Tension drained from her visibly. She stepped closer to look up at him. “What you used to kill the Darkhounds is called balefire. I can still sense the residue of it here.” He could, too, like the fading smell remaining after a pie was carried out of the room, or the memory of something just snatched out of sight. “Since before the Breaking of the World, the use of balefire has been forbidden. The White Tower forbids us even to learn it. In the War of Power, the Forsaken and the Shadowsworn themselves used it only reluctantly.”
“Forbidden?” Rand said, frowning. “I saw you use it once.” He could not be sure in the pale light of the moon, but he thought color flamed in her cheeks. For this once, perhaps she was the one off balance.
“Sometimes it is necessary to do that which is forbidden.” If she was flustered, it did not show in her voice. “When anything is destroyed with balefire, it ceases to exist before the moment of its destruction, like a thread that burns away from where the flame touched it. The greater the power of the balefire, the further back in time it ceases to exist. The strongest I can manage will remove only a few seconds from the Pattern. You are much stronger. Very much so.”
“But if it doesn’t exist before you destroy it . . .” Rand raked fingers through his hair in confusion.
“You begin to see the problems, the dangers? Mat remembers seeing one of the Darkhounds chew through the door, but there is no opening, now. If it had slavered on him as much as he remembers, he would have been dead before I could reach him. For as far back as you destroyed the creature, whatever it did during that time no longer happened. Only the memories remain, for those who saw or experienced it. Only what it did before is real, now. A few tooth holes in the door, and one drop of saliva on Mat’s arm.”
“That sounds just fine to me,” he told her. “Mat’s alive because of it.”
“It is terrible, Rand.” An urgent note entered her voice. “Why do you think even the Forsaken feared to use it? Think of the effect on the Pattern of a single thread, one man, removed from hours, or days, that have already been woven, like one thread picked partly out of a piece of cloth. Fragments of manuscripts remaining from the War of Power say several entire cities were destroyed with balefire before both sides realized the dangers. Hundreds of thousands of threads pulled from the Pattern, gone for days already past; whatever those people had done, now no longer had been done, and neither had what others had done because of their actions. The memories remained, but not the actions. The ripples were incalculable. The Pattern itself nearly unraveled. It could have been the destruction of everything. World, time, Creation itself.”
Rand shivered, nothing to do with the cold cutting through his coat. “I can’t promise not to use it again, Moiraine. You yourself said there are times when it’s necessary to do what’s forbidden.”
“I did not think that you would,” she said coolly. Her agitation was vanishing, her balance restored. “But you must be careful.” She was back to “must” again. “With a sa’angreal like Callandor, you could annihilate a city with balefire. The Pattern could be disrupted for years to come. Who can say that the weave would even remain centered on you, ta’veren as you are, until it settled down? Being ta’veren, and so strongly so, may be your margin of victory, even in the Last Battle.”
“Perhaps it will,” he said bleakly. In tale after heroic tale, the protagonist proclaimed he would have victory or death. It seemed that the best he could hope for was victory and death. “I have to check on someone,” he went on quietly. “I will see you in the morning.” Gathering the Power into him, life and death in swirling layers, he made a hole in the air taller than he was, opening into blackness that made the moonlight seem day. A gateway, Asmodean called it.
“What is that?” Moiraine gasped.
“Once I’ve done something, I remember how. Most of the time.” That was no answer, but it was time to test Moiraine’s vows
. She could not lie, but Aes Sedai could find loopholes in a stone. “You are to leave Mat alone tonight. And you won’t try to take that medallion away from him.”
“It belongs in the Tower for study, Rand. It must be a ter’angreal, but none has ever been found that—”
“Whatever it is,” he said firmly, “it is his. You will leave it with him.”
For a moment she seemed to struggle with herself, back stiffening and head coming up as she stared at him. She could not be used to taking orders from anyone except Siuan Sanche, and Rand was willing to wager she had never done that without a tussle. Finally she nodded, and even made the suggestion of a curtsy. “As you say, Rand. It is his. Please be careful, Rand. Learning a thing like balefire by yourself can be suicide, and death cannot be Healed.” This time there was no mockery. “Until the morning.” Lan followed her as she left, the Warder giving Rand an unreadable expression; he would not be pleased by this turn of events.
