Winter's Heart (94 page)

Awkwardly, forcing himself to work gently, to use the unfamiliar
saidar
’s own immense strength to guide it as he wanted, he wove a conduit
that touched the male half of the Source at one end and the distantly seen city at the other. The conduit had to be of untainted
saidar.
If this worked as he hoped, a tube of
saidin
might shatter when the taint began to leech out of it. He thought of it as a tube, at least, though it was not. The weave did not form at all as he expected it to. As if
saidar
had a mind of its own, the weave took on convolutions and spirals that made him think of a flower. There was nothing to see, no grand weaves sweeping down from the sky. The Source lay at the heart of creation. The Source was everywhere, even in Shadar Logoth. The conduit covered distance beyond his imagining, and had no length at all. It had to be a conduit, no matter its appearance. If it was not . . .

Drawing on
saidin,
fighting it, mastering it in the deadly dance he knew so well, he forced it into the flowery weave of
saidar.
And it flowed through.
Saidin
and
saidar,
like and unlike, could not mix. The flow of
saidin
squeezed in on itself, away from the surrounding
saidar,
and the
saidar
pushed it from all sides, compressing it further, making it flow faster. Pure
saidin,
pure except for the taint, touched Shadar Logoth.

Rand frowned. Had he been wrong? Nothing was happening. Except . . . The wounds in his side seemed to be throbbing faster. Amid the firestorm and icy fury of
saidin,
it seemed that the foulness stirred and shifted. Just a slight movement that might have escaped notice had he not been straining to find anything. A slight stirring in the midst of chaos, but all in the same direction.

“Go on,” Nynaeve urged. Her eyes were bright, as though just having
saidar
flow in her was enough for joy.

He drew more deeply on both halves of the source, strengthening the conduit as he forced more of
saidin
into it, drew on the Power until nothing he did would bring more. He wanted to shout at how much was flowing into him, so much that it seemed he did not exist any more, only the One Power. He heard Nynaeve groan, but the murderous struggle with
saidin
consumed him.

Fingering the Great Serpent ring on her left forefinger, Elza stared at the man she had sworn to serve. He sat on the ground, grim-faced, staring straight ahead as if he could not see the wilder Nynaeve sitting right in front of him, glowing like the sun. Perhaps he could not. She could feel
saidar
sweeping through Nynaeve in torrents undreamed of. All the sisters
of the Tower combined could have wielded only a fraction of that ocean. She envied the wilder that, and at the same time she thought she might have gone mad from the sheer joy of it. Despite the cold, there were beads of sweat on Nynaeve’s face. Her lips were parted, and her wide eyes stared rapturously beyond the Dragon Reborn.

“It will begin soon, I fear,” Cadsuane announced. Turning away from the seated pair, the gray-haired sister planted her hands on her hips and swept a piercing gaze across the hilltop. “They’ll be feeling that in Tar Valon, and maybe on the other side of the world. Everyone to your places.”

“Come, Elza,” Merise said, the light of
saidar
suddenly around her.

Elza allowed herself to be drawn into a link with the stern-faced sister, but she flinched when Merise added her Asha’man Warder to the circle. He was darkly beautiful, but the crystal sword in his hands shone with a faint light, and she could feel the incredible seething tumult that must be
saidin.
Even though Merise was controlling the flows, the vileness of
saidin
turned Elza’s stomach. It was a midden heap rotting in a sweltering summer. The other Green was a lovely woman in spite of her sternness, but her mouth thinned as if she, too, were struggling not to vomit.

All around the hilltop the circles were forming, Sarene and Corele linked with the old man, Flinn, and Nesune, Beldeine and Daigian with the boy Hopwil. Verin and Kumira even made a circle with the Sea Folk wilder; she was actually quite strong, and everyone had to be used. As soon as each of those circles formed, it moved off the hilltop, each vanishing among the trees in a different direction. Alivia, the very peculiar wilder who seemed to have no other name, strode off north, cloak flapping behind her, surrounded by the glow of the Power. A very
troubling
woman with those tiny lines around her eyes, and incredibly strong. Elza would have given a great deal to have her hands on those
ter’angreal
the woman wore.

Alivia and the three circles would provide an encircling defense, if it were needed, but the greatest need lay right there on the hilltop. The Dragon Reborn must be protected at all costs. That job Cadsuane had taken on herself, of course, but Merise’s circle would remain there, too. Cadsuane must have had an
angreal
of her own, from the amount of
saidar
she was drawing, more than Elza and Merise combined, yet even that paled beside the Power that flowed though
Callandor.

Elza glanced toward the Dragon Reborn and drew a deep breath. “Merise, I know I shouldn’t ask, but may I meld the flows?”

She expected to have to plead, but the taller woman hesitated only a
moment before nodding and passing control to her. Almost immediately Merise’s mouth softened, though it could never be called soft. Fire and ice and filth welled up in Elza, and she shuddered. Whatever the cost, the Dragon Reborn had to reach the Last Battle. Whatever the cost.

Riding his cart down the snowy road to Tremonsien, Barmellin wondered whether old Maglin at The Nine Rings would pay what he wanted for the plum brandy in the cart behind him. He was not sanguine. She was tight with silver, Maglin was, the brandy was not very good, and this late in the winter, she might be willing to wait until spring to get better. Suddenly he realized that the day seemed very bright. Almost like summer noon instead of a winter morning. Strangest of all, the glow seemed to be coming from the huge pit beside the road where workmen from the City had been digging away until the previous year. There was supposed to be a monstrous statue down there, but he had never been interested enough to actually look for himself.

