The Dragon Reborn (4 page)

“Forgive me, Great Lord.” Ordeith made a deep bow, his smile never slipping. “I hate Darkfriends.”

Niall studied the face in chalks.
Rand al’Thor, of the Two Rivers
. “Perhaps I must make plans for the Two Rivers. When the snows clear. Perhaps.”

“As the Great Lord wishes,” Ordeith said blandly.

The grimace on Carridin’s face as he strode through the halls of the Fortress made other men avoid him, though in truth few sought the company of Questioners. Servants, hurrying about their tasks, tried to fade into the stone walls, and even men with golden knots of rank on their white cloaks took side corridors when they saw his face.

He flung open the door to his rooms and slammed it behind him, feeling none of the usual satisfaction at the fine carpets from Tarabon and Tear in lush reds and golds and blues, the beveled mirrors from Illian, the gold-leaf work on the long, intricately carved table in the middle of the floor. A master
craftsman from Lugard had worked nearly a year on that. This time he barely saw it.

“Sharbon!” For once his body servant did not appear. The man was supposed to be readying the rooms. “The Light burn you, Sharbon! Where are you?”

A movement caught the corner of his eye, and he turned ready to shrivel Sharbon with his curses. The curses themselves shriveled as a Myrddraal took another step toward him with the sinuous grace of a serpent.

It was a man in form, no larger than most, but there the resemblance ended. Dead black clothes and cloak, hardly seeming to stir as it moved, made its maggot-white skin appear ever paler. And it had no eyes. That eyeless gaze filled Carridin with fear, as it had filled thousands before.

“Wha. . . .” Carridin stopped to work moisture back into his mouth, to try bringing his voice back down to its normal register. “What are you doing here?” It still sounded shrill.

The Halfman’s bloodless lips quirked in a smile. “Where there is shadow, there may I go.” Its voice sounded like a snake rustling through dead leaves. “I like to keep a watch on all those who serve me.”

“I ser. . . .”

It was no use. With an effort Carridin jerked his eyes away from that smooth expanse of pale, pasty face and turned his back. A shiver ran down his spine, having his back to a Myrddraal. Everything was sharp in the mirror on the wall in front of him. Everything but the Halfman. The Myrddraal was an indistinct blur. Hardly soothing to look at, but better than meeting that stare. A little strength returned to Carridin’s voice.

“I serve the. . . .” He cut off, suddenly aware of where he was. In the heart of the Fortress of the Light. The rumor of a whisper of the words he was about to say would have him given to the Hand of the Light. The lowest of the Children would strike him down on the spot if he heard. He was alone except for the Myrddraal, and perhaps Sharbon—
Where is that cursed man?
It would be good to have someone to share the Halfman’s stare, even if the other would have to be disposed of afterwards—but still he lowered his voice. “I serve the Great Lord of the Dark, as you do. We both serve.”

“If you wish to see it so.” The Myrddraal laughed, a sound that made Carridin’s bones shiver. “Still, I will know why you are here instead of on Almoth Plain.”

“I . . . I was commanded here by word of the Lord Captain Commander.”

The Myrddraal grated, “Your Lord Captain Commander’s words are dung! You were commanded to find the human called Rand al’Thor and kill him. That before all else. Above all else! Why are you not obeying?”

Carridin took a deep breath. That gaze on his back felt like a knife blade grating along his spine. “Things . . . have changed. Some matters are not as much in my control as they were.” A harsh, scraping noise jerked his head around.

The Myrddraal was drawing a hand across the tabletop, and thin tendrils of wood curled away from its fingernails. “Nothing has changed, human. You forswore your oaths to the Light and swore new oaths, and
those
oaths you will obey.”

Carridin started at the gouges marring the polished wood and swallowed hard. “I don’t understand. Why is it suddenly so important to kill him? I thought the Great Lord of the Dark meant to use him.”

“You question me? I should take your tongue. It is not your part to question. Or to understand. It is your part to obey! You will give dogs lessons in obedience. Do you understand
that
? Heel, dog, and obey your master.”

Anger wormed its way through the fear, and Carridin’s hand groped at his side, but his sword was not there. It lay in the next room now, where he had left it on going to attend Pedron Niall.

The Myrddraal moved faster than a striking viper. Carridin opened his mouth to scream as its hand closed on his wrist in a crushing grip; bones grated together, sending jolts of agony up his arm. The scream never left his mouth, though, for the Halfman’s other hand gripped his chin and forced his jaws shut. His heels rose up, and then his toes left the floor. Grunting and gurgling, he dangled in the Myrddraal’s grasp.

“Hear me, human. You will find this youth and kill him as quickly as possible. Do not think you can dissemble. There are others of your
children
who will tell me if you turn aside in your purpose. But I will give you this to encourage you. If this Rand al’Thor is not dead in a month, I will take one of your blood. A son, a daughter, a sister, an uncle. You will not know who until the chosen has died screaming. If he lives another month, I will take another. And then another, and another. And when there is no one of your blood living except yourself, if he still lives, I will take you to Shayol Ghul itself.” It smiled. “You will be years in the dying, human. Do you understand me, now?”

Carridin made a sound, half groan, half whimper. He thought his neck was going to break.

With a snarl, the Myrddraal hurled him across the room. Carridin slammed against the far wall and slid to the rug, stunned. Facedown, he lay fighting for breath.

