword.

  “It has been an honor,” Turan said, then closed his eyes. Ituralde’s sword—heron-marked—took the man’s head a moment later. Turan’s own blade bore a heron, barely visible on the gleaming length of blade the Seanchan had managed to pull. It was a pity that the two of them hadn’t been able to cross swords—though, in a way, these past few weeks had been just that, on a different scale.

  Ituralde cleaned his sword, then slid it back into its sheath. In a final gesture, he slid Turan’s sword out and rammed it into the ground beside the fallen general. Ituralde then remounted and, nodding farewell to the messenger, made his way back across the shadowed field of corpses.

  The ravens had begun.

  “I’ve tried encouraging several of the serving men and Tower Guards,” Leane said softly, sitting beside the bars of her cell. “But it’s hard.” She smiled, glancing at Egwene, who sat on a stool outside the cell. “I don’t exactly feel alluring these days.”

  Egwene’s responding smile was wry, and she seemed to understand. Leane wore the same dress that she’d been captured in, and it had not yet been laundered. Every third morning, she removed it and used the morning’s bucket of water—after washing herself clean with a damp rag—to clean the dress in her basin. But there was only so much one could do without soap. She’d braided her hair to give it a semblance of neatness, but could do nothing about her ragged nails.

  Leane sighed, thinking of those mornings spent standing in the corner of her cell, hidden from sight, wearing nothing while she waited for the dress and shift to dry. Just because she was Domani didn’t mean she liked parading about without a scrap on. Proper seduction required skill and subtlety; nudity used neither.

  Her cell wasn’t bad as cells went—she had a small bed, meals, plenty of water, a chamber pot that was changed daily. But she was never allowed out, and was always guarded by two sisters who kept her shielded. The only one who visited her—save for those trying to pry information from her regarding Traveling—was Egwene.

  The Amyrlin sat on her stool, expression thoughtful. And she was Amyrlin. It was impossible to think of her any other way. How could a child so young have learned so quickly? That straight back, that poised expression. Being in control wasn’t so much about the power you had, but the power you implied that you had. It was much like dealing with men, actually.

  “Have you . . . heard anything?” Leane asked. “About what they plan to do with me?”

  Egwene shook her head. Two Yellow sisters sat chatting nearby on the bench, lit by a lamp on the table beside them. Leane hadn’t answered any of the questions her captors put to her, and Tower law was very strict about the questioning of fellow sisters. They couldn’t harm her, particularly not with the Power. But they could just leave her alone, to rot.

  “Thank you for coming to see me these evenings,” Leane said, reaching through the lattice of bars to take Egwene’s hand. “I believe I owe my sanity to you.”

  “It is my pleasure,” Egwene said, though her eyes showed a hint of the exhaustion she undoubtedly felt. Some of the sisters who visited Leane mentioned the beatings Egwene was suffering as “penances” for her insubordination. Odd, how a novice to be instructed could be beaten but a prisoner to be interrogated could not. And despite the pain, Egwene came to visit Leane in the cell virtually every night.

  “I will see you free, Leane,” Egwene promised, still holding her hand. “Elaida’s tyranny cannot last. I’m confident it won’t be long now.”

  Leane nodded, letting go and standing up. Egwene took hold of the bars and pulled herself to her feet, cringing ever so slightly at the motion. She nodded farewell to Leane, then hesitated, frowning.

  “What is it?” Leane asked.

  Egwene took her hands off of the bars and looked at her palms. They seemed to be coated with a reflective, waxy substance. Frowning, Leane looked at the bars, and was shocked to see Egwene’s handprints on the iron.

  “What in the Light—” Leane said, poking at one of the bars. It bent beneath her finger like warm wax on the lip of a candle’s bowl.

  Suddenly, the stones beneath Leane’s feet shifted, and she felt herself sinking. She cried out. Globs of melted wax starting to rain down from the ceiling, splattering across her face. They weren’t warm, but they were somehow liquid. They had the color of stone!

  She gasped, panicked, stumbling and sliding as her feet sank deeper in the too-slick floor. A hand caught hers; she looked up to where Egwene had grabbed her. The bars melted out of the way as Leane watched, the iron drooping to the sides, then liquefying.

  “Help!” Egwene screamed at the Yellows outside. “Burn you! Stop staring!”

  Leane scrambled for purchase, terrified, trying to pull herself along the bars toward Egwene. She grasped only wax. A lump of bar came loose in her hand, squishing between her fingers, and the floor warped around her, sucking her down.

  And then threads of Air seized her, yanking her free. The room lurched as she was tossed forward into Egwene, knocking the younger woman backward. The two Yellows—white-haired Musarin and short Gelarna—had jumped to their feet, and the glow of saidar surrounded them. Musarin called for help, watching the melting cell with wide eyes.

  Leane righted herself, scrambling off of Egwene, her dress and legs coated with the strange wax, and stumbled back away from the cell. The floor here in the hallway felt stable. Light, how she wished she could embrace the source herself! But she was too full of forkroot, not to mention the shield.

