The Wheel of Time

by Robert Jordan

  “I suppose we might lower the price further for such a large quantity,” a balding man told Berelain, scratching at his gray-streaked beard. It was cut short, and greasy enough to cling close to his chin. Perrin wanted to scratch his own beard just watching the fellow.

  “It’s been a hard winter,” a round-faced woman muttered. Only two of the other merchants bothered to frown at her.

  Perrin set his winecup down on a nearby table and walked over to the gathering in the middle of the room. Annoura gave him one sharp, warning glance, but several of the merchants looked at him curiously. And cautiously. Gallenne had made his introductions all over again, but these folk were not entirely clear where Mayene was, exactly, or how powerful, and the Two Rivers only meant good tabac, to them. Two Rivers tabac was known everywhere. If not for the presence of an Aes Sedai, his eyes might have set them running. Everyone fell silent as Perrin scooped up a handful of millet, the tiny spheres smooth and vivid yellow on his palm. This grain was the first clean thing he had seen in the town. Letting the grain spill back onto the table, he picked up the lid of one of the containers. The threads cut into the wood were sharp and unworn. The lid would fit tightly. Mistress Arnon’s eyes slid away from his, and she licked her lips.

  “I want to see the grain in the warehouses,” he said. Half the people around the table twitched.

  Mistress Arnon drew herself up, blustering. “We don’t sell what we don’t have. You can watch our laborers load every sack on your carts, if you wish to spend hours in the cold.”

  “I was about to suggest a visit to a warehouse,” Berelain put in. Rising, she drew her red gloves from behind her belt and began tugging them on. “I would never buy grain without seeing the warehouse.”

  Mistress Arnon sagged. The bald-headed man put his head down on the table. No one said anything, though.

  The dispirited merchants did not bother to fetch their cloaks before leading them into the street. The breeze had picked up to a wind, cold as only a late winter wind could be, when people were already thinking ahead to spring, but they did not seem to notice. The hunch of their shoulders had nothing to do with cold.

  “Can we go now, Lord Perrin?” Flann asked anxiously when Perrin and the others appeared. “This place makes me want a bath.” Annoura gave him a frown in passing that made him flinch like one of the merchants. Flann tried a placating smile on her, but it was a sickly effort, and too late for anything but her back.

  “As soon as I can arrange it,” Perrin said. The merchants were already scurrying down the street, heads down and not looking at anyone. Berelain and Annoura managed to follow without appearing to rush, gliding along, one as composed as the other, two fine ladies out for a stroll and never mind the filth underfoot, or the stink in the air, or the dirty people who started at the sight of them and sometimes all but ran away as fast as they could. Gallenne had finally donned his helmet, and openly held his sword hilt with both hands, ready to draw. Kireyin was carrying his helmet on his hip, his other hand occupied with his winecup. Contemptuously eyeing the grimy-faced folk who hurried by, he sniffed at the wine as if it were a pomander to fight off the stench of the town.

  The warehouses were located on a stone-paved street barely wider than a wagon, between the town’s two walls. The smell was better there, close to the river, but the windblown street was empty except for Perrin and the others. There was not even a stray dog to be seen. Dogs disappeared when a town grew hungry, but why would a town with enough grain to sell be hungry? Perrin pointed to a two-story warehouse chosen at random, no different from any other, a windowless stone building with a wide pair of wooden doors held shut by a wooden bar that could have done for a ceiling beam at the Golden Barge.

  The merchants suddenly recalled that they had forgotten to bring men to lift the bars. They offered to go back for them. The Lady Berelain and Annoura Sedai could rest in front of the fire at the Golden Barge while workmen were fetched. They were sure Mistress Vadere would lay a fire. Their tongues went still when Perrin placed his hand beneath the thick beam and shoved it up out of the wooden brackets. The thing was heavy, but he backed up with it to give him room to turn and toss it down on the street with a crash. The merchants stared. This might have been the first time they had ever seen a man in a silk coat do anything that could be called work. Kireyin rolled his eyes and took another sniff at his wine.

  “Lanterns,” Mistress Arnon said weakly. “We’ll need lanterns, or torches. If . . .”

