The Dragon Reborn (89 page)

“I do not speak of a Myrddraal, Perrin. No one knows the strength of the Forsaken, except that Ishamael and Lanfear were the strongest, but the weakest of them could sense any warding I might set from a mile or more away. And rip all of us to shreds in seconds. Possibly without stirring from where he stood.”

“You’re saying he can tie you in knots,” Perrin muttered. “Light! What are we supposed to do? How can we do anything?”

“Even the Forsaken cannot stand up to balefire,” she said. He wondered if that was what she had used on the Darkhounds; it still made him uneasy, what he had seen, and what she had said then. “I have learned things in the last year, Perrin. I am . . . more dangerous than when I came to Emond’s Field. If I can come close enough to Be’lal, I can destroy him. But if he sees me first, he can destroy us all, long before I have a chance.” She turned her attention to Loial. “What can you tell me of Be’lal?”

Perrin blinked in confusion.
Loial?

“Why are you asking him?” Zarine burst out angrily. “First you tell the blacksmith you mean us to fight one of the Forsaken!—who can kill us all before we can even think!—and now you ask Loial about him?” Loial murmured urgently, that name she used—“Faile! Faile!”—but she did not even slow. “I thought Aes Sedai knew everything. Light, at least I am smart enough not to say I will fight someone unless I know everything I can of him! You. . . .” She trailed off under Moiraine’s stare, muttering.

“Ogier,” the Aes Sedai said coolly, “have long memories, girl. It has been well over a hundred generations since the Breaking for humans, but less than thirty for Ogier. We still learn things from their stories that we did not know. Now tell me, Loial. What do you know of Be’lal. And briefly, for once. I want your long memory, not your long wind.”

Loial cleared his throat, a sound much like firewood tumbling down a chute. “Be’lal.” His ears flickered out of his hair like hummingbird wings, then snapped down again. “I do not know what can be in the stories about him you do not already know. He is not much mentioned, except in the razing of the Hall of the Servants just before Lews Therin Kinslayer and the Hundred Companions sealed him up with the Dark One. Jalanda son of Aried son of Coiam wrote that he was called the Envious, that he forsook the Light because he envied Lews Therin, and that he envied Ishamael and Lanfear, too. In
A Study of the War of the Shadow
, Moilin daughter of Hamada daughter of Juendan called Be’lal the Netweaver, but I do not know why. She mentioned him playing a game of stones with Lews Therin and winning, and that he always boasted of it.” He glanced at Moiraine and rumbled, “I am trying to be brief. I do not know anything important about him. Several writers say Be’lal and Sammael were both leaders in the fight against the Dark One before they forsook the Light, and both were masters of the sword. That is truly all I know. He may be mentioned in other books, other stories, but I have not read them. Be’lal is just not spoken of very often. I am sorry I could not tell you anything useful.”

“Perhaps you have,” Moiraine told him. “I did not know of the name, the Netweaver. Or that he envied the Dragon as well as his companions in the Shadow. That strengthens my belief that he wants
Callandor
. That must be the reason he has chosen to make himself a High Lord of Tear. And the Netweaver—a name for a schemer, a patient and cunning planner. You have done well, Loial.” For a moment the Ogier’s wide mouth curved up in a pleased smile, but then it curved down again.

“I will not pretend I am not afraid,” Zarine said suddenly. “Only a fool
would not be afraid of the Forsaken. But I swore I would be one of you, and I will. That is all that I wanted to say.”

Perrin shook his head.
She
must
be crazy. I could wish I were not one of this party. I could wish I were back home working Master Luhhan’s forge
. Aloud, he said, “If he is inside the Stone, if he is waiting there for Rand, we must go inside to reach him. How do we do that? Everyone keeps saying no one enters the Stone without the permission of the High Lords, and looking at it, I don’t see any way but through the gates.”

“You do not go in,” Lan said. “Moiraine and I will be the only ones to enter. The more who go, the harder it will be. Whatever way in I find, I cannot believe it will be easy even for only two.”

“Gaidin,” Moiraine began in a firm voice, but the Warder cut her off with one just as firm.

“We go together, Moiraine. I will not stand aside this time.” After a moment she nodded. Perrin thought he saw Lan relax. “The rest of you had better get some sleep,” the Warder went on. “I have to be out studying the Stone.” He paused. “There is a thing that your news drove out of my head, Moiraine. A small thing, and I cannot see what it might mean. There are Aiel in Tear.”

“Aiel!” Loial exclaimed. “Impossible! The entire city would be in a panic if one Aiel came through the gates.”

“I did not say they were walking the streets, Ogier. The rooftops and chimneys of the city make as good hiding as the Waste. I saw no less than three, though apparently no one else in Tear has seen any of them. And if I saw three, you can be sure there are many times that I did not see.”

“It means nothing to me,” Moiraine said slowly. “Perrin, why are you frowning in that way?”

He had not known that he was frowning. “I was thinking about that Aiel in Remen. He said that when the Stone falls, the Aiel will leave the Three-fold Land. That’s the Waste, isn’t it? He said it was a prophecy.”

“I have read every word of the Prophecies of the Dragon,” Moiraine said softly, “in every translation, and there is no mention of the Aiel. We stagger blindly while Be’lal weaves his nets, and the Wheel weaves the Pattern around us. But are the Aiel the Wheel’s weaving, or Be’lal’s? Lan, you must find me the way into the Stone quickly. Us. Find us a way in quickly.”

