Crossroads of Twilight

by Jordan, Robert

  “Yes. No. Burn me, I liked her!” Turning away, he scrubbed fingers through his hair, pushing the cap off. He had never been so glad to get away from a woman in his life, but this . . . ! “And I left her tied up and gagged so she couldn’t even call for help, easy prey for the gholam,” he said bitterly. “It was looking for me. Don’t shake your head. Thom. You know it as well as I do.”

  “What is a . . . gholam?” Tuon asked.

  “Shadowspawn, my Lady,” Thom said. He frowned worriedly. He did not take easily to worry, but anybody except a fool would worry about a gholam. “It looks like a man, but it can slip through a mousehole, or under a door, and it’s strong enough to . . .” He harrumphed through his mustaches. “Well, enough of that. Mat, she could have had a hundred guards around her, and it wouldn’t have stopped that thing.” She would not have needed a hundred guards if she had not taken up with Mat Cauthon.

  “A gholam,” Tuon murmured wryly. Suddenly she rapped Mat hard on the top of the head with her knuckles. Clapping a hand to his scalp, he stared over his shoulder incredulously. “I’m very happy that you show loyalty to Tylin, Toy,” she told him in a severe voice, “but I won’t have superstition in you. I will not have it. It does Tylin no honor.” Burn him, Tylin’s death seemed to concern her as little as whether or not Suroth committed suicide. What kind of woman was he going to marry?

  When a fist pounded on the door this time, he did not even bother to stand. He felt numb at the core and scraped raw on the surface. Blaeric pushed into the wagon without asking, his dark brown cloak dripping rain. It was an old cloak, worn thin in spots, but he appeared not to care whether rain leaked through. The Warder ignored everyone but Mat, or almost everyone. The man actually took a moment to consider Selucia’s bosom! “Joline wants you, Cauthon,” he said, still studying her. Light! This was all Mat needed to make it a fine day.

  “Who is Joline?” Tuon demanded.

  Mat ignored her. “Tell Joline I’ll see her once we’re on the road, Blaeric.” The last thing he wanted was to be forced to listen to more of the Aes Sedai’s grievances now.

  “She wants you now, Cauthon.”

  With a sigh, Mat got to his feet and gathered his cap from the floor. Blaeric looked as if he might try to drag him, otherwise. In his own current mood, he thought he might put a knife in the man if he tried. And get his neck broken for his pains; a Warder would not take a knife in the ribs lightly. He was fairly sure he had already died the one time he was allowed, and not in an old memory. Sure enough not to take risks he could sidestep.

  “Who is Joline, Toy?” If he had not known better, he would have said Tuon sounded jealous.

  “A bloody Aes Sedai,” he grumbled, tugging the cap on, and got one small pleasure for the day. Tuon’s jaw dropped in shock. He shut the door behind him on the way out before she could find a word to say. A very small pleasure. One butterfly on a midden heap. Tylin dead, and the Windfinders might take the blame yet, whatever Thom said. And that was aside from Tuon and the bloody dice. A very tiny butterfly on a very large midden.

  The sky was full of dark clouds, now, and the downpour steady. A soaking rain, they would have called it back home. It began to slick his hair, cap or no, and seep through his coat as soon as he stepped outside. Blaeric hardly seemed to notice, barely gathering his cloak. There was nothing for it but for Mat to hunch his shoulders and splash through the widening puddles on the dirt streets. By the time he could reach his wagon for a cloak, he would be drenched to the skin anyway. Besides, the weather fit his spirits.

