The Wheel of Time

by Robert Jordan

  A few minutes of bargaining followed. She passed over three silver marks, frowned at the coppers she got back, then stuffed them into her purse and came forward to stand beside Perrin.

  She had an herbal scent to her, light and fresh and clean. Those dark, tilted eyes regarded him over high cheekbones, then turned to look back toward shore. She was about his own age, he decided; he could not decide if her nose fit her face, or dominated it. You are a fool, Perrin Aybara. Why care what she looks like?

  The gap to the wharf was a good twenty paces, now; the sweeps dug in, cutting white furrows in black water. For a moment he considered tossing her over the side.

  “Well,” she said after a moment, “I never expected my travels to take me back to Illian so soon as this.” Her voice was high, and she had a flat way of speaking, but it was not unpleasant. “You are going to Illian, are you not?” He tightened his mouth. “Don’t sulk,” she said. “You left quite a mess back there, you and that Aielman between you. The uproar was just beginning when I left.”

  “You did not tell them?” he said in surprise.

  “The townsfolk think the Aielman chewed through the chain, or broke it with his bare hands. They had not decided which when I left.” She made a sound suspiciously like a giggle. “Orban was quite loud in his disgust that his wounds would keep him from hunting down the Aielman personally.”

  Perrin snorted. “If he ever sees an Aiel again, he’ll bloody soil himself.” He cleared his throat and muttered, “Sorry.”

  “I do not know about that,” she said, as if his remark had been nothing out of the way. “I saw him in Jehannah during the winter. He fought four men together, killed two and made the other two yield. Of course, he started the fight, so that takes something away from it, but they knew what they were doing. He did not pick a fight with men who could not defend themselves. Still, he is a fool. He has these peculiar ideas about the Great Blackwood. What some call the Forest of Shadows. Have you ever heard of it?”

  He eyed her sideways. She spoke of fighting and killing as calmly as another woman might speak of baking. He had never heard of any Great Blackwood, but the Forest of Shadows lay just south of the Two Rivers. “Are you following me? You were staring at me, back at the inn. Why? And why didn’t you tell them what you saw?”

  “An Ogier,” she said, staring at the river, “is obviously an Ogier, and the others were not much more difficult to figure out. I managed a much better look inside Lady Alys’s hood than Orban did, and her face makes that stone-faced fellow a Warder. The Light burn me if I’d want that one angry with me. Does he always look like that, or did he eat a rock for his last meal? Anyway, that left only you. I do not like things I cannot account for.”

  Once again he considered tossing her over the side. Seriously, this time. But Remen was now only a blotch of light well behind them in the darkness, and no telling how far it was to shore.

  She seemed to take his silence as an urging to go on. “So there I have an”—she looked around, then dropped her voice, though the closest crewman was working a sweep ten feet away—“an Aes Sedai, a Warder, an Ogier—and you. A countryman, by first look at you.” Her tilted eyes rose to study his yellow ones intently—he refused to look away—and she smiled. “Only you free a caged Aielman, hold a long talk with him, then help him chop a dozen Whitecloaks into sausage. I assume you do this regularly; you certainly looked as if it were nothing out of the ordinary for you. I scent something strange in a party of travelers such as yours, and strange trails are what Hunters look for.”

  He blinked; there was no mistaking that emphasis. “A Hunter? You? You cannot be a Hunter. You’re a girl.”

  Her smile became so innocent that he almost walked away from her. She stepped back, made a flourish with each hand, and was holding two knives as neatly as old Thom Merrilin could have done it. One of the men at the sweeps made a choking sound, and two others stumbled; sweeps thrashed and tangled, and the Snow Goose lurched a little before the captain’s shouts set things right. By that time, the black-haired girl had made the knives disappear again.

  “Nimble fingers and nimble wits will take you a good deal further than a sword and muscles. Sharp eyes help, as well, but fortunately, I have these things.”

  “And modesty, as well,” Perrin murmured. She did not seem to notice.

