The Wheel of Time

by Robert Jordan

  Mat spun. The pedestals were now occupied by Eelfinn, four males, four females. All eight wore white instead of black—white skirts with straps across the chests for the males and blouses for the females, made from that disturbing pale substance that looked like skin.

  “Mark your tongues,” Mat said to Thom and Noal, trying to contain his worry. “Speak amiss, and they’ll have you strung up, claiming it was your own desire. Ask nothing of them.”

  The other two fell silent, Thom holding Moiraine close, Noal carrying his torch and staff warily, pack over his shoulder.

  “This is the great hall,” Mat said to the Eelfinn. “The place called the Chamber of Bonds. You must abide by the pacts you make here.”

  “The bargain has been arranged,” one of the Eelfinn males said, smiling, showing pointed teeth.

  The other Eelfinn leaned in, breathing deeply, as if smelling something. Or…as if drawing something from Mat and the others. Birgitte had said that they fed off emotion.

  “What bargain?” Mat snapped, glancing around at the pedestals. “Burn you, what bargain?”

  “A price must be paid,” one said.

  “The demands must be met,” said another.

  “A sacrifice must be given.” This from one of the females. She smiled more broadly than the others. Her teeth were pointed, too.

  “I want the way out restored as part of the bargain,” Mat said. “I want it back where it was and open again. And I’m not bloody done negotiating, so don’t assume that this is my only request, burn you.”

  “It will be restored,” an Eelfinn said. The others leaned forward. They could sense his desperation. Several of them seemed dissatisfied. They didn’t expect us to make it here, Mat thought. They don’t like to risk losing us.

  “I want you to leave that way out open until we get through,” Mat continued. “No blocking it up or making it bloody vanish when we arrive. And I want the way to be direct, no changing rooms about. A straight pathway. And you bloody foxes can’t knock us unconscious or try to kill us or anything like that.”

  They did not like that. Mat caught several of them frowning. Good. They would see they were not negotiating with a child.

  “We take her,” Mat said. “We get out.”

  “These demands are expensive,” one of the Eelfinn said. “What will you pay for these boons?”

  “The price has been set,” another whispered from behind.

  And it had been. Somehow, Mat knew. A part of him had known from the first time he had read that note. If he had never spoken to the Aelfinn that first time, would any of this have happened? Likely, he would have died. They had to tell the truth.

  They had warned him of a payment to come. For life. For Moiraine. And he would have to pay it. In that moment, he knew that he would. For he knew that if he did not, the cost would be too great. Not just to Thom, not just to Moiraine, and not just to Mat himself. By what he’d been told, the fate of the world itself depended on this moment.

  Well burn me for a fool, Mat thought. Maybe I am a hero after all. Didn’t that beat all?

  “I’ll pay it,” Mat announced. “Half the light of the world.” To save the world.

  “Done!” one of the male Eelfinn announced.

  The eight creatures leaped—as if one—from their pedestals. They enclosed him in a tightening circle, like a noose. Quick, supple and predatory.

  “Mat!” Thom cried, struggling to hold the unconscious Moiraine while reaching for one of his knives.

  Mat held up a hand toward Thom and Noal. “This must be done,” he said, taking a few steps away from his friends. The Eelfinn passed them without sparing a glance. The gold studs on the straps crossing the male Eelfinn’s chests glittered in the yellow light. All eight creatures were smiling wide.

  Noal raised his sword.

  “No!” Mat yelled. “Don’t break this agreement. If you do, we all will die here!”

  The Eelfinn stepped up in a tight circle around Mat. He tried to look at them all at once, heart thudding louder and louder in his chest. They were sniffing at him again, drawing in deep breaths, enjoying whatever it was they drew from him.

  “Do it, burn you,” Mat growled. “But know this is the last you’ll get of me. I’ll escape your tower, and I’ll find a way to free my mind from you forever. You won’t have me. Matrim Cauthon is not your bloody puppet.”

  “We shall see,” an Eelfinn male growled, eyes lustful. The creature’s hand snapped forward, too-sharp nails glittering in the dim light. He drove them directly into the socket around Mat’s left eye, then ripped the eye out with a snap.

