Knife of Dreams

  Controlling the black with his knees—trained as a warhorse, Tai'daishar responded immediately, though he still snorted—Rand stared in amazement, too. It seemed Master Poel actually had made his steamwagon work. "But how did the thing get to Tear?" he asked the air. The last he had seen, it had been at the Academy of Cairhien, and seizing up every few paces.

  "It's called a steamhorse, my Lord," a barefoot, dirty-faced urchin in a ragged shirt said, bouncing on the pavement. Even the sash holding up his baggy breeches seemed as much holes as cloth. "I've seen it nine times! Com here's only seen it seven."

  "A steamwagon, Doni," his equally ragged companion put in. "A steamwagon." Neither of them could have been more than ten, and they were gaunt rather than skinny. Their muddy feet, torn shirts and holed breeches meant they came from outside the walls, where the poorest folk lived. Rand had changed a number of laws in Tear, especially those that weighed heavily on the poor, but he had been unable to change everything. He had not even known how to begin. Lews Therin began to maunder on about taxes and money creating jobs, but he might as well have been spilling out words at random for all the sense he made. Rand muted the voice to a buzz, a fly on the other side of a room.

  "Four of them hitched together, one behind the other, pulled a hundred wagons all the way from Cairhien," Doni went on, ignoring the other boy. "They covered near a hundred miles every day, my Lord. A hundred miles!"

  Com sighed heavily. "There were six of them, Doni, and they only pulled fifty wagons, but they covered more than a hundred miles every day. A hundred and twenty some days, I heard, and it was one of the steam-men said it." Doni turned to scowl at him, the pair of them balling up fists.

  "Either way, it's a remarkable achievement," Rand told them quickly, before they could begin trading blows. "Here."

  Dipping into his coat pocket, he pulled out two coins and tossed one toward each boy without looking to see what they were. Gold glittered in the air before the boys eagerly snatched the coins. Exchanging startled glances, they went running out through the gates as fast as they could go, no doubt fearful he would demand the coins back. Their families could live for months on that much gold.

  Min gazed after them with an expression of misery that the bond echoed even after she shook her head and smoothed her face. What had she seen? Death, probably. Rand felt anger, but no sorrow. How many tens of thousands would die before the Last Battle was done? How many would be children? He had no room left in him for sorrow.

  "Very generous," Nynaeve said in a tight voice, "but are we going to stand here all morning?" The steamwagon was moving on out of sight quickly, yet her plump brown mare was still blowing anxiously and tossing her head, and she was having difficulty with the animal, placid as it was by nature. She was far from as good a rider as she thought herself. For that matter, Min's mount, an arch-necked gray mare from Algarin's stables, danced so that only Min's firm, red-gloved grip on the reins kept her from running, and Alivia's roan was trying to dance, though the former damane controlled the animal as easily as Cadsuane did her bay. Alivia sometimes displayed surprising talents. Damane were expected to ride well.

  As they rode into the city, Rand took a last glance at the disappearing steamwagon. Remarkable was hardly the word. A hundred wagons or only fifty—only!—incredible was more like it. Would merchants start using those things instead of horses? It hardly seemed likely. Merchants were conservative folk, not known for leaping at new ways of doing things. For some reason, Lews Therin began laughing again.

  Tear was not beautiful, like Caemlyn or Tar Valon, and few of its streets could be called particularly broad, but it was large and sprawling, one of the great cities of the world, and, like most great cities, a jumble that had grown up willy-nilly. In those tangled streets, tile-roofed inns and slate-roofed stables, the roof corners slanted sharply, stood alongside palaces with squared white domes and tall, balcony-ringed towers that often came to points, the heights of domes and towers gleaming in the early-morning sun. Smithies and cutlers, seamstresses and butchers, fishmongers and rugweavers' shops rubbed against marble structures with tall bronze doors behind massive white columns, guild halls and bankers and merchants' exchanges.