  “I took the oath and received the blessing in the Great Square of Tammaz, in Illian. Perhaps I was the youngest, but in that crowd, with all the trumpets and drums and cymbals and shouting. . . . A six-year-old could have taken the oath, and none would have noticed. There were over a thousand of us, perhaps two, and every one with an idea of where to find the Horn of Valere. I have mine—it still may be the right one—but no Hunter can afford to pass up a strange trail. The Horn will certainly lie at the end of a strange trail, and I have never seen one any stranger than the trail you four make. Where are you bound? Illian? Somewhere else?”

  “What was your idea?” he asked. “About where the Horn is?” Safe in Tar Valon, I hope, and the Light send I never see it again. “You think it’s in Ghealdan?”

  She frowned at him—he had the feeling she did not give up a scent once she had raised it, but he was ready to offer her as many side trails as she would take—then said, “Have you ever heard of Manetheren?”

  He nearly choked. “I have heard of it,” he said cautiously.

  “Every queen of Manetheren was an Aes Sedai, and the king the Warder bound to her. I can’t imagine a place like that, but that is what the books say. It was a large land—most of Andor and Ghealdan and more besides—but the capital, the city itself, was in the Mountains of Mist. That is where I think the Horn is. Unless you four lead me to it.”

  His hackles stirred. She was lecturing him as if he were an untaught village lout. “You’ll not find the Horn or Manetheren. The city was destroyed during the Trolloc Wars, when the last queen drew too much of the One Power to destroy the Dreadlords who had killed her husband.” Moiraine had told him the names of that king and queen, but he did not remember them.

  “Not in Manetheren, farmboy,” she said calmly, “though a land such as that would make a good hiding place. But there were other nations, other cities, in the Mountains of Mist, so old that not even Aes Sedai remember them. And think of all those stories about it being bad luck to enter the mountains. What better place for the Horn to be hidden than in one of those forgotten cities.”

  “I have heard stories of something being hidden in the mountains.” Would she believe him? He had never been good at lying. “The stories did not say what, but it’s supposed to be the greatest treasure in the world, so maybe it is the Horn. But the Mountains of Mist stretch for hundreds of leagues. If you are going to find it, you should not waste time following us. You’ll need it all to find the Horn before Orban and Gann.”

  “I told you, those two have some strange idea the Horn is hidden in the Great Blackwood.” She smiled up at him. Her mouth was not too big at all, when she smiled. “And I told you a Hunter has to follow strange trails. You are lucky Orban and Gann were injured fighting all those Aielmen, or they might well be aboard, too. At least I will not get in your way, or try to take over, or pick a fight with the Warder.”

  He growled disgustedly. “We are just travelers on our way to Illian, girl. What is your name? If I have to share this ship with you for days yet, I can’t keep calling you girl.”

  “I call myself Mandarb.” He could not stop the guffaw that burst out of him. Those tilted eyes regarded him with heat. “I will teach you something, farmboy.” Her voice remained level. Barely. “In the Old Tongue, Mandarb means ‘blade.’ It is a name worthy of a Hunter of the Horn!”

  He managed to get his laughter under control, and hardly wheezed at all as he pointed to the rope pen between the masts. “You see that black stallion? His name is Mandarb.”

  The heat went out of her eyes, and spots of color bloomed on her cheeks. “Oh. I was born Zarine Bashere, but Zarine is no name for a Hunter. I
n the stories, Hunters have names like Rogosh Eagle-eye.”

  She looked so crestfallen that he hastened to say, “I like the name Zarine. It suits you.” The heat flashed back into her eyes, and for a moment he thought she was about to produce one of her knives again. “It is late, Zarine. I want some sleep.”

  He turned his back to start for the hatch that led belowdeck, prickles running across his shoulders. Crewmen still padded up the deck and back, working the sweeps. Fool. A girl would not stick a knife in me. Not with all these people watching. Would she? Just as he reached the hatch, she called to him.

  “Farmboy! Perhaps I will call myself Faile. My father used to call me that, when I was little. It means ‘falcon.’ ”

  He stiffened and almost missed the first step of the ladder. Coincidence. He made himself go down without looking back toward her. It has to be. The passageway was dark, but enough moonlight filtered down behind him for him to make his way. Someone was snoring loudly in one of the cabins. Min, why did you have to go seeing things?