  Mat screamed. Light, but it hurt! More than any wound taken in battle, more than any insult or barb. It was as if the creature had pressed its deceitful claws into his mind and soul.

  Mat fell to his knees, spear clattering to the ground as he raised hands to his face. He felt slickness on his cheek, and he screamed again as his fingers felt the empty hole where his eye had been.

  He threw his head back and yelled into the room, bellowing in agony.

  Eelfinn watched with their horrid, almost-human faces, eyes narrowed in ecstasy as they fed on something rising from Mat. An almost invisible vapor of red and white.

  “The savor!” one Eelfinn exclaimed.

  “So long!” cried another.

  “How it twists around him!” said the one who had taken his eye. “How it spins! Scents of blood in the air! And the gambler becomes the center of all! I can taste fate itself!”

  Mat howled, his hat falling back as he looked through a single, tear-muddled eye toward the darkness above. His eye socket seemed to be on fire! Blazing! He felt the blood and sera dry on his face, then flake away as he screamed. The Eelfinn drew in deeper breaths, looking drunk.

  Mat let out one final scream. Then he clenched his fists and shut his jaw, though he could not stop a low groan—a growl of anger and pain—from sounding deep within his throat. One of the Eelfinn males collapsed, as if overwhelmed. He was the one who had taken Mat’s eye. He clutched it in his hands, curling around it. The others stumbled away, finding their way to pillars or the sides of the room, resting against them for support.

  Noal dashed to Mat’s side, Thom following more carefully, still cradling Moiraine.

  “Mat?” Noal asked.

  Teeth still clenched against the pain, Mat forced himself to reach back and snatch his hat off the white floor. He was not leaving his hat, burn him. It was a bloody good hat.

  He stumbled to his feet.

  “Your eye, Mat…” Thom said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Mat said. Burn me for a fool. A bloody, goat-headed fool. He could barely think through the agony.

  His other eye blinked tears of pain. It really did seem he had lost half of the light of the world. It was like looking through a window with one half blackened. Despite the blazing pain in his left socket, he felt as he should be able to open his eye.

  But he could not. It was gone. And no Aes Sedai channeling could replace that.

  He pulled on his hat, defiantly ignoring the pain. He pulled the brim down on the left, shading the empty socket, then bent down and picked up his ashandarei, stumbling but managing it.

  “I should have been the one to pay,” Thom said, voice bitter. “Not you, Mat. You didn’t even want to come.”

  “It was my choice,” Mat said. “And I had to do it, anyway. It’s one of the answers I was told by the Aelfinn when I first came. I’d have to give up half the light of the world to save the world. Bloody snakes.”

  “To save the world?” Thom asked, looking down at Moiraine’s peaceful face, her body wrapped in the patchwork cloak. He had left his pack on the floor.

  “She has something yet to do,” Mat said. The pain was retreating somewhat. “We need her, Thom. Burn me, but it’s probably something to do with Rand. Anyway, this had to happen.”

  “And if it hadn’t?” Thom asked. “She said she saw…”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Mat said,
turning toward the doorway. The Eelfinn were still overwhelmed. One would think they had been the ones to lose an eye, looking at those expressions! Mat set his pack on his shoulder, leaving Thom’s where it sat. He could not carry two, not and be able to fight.

  “Now I’ve seen something,” Noal said, looking over the room and its occupants. “Something no man has ever seen, I warrant. Should we kill them?”

  Mat shook his head. “Might break our bargain.”

  “Will they keep it?” Thom asked.

  “Not if they can wiggle out of it,” Mat said, then winced again. Light, but his head hurt! Well, he could not sit around and cry like he had lost his favorite foal. “Let’s go.”

  They made their way out of the grand hall. Noal carried a torch, though he had reluctantly left his staff behind, favoring his shortsword.

  There were no openings in the hallway this time, and Mat heard Noal muttering at that. It felt right. He had demanded a straight pathway back. The Eelfinn were liars and cheats, but they seemed to be liars and cheats like the Aes Sedai. Mat had made his demands carefully this time, rather than spouting out whatever occurred to him.