  At this hour, the streets themselves were still cast in deep shadows, yet they bustled with that storied southern industry. Sedan chairs borne by pairs of lean men wove through the crowds almost as quickly as the children who raced about in play while coaches and carriages behind teams of four or six moved as slowly as the carts and wagons, most drawn by large oxen. Porters trudged along, their bundles slung beneath poles carried on two men's shoulders, and apprentices carried rolled carpets and boxes of the masters' handiwork on their backs. Hawkers cried their wares from trays or handbarrows, pins and ribbons, a few with roasted nuts and meat pies, and tumblers or jugglers or musicians performed at nearly every intersection. You would never have thought this city was the site of a siege.

  Not everything was peaceful, though. Early morning or not, Rand saw obstreperous drunks being thrown out of inns and taverns and so many fistfights and men wrestling on the pavement that it seemed one pair was not well out of sight before the next came into view. A good many obvious armsmen mingled in the crowd, swords at their hips and the fat sleeves of their woolen coats striped in various House colors, but even those wearing breastplates and helmets made no move to break up the rows. A fair number of the fights involved armsmen, with one another, with Sea Folk, with roughly clad fellows who might have been laborers or apprentices or shoulderthumpers. Soldiers with nothing to do grew bored, and bored soldiers got drunk and fought. He was glad to see the rebel’s armsmen bored.

  The Maidens, drifting through the throng and still trying to pretend they had no association with Rand, drew puzzled looks and head-scratching, mainly from dark-faced Sea Folk, though a gaggle of children trailed after them gaping. The Tairens, many of whom were not all that much fairer than the Sea Folk, had seen Aiel before, and if they wondered why they had returned to the city, it appeared they had different business at hand this morning, and more important. No one seemed to give Rand or his other companions a second glance. There were other mounted men and women in the streets, most of them outlanders, here a pale Cairhienin merchant in a somber coat, there an Arafellin with silver bells fastened to his dark braids, here a copper-skinned Domani in a barely opaque riding dress barely hidden by her cloak followed by a pair of hulking bodyguards in leather coats sewn with steel discs, there a Shienaran with his head shaved except for a gray topknot and his belly straining his buttons. You could not move ten paces in Tear without seeing outlanders. Tairen commerce had long arms.

  Which was not to say that he passed through the city without incident. Ahead of him, a running baker's boy tripped and fell, flinging his basket into the air, and when the boy levered himself off the paving stones as Rand rode by, he stopped halfway up with his mouth hanging open, staring at the long loaves standing on end near the basket, propped together in a rough cone. A fellow in his shirtsleeves, drinking in a second-story window of an inn, overbalanced and toppled toward the street with a shriek that cut off when he landed on his feet not ten paces from Tai'daishar, mug still in hand. Rand left him behind wide-eyed and feeling at himself in wonderment. Ripples of altered chance were following Rand, spreading across the city.

  Not every event would be as harmless as the loaves, or as beneficial as the man landing on his feet rather than his head. Those ripples could turn what should be a bruiseless tumble into broken bones or a broken neck. Lifelong feuds could be started by men speaking words they had never thought to hear come from their own lips. Women could decide to poison their husbands over trivial offenses they had tolerated complacently for years. Oh, some fellow might find a rotting sack full of gold buried in his own basement without really knowing why he had decided to dig in the first place, or a man might ask and gain the hand of a woman he had never before had the courage to approach, but as many would find ruination as found good fortune. Balance, Min
had called it. A good to balance every ill. He saw an ill to balance every good.

  He needed to be done in Tear and gone as soon as possible. Galloping in those crowded streets was out of the question, but he picked up his pace enough that the Maidens had to trot.