“Do you understand me, human?”

“I . . . I hear and obey,” Carridin managed into the carpet. There was no answer.

He turned his head, wincing at the pain in his neck. The room was empty except for him. Halfmen rode shadows like horses, so the legends said, and when they turned sideways, they disappeared. No wall could keep them out. Carridin wanted to weep. He levered himself up, cursing the jolt of pain from his wrist.

The door opened, and Sharbon hurried in, a plump man with a basket in his arms. He stopped to stare at Carridin. “Master, are you all right? Forgive me for not being here, master, but I went to buy fruits for your—”

With his good hand Carridin struck the basket from Sharbon’s hands, sending withered winter apples rolling across the carpets, and backhanded the man across the face.

“Forgive me, master,” Sharbon whispered.

“Fetch me paper and pen and ink,” Carridin snarled. “Hurry, fool! I must send orders.”
But which? Which?
As Sharbon scurried to obey, Carridin stared at the gouges in the tabletop and shivered.

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was
a
beginning.

Down long valleys the wind swept, valleys blue with morning mist hanging in the air, some forested with evergreens, some bare where grasses and wildflowers would soon spring up. It howled across half-buried ruins and broken monuments, all as forgotten as those who had built them. It moaned in the passes, weatherworn cuts between peaks capped with snow that never melted. Thick clouds clung to the mountaintops so that snow and white billows seemed one.

In the lowlands winter was going or gone, yet here in the heights it held awhile, quilting the mountainsides with broad, white patches. Only evergreens clung to leaf or needle; all other branches stood bare, brown or gray against the rock and not yet quickened ground. There was no sound but the crisp rush of wind over snow and stone. The land seemed to be waiting. Waiting for something to burst.

Sitting his horse just inside a thicket of leatherleaf and pine, Perrin
Aybara shivered and tugged his fur-lined cloak closer, as close as he could with a longbow in one hand and a great, half-moon axe at his belt. It was a good axe of cold steel; Perrin had pumped the bellows the day master Luhhan had made it. The wind jerked at his cloak, pulling the hood back from his shaggy curls, and cut through his coat; he wiggled his toes in his boots for warmth and shifted on his high-cantled saddle, but his mind was not really on the cold. Eyeing his five companions, he wondered if they, too, felt it. Not the waiting they had been sent there for, but something more.

Stepper, his horse, shifted and tossed his head. He had named the dun stallion for his quick feet, but now Stepper seemed to feel his rider’s irritation and impatience.
I am tired of all this waiting, all this sitting while Moiraine holds us as tight as tongs. Burn the Aes Sedai! When will it end?

He sniffed the wind without thinking. The smell of horse predominated, and of men and men’s sweat. A rabbit had gone through those trees not long since, fear powering its run, but the fox on its trail had not killed there. He realized what he was doing, and stopped it.
You’d think I would get a stuffed nose with all this wind
. He almost wished he did have one.
And I wouldn’t let Moiraine do anything about it, either
.

Something tickled the back of his mind. He refused to acknowledge it. He did not mention his feeling to his companions.

The other five men sat their saddles, short horsebows at the ready, eyes searching the sky above as well as the thinly treed slopes below. They seemed unperturbed by the wind flaring their cloaks out like banners. A two-handed sword hilt stuck up above each man’s shoulder through a slit in his cloak. The sight of their bare heads, shaven except for topknots, made Perrin feel colder. For them, this weather was already well into spring. All softness had been hammered out of them at a harder forge than he had ever known. They were Shienarans, from the Borderlands up along the Great Blight, where Trolloc raids could come in any night, and even a merchant or a farmer might well have to take up sword or bow. And these men were no farmers, but soldiers almost from birth.

He sometimes wondered at the way they deferred to him and followed his lead. It was as if they thought he had some special right, some knowledge hidden from them.
Or maybe it’s just my friends
, he thought wryly. They were not as tall as he, nor as big—years as a blacksmith’s apprentice had given him arms and shoulders to make two of most men’s—but he had begun shaving every day to stop their jokes about his youth. Friendly jokes, but still jokes. He would not have them start again because he spoke of a feeling.

With a start, Perrin reminded himself that he was supposed to be keeping watch, too. Checking the arrow nocked to his longbow, he peered down the valley running off to the west, widening as it fell away, the ground streaked with broad, twisted ribbons of snow, remnants of winter. Most of the scattered trees down there still clawed the sky with stark winter branches, but enough evergreens—pine and leatherleaf, fir and mountain holly, even a few towering greenwoods—stood on the slopes and the valley floor to give cover for anyone who knew how to use it. But no one would be there without a special purpose. The mines were all far to the south or even further north; most people thought there was ill luck in the Mountains of Mist, and few entered them who could avoid it. Perrin’s eyes glittered like burnished gold.

The tickling became an itch.
No!

He could push the itch aside, but the expectation would not go. As if he teetered on a brink. As if everything teetered. He wondered whether something unpleasant lay in the mountains around them. There was a way to know, perhaps. In places like this, where men seldom came, there were almost always wolves. He crushed the thought before it had a chance to firm.
Better to wonder. Better than that
. Their numbers were not many, but they had scouts. If there was anything out there, the outriders would find it.
This is my forge; I’ll tend it, and let them tend theirs
.