  The hallway went on for a long while. Noal was growing more and more nervous; Mat kept on forward, footsteps in time with his throbbing skull. How would missing an eye change how he fought? He would have to be more careful of that left side. And he would have trouble judging distance now. In fact, he had that trouble now—walls and floor were disturbingly hard to judge.

  Thom clutched Moiraine close to his chest, like a miser holding his gold. What was she to him, anyway? Mat had assumed that Thom was along for the same reason that Mat was—because it felt as if it needed to be done. That tenderness in Thom’s face was not what Mat had expected to see.

  The hallway ended abruptly in a five-sided arch. The room beyond appeared to be the one with the melted slag on the floor. No signs of the fight before were visible, no blood on the floor.

  Mat took a deep breath and led the way through. He tensed as he saw Eelfinn here, crouching or standing in the shadows, hissing and growling. They did not move, did not strike, though some yipped quietly. Shadows made them seem even more like foxes. If Mat looked right at one, he could almost mistake them for ordinary men and women, but the way they moved in darkness, sometimes on all fours…No man walked like that, with the anxious tension of a chained predator. Like an angry hound, separated from you by a fence and fiercely eager to get to your throat.

  But they held to their bargain. None attacked, and Mat began to feel right good about himself once they reached the other side of the room. He had beaten them. Last time, they had gotten the better end, but that was only because they had fought like cowards, punching a man who did not know the fight had started.

  This time he had been ready. He had shown them that Matrim Cauthon was no fool.

  They entered a corridor with the faintly glowing white steam at the top. The floor was of those black, interlocking triangles, curved on the sides like scales. Mat began to breathe easier as they entered one of the rooms with the twisting steam rising from the corners, though his eye socket still hurt like the nethers of a freshly gelded stallion.

  He stopped in the center of the room, but then continued forward. He had demanded a straight pathway. That was what he would get. No doubling back and forth this time. “Blood and bloody ashes!” Mat said, realizing something as he walked.

  “What?” Thom asked, looking up from Moiraine with alarm.

  “My dice,” Mat said. “I should have included getting my dice back in the bargain.”

  “But we discovered you don’t need them to guide us.”

  “It’s not about that,” Mat grumbled. “I like those dice.” He pulled his hat down again, looking down the hallway ahead. Was that motion he saw? All the way in the distance, a good dozen rooms away? No, it must be a trick of the shadows and the shifting steam.

  “Mat,” Noal said. “I’ve mentioned that my Old Tongue isn’t what it once was. But I think I understood what you said. The bargain you made.”

  “Yes?” Mat said, only half-listening. Had he been speaking in the Old Tongue again? Burn him. And what was that down the hallway?

  “Well,” Noal said, “you said—as part of the bargain—something like ‘you foxes can’t knock us down or try to kill us or anything.’ ”

  “Sure did,” Mat said.

  “You said foxes, Mat,” Noal said. “The foxes can’t hurt us.”

  “And they let us pass.”

  “But what about the others?” Noal asked. “The Aelfinn? If the Eelfinn can’t hurt us, are the Aelfinn required to leave us be as well?”

  The shadows in the far-distant corridor resolved into figures carrying long, sinuous bronze swords with curving blades. Tall figures, wearing layers of yellow cloth, the hair on their heads straight and black. Dozens of them, who moved with an unnatural grace, eyes staring forward. Eyes with pupils that were vertical slits.

  Bloody and bloody ashes!

  “Run!” Mat yelled.

  “Which direction?” Noal asked, alarmed.

  “Any direction!” Mat yelled. “So long as it’s away from them!”

  Chapter 55

  The One Left Behind

  A loud boom shook the hallways, making the entire structure rumble. Mat stumbled, leaning against the wall for support as smoke and chips of rock sprayed out of the opening behind them.

  He ducked his head around and looked down the hallway as Thom and Noal ran onward, Thom clutching Moiraine. Noal had tossed his torch aside and gotten out a drum to try to soothe the Aelfinn. That had not worked, and so Mat had turned to the exploding cylinders and nightflowers.