  A ball of light appeared floating above Annoura’s hand, glowing bright enough in the gray morning to cast everyone in faint shadows on the paving and the stone walls. Some of the merchants put hands up to shield their eyes. After a moment, Master Crossin tugged one of the doors open by an iron ring.

  The smell inside was the familiar sharp scent of barley, almost strong enough to overcome the stench of the town, and something more. Small dim shapes slunk away into the shadows ahead of Annoura’s light. He could have seen better without it, or at least deeper into the darkness. The glowing ball cast a large pool of light, and walled off what lay beyond. He smelled cat, closer to feral than not. And rat, too. A sudden squeal in the black depths of the warehouse, suddenly cut off, spoke of cat meeting rat. There were always rats in grain barns, and cats to hunt them. It was comforting, and normal. Almost enough to soothe his uneasiness. Almost. He smelled something else, a smell he should know. A fierce yowl deep in the warehouse turned to rising cries of pain that died abruptly. Apparently the rats of So Habor sometimes hunted back. Perrin’s hackles stirred again, but surely there was nothing here the Dark One would want to spy on. Most rats were just rats.

  There was no need to go very far in. Coarse sacks filled the darkness, in high slant-sided stacks on low wooden platforms to keep the sacks off the stone floor. Rows and rows of stacks piled nearly to the ceiling, and likely the same on the floor above. If not, this building still held enough grain to feed his people for weeks. Walking to the nearest stack, he drove his belt knife into a pale brown sack and sliced down through the tough jute fibers. A flood of barleycorns spilled out. And, clear in the glow of Annoura’s brilliant light, wriggling black specks. Weevils, almost as many as there were barleycorns. Their scent was sharper than that of the barley. Weevils. He wished the hair on his neck would stop trying to rise. The cold should have been enough to kill weevils.

  That one sack was proof, and his nose knew the smell of weevils, now, but he moved to another stack, then another, and another, each time slicing open one sack. Each released a spill of pale brown barley and black weevils.

  The merchants were standing huddled together in the doorway, daylight behind them, but Annoura’s light cast their faces in sharp relief. Worried faces. Despairing faces.

  “We would be most happy to winnow each sack we sell,” Mistress Arnon said unsteadily. “For only a slight additional—”

  “For half the last price I offered,” Berelain cut in sharply. Wrinkling her nose in disgust, she moved her skirts clear of the weevils scuttling among the grain on the floor. “You will never get all of them.”

  “And no millet,” Perrin said grimly. His men needed food, and so did the soldiers, but the millet grains were hardly bigger than the weevils. Winnow as they would, he would bring back weevils and millet in equal weight. “We’ll take extra beans instead. But they get winnowed, too.”

  Suddenly someone shrieked outside in the street. Not a cat or a rat, but a man in terror. Perrin did not even realize he had drawn his axe until he found the haft in his hand as he pushed through the merchants in the doorway. They huddled closer together, licking their lips and not even trying to see who had screamed.

  Kireyin was backed up against the wall of a warehouse across the way, his shining helmet with the white plume lying on the pavement beside his winecup. The man’s sword was half out of the scabbard, but he seemed frozen, staring with bulging eyes at the wall of the building Perrin had just come out of. Perrin touched his arm, and he jumped.

&n
bsp; “There was a man,” the Ghealdanin said uncertainly. “He was just there. He looked at me, and . . .” Kireyin scrubbed a hand over his face. Despite the cold, sweat glistened on his forehead. “He walked through the wall. He did. You must believe me.” Someone moaned; one of the merchants, Perrin thought.

  “I saw the man, too,” Seonid said behind him, and it was his turn to give a start. His nose was useless in this place!

  Giving the wall Kireyin had indicated a last glance, the Aes Sedai stepped away from it with a palpable unwillingness. Her Warders were tall men, towering over her, but they stayed only far enough away to gain room to draw their swords. Though what the grim-eyed Warders were to fight if Seonid was serious, Perrin could not imagine.