  CHAPTER

  36

  Daughter of the Night

  Realizing that he had no way of knowing which cabin was supposed to be his, he put his head into several. They were dark, and all of them had two men asleep in the narrow beds built against each side, all but one, which held Loial, sitting on the floor between the beds—and barely fitting—scribbling in his cloth-bound book of notes by the light of a gimballed lantern. The Ogier wanted to talk about the events of the day, but Perrin, jaws creaking with the effort of holding his yawns in, thought the ship must have run far enough downriver by now to make it safe to sleep. Safe to dream. Even if they tried, wolves could not long keep pace with the sweeps and the current.

  Finally he found a windowless cabin with no one in it at all, which suited him just as well. He wanted to be alone. A coincidence in the name, that’s all, he thought as he lit the lantern mounted on the wall. Anyway, her real name is Zarine. But the girl with the high cheekbones and dark, tilted eyes was not uppermost in his thoughts. He put his bow and other belongings on one cramped bed, tossed his cloak over them, and sat on the other to tug off his boots.

  Elyas Machera had found a way to live with what he was, a man somehow linked with wolves, and he had not gone mad. Thinking back, Perrin was sure Elyas had been living that way for years before he ever met the man. He wants to be that way. He accepts it, anyway. That was no solution. Perrin did not want to live that way, did not want to accept. But if you have the bar stock to make a knife, you accept it and make a knife, even if you’d like a woodaxe. No! My life is more than iron to be hammered into shape.

  Cautiously, he reached out with his mind, feeling for wolves, and found—nothing. Oh, there was a dim impression of wolves somewhere in the distance, but it faded even as he touched it. For the first time in so long, he was alone. Blessedly alone.

  Blowing out the lantern, he lay down, for the first time in days. How in the Light will Loial manage in one of these? Those all but sleepless nights rolled over him, exhaustion slacking his muscles. It came to him that he had managed to put the Aiel out of his head. And the Whitecloaks. Light-forsaken axe! Burn me, I wish I had never seen it, was his last thought before sleep.

  Thick gray fog surrounded him, dense enough low down that he could not see his own boots, and so heavy on every side that he could not make out anything ten paces away. There was surely nothing nearer. Anything at all might lie within it. The mist did not feel right; there was no dampness to it. He put a hand to his belt, seeking the comfort of knowing he could defend himself, and gave a start. His axe was not there.

  Something moved in the fog, a swirling in the grayness. Something coming his way.

  He tensed, wondering if it was better to run or stand and fight with his bare hands, wondering if there was anything to fight.

  The billowing furrow boring through the fog resolved itself into a wolf, its shaggy form almost one with the heavy mist.

  Hopper?

  The wolf hesitated, then came to stand beside him. It was Hopper—he was certain—but something about the wolf’s stance, something in the yellow eyes that looked up briefly to meet his, demanded silence, in mind as well as body. Those eyes demanded that he follow, too.

  He laid a hand on the wolf’s back, and as he did, Hopper started forward. He let himself be led. The fur under his hand was thick and shaggy. It felt real.

  The fog began to thicken, until only his hand told him Hopper was still there, until a glance down did not even show him his own chest. Just gray mist. He might as well have been wrapped in new-sheared wool for all he could see. It struck him that he had heard nothing, either. Not even the sound of his own footsteps. He wiggled his toes, and was relieved to feel the boots on his feet.

  The gray became darker, and he and the wolf walked through pitch-blackness. He could not see his hand when he touched his nose. He could not see his nose, for that matter. He tried closing his eyes for a moment, and could not tell any difference. There was still no sound. His hand felt the rough hair of Hopper’s back, but he was not sure he could feel anything under his boots.

  Suddenly Hopper stopped, forcing him to halt, too. He looked around . . . and snapped his eyes shut. He could tell a difference, now. And feel something, too, a queasy twisting of his stomach. He made himself open his eyes and look down.

