The Path of Daggers (46 page)

I now have as many as fifty recruiting parties in the field at any given time, with the result that three or four men are added to the rolls almost every day. In a few months, the Black Tower will equal the White, as I said it would. In a year, Tar Valon will tremble at our numbers
.

I harvested that blackberry bush myself. A small bush, and thorny, but a surprising number of berries for the size
.

Mazrim Taim
M’Hael

Rand grimaced, putting the . . . the blackberry bush . . . out of his mind. What had to be done, had to be done. The whole world paid a price for his existence. He would die for it, but the whole world paid.

There were other things to grimace over, anyway. Three or four new men a day? Taim was optimistic. In a few months, at that rate, there would be more men who could channel than Aes Sedai, true, but the newest sister had years of training behind her. And part of that specifically taught how to deal with a man who could channel. He did not want to contemplate any encounter between Asha’man and Aes Sedai who knew what they were facing; blood and regret could be the only outcome, whatever happened. The Asha’man were not aimed at the White Tower, though, no matter what Taim thought. It was a convenient belief, however, if it made Tar Valon step warily. An Asha’man only needed to know how to kill. If there were enough to do that at the right place and time, if they lived long enough to, that was all they had been created for.

“How many deserters, Torval?” he said quietly. He picked up the wine mug and took a swallow, as if the answer were unimportant. The wine should have been warming, but the ginger and sweet serrel and mace tasted bitter on his tongue. “How many losses in training?”

Torval was recovering himself over the refreshments, rubbing his hands and arching an eyebrow at the choice of wines, making a great show of knowing the best, making a show of lording it. Dashiva had accepted the first offered, and stood glowering into his twist-stemmed goblet as though it held swill. Pointing to one of the trays, Torval cocked his head thoughtfully, but he had the words ready on his tongue. “Nineteen deserters, so far. The M’Hael, he has ordered them killed whenever they are found, and their heads brought back for examples.” Plucking a bit of glazed pear from the proffered tray, he popped it into his mouth and smiled brightly. “Three heads hang like fruit on the Traitor’s Tree at this moment.”

“Good,” Rand said levelly. Men who ran now could not be trusted not to run later, when lives depended on them standing. And these men could not be allowed to go their own way; those fellows back on the hills, if they escaped in a body, were less dangerous than one man trained in the Black Tower. The Traitor’s Tree? Taim was a great one for naming things. But men needed the trappings, the symbols and the names, the black coats and the pins, to help hold them together. Until it was time to die. “The next time I visit the Black Tower, I want to see every deserter’s head.”

A second piece of candied pear, halfway to Torval’s mouth, dropped from his fingers and streaked the front of his fine coat. “It might interfere with recruiting, making that sort of effort,” he said slowly. “The deserters, they do not announce themselves.”

Rand held the other man’s gaze until it fell. “How many losses in training?” he demanded. The sharp-nosed Asha’man hesitated. “How many?”

Narishma leaned forward, staring intently at Torval. So did Hopwil. The servants continued their smooth, silent dance, offering their trays to men who no longer saw them. Boreane took advantage of Narishma’s preoccupation to make sure his silver mug held more hot water than spiced wine.

Torval shrugged, too casually. “Fifty-one, all told. Thirteen burned out, and twenty-eight dead where they stood. The rest. . . . The M’Hael, he adds something to their wine, and they do not wake.” Abruptly his tone turned malicious. “It can come suddenly, at any time. One man began screaming that spiders were crawling beneath his skin on his second day.” He smiled viciously at Narishma and Hopwil, and nearly so at Rand, but it was to the other two he addressed himself, swinging his head between them. “You see? Not to worry if you slide into madness. You’ll not hurt yourselves or a soul. You go to sleep . . . forever. Kinder than gentling, even if we knew how. Kinder than leaving you insane
and
cut off, yes?” Narishma stared back, taut as a harpstring, his mug forgotten in his hand. Hopwil was once more frowning at something only he could see.

“Kinder,” Rand said in a flat voice, setting the mug back beside him on the table. Something in the wine. My
soul is black with blood, and damned
. It was not a hard thought, not biting or edged; a simple statement of fact. “A mercy any man might wish for, Torval.”