  To his surprise, rain or no rain, an incredible amount of work had been done in the short time he was inside. The canvas wall was gone as far as he could see in either direction, and half the storage wagons that had been around Tuon’s wagon were missing, too. So were most of the animals that had been picketed on the horselines. A large, iron-barred cage containing a black-maned lion trundled past toward the road behind a plodding team, the horses as unconcerned with the apparently sleeping lion behind them as they were with the shower. Performers were already taking to the road, too, though how they determined the order of leaving was a mystery. Most of the tents seemed to have vanished; in one place three of the brightly colored wagons together might be missing, another place every second wagon, while elsewhere the wagons standing and waiting still seemed a solid mass. The only thing that said the showfolk were not scattering was Luca himself, a bright red cloak gathered around him against the wet as he paraded along the street, stopping now and then to clap a man on the shoulder or murmur something to a woman that made her laugh. If the show had been breaking apart, Luca would have been out chasing down those who tried to leave. He held the show together as much by persuasion as anything else, and he never let anyone leave without talking himself hoarse trying to argue them out of it. Mat knew he should feel good about seeing Luca still there, though it had never occurred to him that the man would run out on the gold, but right at that moment, he doubted that anything could make him feel anything but numb and angry.

  The wagon that Blaeric took him to was almost as large as Luca’s, but it had been whitewashed rather than painted. The white had long since run and streaked and faded, and the rain was washing it a little more toward gray, where the wood was not already bare. The wagon belonged to a company of fools, four morose men who painted their faces for the show’s patrons, dousing each other with water and hitting each other with inflated pig-bladders, and otherwise spent their time and money imbibing as much wine as they could buy. With what Mat had paid for rent, they might be drunk for months, and it had cost more than that to make anyone take them in.

  Four shaggy, nondescript horses were already hitched to the wagon, and Fen Mizar, Joline’s other Warder, was up on the driver’s seat, swathed in an old gray cloak and reins in hand. His tilted eyes watched Mat the way a wolf might watch an impudent cur. The Warders had been unhappy with Mat’s plan from the start, sure they could have gotten the sisters away safely once they were outside the city walls. Perhaps they could have, but the Seanchan hunted vigorously for women who could channel—the show itself apparently had been searched four times in the days after Ebou Dar fell—and all it would have taken was one slip to land all of them in the stewpot. From what Egeanin and Domon said, the Seekers could make a boulder tell everything it had ever seen. Luckily, not all the sisters were as sure as Joline’s Warders. Aes Sedai tended to dither when they could not agree on what to do.

  When Mat reached the steps at the back of the wagon, Blaeric stopped him with a hand to his chest. The Warder’s face might have been carved, no more concerned than a piece of wood with the rain running down his cheeks. “Fen and I are grateful to you for getting her out of the city, Cauthon, but this can’t continue. The sisters are crowded, sharing with those other women, and they don’t get on. There is going to be trouble if we can’t find another wagon.”

  “Is that what this is about?” Mat said crossly, tugging his collar tighter. Not that it did much good. He was already wet through on the back, and not much better in front. If Joline had pulled him here to whine about the accommodations again . . .

  “She’ll tell you what it’s about, Cauthon. Just you remember what I said.”

  Grumbling under his breath, Mat climbed the dirt-streaked steps and went in, not quite slamming the door behind him.

  The wagon was laid out much like the one Tuon was in, though with four beds, two of them folded flat against the walls above the other two. He had no idea how the six women arranged sleeping, but he suspected it was not done peacefully. The air in the wagon all but crackled like grease on a griddle. Three women sat on each of the lower beds, each variously watching or ignoring the women seated on the other bed. Joline, who had never been held as damane, behaved as though the three sul’dam did not exist. Reading a small wood-bound book, she was an Aes Sedai to the inch and arrogance on a stick despite her well-worn blue dress, lately owned by a woman who taught the lions to do tricks. The other two sisters knew fir
sthand what it was to be damane, though. Edesina watched the three sul’dam warily, one hand resting near her belt knife, while Teslyn’s eyes shifted constantly, looking at anything except the sul’dam, and her hands kneaded her dark woolen skirts. He did not know how Egeanin had coerced the three sul’dam into helping damane escape, but even though they were being sought by the authorities as surely as Egeanin, they had not changed their attitudes toward women who could channel. Bethamin, tall and as dark as Tuon in an Ebou Dari dress with a very deep neckline and skirts sewn up above her knee on one side to show faded red petticoats, seemed a mother waiting for inevitable misbehavior by children, while yellow-haired Seta, in high-necked gray wool that covered her completely, appeared to be studying dangerous dogs that would need to be caged sooner or later. Renna, she of the talk about cutting off hands and feet, pretended to be reading, too, but every so often her deceptively mild brown eyes rose from the slim volume to study the Aes Sedai, and when they did, she smiled in an unpleasant way. Mat felt like cursing before one of them opened her mouth. A wise man kept clear when women were at odds, especially if there were Aes Sedai among them, but this was how it always was when he came to this wagon.