  “I find it difficult to lie, Lord Perrin,” Seonid said dryly when he expressed doubt, but her tone quickly became as serious as her face, and her eyes were so intent that they alone began to make Perrin feel uneasy. “The dead are walking in So Habor. Lord Cowlin fled the town for fear of his wife’s spirit. It seems there was doubt as to how she died. Hardly a man or woman in the town has not seen someone dead, and a good many have seen more than one. Some say people have died from the touch of someone dead. I cannot verify that, but people have died of fright, and others because of it. No one goes out at night in So Habor, or walks into a room unannounced. People strike out at shadows and surprises with whatever is to hand, and sometimes they have found a husband, wife or neighbor dead at their feet. This is not hysteria or a tale to frighten children, Lord Perrin. I have never heard of the like, but it is real. You must leave one of us here to do what we can.”

  Perrin shook his head slowly. He could not afford to lose an Aes Sedai if he was to free Faile. Mistress Arnon began to weep even before he said, “So Habor will have to face its dead alone.”

  But fear of the dead only explained so much. Maybe people were too frightened to think of washing, but it seemed unlikely that fear would take everyone that way. They just did not seem to care anymore. And weevils thriving in winter, in freezing cold? There was worse wrong in So Habor than spirits walking, and every instinct told him to leave at a dead run, without looking back. He purely wished that he could.

  CHAPTER

  27

  What Must Be Done

  The winnowing took place on the snowy eastern riverbank, where there was nothing to cut the sharp north wind. Men and women from the town hauled sacks across the bridges in four-horse wagons and one-horse carts even barrows pushed by hand. Normally buyers brought their own wagons to the warehouses, or at worst the grain and dried beans only had to be carried as far as the wharf, but Perrin had no intention of sending his cart drivers into So Habor. Or anyone else, for that matter. Whatever was wrong in that town might be catching. Anyway, the drivers were uneasy enough as it was, frowning at the dirty townsfolk, people who never spoke, but laughed nervously when they accidentally met someone’s eye. The grimy-faced merchants overseeing the work were no better. In the drivers’ native Cairhien, merchants were clean, respectable people, at least outwardly, who very seldom twitched just because someone moved at the corner of their vision. Between merchants with a tendency to peer suspiciously at anyone they did not know, and townsfolk who dragged their feet recrossing the bridges, clearly reluctant to go back inside their own walls, the cart drivers were right on edge. They gathered in little clusters, pale, dark-clad men and women, gripping the hilts of their belt knives and peering at the taller locals as if at murderous madmen.

  Perrin rode about slowly, watching the winnowing, examining the row of carts that stretched up the rise and out of sight waiting to be loaded, or the town’s wagons and carts and barrows rolling across the bridges. He made sure he was in plain view. He was not sure why the sight of him pretending to be unconcerned should settle anyone else’s nerves, yet it seemed to. Enough that no one started running, at least, though they continued to look askance at the people of So Habor. They kept their distance, too, and just as well. Let the notion that some of those folk might not be alive get into the Cairhienin’s heads, and half would whip up their cart horses to flee then and there. Most of the rest might not wait much past dark. That sort of tale could twist anyone’s head, come night. The wan sun, nearly hidden by gray overcast, still sat less than halfway to its noonday peak, yet increasingly it was obvious they would have to be there through the night. Maybe more than one. His jaw knotted with the effort of not grinding his teeth, and even Neald began to avoid his scowls. He did not snap at anyone. He just wanted to.

  It was an arduous process, the winnowing. Every last sack had to be opened and emptied onto large flat wicker baskets, each of which took two people to toss the grain or beans. The cold wind carried away weevils in a shower of black flecks, and men and women with woven two-handed fans added to the gusts. A swift current swept away everything that was blown into the river, but soon the snow on the riverbank was trampled underfoot and the gray slush layered with insects dead or dying from the cold, and a liberal coating of oats and barley speckled with red beans. There was always a new layer to replace what feet mashed into the snow. What was left on the baskets seemed cleaner, though, if not entirely clean when it was poured back into the coarse jute bags, which had been turned inside out and beaten fiercely with sticks by children to shake out vermin. The refilled sacks went into the Cairhienin’s carts as soon as the tops were tied, but the piles of empty bags grew at a prodigious rate.