  Egwene climbed to her feet with a hand from Leane. The room fell still, lamp flickering, all of them staring at the cell. The melting had stopped, the bars split, the top halves frozen with drips of steel on their tips, the lower halves bent inward. Many had been flattened to the stones by Leane’s escape. The floor inside the room had bowed inward, like a funnel, the rocks stretching. Those stones bore gashes where Leane’s scrambling had scored them.

  Leane stood, her heart beating, realizing that only seconds had passed. What should they do? Sc
uttle away in fear? Was the rest of the hallway going to melt, too?

  Egwene stepped forward, tapping her toe against one of the bars. It resisted. Leane took a step forward, and her dress crunched, bits of stone—like mortar—falling free. She reached down and brushed at her skirt, and felt rough rock coating it instead of wax.

  “These sorts of events are more frequent,” Egwene said calmly, glancing at the two Yellows. “The Dark One is getting stronger. The Last Battle approaches. What is your Amyrlin doing about it?”

  Musarin glanced at her; the tall, aging Aes Sedai looked deeply disturbed. Leane took Egwene’s lead, forcing herself to be calm as she stepped up beside the Amyrlin, chips of stone falling from her dress.

  “Yes, well,” Musarin said. “You shall return to your rooms, novice. And you . . .” She glanced at Leane, then at the remains of the cell. “We will . . . have to relocate you.”

  “And get me a new dress as well, I assume,” Leane said, folding her arms.

  Musarin’s eyes flickered at Egwene. “Go. This is no longer your business, child. We will care for the prisoner.”

  Egwene gritted her teeth, but then she turned to Leane. “Stay strong,” she said, and hurried away, heading down the hallway.

  Exhausted, disturbed by the stone-warping bubble of evil, Egwene walked with swishing skirts toward the Tower wing that contained the novices’ quarters. What would it take to convince the foolish women that there wasn’t time to spare for squabbling!

  The hour was late, and few women walked the corridors, none of them novices. Egwene passed several servants bustling at late-night duties, their slippered feet falling softly on the floor tiles. These sectors of the Tower were populated enough that lamps burned on the walls, trimmed low, giving an orange light. A hundred different polished tiles reflected the flickering flames, looking like eyes that watched Egwene as she walked.

  It was hard to comprehend that this quiet evening had turned into a trap that nearly killed Leane. If even the ground itself could not be trusted, then what could? Egwene shook her head, too tired, too sore, to think of solutions at the moment. She barely noticed when the floor tiles turned from gray to a deep brown. She just continued on, into the Tower wing, counting the doors she passed. Hers was the seventh . . .

  She froze, frowning at a pair of Brown sisters: Maenadrin—a Saldaean—and Negaine. The two had been speaking in hushed whispers, and they frowned at Egwene as she passed them. Why would they be in the novices’ quarters?

  But wait. The novices’ quarters didn’t have brown floor tiles. This section should have had nondescript gray tiles. And the doors in the hallway were spaced far too widely. This didn’t look at all like the novices’ quarters! Had she been so tired that she’d walked in completely the wrong direction?

  She retraced her steps, passing the two Brown sisters again. She found a window and looked out. The rectangular white expanse of the Tower wing extended around her, just as it should. She wasn’t lost.

  Perplexed, she looked back down the hallway. Maenadrin had folded her arms, regarding Egwene with a set of dark eyes. Negaine, tall and spindly, stalked up to Egwene. “What business have you here this time of night, child?” she demanded. “Did a sister send for you? You should be back in your room for sleep.”

  Wordlessly, Egwene pointed out the window. Negaine glanced out, frowning. She froze, gasping softly. She looked back in at the hallway, then back out, as if unable to believe where she was.

  In minutes, the entire Tower was in a frenzy. Egwene, forgotten, stood at the side of a hallway with a cluster of bleary-eyed novices as sisters argued with one another in tense voices, trying to determine what to do. It appeared that two sections of the Tower had been swapped, and the slumbering Brown sisters had been moved from their sections on the upper levels down into the wing. The novices’ rooms—intact—had been placed where the section of Brown sisters had been. Nobody remembered any motion or vibration when the swap happened, and the transfer appeared seamless. A line of floor tiles had been split right down the middle, then melded with tiles from the section that had shifted.

  It’s getting worse and worse, Egwene thought as the Brown sisters decided—for now—that they would have to accept the switch. They couldn’t very well move sisters into rooms the size that novices used.

  That would leave the Browns divided, half in the wing, half in their old location—with a clump of novices in the middle of them. A division aptly representative of the less-visible divisions the Ajahs were suffering.

  Eventually, exhausted, Egwene and the others were sent off to sleep—though now she had to trudge up many flights of stairs before reaching her bed.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Plan for Arad Doman

  “A storm is coming,” Nynaeve said, looking out the window of the manor.

  “Yes,” replied Daigian from her chair by the hearth without bothering to glance at the window. “I think you might be right, dear. I swear, it seems as if it has been overcast for weeks!”