  What he saw could not have been there, not unless he and Hopper were standing in midair. He could see nothing of the wolf or himself, as if neither had bodies at all—that thought nearly tied his stomach into knots—but below him, as clear as if lit by a thousand lamps, stretched a vast array of mirrors, seemingly hanging in blackness though as level as if they stood on a vast floor. They stretched as far as he could see in every direction, but right beneath his feet, there was a clear space. And people in it. Suddenly he could hear their voices as well as if he had been standing among them.

  “Great Lord,” one of the men muttered, “where is this place?” He looked around once, flinching at his image cast back at him many thousandfold, and held his eyes forward after that. The others huddled around him seemed even more afraid. “I was asleep in Tar Valon, Great Lord. I am asleep in Tar Valon! Where is this place? Have I gone mad?”

  Some of the men around him wore ornate coats full of embroidery, others plainer garb, while some seemed to be naked, or in their smallclothes.

  “I, too, sleep,” a naked man nearly screamed. “In Tear. I remember lying down with my wife!”

  “And I do sleep in Illian,” a man in red and gold said, sounding shaken. “I know that I do sleep, but that cannot be. I know that I do dream, but that does be impossible. Where does this be, Great Lord? Are you really come to me?”

  The dark-haired man who faced them was garbed in black, with silver lace at his throat and wrists. Now and again he put a hand to his chest, as if it hurt him. There was light everywhere down there, coming from nowhere, but this man below Perrin seemed cloaked in shadow. Darkness rolled around him, caressed him.

  “Silence!” The black-clothed man did not speak loudly, but he had no need to. For the space of that word, he had raised his head; his eyes and mouth were holes boring into a raging forge-fire, all flame and fiery glow.

  Perrin knew him, then. Ba’alzamon. He was staring down at Ba’alzamon himself. Fear struck through him like hammered spikes. He would have run, but he could not feel his feet.

  Hopper shifted. He felt the thick fur under his hand and gripped it hard. Something real. Something more real, he hoped, than what he saw. But he knew that both were real.

  The men huddling together cowered.

  “You have been given tasks,” Ba’alzamon said. “Some of these tasks you have carried out. At others, you have failed.” Now and again his eyes and mouth vanished in flame again, and the mirrors flashed with reflected fire. “Those who have been marked for death must die. Those who have been marked for taking must bow to me. To fail the Great Lord of the Dark cannot be forgiven.” Fire shone through hi
s eyes, and the darkness around him roiled and spun. “You.” His finger pointed out the man who had spoken of Tar Valon, a fellow dressed like a merchant, in plainly cut clothes of the finest cloth. The others shied away from him as if he had blackbile fever, leaving him to cower alone. “You allowed the boy to escape Tar Valon.”

  The man screamed, and began to quiver like a file struck against an anvil. He seemed to become less solid, and his scream thinned with him.

  “You all dream,” Ba’alzamon said, “but what happens in this dream is real.” The shrieking man was only a bundle of mist shaped like a man, his scream far distant, and then even the mist was gone. “I fear he will never wake.” He laughed, and his mouth roared flame. “The rest of you will not fail me again. Begone! Wake, and obey!” The other men vanished.

  For a moment Ba’alzamon stood alone, then suddenly there was a woman with him, clad all in white and silver.

  Shock hit Perrin. He could never forget a woman so beautiful. She was the woman from his dream, the one who had urged him to glory.

  An ornate silver throne appeared behind her, and she sat, carefully arranging her silken skirts. “You make free use of my domain,” she said.

  “Your domain?” Ba’alzamon said. “You claim it yours, then? Do you no longer serve the Great Lord of the Dark?” The darkness around him thickened for an instant, seemed to boil.

  “I serve,” she said quickly. “I have served the Lord of the Twilight long. Long did I lie imprisoned for my service, in an endless, dreamless sleep. Only Gray Men and Myrddraal are denied dreams. Even Trollocs can dream. Dreams were always mine, to use and walk. Now I am free again, and I will use what is mine.”

  “What is yours,” Ba’alzamon said. The blackness swirling ’round him seemed mirthful. “You always thought yourself greater than you were, Lanfear.”