  Light, but the cylinders were deadly! He saw corpses of Aelfinn lying scattered through the hallway, their glistening skin ripped and torn, evillooking smoke steaming from their blood. Others slid out of doorways and alcoves, pushing through the smoke. They walked on two legs, but they seemed to slither as they walked, waving back and forth through the hallway, their hissing growing angrier and angrier.

  Heart pounding, Mat charged after Thom and Noal. “They still following?” Noal called.

  “What do you think?” Mat said, catching up to the other two. “Light, but those snakes are fast!”

  Mat and the other two burst into another room, identical to all of the others. Vaguely off-scale square walls, steam rising from the corners, black triangle-pattern floor tiles. There was no triangular opening at the center to get them out. Blood and bloody ashes.

  Mat glanced at the three ways out, holding his ashandarei in sweaty hands. They could not do the same trick as before, bouncing back and forth between the same two rooms. Not with the Aelfinn behind them. He needed to invoke his luck. He prepared to spin, and—

  “We have to keep moving!” Noal yelled. He had stopped by the doorway, dancing from one toe to the next in anxiety. “Mat! If those snakes catch us…”

  Mat could hear them behind, hissing. Like the rush of a river. He picked a direction and ran.

  “Throw another cylinder!” Thom said.

  “That was the last one!” Mat said. “And we’ve only got three nightflowers.” His pack was feeling light.

  “Music doesn’t work on them,” Noal said, throwing aside his drum. “They’re too angry.”

  Mat cursed and lit a nightflower with a striker, then tossed it over his shoulder. The three of them barreled into another room, then continued on directly through the doorway on the other side.

  “I don’t know what way to go, lad,” Thom said. He sounded so winded! “We’re lost.”

  “I’ve been picking directions at random!” Mat said.

  “Only you can’t go backward,” Thom said. “That’s probably the direction the luck wants us to go!”

  The nightflower boomed, the explosion echoing through the corridors. It was not nearly as great as that of the cylinders. Mat risked a glance over his shoulder, seeing smoke and sparks fly through the tunnel. The fire slowed the Ael
finn, but soon the more daring members of the band slithered through the smoke.

  “Maybe we can negotiate!” Thom panted.

  “They look too angry!” Noal said.

  “Mat,” Thom said, “you mentioned that they knew about your eye. They answered a question about it.”

  “They told me I’d bloody give up half the light of the world,” Mat said, skull still throbbing. “I didn’t want to know, but they told me anyway.”

  “What else did they say?” Thom asked. “Anything that can be a clue? How did you get out last time?”

  “They threw me out,” Mat said.

  He and the others burst into another room—no doorway—then dashed out the left-hand exit. What Thom had said before was correct. They probably needed to double back. But they could not, not with that nest of vipers following so closely!

  “They threw me out of the doorframe in the Aelfinn realm,” Mat said, feeling winded. “It leads to the basement of the Stone of Tear.”

  “Then maybe we can find that!” Thom said. “Your luck, Mat. Have it take us to the Aelfinn realm.”

  It might work. “All right,” he said, closing his eye and spinning about.

  Mat pointed in a direction and opened his eye. He was pointing directly toward the gang of Aelfinn, weaving up the corridor toward them.

  “Bloody ashes!” Mat cursed, turning and running away from them, picking another corridor at random.

  Thom joined him, but was looking very wearied. Mat could take Moiraine from him for a while, but Thom would be so tired he would not be able to fight. The Aelfinn were going to run them ragged, as they had Birgitte centuries ago.

  In the next room, Thom stumbled to a halt, drooping, though he still held Moiraine. Like all of the chambers, this one had four ways out. But the only way that mattered was one directly toward the Aelfinn. The one they couldn’t take.

  “There’s no winning this game,” Thom said, panting. “Even if we cheat, there’s no winning.”

  “Thom…” Mat said urgently. He handed Thom his ashandarei, then picked up Moiraine. She was so light. A good thing, too, otherwise Thom would never have lasted as long as he had.