  His destination had been in sight since long before he entered the city, a mass of stone like a barren, sheer-sided hill that stretched from the River Erinin into the city's heart, covering at least eight or nine marches, a good square mile or more, and dominating the city's sky. The Stone of Tear was mankind's oldest stronghold, the oldest structure in the world, made with the One Power in the last days of the Breaking itself. One solid piece of stone it was, without a single join, though better than three thousand years of rain and wind had weathered the surface to roughness. The first battlements stood a hundred paces above the ground, though there were arrowslits aplenty lower, and stone spouts for showering attackers with boiling oil or molten lead. No besieger could stop the Stone from being supplied through its own wall-shielded docks, and it contained forges and manufactories to replace or mend every sort of weapon should its armories fall short. Its highest tower, rearing over the very center of the Stone, held the banner of Tear, half red, half gold, with a slanting line of three silver crescents, and so large that it could be made out plainly as it curled in a strong breeze. It had to be strong to move that flag. Lower towers supported smaller versions, but here they alternated with another rippling banner, the ancient symbol of Aes Sedai, black-and-white on a field of red. The Banner of Light. The Dragon Banner, some called it, as if there were not another that bore that name. The High Lord Darlin was flaunting his allegiance, it seemed. That was well.

  Alanna was in there, and whether or not that was well he would have to learn. He was not as sharply aware of her as before Elayne and Aviendha and Min jointly bonded him—he thought he was not; they had pushed her aside to take primacy somehow, and she had told him she could sense little more of him than his presence—yet she still lay in the back of his head, a bundle of emotions and physical sensations. It seemed a long time since he had been near enough to her to sense those. Once again, the bond with her felt an intrusion, a would-be usurper of his bond to Min and Elayne and Aviendha. Alanna was weary, as if perhaps she had not been getting enough sleep lately, and frustrated, with strong streaks of anger and sulkiness. Were the negotiations going badly? He would find out soon enough. She would be aware he was in the city, aware he was coming closer if little more. Min had tried to teach him a trick called masking that supposedly could hide him from the bond, but he had never been able to make it work. Of course, she admitted she had never been able to make it work either.

  Soon he found himself on a street that ran directly to the plaza that surrounded the Stone on three sides, but he had no intention of riding straight there. For one thing, every massive iron-strapped gate would be barred tight. For another, he could see several hundred armsmen at the foot of the street. He expected there would be the same in front of every gate. They hardly gave the impression of men besieging a fortress. They seemed to be lounging about with no order—many had their helmets off and their halberds propped against the buildings lining the street, and serving women from nearby taverns and inns circulated among them selling mugs of ale or wine from trays—yet it was highly unlikely they would remain complacent about anyone trying to enter the Stone. Not that they could stop him, of course. He could sweep aside a few hundred men like so many moths.

  He had not come to Tear to kill anyone, though, not unless he had to, so he rode into the stableyard of a tile-roofed inn, three stories of dark gray stone with a prosperous look. The sign out front was freshly painted with, of all things, a rough approximation of the creatures encircling his forearms. The artist apparently had decided the thing was inadequate as described, though, because he had added long, sharp teeth and leathery, ribbed wings. Wings! They almost looked copied from one of those Seanchan flying beasts. Cadsuane looked at the sign and snorted. Nynaeve looked at it and giggled. So did Min!

  Even after Rand gave the barefoot stableboys silver to curry the horses, they stared at the Maidens harder than at the coins, but no harder than the patrons stared in The Dragon's beam-ceilinged common room. Conversation trailed off when the Maidens followed Rand and the others inside, spearpoints sticking up above their heads and bullhide bucklers in hand. Men and women, most in plain if good quality wool, turned in their low-backed chairs to stare. They seemed to be middling merchants and solid craftsfolk, yet they gaped like villagers seeing a city for the first time. The serving women, in dark high-necked dresses and short white aprons, stopped trotting and goggled over their trays. Even the woman playing a hammered dulcimer between the two stone fireplaces, cold on this fine morning, fell silent.

  A very dark fellow with tightly curled hair, at a square table beside the door, seemed not to notice the Maidens at all. Rand took him for one of the Sea Folk at first, though he wore a peculiar coat without collar or lapels, once white but now stained and wrinkled. "I tell you. I have many, many of the . . . the worms that make . . . yes, make . . . silk on a ship," he said haltingly in an odd, musical accent. "But I must have the . . . the . . . andberry . . . yes, andberry leaves to feed them. We will be rich."

  His companion waved a plump, dismissive hand even while staring at the Maidens. "Worms?" he said absently. "Everybody knows silk grows on trees."