  He was leaning on the pommel of Stayer’s saddle, trying to calculate whether it was taking two whole cart loads from the warehouses to fill one of his carts with grain, when Berelain brought her white mare up beside him, holding her scarlet cloak close against the wind with one red-gloved hand. Annoura reined in a few paces away, her ageless face smooth and unreadable. The Aes Sedai appeared to be giving them privacy, yet she was close enough to hear anything above whispers even without any tricks of the Power. Smooth face or no, her beak of a nose gave her a predatory look today. Her beaded braids seemed some strange eagle’s lowered crest.

  “You cannot save everyone,” Berelain said calmly. Away from the stink of the town, her scent was sharp with urgency, and razor-edged with anger. “Sometimes, you must choose. So Habor is Lord Cowlin’s duty. He had no right to abandon his people.” Not angry with him, then.

  Perrin frowned. Did she think he felt guilty? Balanced against Faile’s life, the troubles of So Habor could not budge the scales a hair. But he turned his bay so he was looking at the gray town walls across the river, not the hollow-eyed children piling up empty sacks. A man did what he could. What he had to. “Does Annoura have an opinion on what’s happening here?” he growled. Quietly, but somehow he had no doubt the Aes Sedai heard.

  “I’ve little idea what Annoura thinks,” Berelain replied, making no effort to lower her voice. She not only did not care who overheard, she wanted to be heard. “She is not as forthcoming as she once was. As I once thought she was. It is up to her to mend what she has torn.” Without looking at the Aes Sedai, she turned and rode away.

  Annoura remained behind, eyes unblinking on Perrin’s face. “You are ta’veren, yes, but you are still only a thread in the Pattern, as am I. In the end, even the Dragon Reborn is just a thread to be woven into the Pattern. Not even a ta’veren thread chooses how it will be woven.”

  “Those threads are people,” Perrin said wearily. “Sometimes maybe people don’t want to be woven into the Pattern without any say.”

  “And you think this makes a difference?” Not waiting on an answer, she lifted her reins and heeled her fine-ankled brown mare after Berelain in a gallop that fanned her cloak behind her.

  She was not the only Aes Sedai who wanted words with Perrin.

  “No,” he told Seonid firmly after listening to her, patting Stayer’s neck. It was the rider wanted soothing, though. He wanted to be away from So Habor. “I said no, and I mean no.”

  She sat her saddle stiffly, a pale little woman carved of ice. Except that her eyes were dark coals burni
ng, and she reeked of affronted fury barely in check. Seonid was mild as milk-water with the Wise Ones, but he was not a Wise One. Behind her, Alharra’s dark face was a stone, gray streaking his curly black hair like frost. Wynter’s face was red above his curled mustaches. They had to accept what passed between their Aes Sedai and the Wise Ones, but Perrin was not . . . The wind whipped their Warder cloaks about, leaving their hands free for swords if need be. Rippling in the wind, the cloaks shifted in shades of gray and brown, blue and white. It was easier on the stomach than seeing them make parts of a man disappear. Some easier.

  “If I have to, I’ll send Edarra to bring you back,” he warned.

  Her face stayed cold, her eyes hot, yet a quiver ran through her, swaying the small white gem hanging on her forehead. Not from fear of what the Wise Ones would do to her if she had to be brought back, just from the same offense at Perrin that made her scent a hooked thorn. He was growing accustomed to offending Aes Sedai. Not a habit a wise man got into, but there seemed no way out of it.

  “What about you?” he asked Masuri. “Do you want to stay in So Habor as well?”

  The slim woman was known for speaking straight to the point, direct as a Green for all she was Brown, but she said calmly, “Would you not send Edarra after me, too? There are many ways to serve, and we cannot always pick the ways we would wish.” Which, come to think, might be to the point, in a way. He still had no idea why she visited Masema in secret. Did she suspect that he knew? Masuri’s face was a bland mask. Kirklin wore a bored expression, now they were out of So Habor. He managed to seem slumped while sitting his horse erect, without a worry in the world or a thought in his head. A man who believed that of Kirklin would return the next day to buy a second pig in a poke.