He had tried to imagine the Shaido camp from Elyas’ description, but the reality dwarfed his imaginings. A thousand paces below lay a mass of low Aiel tents and every other sort of tent, a mass of wagons and carts and people and horses. It spread for well over a mile in every direction from the gray stone walls of a city halfway to the next rise. He knew the sprawl must be the same on the other side. It was not one of the great cities, not like Caemlyn or Tar Valon, less than four hundred paces wide along the side he could see and narrower on the others, it seemed, but still a city with high walls and towers and what looked like a fortress at the northmost end. Yet the Shaido encampment swallowed it whole. Faile was somewhere in that great lake of people.
Fumbling his looking glass from his pocket, he remembered at the last instant to cup one hand for shade on the far end of the tube. The sun was a golden ball almost ahead of him, just shy of halfway to its noonday height. A stray reflection from the lens could ruin everything. Groups of people leapt up in the looking glass, their faces clear, at least to his eye. Long-haired women with dark shawls over their shoulders, draped in dozens of long necklaces, women with fewer necklaces milking goats, women wearing the cadin’sor and sometimes carrying spears and bucklers, women peeking from the deep cowls of heavy white robes as they scurried across snow already trampled halfway to mud. There were men and children, too, but his eye skipped past them hungrily, ignored them. Thousands upon thousands of women, just counting those in white.
“Too many,” Marline whispered, and he lowered the glass to glare at her. The others had joined the Maidens and him, all lying in a row in the snow along the ridgeline. The Two Rivers men were taking pains to keep their bowstrings up out of the snow without raising their bows above the ridgeline. Arganda and Gallenne were using their own looking glasses to study the camp below, and Grady was staring down the slope with his chin propped on his hands, every bit as intent as the two soldiers. Maybe he was using the Power in some way. Marline and Annoura were staring at the camp, too, the Aes Sedai licking her lips and the Wise One frowning. Perrin did not think Marline had intended to speak aloud.
“If you think I’ll walk away just because there are more Shaido than I expected,” he began heatedly, but she broke in, meeting his scowl with a level look.
“Too many Wise Ones, Perrin Aybara. Wherever I look, I can see a woman channeling. Just for a moment here, a moment there—Wise Ones do not channel all the time—but they are everywhere I look. Too many to be the Wise Ones of ten septs.”
He drew a deep breath. “How many do you think there are?”
“I think maybe all the Shaido Wise Ones are down there,” Marline replied, as calm as if she were talking about the price of barley. “All who can channel.”
All of them? That made no sense! How could they all be together here, when the Shaido seemed to be scattered everywhere? At least, he had heard tales of what had to be Shaido raids all across Ghealdan and Amadicia, tales of raids here in Altara long before Faile was taken and rumors from even farther. Why would they all be together? If the Shaido intended to gather here, the whole clan . . . No, he had to deal with what he knew for fact. That was bad enough. “How many?” he asked again, in a reasonable tone.
“Do not growl at me, Perrin Aybara. I cannot say exactly how many Shaido Wise Ones remain alive. Even Wise Ones die from sickness, snakebite, accident. Some died at Dumai’s Wells. We found bodies left behind, and they must have carried away those they could for proper burial. Even Shaido cannot have abandoned all custom. If all who remain alive are below, and the apprentices who can channel, I would say perhaps four hundred. Perhaps more, but fewer than five hundred. There were fewer than five hundred Shaido Wise Ones who could channel before they crossed the Dragonwall, and perhaps fifty apprentices.” Most farmers would have shown more emotion over the barley.
Still staring at the Shaido camp, Annoura made a strangled sound, half a sob. “Five hundred? Light! Half the Tower from one clan? Oh, Light!”
“We could sneak in, in the night,” Dannil murmured from down the row, “the way you sneaked into that Whitecloak camp back home.” Elyas gave a grunt that might have meant anything but did not sound hopeful.
Sulin snorted derisively. “We could not sneak into that camp, not with any real hope of getting out. You would be trussed like a goat for the spit before you passed the first tents.”
