The Shadow Rising (The Wheel of Time 4)

The other man looked up, saw Perrin. For a heartbeat he hesitated, then turned and became a streak, slashing away across the hills.

Perrin leaped down to where he had stood, stared at what had occupied the fellow, and without thought pursued, leaving the half-skinned corpse of a wolf behind. A dead wolf in the wolf dream. It was unthinkable. What could kill a wolf here? Something evil.

His prey ran ahead of him in strides that covered miles, never more than barely in sight. Out of the hills and across the tangled Westwood with its wide-scattered farms, over cleared farmland, a quilt of hedged fields and small thickets, and past Watch Hill. It was odd to see the thatched village houses covering the hill with no people in the streets, and farmhouses standing as if abandoned. But he kept his eye on the man fleeing ahead of him. He had become so used to this pursuit that he felt no surprise when one leaping stride put him down on the south bank of the River Taren and the next amid barren hills without trees or grass. North and east he ran, over streams and roads and villages and rivers, intent only on the man ahead. The land grew flat and grassy, broken by scattered thickets, without any sign of man. Then something glittered ahead, sparkling in the sun, a tower of metal. His quarry sped straight for it, and vanished. Two leaps brought Perrin there as well.

Two hundred feet the tower rose, and forty thick, gleaming like burnished steel. It might as well have been a solid column of metal. Perrin walked around it twice without seeing any opening, not so much as a crack, not even a mark on that smooth, sheer wall. The smell hung here, though, that cold, inhuman stink. The trail ended here. The man—if man he was—had gone inside somehow. He only had to find the way to follow.

Stop! It was a raw flow of emotion that Perrin’s mind put a word to. Stop!

He turned as a great gray wolf as tall as his waist, grizzled and scarred, alighted as if he had just leaped down from the sky. He might well have. Hopper had always envied eagles their ability to fly, and here, he could too. Yellow eyes met yellow eyes.

“Why should I stop, Hopper? He killed a wolf.”

Men have killed wolves, and wolves men. Why does anger seize your throat like fire this time?

“I don’t know,” Perrin said slowly. “Maybe because it was here. I didn’t know it was possible to kill a wolf here. I thought wolves were safe in the dream.”

You chase Slayer, Young Bull. He is here in the flesh, and he can kill.

“In the flesh? You mean not just dreaming? How can he be here in the flesh?”

I do not know. It is a thing dimly remembered from long ago, come again as so much else. Things of the Shadow walk the dream, now. Creatures of Heartfang. There is no safety.

“Well, he’s inside, now.” Perrin studied the featureless metal tower. “If I can find how he got in, I can put an end to him.”

Cub foolish, digging in a groundwasps’ nest. This place is evil. All know this. And you would chase evil into evil. Slayer

can kill.

Perrin paused. There was a sense of finality to the emotions his mind attached the word “kill” to. “Hopper, what happens to a wolf who dies in the dream?”

The wolf was silent for a time. If we die here, we die forever, Young Bull. I do not know if the same is true for you, but I believe it is.

“A dangerous place, archer. The Tower of Ghenjei is a bad place for humankind.”

Perrin whirled, half-raising his bow before he saw the woman standing a few paces away, her golden hair in a thick braid to her waist, almost the way women wore it in the Two Rivers, but more intricately woven. Her clothes were oddly cut, a short white coat and voluminous trousers of some thin pale yellow material gathered at the ankles above short boots. Her dark cloak seemed to hide something that glinted silver at her side.

She shifted, and the metallic flicker vanished. “You have sharp eyes, archer. I thought that the first time I saw you.”

How long had she been watching? It was embarrassing that she had sneaked up without him hearing. At the least Hopper should have warned him. The wolf was lying down in the knee-high grass, muzzle on his forepaws, watching him.

The woman seemed vaguely familiar, though Perrin was certain he would have remembered her had he ever seen her before. Who was she, to be in the wolf dream? Or was it Moiraine’s Tel’aran’rhiod, too? “Are you Aes Sedai?”

“No, archer.” She laughed. “I only came to warn you, despite the prescripts. Once entered, the Tower of Ghenjei is hard enough to leave in the world of men. Here it is all but impossible. You have a bannerman’s courage, which some say cannot be told from foolhardiness.”

Impossible to leave? The fellow—Slayer—surely had gone in. Why would he do that if he could not leave? “Hopper said it’s dangerous, too. The Tower of Ghenjei? What is it?”

Her eyes widened, and she glanced at Hopper, who still lay stretched out on the grass ignoring her and watching Perrin. “You can talk to wolves? Now that is a thing long lost in legend. So that is how you are here. I should have known. The tower? It is a doorway, archer, to the realms of the Aelfinn and the Eelfinn.” She said the names as if he should recognize them. When he looked at her blankly, she said, “Did you ever play the game called Snakes and Foxes?”

“All children do. At least, they do in the Two Rivers. But they give it up when they get old enough to realize there’s no way to win.”

“Except to break the rules,” she said. “‘Courage to strengthen, fire to blind, music to daze, iron to bind.’”

“That’s a line from the game. I don’t understand. What does it have to do with this tower?”

“Those are the ways to win against the snakes and the foxes. The game is a remembrance of old dealings. It does not matter so long as you stay away from the Aelfinn and the Eelfinn. They are not evil the way the Shadow is evil, yet they are so different from humankind they might as well be. They are not to be trusted, archer. Stay clear of the Tower of Ghenjei. Avoid the World of Dreams, if you can. Dark things walk.”

“Like the man I was chasing? Slayer.”