Mat scanned the walls, then glared, turning to take them all in, standing up there on their pedestals staring down at him. “Done? What is done? I see no door. You lying goat-fathered—”
“Fool,” a woman said in a whispered growl, and others repeated it. Fool. Fool. Fool.
“Wise to ask leavetaking, when you set no price, no terms.”
“Yet fool not to first agree on price.”
“We will set the price.”
They spoke so quickly he could not tell which said what.
“What was asked will be given.”
“The price will be paid.”
“Burn you,” he shouted, “what are you talking—”
Utter darkness closed around him. There was something around his throat. He could not breathe. Air. He could not … .
CHAPTER 25
The Road to the Spear
Not hesitating at the first row of columns, Rand made himself walk in among them. There could be no turning back now, no looking back. Light, what is supposed to happen in here? What does it really do?
Clear as the finest glass, perhaps a foot thick and standing three paces or more apart, the columns were a forest of dazzling light filled with cascading ripples and glares and odd rainbows. The air was cooler here, enough to make him wish he had a coat, but the same gritty dust covered the smooth white stone under his boots. Not a breeze stirred, yet something made each hair on his body shift, even under his shirt.
Ahead and to the right he could just see another man, in the grays and browns of Aiel, stiff and statue-still in the changing lights. That must be Muradin, Couladin’s brother. Stiff and still; something was happening. Strangely, considering the brilliance, Rand could make out the Aiel’s face clearly. Eyes wide and staring, face tight, mouth quivering on the brink of a snarl. Whatever he was seeing, he did not like it. But Muradin had survived that far, at least. If he could do it, Rand could. The man was six or seven paces ahead of him at best. Wondering why he and Mat had not seen Muradin go in, he took another step.
He rode behind a set of eyes, feeling but not controlling a body. The owner of those eyes crouched easily among boulders on a barren mountainside, beneath a sun-blasted sky, peering down at strange half-made stone structures—No! Less than half-made. That’s Rhuidean, but without any fog, and only just begun—peering down contemptuously. He was Mandein, young for a sept chief at forty. Separateness faded; acceptance came. He was Mandein.
“You must agree,” Sealdre said, but for the moment he ignored her.
The Jenn had made things to draw up water and spill it into great stone basins. He had fought battles over less water than one of those tanks held, with people walking by as though water was of no consequence. A strange forest of glass rose in the center of all their activity, glittering in the sun, and near it the tallest tree he had ever seen, at least three spans high. Their stone structures looked as if each was meant to contain an entire hold, an entire sept, when done. Madness. This Rhuidean could not be defended. Not that anyone would attack the Jenn, of course. Most avoided the Jenn as they avoided the accursed Lost Ones, who wandered searching for the songs they claimed would bring back lost days.
A procession snaked out of Rhuidean toward the mountain, a few dozen Jenn and two palanquins, each carried by eight men. There was enough wood in each of those palanquins for a dozen chief’s chairs. He had heard there were still Aes Sedai among the Jenn.
“You must agree to whatever they ask, husband,” Sealdre said.
He looked at her then, wanting for a moment to run his hands through her long golden hair, seeing the laughing girl who had laid the bridal wreath at his feet and asked him to marry her. She was serious now, though, intent and worried. “Will the others come?” he asked.
“Some. Most. I have talked to my sisters in the dream, and we have all dreamed the same dream. The chiefs who do not come, and those who do not agree … . Their septs will die, Mandein. Within three generations they will be dust, and their holds and cattle belong to other septs. Their names will be lost.”
He did not like her talking to the Wise Ones of other septs, even in dreams. But the Wise Ones dreamed true. When they knew, it was true. “Stay here,” he told her. “If I do not return, help our sons and daughters to hold the sept together.”
She touched his cheek. “I will, shade of my life. But remember. You must agree.”
Mandein motioned, and a hundred veiled shapes followed him down the slope, ghosting from boulder to boulder, bows and spears ready, grays and browns blending with the barren land, vanishing even to his eyes. They were all men; he had left all the women of the sept who carried the spear with the men around Sealdre. If anything went wrong and she decided on something senseless to save him, the men would probably follow her in it; the women would see her back to the hold whatever she wanted, to protect the hold and the sept. He hoped they would. Sometimes they could be fiercer than any man, and more foolish.
The procession from Rhuidean had stopped on the cracked clay flat by the time he reached the lower slope. He motioned his men to ground and went
on alone, lowering his veil. He was aware of other men moving out from the mountain to his right and left, coming across the baked ground from other directions. How many? Fifty? Maybe a hundred? Some faces he had expected to see were missing. Sealdre was right as usual; some had not listened to their Wise Ones’ dream. There were faces he had never seen before, and faces of men he had tried to kill, men who had tried to kill him. At least none were veiled. Killing in front of a Jenn was almost as bad as killing a Jenn. He hoped the others remembered that. Treachery from one, and the veils would be donned; the warriors each chief had brought would come down from the mountains, and this dry clay would be muddied with blood. He half-expected to feel a spear through his ribs any moment.
Even trying to watch a hundred possible sources of death, it was hard not to stare at the Aes Sedai as the bearers lowered their ornately carved chairs to the ground. Women with hair so white it almost seemed transparent. Ageless faces with skin that looked as if the wind might tear it. He had heard the years did not touch Aes Sedai. How old must these two be? What had they seen? Could they remember when his greatfather Comran first found Ogier stedding in the Dragonwall and began to trade with them? Or maybe even when Comran’s greatfather Rhodric led the Aiel to kill the men in iron shirts who had crossed the Dragonwall? The Aes Sedai turned their eyes on him—sharp blue and dark dark brown, the first dark eyes he had ever seen—and seemed to see inside his skull, inside his thoughts. He knew himself chosen out, and did not know why. With an effort he pulled away from those twin gazes, which knew him better than he knew himself.
A gaunt white-haired man, tall if stooped, came forward from the Jenn flanked by two graying women who might have been sisters, with the same deep-set green eyes and the same way of tilting their heads when they looked at anything. The rest of the Jenn stared uneasily at the earth rather than at the Aiel, but not these three.
“I am Dermon,” the man said in a deep strong voice, his blue-eyed scrutiny as steady as any Aiel’s. “These are Mordaine and Narisse.” He gestured to the women beside him in turn. “We speak for Rhuidean, and the Jenn Aiel.”