Perrin nodded slowly. He had thought of slipping in under cover of darkness and somehow spiriting Faile away. And the others, of course. She would not go without the others. He had never had any real belief that could work, though, not against Aiel, and the size of the camp had quenched the last glimmers. He could wander for days among that many people without finding her.
Abruptly, he realized that he was not having to fight down despair. The anger remained, but it was cold as steel in winter, now, and he could not detect a single drop of the hopelessness that had threatened to drown him before. There were ten thousand algai’d’siswai in that camp, and five hundred women who could channel—Gallenne had the right of it; prepare for the worst, and all your surprises were pleasant ones—five hundred women who would not hesitate to use the Power as a weapon; Faile was hidden like one snowflake in a meadow covered with snow, but when you piled up so much, there just was no point in despair. You had to buckle down or be plowed under. Besides, he could see the puzzle, now. Nat Torfinn had always said any puzzle could be solved, once you found out where to push and where to pull.
To the north and south, the land had been cleared farther from the city than the rise where he lay. Scattered farmhouses, none with smoke rising from its chimney, dotted the landscape, and rail fences marked out fields beneath the snow, but more than a handful of men trying to approach from either direction might as well carry torches and banners and blow trumpets. There seemed to be a road leading roughly south through the farms and another roughly north. Useless to him, probably, but you never could tell. Jondyn might bring back some information about the city, though what good that would do when the city was in the middle of the Shaido, he could not begin to guess. Gaul and the Maidens who were making their way around the camp would be able to tell him what lay beyond the next ridge. A saddle in that ridge had the look of a road heading somewhere east. Oddly, a cluster of windmills stood maybe a mile north of the saddle, long white arms turning slowly, and there appeared to another group of windmills atop the next rise beyond. A row of arches, like a long narrow bridge, stretched down the slope from the nearest windmills all the way to the city walls.
“Does anybody know what that is?” he asked, pointing. Studying it through the looking glass told him nothing except that it seemed made of the same gray stone as the wall. The thing was much too narrow for a bridge. It lacked side walls, and there did not seem to be anything for a bridge to cross.
“It is for bringing water,” Sulin replied. “It runs for five miles, to a lake. I do not know why they did not build their city closer, but most of the land around the lake looks as if it will be mud when the cold goes away.” She no longer stumbled over unfamiliar words like mud, yet a touch of awe remained in “lake,” in the idea of so much water in one place. “You think to stop their water supply? That will surely make them come out.” She understood fighting over water. Most fighting in the Waste started with water. “But I do not think—”
The colors erupted inside Perrin’s head, an explosion of hues so strong that sight and hearing vanished. All sight except for the colors themselves, at least. They were a vast tide, as if all the times he had pushed them out of his head had built a dam that they now smashed aside in a silent flood, swirling in soundless whirlpools that tried to suck him under. An image coalesced in the middle of it, Rand and Nynaeve sitting on the ground facing one another, as clear as if they were right in front of him. He had no time for Rand, not now. Not now! Clawing at the colors like a drowning man clawing for the surface, he—forced—them—out!
Sight and hearing, the world around, crashed in on him.
>
“. . . it’s madness,” Grady was saying in worried tones. “Nobody can handle enough of saidin for me to feel that far off! Nobody!”
“No one can handle that much of saidar, either,” Marline murmured. “But someone is.”
“The Forsaken?” Annoura’s voice shook. “The Forsaken, using some sa’angreal we never suspected. Or . . . or the Dark One himself.”
They were all three peering back to the north and west, and if Marline looked calmer than Annoura or Grady, she smelled as frightened and worried. Except for Elyas, the others were watching those three with the look of men awaiting an announcement that a new Breaking of the World had begun. Elyas’s face was accepting. A wolf would snap at a landslide carrying him to his death, but a wolf knew that death came sooner or later, and you could not fight death.