  Walking deeper into the common room, Rand shook his head as the proprietor advanced to meet him. Worms! The tales people could come up with to try prying coin out of somebody else.

  "Agardo Saranche at your service, my Lord, my Ladies," the lean, balding man said with a deep bow, sweeping his hands wide. Not all Tairens were dark by any means, but he was nearly as fair complected as a Cairhienin. "How may I serve?" His dark eyes kept drifting to the Maidens, and every time they did, he tugged at his long blue coat as though it suddenly felt too tight.

  "We want a room with a good view of the Stone," Rand said.

  "It is worms that make silk, friend," a man drawled behind him. "My eyes on it."

  At that familiar accent, Rand spun to find Alivia staring, wide-eyed and her face bloodless, at a man in a dark coat who was just passing through the doorway into the street. With an oath, Rand ran to the door, but there were close to a dozen men in dark coats walking away from the inn, any one of whom might have spoken. There was no way to pick out one man of average height and width seen only from behind. What was a Seanchan doing in Tear? Scouting for another invasion? He would put paid to that soon enough. But he turned from the door wishing he could have laid hands on the man. Knowing would be better than having to guess.

  He asked Alivia whether she had gotten a good look at the fellow, but she shook her head silently. Her face was still pale. She was ferocious when she talked of what she wanted to do to sul'dam, yet it seemed just hearing the accents of her native land was enough to shake her. He hoped that did not turn out to be weakness in her. She was going to help him, somehow, and he could not afford her to be weak.

  "What do you know of the man who just left?" he demanded of Saranche. "The one with the slurred way of talking."

  The innkeeper blinked. "Nothing, my Lord. I've never seen him before. You want one room, my Lord?" He ran his eyes over Min and the other women, and his lips moved as if he were counting.

  "If you're thinking of any impropriety, Master Saranche," Nynaeve said indignantly, tugging at the braid hanging from the cowl of her cloak, "you had best think twice and again. Before I box your ears." Min hissed softly, and one hand drifted toward her other wrist before she checked the motion. Light, but she was quick to reach for her knives!

  "What impropriety?" Alivia asked in tones of puzzlement. Cadsuane snorted.

  "One room," Rand said patiently. Women can always find a reason to be indignant, he thought. Or had that been Lews Therin? He shrugged in discomfort. And a touch of irritation that he only just managed to keep out of his voice. "Your largest with a view of
the Stone. We don't want it for long. You'll be able to rent it out again for tonight. You may have to keep our horses a day or two, though."

  A look of relief crept over Saranche's narrow face, though patently false rue filled his voice. "I regret that my largest room is taken, my Lord. In fact, all of my large rooms are taken. But I will be more than happy to escort you up the street to The Three Moons and—"

  "Phaw!" Cadsuane pushed back her hood enough to reveal her face and some of her golden hair ornaments. She was all cool composure, her gaze implacable. "I think you can find a way to make that room available, boy. I think you had better find a way. Pay him well," she added to Rand, ornaments swaying on their chains. "That was advice, not an order."

  Saranche took Rand's fat golden crown with alacrity—it was doubtful the entire inn earned much more in a week—but it was Cadsuane's ageless face that sent him bounding up the staircase at the back of the common room to return in a handful of minutes and show them to a room on the second floor with dark polished paneling and a rumpled bed wide enough for three flanked by a pair of windows filled by the Stone looming over the rooftops. The previous occupant had been hustled out so quickly that he had left a woolen stocking crumpled at the foot of the bed and a carved horn comb on the washstand in the corner. The innkeeper offered to have their saddlebags brought up, and wine, and seemed surprised when Rand refused, but one glance at Cadsuane's face, and he bowed his way out again hurriedly.

  The room was fairly large as inn rooms went, yet not compared to most chambers in Algarin's manor house, much less in a palace. Especially not with near a dozen people filling the space. The walls seemed to close in on Rand. His chest suddenly felt tight. Every breath came with difficulty. The bond was suddenly full of sympathy and concern. The box, Lews Therin panted. Have to get out of the box!