The Path of Daggers (The Wheel of Time #8)

The Path of Daggers (The Wheel of Time #8) Page 141

Rand forced his hand to loosen its grip on the Dragon Scepter. He had always been sure Dashiva was nearly as mad as Lews Therin himself. Usually the man maintained a better hold on himself, though, however precariously. “I’ve been channeling longer than you, Dashiva. You’re just feeling the taint more.” He could not soften his tone. Light, he could not go mad yet, and neither could they! “Get to your place. We’ll be moving soon.” The scouts had to return soon. Even in this flatter country, even limited to no further than they could see, ten miles would not take long to cover, Traveling.

Dashiva made no move to obey. Instead, he opened his mouth angrily, then snapped it shut. Shaking visibly, he drew a deep breath. “I am well aware how long you have channeled,” he said in an icy, almost contemptuous voice, “but surely even you can feel it. Feel, man! I don’t like ‘strange’ applied to saidin, and I don’t want to die or... or be burned out because you’re blind! Look at my ward! Look at it!”

Rand stared. Dashiva pushing himself forward was peculiar enough, but Dashiva in a temper? And then he did look at the ward. Really look. The flows should have been as steady as the threads in tightwoven canvas. They vibrated. The ward stood solid as it should be, but the individual threads of the Power shimmered with faint movement. Morr had said saidin was strange near Ebou Dar, and for a hundred miles around. They were closer than a hundred miles, now.

Rand made himself feel saidin. He was always aware of the Power — anything else meant death or worse — yet he had become used to the struggle. He fought for life, but the fight had become as natural as life. The struggle was life. He made himself feel that battle, his life. Cold to make stone shatter into dust. Fire to make stone flash to vapor. Filth to make a rotten cesspit smell a garden in full flower. And... a pulsing, like something quivering in his fist. This was not the sort of throbbing he had felt in Shadar Logoth, when the taint on saidin had resonated with the evil of that place, and saidin had pulsed with it. The vileness was strong, but steady here. It was saidin itself that seemed full of currents and surges. Eager, Dashiva called it, and Rand could see why.

Down the slope, behind Flinn, Morr scrubbed a hand through his hair and looked around uneasily. Flinn alternated shifting on his saddle and easing his sword in its scabbard. Narishma, watching the sky for flying creatures, blinked too often. A muscle twitched in Adley’s cheek. Every one of them displayed some sign of nervousness, and little wonder. Relief welled up in Rand. Not madness after all.

Dashiva smiled, a twisted selfsatisfied smile. “I cannot believe you didn’t notice before.” There was very close to a sneer in his voice. “You’ve been holding saidin practically day and night since we began this mad expedition. This is a simple ward, but it did not want to form, then it snapped together like pulling out of my hands.”

The silverblue slash of a gateway rotated open atop one of the bare hills, half a mile to the west, and a Soldier pulled his horse through and mounted hurriedly, returning from the scout. Even at a distance, Rand could make out the faint shimmer of the weaves surrounding the gateway before they vanished. The rider had not reached the bottom of the hill before another gateway opened on the crest, and then a third, a fourth, more, one after another, almost as fast as the preceding man could get out of the way.

“But it did form,” Rand said. So had the scouts’ gateways. “If saidin is hard to control, it’s always hard, and it still does what you want.” But why more difficult here? A question for another time. Light, he wished Herid Fel were still alive; the old philosopher might have had an answer. “Get back with the others, Dashiva,” he ordered, but the man stared at him in astonishment, and he had to repeat himself before the fellow let the ward vanish, jerked his horse around without a salute and thumped the animal back down the slope with his heels.

“Some trouble, my Lord Dragon?” Anaiyella simpered. Ailil merely looked at Rand with flat eyes.

Seeing the first scout on the way toward Rand, the others fanned off to north and south, where they would join one of the other columns. Finding them the oldfashioned way would be faster than casting about with gateways. Drawing rein in front of Rand, Nalaam slapped fist to chest — did he look a bit wildeyed? No matter. Saidin still did what the man wielding it made it do. Nalaam saluted and gave his report. The Seanchan were not encamped ten miles away, they were no more than five or six distant, marching east. And they had sul’dam and damane by the score.

Rand issued his orders as Nalaam galloped away, and his column began moving west. The Defenders and the Companions rode on either flank. The Legionmen marched at the rear, just behind Denharad. A reminder to the noblewomen, and their armsmen, if they needed one. Anaiyella certainly looked over her shoulder often enough, and Ailil’s refusal to was pointed. Rand formed the main thrust of the column, Rand and Flinn and the others, just as it would be with the other columns. Asha’man to strike, and men with steel to guard their backs while they killed. The sun still had a long way to climb before midday. Nothing had changed to alter the plan.

Madness waits for some, Lews Therin whispered. It creeps up on others.

Miraj rode near the head of his army marching east along a muddy road that wound through hilly olive groves and patchy forest. Not at the head. A full regiment, most Seanchan, rode between him and the forward scouts. He had known generals who wanted to be at the very front. Most were dead. Most had lost the battles they died in. Mud kept down dust, yet word of an army on the move ran like wildfire on the Sa’las Plains, whatever the land. Here and there among the olive trees he spotted an overturned wheelbarrow or an abandoned pruning hook, but the workers had vanished long since. Luckily, they would avoid his opponents as much as they did him. With luck, lacking raken, his opponents would not know he was on them until it was too late. Kennar Miraj did not like trusting to luck.

Aside from underofficers ready to produce maps or copy orders and messengers ready to carry them, he rode accompanied only by Abaldar Yulan, small enough to make his quite ordinary brown gelding seem immense, a fiery man with the nails of his little fingers painted green who wore a black wig to conceal his baldness, and Lisaine Jarath, a grayhaired woman from Seandar itself, whose pale plump face and blue eyes were a study in serenity. Yulan was not calm; Miraj’s coaldark Captain of the Air often wore a scowl for the rules that seldom let him touch the reins of a raken anymore, but today his frown went bone deep. The sky was clear, perfect weather for raken, but by Suroth’s command, none of his fliers would be in the saddle today, not here. There were too few raken with the Hailene to risk them unnecessarily. Lisaine’s calm troubled Miraj more. More than the senior der’sul’dam under his command, she was a friend with whom he had shared many a cup of kaf and many a game of stones. An animated woman, always bubbling over with enthusiasms and amusement. And she was icy calm, as silent as any sul’dam