Now, almost against his will, he reined in his stout mare and climbed down into the snow to trudge to the brink of the pit. It was a hundred paces deep and ten times as far across, and he had to put his hands in front of his face against the blinding glare that came from the bottom. Squinting through his fingers, he could make out a glowing ball, like a second sun. Abruptly, it came to him that this must the One Power.

With a strangled yell he lumbered back through the snow to his cart and scrambled up, flailing Nisa with the reins to get her moving even as he was trying to jerk her head around to head back to his farm. He was going to stay in his own house and drink that brandy himself. All of it.

Strolling lost in thought, Timna barely saw the fallow fields that covered all the hillsides but one around her. Tremalking was a large island, and this far from the sea, the wind carried no hint of salt, yet it was the Atha’an Miere that troubled her. They refused the Water Way, yet Timna was one of the Guides chosen to protect them from themselves, if possible. That was very difficult now, with them all in an uproar over this Coramoor of theirs. Very few remained on the island. Even the Governors, always fretting at being away from the sea as the Atha’an Miere did, had set sail to search for him in any craft they could find.

Suddenly the one unplowed hill caught her eye. A great stone hand
stuck out of the ground clasping a clear sphere as large as a house. And that sphere was shining like a glorious summer sun.

All thoughts of the Atha’an Miere gone, Timna gathered her cloak and sat down on the ground, smiling to think that she might see the fulfillment of prophecy and the end of Illusion.

“If you truly are one of the Chosen, I will serve you,” the bearded man in front of Cyndane said doubtfully, but she did not hear what else he had to say.

She could feel it. That much of
saidar
being drawn to one spot was a beacon that any woman in the world who could channel would feel and locate. So he had found a woman to use the other access key. She would have faced the Great Lord—faced the Creator!—with him. She would have shared the power with him, let him rule the world at her side. And he had spurned her love, spurned her!

The fool babbling at her was an important man as such things were accounted here and now, but she did not have time to make certain of his trustworthiness, and without that, she could not leave him to babble, not when she could feel Moridin’s hand caressing the
cour’souvra
that held her soul. A razor-thin flow of Air sliced the fellow’s beard in two as it took off his head. Another flow shoved the body backward so the blood fountaining from the stub of his neck did not spot her dress. Before body or head hit the stone floor, she had spun her gateway. A beacon she could point to, beckoning her.

As she stepped into rolling forest where scattered carpets of snow littered the ground beneath stark branches bare save for the thick ropes of drooping brown vines, she wondered where the beacon had drawn her. It did not matter. South of her, that beacon shone, enough
saidar
to lay waste to a continent in one blow. He would be there, him and whoever the woman was he had betrayed her with. Carefully, she drew on the Power to spin a web for his death.

Lightnings such as Cadsuane had never seen streaked down from the cloudless sky, not jagged bolts but lances of silver-blue that struck at the hilltop where she stood, and struck instead the inverted shield she had woven, erupting with a deafening roar fifty feet above her head. Even within the shield the air crackled, and her hair stirred and lifted. Without the aid of the
angreal
that looked a little like a shrike dangling from her bun, she would not have been able to hold the shield up.

A second golden bird, a swallow, hung from her hand by its thin chain. “There,” she said, pointing in the direction it seemed to be flying. A pity she could not say how far away the Power had been channeled, or whether by a man or a woman, but the direction would have to do. She hoped there would be no . . . mishaps. Her people were out there, too. If the warning came with an attack, though, there could not be much doubt.

As soon as the single word left her mouth, a fountain of flame erupted in the forest to the north, and then another and another, a staggered line racing northward.
Callandor
shone like a flame in young Jahar’s hands. Surprisingly, from the intensity on Elza’s face and the way she gripped her skirts in fists, she was the one directing those flows.

Merise took a fistful of the boy’s black hair and gently shook his head. “Steady, my pretty,” she murmured. “Oh, steady, my lovely strong one.” He smiled at her, a ravishing smile.

Cadsuane shook her own head slightly. Understanding any sister’s relationship with her Warder was difficult, especially among Greens, but she could not begin to fathom what passed between Merise and her boys.

Her real attention was on another boy, though. Nynaeve was swaying, groaning with the ecstasy of such an unbelievable mass of
saidar
flooding through her, but Rand sat like a stone, sweat rolling down his face. His eyes were blank, like polished sapphires. Was he even aware of what was happening around him?

The swallow turned on its chain beneath her hand.

“There,” she said, pointing toward the ruins of Shadar Logoth.

Rand could not see Nynaeve any longer. He could not see anything, feel anything. He swam in surging seas of flame, scrambled across collapsing mountains of ice. The taint flowed like an ocean tide, trying to sweep him away. If he lost control for an instant, it would strip away everything that was him and carry that down the conduit, too. As bad, or maybe worse, despite the tide of filth flooding through that odd flower, the taint on the male half of the Source seemed no less. It was like oil floating on water in a coating so thin you would not notice till you touched the surface, yet covering the vastness of the male half, it was an ocean in itself. He had to hold on. He had to. But for how long? How long could he hold on?

If he could undo what al’Thor had done at the source, Demandred thought as he stepped through his gateway into Shadar Logoth, undo it sharply and suddenly, that might well kill the man, or at least sear the ability to channel out of him. He had reasoned out what al’Thor’s plan had to be as soon as he realized where the access key was. A brilliant scheme, he did not mind admitting, however insanely dangerous. Lews Therin had always been a brilliant planner, too, if not so brilliant as everyone made out. Not nearly as brilliant as Demandred himself.

One look at the rubble-strewn street changed his mind about altering anything, though. Beside him rose half a pale dome, its shattered top two hundred feet or more above the street, and above it, the sky held the light of midmorning. From the broken rim of the ruin down to the street, though, the air was dark with shadows, as if night were already falling. The city . . . quivered. He could feel it through his boots.