Torval’s cruel smile faded, and he stood breathing hard. The sums were easy; one man in ten destroyed, one man in fifty mad, and more surely to come. Early days yet, and no way till the day you died to know you had beaten the odds. Except that the odds would beat you, one way or another, in the end. Whatever else, Torval stood under that threat, too.

Abruptly Rand became aware of Boreane. It took a moment before he recognized the expression on her face, and when he did, he bit back cold words. How dare she feel pity! Did she think Tarmon Gai’don could be won without blood? The Prophecies of the Dragon demanded blood like rain!

“Leave us,” he told her, and she quietly gathered the servants. But she still carried compassion in her eyes as she herded them out.

Casting around for a way to change the mood, Rand found nothing. Pity weakened as surely as fear, and they had to be strong. To face what they had to face, they
all
must be steel. His making, his responsibility.

Lost in his own thoughts, Narishma peered into the steam rising from his wine, and Hopwil still tried to stare through the side of the tent. Torval cast sideways glances at Rand and struggled to put the scornful twist back on his mouth. Dashiva alone appeared unaffected, with his arms folded, studying Torval as a man might study a horse offered for sale.

Into the painfully stretching silence burst a husky, windblown young man in black, with the Sword and Dragon on his collar. Of an age with Hopwil, still not old enough to marry most places, Fedwin Morr wore intensity more closely than his shirt; he moved on his toes, and his eyes had the look of a hunting cat that knew itself hunted in turn. He had been different, once, and not so long ago. “The Seanchan will move from Ebou Dar soon,” he said as he saluted. “They mean to come against Illian next.” Hopwil gave a start and a gasp, jolted out of his dark study. Once again, Dashiva’s response was to laugh, mirthlessly this time.

Nodding, Rand took up the Dragon Scepter. After all, he carried it for remembrance. The Seanchan danced to their own tune, not the song he wished for.

If Rand received the announcement in silence, Torval did not. Finding his sneer, he raised a contemptuous eyebrow. “Did they tell you all that, now?” he said mockingly. “Or have you learned to read minds? Let me tell you something, boy. I have fought, against Amadicians and Domani both, and no army takes a city then packs itself up to march a thousand miles! More than a thousand miles! Or do you think they can Travel?”

Morr met Torval’s derision calmly. Or if it unsettled him at all, the only sign he gave was running a thumb down his long sword hilt. “I did talk to some of them. Most were Taraboners, and more landing by ship every day, or near enough.” Shouldering past Torval to the table, he favored the Taraboner with a level look. “All stepping right quick whenever anybody with a slurring way of speech opened a mouth.” The older man opened his, angrily, but the younger pressed on hurriedly, to Rand. “They’re putting soldiers all along the Venir Mountains. Five hundred, sometimes a thousand together. All the way to Arran Head already. And they’re buying or taking every wagon and cart within twenty leagues of Ebou Dar, and the animals to draw them.”

“Carts!” Torval exclaimed. “Wagons! Is it that they mean to hold a market fair, do you think? And what fool would march an army through mountains when there are perfectly good roads?” He noticed Rand watching him, and cut off with a small frown, suddenly uncertain.

“I told you to stay low, Morr.” Rand let anger touch his voice. The young Asha’man had to step back as he jumped down from the table. “Not to go asking the Seanchan their plans. To look and stay low.”

“I was careful; I didn’t wear my pins.” Morr’s eyes did not change for Rand, still hunter and hunted in one. He seemed to be boiling inside. Had Rand not known better, he would have thought Morr held the Power, struggling to survive
saidin
even as it gave him life ten times over. His face seemed to want to sweat. “If any of the men I talked to knew where they’re going next, they didn’t say, and I didn’t ask, but they were willing to complain over a mug of ale about marching all the time and never standing still. In Ebou Dar, they were soaking up all the ale in the city as fast as they could, because they say they have to march again. And they’re gathering wagons, just like I said.” That all came out in a rush, and he clamped his teeth at the end as though to trap more words that wanted to fly from his tongue.

Smiling suddenly, Rand clapped him on the shoulder. “You did well. The wagons would have been enough, but you did well. Wagons are important,” he added, turning to Torval. “If an army feeds off the country, it eats what it finds. Or not, if it doesn’t.” Torval had not flickered an eyelid at hearing of Seanchan in Ebou Dar. If that tale had reached the Black Tower, why had Taim not mentioned it? Rand hoped his smile did not look a snarl. “It’s harder to arrange supply trains, but when you have one you know there’s fodder for the animals and beans for the men. The Seanchan organize everything.”