  “This better be important, Joline.” Unbuttoning his coat, he tried to shake some of the water off. He thought he would do better wringing the garment out. “I just learned that the gholam killed Tylin the night we left, and I’m in no mood for complaints.”

  Joline marked her place carefully with an embroidered marker and folded her hands on the book before speaking. Aes Sedai never hurried; they just expected everyone else to. Without him, she likely would have been wearing an a’dam by now herself, but he had never found Aes Sedai particularly noted for gratitude, either. She ignored what he had said about Tylin. “Blaeric tells me the show has already begun moving,” she said coolly, “but you must stop it. Luca will only listen to you.” Her mouth tightened slightly on the words. Aes Sedai also were unused to not being listened to, and Greens were not the best at hiding their displeasure. “We must abandon the idea of Lugard for the time being. We must take the ferry across the harbor and go to Illian.”

  That was about as bad a suggestion as he had heard out of her, though she did not mean it for a suggestion, of course; she was worse than Egeanin that way. With half the show already on the road, or near enough, it would take all day just to get everyone down to the ferry landing, and it would mean going into the city, besides. Heading for Lugard took the show away from the Seanchan as quickly as possible, while they had soldiers camped all the way to the Illian border and maybe beyond. Egeanin was reluctant to tell what she knew, but Thom had his ways of learning these things. Mat did not bother to crack his teeth, though. He did not need to.

  “No,” Teslyn said in a tight voice, her Illianer accent strong. Leaning past Edesina, she looked as though she chewed rocks three meals a day, hard-faced and set-jawed, but there was a nervousness in her eyes, put there by her weeks as a damane. “No, Joline. I have told you, we do no dare risk it! We do no dare!”

  “Light!” Joline spat, slamming her book to the floor. “Take hold of yourself, Teslyn! Just because you were held prisoner for a little time is no reason to go to pieces!”

  “Go to pieces? Go to pieces? Let them put that collar on you and then speak of going to pieces!” Teslyn’s hand went to her throat as though she felt the a’dam’s collar still. “Help me convince her, Edesina. She will have us collared again, if we do let her!”

  Edesina drew back on herself against the wall behind the bed—a slim, handsome woman with black hair spilling to her waist, she always went silent when the Red and the Green argued, as they did often—but Joline did not spare her so much as a glance. “You ask a rebel for help, Teslyn? We should have left her for the Seanchan! Listen to me. You can feel it as well as I. Would you really accept a greater danger to avoid a lesser?”

  “Lesser!” Teslyn snarled. “You do know nothing of—!”

  Renna held her book out at arm’s length and let it drop to the floor with a bang. “If my Lord will excuse us a little while, we still have our a’dam, and we can teach these girls to behave again in short order.” Her accent had a musical quality, but the smile on her lips never touched her brown eyes. “It never works to let them go slack this way.” Seta nodded grimly and stood as if to fetch out the leashes.

  “I think we’re done with a’dam,” Bethamin said, ignoring the shocked looks from the other two sul’dam, “but there are other ways to settle these girls down. May I suggest my Lord return in an hour? They’ll tell you what you want to know without any squabbling once they can’t sit down.” She sounded as though she meant exactly what she said. Joline was staring at the three sul’dam in outraged disbelief, but Edesina was sitting up straight, gripping her belt knife with a determined expression, while Teslyn was now the one shrinking back against the wall, her hands clasped tightly at her waist.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Mat said after a moment. Only a moment. However satisfying it might be to have Joline “settled down,” Edesina might draw that knife, and that would set the cat among the chickens no matter how it turned out. “What greater danger are you talking about, Joline? Joline? What danger is greater than the Seanchan right now?”

