“Does it involve us?”
“The Forsaken always involve us,” Perrin said, standing. He reached down, touched Gaul on the shoulder and shifted them in the direction Steps had indicated. The position wasn’t exact, but once Perrin arrived, he found some wolves who had seen Heartseeker on their way to the Borderlands the day before. They sent Perrin eager greetings, asking if he was going to lead them.
He rebuffed their questions, pinpointing where Heartseeker had been spotted. It was Merrilor.
Perrin shifted there. A strange mist hung over the landscape here. Tall trees, the ones Rand had grown, reflected here, and their lofty tops poked out of the mist above.
Tents dotted the landscape, like the tops of mushrooms. Aiel tents were plentiful, and between them cook fires glowed in the mist. This camp had been here long enough to manifest in the wolf dream, though tent flaps changed places and bedrolls vanished, flickering in the insubstantial way of this place.
Perrin led Gaul between the neat rows of tents and horseless horse pickets. They both froze as they heard a sound. Someone muttering. Perrin used the trick he’d seen Lanfear use, creating a pocket of… something around himself that was invisible, but which stopped sound. It was strange, but he did it by creating a barrier with no air in it. Why would that make the sound stop?
He and Gaul crept forward to the canvas of a tent. That of the man Rodel Ituralde, one of the great captains, judging by the banner. Inside, a woman in trousers picked through documents on a table. They kept vanishing in her fingers.
Perrin didn’t recognize her, though she was painfully homely. That certainly wasn’t what he’d have expected from one of the Forsaken; not that large forehead, bulbous nose, uneven eyes or thinning hair. He didn’t recognize her curses, though he grasped the meaning from her tone.
Gaul looked at him, and Perrin reached for his hammer, but hesitated. Attacking Slayer was one thing, but one of the Forsaken? He was confident of his ability to resist weaves here in the wolf dream. But still…
The woman cursed again as the paper she was reading vanished. Then she looked up.
Perrin’s reaction was immediate. He created a paper-thin wall between her and him, her side painted with an exact replica of the landscape behind him, his side transparent. She looked right at him, but didn’t see him, and turned away.
Beside him, Gaul let out a very soft breath of relief. How did I do that? Perrin thought. It wasn’t something he had practiced; it had merely seemed right.
Heartseeker—this had to be she—waved her fingers, and the tent split in half above her, the canvas flaps hanging down. She rose through the air, moving toward the black tempest above.
Perrin whispered to Gaul, “Wait here and watch for danger.”
Gaul nodded. Perrin cautiously followed Heartseeker, lifting himself into the air with a thought. He tried to form another wall between him
self and her, but it was too difficult to keep the right image displayed while moving. Instead, he kept his distance and put a blank brownish-green wall between him and the Forsaken, hoping that if she happened to glance down, she’d pass over the small oddity.
She began to move more quickly, and Perrin forced himself to keep up. He glanced down, and was rewarded with the stomach-churning sight of Merrilor’s landscape dwindling below. Then it grew dark and vanished into blackness.
They didn’t pass through the clouds. As the ground faded away, so did the clouds, and they entered someplace black. Pinpricks of light appeared all around Perrin. The woman above stopped and hung in the air for a few moments before streaking away to the right.
Perrin followed again, coloring himself—his skin, his clothing, everything—black to hide. The woman approached one of the pinpricks of light until it expanded and dominated the sky in front of her.
Heartseeker reached her hands forward and pressed them against the light. She was muttering to herself. Feeling he needed to hear what she was saying, Perrin dared move closer, though he suspected that the pounding of his heart was so loud it would give him away.
“… take it from me?” she said. “You think I care? Give me a face of broken stone. What do I care? That’s not me. I will have your place, Moridin. It will be mine. This face will just make them underestimate me. Burn you.”
Perrin frowned. He couldn’t make much sense of what she was saying.
“Go ahead and throw your armies at them, you fools,” she continued to herself. “I’ll have the greater victory. An insect can have a thousand legs, but only one head. Destroy the head, and the day is yours. All you’re doing is cutting off the legs, stupid fool. Stupid, arrogant, insufferable fool. I’ll have what is due me, I’ll…”
She hesitated, then pivoted. Perrin, spooked, immediately sent himself back to the ground. It worked, thankfully—he hadn’t known if it would, up in that place of lights. Gaul jumped, and Perrin took a deep breath. “Let’s—”
A ball of blazing fire crashed into the ground beside him. Perrin cursed and rolled, cooling himself with a gust of wind, imagining his hammer up into his hand.
Heartseeker dropped to the ground in a wave of energy, power rippling around her. “Who are you?” she demanded. “Where are you? I—”
She focused suddenly on Perrin, seeing him completely for the first time, the blackness having faded from his clothing. “You!” she screeched. “You are to blame for this!”
She raised her hands; her eyes almost seemed to glow with hatred. Perrin could smell the emotion in spite of the blowing wind. She released a white-hot bar of light, but Perrin bent it around himself.
The woman started. They always did that. Didn’t they realize that nothing was real here except what you thought to be real? Perrin vanished, appearing behind her, raising his hammer. Then he hesitated. A woman?
She spun about, screaming and ripping the earth beneath him. He jumped up into the sky, and the air around him tried to seize him—but he did what he’d done before, creating a wall of nothingness. There was no air to grab him. Holding his breath, he vanished and appeared back on the ground, summoning banks of earth in front of him to block the balls of fire that hurtled his way.