Rand stepped through the gateway, and it vanished.
He was standing on a disc, a six-foot copy of the ancient Aes Sedai symbol. Even the black half of it seemed lighter against the endless darkness that surrounded him, above and below; he was sure that if he fell off, he would fall forever. Asmodean claimed there was a faster method, called Traveling, for using a gateway, but he had not been able to teach it, partly because he did not have the strength to make a gateway while wearing Lanfear’s shield. In any case, Traveling required that you know your starting point very well. It seemed more logical to him that you should have to know where you were heading well, but Asmodean seemed to think that that was like asking why air was not water. There was a great deal that Asmodean took for granted. Anyway, Skimming was fast enough.
As soon as he planted his boots on it, the disc lurched what seemed to be a foot and stopped, another gateway appearing in front of it. Fast enough, especially over this short distance. Rand stepped into the hallway outside the room where Asmodean was.
The moon through the windows at the ends of the corridor gave the only light; Asmodean’s lamp was out. The flows he had woven around the room were still in place, still firmly tied. Nothing moved, but there was still a faint smell of burned sulphur.
Moving close to the bead curtain, he peered through the doorway. Moonshadows filled the room, but one of them was Asmodean, tossing in his blankets. Wrapped in the Void, Rand could hear his heartbeat, smell the sweat of troubled dreams. He bent to examine the pale blue floor tiles, and the prints impressed in them.
He had learned to track as a boy, and reading them was no difficulty. Three or four Darkhounds had been there. They had approached the doorway one by one, it seemed, each stepping almost in the others’ footprints. Had the net woven around the room stopped them there? Or had they merely been sent to look, and report? Troubling to think of even Shadowspawn dogs having that much intelligence. But then, Myrddraal used ravens and rats for spies, too, and other animals closely linked to death. Shadoweyes, the Aiel called them.
Channeling fine flows of Earth, he smoothed out the floor tiles, lifting up the compressions until he was out in the empty, night-cloaked street and a hundred paces from the tall building. In the morning, anyone would be able to see the trail ending there, but none would suspect that the Darkhounds had gone anywhere near Asmodean. Darkhounds could have no interest in Jasin Natael the gleeman.
Every Maiden in the city was likely awake by this time; certainly none would still be asleep under the Roof of the Maidens. Making another gateway there in the street, a deeper blackness against the night, he let the disc carry him back to his own room. He wondered why he had chosen the ancient symbol—it was his choice, if unconscious; other times it had been a stairstep or a piece of floor. The Darkhounds had oozed away from that sign before re-forming. Under this sign will he conquer.
Standing in his pitch-black bedchamber, he channeled the lamps alight, but he did not let go of saidin. Instead he channeled again, careful not to spring any of his own traps, and a piece of the wall vanished, revealing a niche he had carved there himself.
In the little alcove stood two figurines a foot tall, a man and a woman, each in flowing robes and serene of face, each holding a crystal globe aloft in one hand. He had lied to Asmodean about them.
There were angreal, like the round little man in Rand’s coat pocket, and sa’angreal, like Callandor, that increased the amount of the Power that could be safely handled as much over angreal as angreal did over channeling unaided. Both were very rare, and prized by Aes Sedai, though they could only recognize those attuned to women and saidar. These two figures were something else, not so rare, but just as highly valued. Ter’angreal had been made to use the Power not to magnify it, but to use it in specific ways. The Aes Sedai did not know the intended purpose even of most ter’angreal they had in the White Tower; some they used, but without knowing whether the use they put them to was anything like the function they had been made for. Rand knew the function of these two.
The male figure could link him to a huge replica of itself, the most powerful male sa’angreal ever made, even if he were on the other side of the Aryth Ocean from it. It had only been finished after the Dark One’s prison was resealed—How do I know that?—and hidden before any of the male Aes Sedai going mad could find it. The female figure could do the same for a woman, joining her to the female equivalent of the great statue he hoped was still almost completely buried in Cairhien. With that much power . . . Moiraine had said death could not be Healed.
Unbidden, unwanted, memory returned of the next-to-last time he had dared let himself hold Callandor, images floating beyond the Void.
The body of the dark-haired girl, little more than a child, lay sprawled with eyes wide and fixed on the ceiling, blood blackening the bosom of her dress where a Trolloc had run her through.