“It’s Rand,” Perrin muttered thickly. He shuddered as the colors tried to return, but he hammered them down. “His business. He’ll take care of it, whatever it is.” Everyone was staring at him, even Elyas. “I need prisoners, Sulin. They must send out hunting parties. Elyas says they have sentries out a few miles, small groups. Can you get me prisoners?”
“Listen to me carefully,” Annoura said, the words rushing out of her. She rose up out of the snow enough to reach over Marline and seize a fistful of Perrin’s cloak. “Something is happening, perhaps wonderful, perhaps terrible, but in any case momentous, more so than anything in recorded history! We must know what! Grady can take us there, close enough to see. I could take us if I knew the weaves. We must know!”
Meeting her gaze, Perrin raised his hand, and she stopped with her mouth open. Aes Sedai never shut up that easily, yet she did. “I told you what it is. Our work is right down there in front of us. Sulin?”
Sulin’s head swung from him to the Aes Sedai to Marline. Finally, she shrugged. “You will learn little useful even if you put them to the question. They will embrace the pain and laugh at you. And shame will be slow—if these Shaido can still be shamed.”
“Whatever I learn will be more than I know now,” he replied. His work lay in front of him. A puzzle to solve, Faile to free, and the Shaido to destroy. That was all that mattered in the world.
CHAPTER
9
Traps
“And she complained again that the other Wise Ones are timid,” Faile finished in her best meek voice, shifting the tall basket she held balanced on one shoulder, shifting from foot to foot in the muddy snow. The basket was not heavy, though filled with dirty laundry, and the wool of her white robe was thick and warm, with two under-robes beneath, but her soft leather boots, themselves bleached white, gave little protection from the cold slush. “I was told to report what the Wise One Sevanna said exactly,” she added quickly. Someryn was one of the “other” Wise Ones, and her mouth had turned down at the word timid.
With her eyes lowered, that was all Faile could see of Someryn’s face. Gai’shain were required to maintain a humble manner, especially the gai’shain who were not Aiel, and though she looked up through her eyelashes to read Someryn’s expression, the other woman was taller than most men, even Aiel men, a yellow-haired giant who towered over her. Most of what she could see was Someryn’s over-large bosom, plump sun-dark cleavage exposed by a blouse unlaced halfway down her chest and covered mainly by a massive collection of long necklaces, firedrops and emeralds, rubies and opals, three-tiered strands of fat pearls and intricately patterned chains of gold. Most of the Wise Ones seemed to dislike Sevanna, who “spoke for the chief” until a new Shaido clan chief could be chosen, an event unlikely to occur any time soon, and they tried to undercut her authority whenever they were not squabbling among themselves or forming cliques, but many shared Sevanna’s love of wetlander jewelry, and some had even begun wearing finger rings, like Sevanna. On her right hand Someryn wore a large white opal that flashed caverns of red whenever she adjusted her shawl, and a long blue sapphire surrounded by rubies on the left. She had not adopted silk clothing, however. Her blouse was plain white algode, from the Waste, and her skirt and shawl thick wool as dark as the folded scarf that held her waist-long yellow hair back from her face. The cold did not appear to discomfort her in the least.
The two of them stood just beyond what Faile thought of as the border between the Shaido camp and the gai’shain camp—the prisoners’ camp—not that there really were two camps. A few gai’shain slept among the Shaido, but the rest were kept to the center of the camp unless doing their assigned work, cattle fenced off from the lure of freedom by a wall of Shaido. Most of the men and women who passed them wore white gai’shain robes, though few as finely woven as what she wore. With so many to clothe, the Shaido scooped up any sort of white cloth they could find. Some were garbed in layers of coarse linen or toweling or robes of rough tent cloth, and many of the robes were stained with mud or soot. Only now and then did one of the gai’shain show the height and pale eyes of an Aiel. The vast majority were ruddy-faced Amadicians, olive-skinned Altarans, and pale Cairhienin, along with occasional travelers or merchants from Illian or Tarabon or elsewhere who had found themselves in the worst place at the worst time. The Cairhienin were the longest held and most resigned to their situation aside from the handful of Aiel in white, but they all kept their eyes down and moved about their tasks as fast as the trampled mush of snow and mud would allow. Gai’shain were expected to display humility, obedience, and an eagerness to embrace both. Any less resulted in painful reminders.