  “It has been a single week,” Nynaeve said, holding her long, dark braid in one hand. She glanced at the other woman. “I haven’t seen a patch of clear sky in over ten days.”

  Daigian frowned. Of the White Ajah, she was plump and curvaceous. She wore a small stone on her forehead as Moiraine had so long ago, though Daigian’s was an appropriately white moonstone. The tradition apparently had something to do with being a Cairhien noblewoman, as did the four colored slashes the woman wore on her dress.

  “Ten days, you say?” Daigian said. “Are you certain?”

  Nynaeve was. She paid attention to the weather; that was one of the duties of a village Wisdom. She was Aes Sedai now, but that didn’t mean she stopped being who she was. The weather was always there, in the back of her mind. She could sense the rain, sun, or snow in the wind’s whispers.

  Lately, however, the sensations hadn’t been like whispers at all. More like distant shouts, growing louder. Or like waves crashing against one another, still far to the north, yet harder and harder to ignore.

  “Well,” Daigian said, “I’m certain this isn’t the only time in history that it has been cloudy for ten days!”

  Nynaeve shook her head, tugging on her braid. “It’s not normal,” she said. “And those overcast skies aren’t the storm I’m talking about. It’s still distant, but it’s coming. And it is going to be terrible. Worse than any I’ve ever seen. Far worse.”

  “Well, then,” Daigian said, sounding slightly uncomfortable, “we will deal with it when it arrives. Are you going to sit down so that we can continue?”

  Nynaeve glanced at the plump Aes Sedai. Daigian was extremely weak in the Power. The White might just be the weakest Aes Sedai that Nynaeve had ever met. By traditional—yet unspoken—rules, that meant that Nynaeve should be allowed to take the lead.

  Unfortunately, Nynaeve’s position was still questionable. Egwene had raised her to the shawl by decree, just as she’d raised Elayne: there had been no testing, nor had Nynaeve sworn on the Oath Rod. To most—even those who accepted Egwene’s place as the true Amyrlin—those omissions made Nynaeve something less than Aes Sedai. Not an Accepted, but hardly equal to a sister.

  The sisters with Cadsuane were particularly bad, as they hadn’t declared for either the White Tower or the rebels. And the sisters sworn to Rand were worse; most were still loyal to the White Tower, not seeing a problem with supporting both Elaida and Rand. Nynaeve still wondered what Rand had been thinking, allowing sisters to swear fealty to him. She’d explained his mistake to him on several occasions—quite rationally—but talking to Rand these days was like talking to a stone. Only less effective and infinitely more infuriating.

  Daigian was still waiting for her to sit. Rather than provoke a contest of wills, Nynaeve did so. Daigian was still suffering from having lost her Warder—Eben, an Asha’man—during the fight with the Forsaken. Nynaeve had spent that fight completely absorbed by providing Rand with immense amounts of saidar to weave.

>   Nynaeve could still remember the sheer joy—the awesome euphoria, strength, and sheer feel of life—that had come from drawing that much power. It frightened her. She was glad the ter’angreal she’d used to touch that power had been destroyed.

  But the male ter’angreal was still intact: an access key to a powerful sa’angreal. As far as Nynaeve knew, Rand had not been able to persuade Cadsuane to return it to him. As well she shouldn’t. No human being, not even the Dragon Reborn, should channel that much of the One Power. The things one could be tempted to do. . . .

  She’d told Rand that he needed to forget about the access key. Like talking to a stone. A big, red-haired, iron-faced idiot of a stone. Nynaeve harrumphed to herself. That caused Daigian to raise an eyebrow. The woman was quite good at controlling her grief, though Nynaeve—whose room in the Domani mansion was beside Daigian’s—heard the woman crying to herself at night. It was not easy to lose one’s Warder.

  Lan. . . .

  No, best not to think of him at the moment. Lan would be fine. Only at the end of his journey of thousands of miles would he be in danger. It was there he intended to throw himself at the Shadow like a lone arrow loosed at a brick wall . . .

  No! she thought to herself. He will not be alone. I saw to that.

  “Very well,” Nynaeve said, forcing herself to focus, “let us continue.” She showed no deference to Daigian. She was doing this woman a favor, distracting her from her grief. That was how Corele had explained it, anyway. It wasn’t, certainly, for Nynaeve’s benefit that they met. She had nothing to prove. She was Aes Sedai, no matter what the others thought or implied.

  This was all just a ruse to help Daigian. That was it. Nothing else.

  “Here is the eighty-first weave,” the White said. The glow of saidar sprang up around her, and she channeled, crafting a very complex weave of Fire, Air and Spirit. Complex, but useless. The weave created three burning rings of fire in the air which glowed with unusual light, but what was the point of that? Nynaeve already knew how to make fireballs and balls of light; why waste time learning weaves that repeated what she already knew, only in a far more complicated way? And why did each ring have to be a slightly different color?