  The Green decided her stare was making no impression on Bethamin and turned it on Mat, instead. Had she been other than Aes Sedai, he would have said she looked sulky. Joline disliked explaining. “If you must know, someone is channeling.” Teslyn and Edesina nodded, the Red sister reluctantly, the Yellow emphatically.

  “In the camp?” he said in alarm. His right hand rose on its own to press against the silver foxhead under his shirt, but the medallion had not turned cold.

  “Far away,” Joline replied, still unwilling. “To the north.”

  “Much farther than any of us should be able to sense channeling,” Edesina put in, a touch of fear in her voice. “The amount of saidar being wielded must be immense, inconceivable.” She fell silent at a sharp glance from Joline, who turned back to study Mat as though deciding how much she had to tell him.

  “At that distance,” she went on, “we wouldn’t be able to feel every sister in the Tower channeling. It has to be the Forsaken, and whatever they’re doing, we do not want to be any closer than we can avoid.”

  Mat was still for a moment; then finally, he said, “If it’s far, then we stick with the plan.”

  Joline went on arguing, but he did not bother to listen. Whenever he thought of Rand or Perrin, colors swirled in his head. A part of being ta’veren, he supposed. This time, he had not thought of either of his friends, but the colors had suddenly been there, a fan of a thousand rainbows. This time, they had almost formed an image, a vague impression that might have been a man and a woman seated on the ground facing one another. It was gone in an instant, but he knew as surely as he knew his name. Not the Forsaken. Rand. And he could not help wondering, what had Rand been doing when the dice stopped?

  CHAPTER

  4

  The Tale of a Doll

  Furyk Karede sat staring at his writing table without seeing the papers and maps spread out in front of him. Both of his oil lamps were lit and sitting on the table, but he no longer had need of them. The sun must be rimming the horizon, yet since waking from a fitful sleep and saying his devotions to the Empress, might she live forever, he had only donned his robe, in the dark Imperial green that some insisted on calling black, and sat here without moving since. He had not even shaved. The rain had stopped, and he considered telling his servant Ajimbura to swing a window open for a little fresh air in his room at The Wandering Woman. Clean air might clear his head. But over the last five days there had been lulls in the rain that ended with sudden drenching downpours, and his bed was located between the windows. He had needed to have his mattress and bedding hung in the kitchen to dry once already.

  A tiny squeal and a pleased grunt from Ajimbura made him look up to find the wiry little man displaying a limp rat half the size
of a cat on the end of his long knife. It was not the first Ajimbura had killed in this room recently, something Karede believed would not have happened if Setalle Anan still owned the inn, though the number of rats in Ebou Dar seemed to be increasing well in advance of spring. Ajimbura looked a little like a wizened rat himself, his grin both satisfied and feral. After more than three hundred years under the Empire, the Kaensada hill tribes were only half civilized, and less than half tamed. The man wore his white-streaked dark red hair in a thick braid that hung to his waist, to make a good trophy if he ever found his way back to those near-mountains and fell in one of the endless feuds between families or tribes, and he insisted on drinking from a silver-mounted cup that anyone who looked closely could see was the top of someone’s skull.

  “If you are going to eat that,” Karede said as though there were any question, “you will clean it in the stableyard out of anyone’s sight.” Ajimbura would eat anything except for lizards, which were forbidden to his tribe for some reason he would never make clear.

  “But of course, high one,” the man replied with the hunch of his shoulders that passed for a bow among his people. “I know well the ways of the townspeople, and I would not embarrass the high one.” After close to twenty years in Karede’s service, without a reminder he still would have skinned out the rat and roasted it over the flames in the small brick fireplace.

  Scraping the carcass off the blade into a small canvas sack, Ajimbura tucked that into a corner for later and carefully wiped his knife clean before sheathing it and settling on his heels to await Karede’s needs. He would wait like that all day, if necessary, as patiently as a da’covale. Karede had never puzzled out exactly why Ajimbura had left his hill fort home to follow one of the Deathwatch Guard. It was a much more circumscribed life than the man had known before, and besides, Karede had nearly killed him three times before he made that choice.