“As you command, Aes Sedai,” he said, but his tone was more warm than formal. He vanished through the door. Moiraine frowned at the table, eyes clouded in thought.

Zarine came over to look down at Perrin, her head tilted to one side. “And what are you going to do, blacksmith? It seems they mean us to wait and watch while they go adventuring. Not that I will complain.”

He doubted that last. “First,” he told her, “I am going to have something to eat. And then I am going to think about a hammer.”
And try to puzzle out how I feel about you. Falcon
.

From the corner of her eye, Nynaeve thought she glimpsed a tall man with reddish hair, in a swirling brown cloak, well down the sunlit street, but as she turned to peer from under the wide brim of the blue straw hat Ailhuin had given her, an ox-drawn wagon was already lumbering between them. When it lurched on, the man was nowhere to be seen. She was almost certain that had been a wooden flute case on his back, and his clothes were certainly not Tairen.
It couldn’t be Rand. Just because I keep dreaming about him does not mean he is going to come all the way from Almoth Plain
.

One of the barefoot men hurrying past, with the sickle-shaped tails of a dozen large fish sticking up from the basket on his back, suddenly tripped, catapulting silver-scaled fish over his head as he fell. He landed on hands and knees in the mud, staring at the fish that had come out of his basket. Every one of the long, sleek shapes stood upright, stuck nose down in the mud, forming a neat circle. Even a few passersby gaped at that. Slowly the man got to his feet, apparently unaware of the mud on him. Unslinging his basket, he began gathering the fish back into it, shaking his head and muttering to himself.

Nynaeve blinked, but her business was with this cow-faced brigand, facing her in the doorway of his shop with bloody cuts of meat hanging from hooks behind him. She gave her braid a tug and fixed the fellow with her eye.

“Very well,” she said sharply, “I will take it, but if this is what you charge for so poor a cut, you’ll not have more business from me.”

He shrugged placidly as he took her coins, then wrapped the fatty mutton roast in a cloth she produced from the basket on her arm. She glared at him as she put the wrapped meat into the basket, but that did not affect him.

She whirled to stalk away—and nearly fell. She was still not used to these clogs; they kept sticking in the mud, and she could not see how the folk who wore them managed. She hoped this sunshine dried the ground soon, but she had a feeling that the mud was more or less permanent in the Maule.

Stepping gingerly, she started back toward Ailhuin’s house, muttering under her breath. The prices were outrageous for everything, the quality inevitably poor, and almost no one seemed to care, not the people buying or those selling. It was a relief to pass a woman shouting at a shopkeeper, waving a bruised reddish-yellow fruit—Nynaeve did not know what; they had a good many fruits and vegetables she had never heard of, here—in each hand and calling for everyone to see what refuse the man sold, but the shopkeeper only stared at her wearily, not even bothering to argue back.

There was some excuse for the prices, she knew—Elayne had explained all about the grain being eaten by rats in the granaries because no one in Cairhien could buy, and how big the Cairhienin grain trade had become since the Aiel War—but nothing excused the way everyone seemed ready to lie down and die. She had seen hail ruin food crops in the Two Rivers, and grasshoppers eat them and blacktongue kill the sheep and redspot wither the tabac so there was nothing to sell when the merchants came down from Baerlon. She could remember two years in a row when there had been little to eat except turnip soup and old barley, and hunters had been lucky to bring home a scrawny rabbit, but Two Rivers folk picked themselves up when they were knocked down and went back to work. These people had had only one bad year, and their fisheries and their other trade seemed to be flourishing. She had no patience with them. The trouble was, she knew she should have a little patience. They were odd people with odd ways, and things she took for cringing, they seemed to see as a matter of course, even Ailhuin and Sandar. She should be able to summon up just a little patience.

If for them, why not for Egwene?
She put that aside. The child behaved wretchedly, snapping at the most obvious suggestions, objecting to the most sensible things. Even when it was plain what they should do, Egwene
wanted to be convinced. Nynaeve was not used to having to convince people, especially not people she had changed swaddling clothes for. The fact that she was only a matter of seven years older than Egwene was of no account.

It is all those bad dreams
, she told herself.
I cannot understand what they mean, and now Elayne and I are having them, too, and I do not know what that means either, and Sandar won’t say anything except that he is still looking, and I am so frustrated I . . . I could just spit!
She jerked her braid so hard it hurt. At least she had been able to convince Egwene not to use the
ter’angreal
again, to put the thing back in her pouch instead of wearing it next to her skin always. If the Black Ajah was in
Tel’aran’rhiod
. . . . She did not want to think about that possibility.
We
will
find them!

“I will bring them down,” she muttered. “Trying to sell me like a sheep! Hunting me like an animal! I am the hunter this time, not the rabbit! That Moiraine! If she had never come to Emond’s Field, I could have taught Egwene enough. And Rand. . . . I could have . . . I could have done something.” That she knew neither was true did not help; it made it worse. She hated Moiraine almost as much as she hated Liandrin and the Black Ajah, maybe as much as she hated the Seanchan.

She rounded a corner, and Juilin Sandar had to leap out of her way to keep from being trampled. Even used to them as he was, he nearly tripped over his own clogs, only his staff saving him from falling on his face in the mud. That pale, ridged wood was called bamboo, she had learned, and it was stronger than it looked.

“Mistress—uh—Mistress Maryim,” Sandar said, regaining his balance. “I was . . . looking for you.” He flashed her a nervous smile. “Are you angry? Why are you frowning at me that way?”