Faile would very much have liked to hurry on herself. Cold feet were only a small part of it, and eagerness to do Sevanna’s laundry less. Too many eyes could see her standing there in the open with Someryn, and even with her deep cowl hiding her face, the broad mesh belt of shiny golden links around her waist and a close-fitting collar to match marked her as one of Sevanna’s servants. No one called them that—in Aiel eyes, being a servant was demeaning—but that was what they were, the wetlanders at least, just unpaid and with fewer rights and less freedom than any servant Faile had ever heard tell of. Sooner or later Sevanna herself was going to learn that Wise Ones were stopping her gai’shain to question them. Sevanna had well over a hundred servants and kept adding to them, and Faile was certain that every last one was repeating every word they heard Sevanna say to the Wise Ones.
It was a brutally efficient trap. Sevanna was a harsh mistress, in a rather casual way, never snapping, seldom openly angry, but the slightest infraction, the smallest slip in demeanor or behavior, was punished immediately with the switch or the strap, and every night the five gai’shain who had pleased her least that day were chosen out for further punishment, sometimes a night bound and gagged on top of a beating, just to encourage the rest. Faile did not want to think of what the woman would order for a spy. On the other hand, the Wise Ones had made it clear that anyone who did not talk freely of what they heard, anyone who tried to hold back or bargain, faced an uncertain future, possibly ending in a shallow grave. Harming a gai’shain beyond the permitted limits of discipline was a violation of ji’e’toh, the web of honor and obligation that governed the lives of Aiel, but wetlander gai’shain seemed to stand outside a number of the rules.
Sooner or later, one side or the other of that trap would snap shut. All that had held the jaws apart this long was that the Shaido seemed to see their wetlander gai’shain as no different from cart horses or pack animals, though in truth the animals received far better treatment. Now and then a gai’shain tried to run away, but aside from that, one simply gave them food and shelter, put them to work and punished them if they faltered. The Wise Ones no more expected them to disobey, Sevanna no more expected them to spy on her, than they expected a cart horse to sing. Sooner or later, though . . . And that was not the only trap Faile was caught in.
“Wise One, I have nothing more to tell,” she murmured when Someryn said nothing. Unless you were addled in the head, you did not just walk away from a Wise One, not until she dismissed you. “The Wise One Sevanna talks freely in front of us, but
she says little.”
The tall woman remained silent, and after a long moment Faile dared to raise her eyes a little more. Someryn was staring over Faile’s head, her mouth hanging open in stunned amazement. Frowning, Faile shifted the basket on her shoulder and looked behind her, but there was nothing to account for Someryn’s expression, just the sprawl of the camp, dark low Aiel tents mingled with peaked tents and walled tents and every sort of tent, most in shades of dirty white or pale brown, others green or blue or red or even striped. The Shaido took everything valuable when they struck, everything that might prove useful, and they left behind nothing that resembled a tent.
As it was, they hardly had enough shelter to go around. There were ten septs gathered here, more than seventy thousand Shaido and nearly as many gai’shain, by her estimate, and everywhere she saw only the usual bustle, dark-clad Aiel going about their lives among scurrying white-clad captives. A smith was working the bellows on his forge in front of an open tent with his tools laid out on a tanned bull hide, children were herding flocks of bleating goats with switches, a trader was displaying her goods in an open pavilion of yellow canvas, everything from golden candlesticks and silver bowls to pots and kettles, all looted. A lean man with a horse on a lead stood talking with a gray-haired Wise One named Masalin, no doubt seeking a cure for some ailment the animal had, from the way he kept pointing at the horse’s belly. Nothing to make Someryn gape.
Crossroads of Twilight Page 27