Sorting through the maps, he found the one he wanted and spread it out, weighted at one side with his sword and at the other with the Dragon Scepter. The coast between Illian and Ebou Dar stared up at him, rimmed for most of its length by hills and mountains, dotted with fishing villages and small towns. The Seanchan did organize. Ebou Dar had been theirs barely more than a week, but the merchants’ eyes-and-ears wrote of repairs well under way on the damage done to the city in its taking, of clean sick-houses set up for the ill, of food and work arranged for the poor and those driven from their homes by troubles inland. The streets and the surrounding countryside were patrolled so that no one need fear footpads or bandits, day or night, and while merchants were welcome, smuggling had been cut to a trickle if not less. Those honest Illianer merchants had been surprisingly glum about the smuggling. What were the Seanchan organizing now?

The others gathered around the table as Rand perused the map. There were roads hard along the coast, but poor straggling things, marked as little more than cart paths. The broad trade roads lay inland, avoiding the worst of the terrain and the worst of what the Sea of Storms had to offer. “Men raiding out of those mountains could make passage difficult for anyone trying to use the inland roads,” he said finally. “By controlling the mountains, they make the roads safe as a city street. You’re right, Morr. They are coming to Illian.”

Leaning on his fists, Torval glared at Morr, who had been right when he was wrong. A grievous sin, perhaps, in Torval’s book. “Even so, it will be months before they can trouble you here,” he said sullenly. “A hundred Asha’man, fifty, placed in Illian, could destroy any army in the world before one man crosses the causeways.”

“I doubt an army with
damane
is destroyed as easily as one kills Aiel committed to an attack and caught by surprise,” Rand said quietly, and Torval stiffened. “Besides, I have to defend all of Illian, not just the city.”

Ignoring the man, Rand traced lines across the map with a finger. Between Arran Head and the city of Illian lay a hundred leagues of open water, across the mouth of Kabal Deep, where, ship captains in Illian said, their longest sounding lines could find no bottom just a mile or so from the shore. The waves there could overturn ships as they surged north to pound the coast with breakers fifteen paces high. In this weather, it would be worse. Marching around the Deep was a route of two hundred leagues to reach the city, even keeping to the shortest ways, but if the Seanchan pressed on from Arran Head, they could reach the border in two weeks despite the rainstorms. Maybe less. Better to fight where he chose, not where they did. His finger slid along the south coast of Altara, along the Venir range, until the mountains dwindled to hills short of Ebou Dar. Five hundred here, a thousand there. A tantalizing string of beads dropped along the mountains. A sharp rap might roll them back to Ebou Dar, might even pen them there while they tried to figure out what he was up to. Or. . . .

“There was something else,” Morr said abruptly, rushing again. “There was talk about some sort of Aes Sedai weapon. I found where it was used, a few miles from the city. The ground was all burned over, seared clean in the middle, a good three hundred paces wide or more, and ruined orchards further. The sand was melted to sheets of glass.
Saidin
was worst, there.”

Torval waved a hand at him dismissively. “There could have been Aes Sedai near when the city fell, yes? Or maybe the Seanchan themselves did it. One sister with an
angreal
could—”

Rand cut in. “What do you mean,
saidin
was worst there?” Dashiva moved, eyeing Morr oddly, reaching as though to seize the young man. Rand fended him off roughly. “What do you mean, Morr?”

Morr stared, mouth shut tight, running his thumb up and down the length of his sword hilt. The heat inside of him seemed ready to burst out. There really was sweat beading on his face now.
“Saidin
was . . . strange,” he said hoarsely. His words came in rapid bursts. “Worst there—I could . . . feel it . . . in the air all around me—but strange everywhere around Ebou Dar. And even a hundred miles away. I had to fight it; not like always; different. Like it was alive. Sometimes. . . . Sometimes, it didn’t do what I wanted. Sometimes, it . . . did something else. It did. I’m not mad! It did!” The wind gusted, howling for a moment, shivering and snapping the tent walls, and Morr fell silent. Narishma’s bells chimed at a jerk of his head, then were still.