The Great Hunt

  Again they crossed land blackened and burned, even the soil crunching under the horses’ hooves as if it had been seared. The burned swathes, sometimes a mile wide, sometimes only a few hundred paces, all ran east and west as straight as an arrow’s flight. Twice Rand saw the end of a burn, once as they rode over it, once as they passed nearby; they tapered to points at the ends. At least, the ends he saw were so, but he suspected they were all the same.

  Once he had watched Whatley Eldin decorate a cart for Sunday, back home in Emond’s Field, What painting the scenes in bright colors, and the intricate scrollwork that surrounded them. For the borders, What let the point of his brush touch the cart, making a thin line that grew thicker as he pressed harder, then thinner again as he eased up. That was how the land looked, as if someone had streaked it with a monstrous brush of fire.

  Nothing grew where the burns were, though some burns, at least, had the feel of a thing long done. Not so much as a hint of char remained in the air there, not a whiff even when he leaned down to break off a black twig and smell it. Old, yet nothing had come in to reclaim the land. Black gave way to green, and green to black, along knife-edge lines.

  In its own way, the rest of the land lay as dead as the burns, though grass covered the ground and leaves covered the trees. Everything had that faded look, like clothes too often washed and too long left in the sun. There were no birds or animals, not that Rand saw or heard. No hawk wheeling in the sky, no bark of a hunting fox, no bird singing. Nothing rustled in the grass or lit on a tree branch. No bees, or butterflies. Several times they crossed streams, the water shallow, though often it had dug itself a deep gulley with steep banks the horses had to scramble down and climb on the other side. The water ran clear except for the mud the horses’ hooves stirred, but never a minnow or tadpole wriggled out of the roiling, not even a waterspider dancing across the surface, or a hovering lacewing.

  The water was drinkable, which was just as well, since their waterbottles could not last forever. Rand tasted it first, and made Loial and Hurin wait to see if anything happened to him before he let them drink. He had gotten them into this; it was his responsibility. The water was cool and wet, but that was the best that could be said for it. It tasted flat, as if it had been boiled. Loial made a face, and the horses did not like it either, shaking their heads and drinking reluctantly.

  There was one sign of life; at least, Rand thought it must be so. Twice he saw a wispy streak crawling across the sky like a line drawn with cloud. The lines were too straight to be natural, it seemed, but he could not imagine what might make them. He did not mention the lines to the others. Perhaps they did not see, Hurin intent on the trail as he was and Loial drawn in on himself. They said nothing of the lines, at any rate.

  When they had ridden half the morning, Loial abruptly swung down from his huge horse without a word and strode to a stand of giantsbroom, their trunks splitting into many thick branches, stiff and straight, not a pace above the ground. At the top, all split again, into the leafy brush that gave them their name.

  Rand pulled Red up and started to ask what he was doing, but something about the Ogier’s manner, as if he himself were uncertain, kept Rand silent. After staring at the tree, Loial put his hands on a trunk and began to sing in a deep, soft rumble.

  Rand had heard Ogier Treesong, once, when Loial had sung to a dying tree and brought it back to life, and he had heard of sung wood, objects wrought from trees by the Treesong. The Talent was fading, Loial said, he was one of the few who had the ability, now; that was what made sung wood even more sought after and treasured. When he had heard Loial sing before, it had been as if the earth itself sang, but now the Ogier murmured his song almost diffidently, and the land echoed it in a whisper.

  It seemed pure song, music without words, at least none that Rand could make out; if there were words, they faded into the music just as water pours into a stream. Hurin gasped and stared.

  Rand was not sure what it was Loial did, or how; soft as the song was, it caught him up hypnotically, filling his mind almost the way the void did. Loial ran his big hands along the trunk, singing, caressing with his voice as well as his fingers. The trunk now seemed smoother, somehow, as if his stroking were shaping it. Rand blinked. He was sure the piece Loial worked on had had branches at its top just like the others, but now it stopped in a rounded end right above the Ogier’s head. Rand opened his mouth, but the song quieted him. It seemed so familiar, that song, as if he should know it.

  Abruptly Loial’s voice rose to a climax—almost a hymn of thanks, it sounded—and ended, fading as a breeze fades.

  “Burn me,” Hurin breathed. He looked stunned. “Burn me, I never heard anything like. . . . Burn me.”

  In his hands Loial held a staff as tall as he was and as thick as Rand’s forearm, smooth and polished. Where the trunk had been on the giantsbroom was a small stem of new growth.

  Rand took a deep breath. Always something new, always something I didn’t expect, and sometimes it isn’t horrible.

  He watched Loial mount, resting the staff across his saddle in front of him, and wondered why the Ogier wanted a staff at all, since they were riding. Then he saw the thick rod, not as big as it was, but in relation to the Ogier, saw the way Loial handled it. “A quarterstaff,” he said, surprised. “I didn’t know Ogier carried weapons, Loial.”

  “Usually we do not,” the Ogier replied almost curtly. “Usually. The price has always been too high.” He hefted the huge quarterstaff and wrinkled his broad nose with distaste. “Elder Haman would surely say I am putting a long handle on my axe, but I am not just being hasty or rash, Rand. This place. . . .” He shivered, and his ears twitched.

  “We’ll find our way back soon,” Rand said, trying to sound confident.

  Loial spoke as if he had not heard. “Everything is . . . linked, Rand. Whether it lives or not, whether it thinks or not, everything that is, fits together. The tree does not think, but it is part of the whole, and the whole has a—a feeling. I can’t explain any more than I can explain what being happy is, but. . . . Rand, this land was glad for a weapon to be made. Glad!”

  “The Light shine on us,” Hurin murmured nervously, “and the Creator’s hand shelter us. Though we go to the last embrace of the mother, the Light illumine our way.” He kept repeating the catechism as if it had a charm to protect him.

  Rand resisted the impulse to look around. He definitely did not look up. All it would take to break them all was another of those smoky lines across the sky right at that moment. “There’s nothing here to hurt us,” he said firmly. “And we’ll keep a good watch and make sure nothing does.”

  He wanted to laugh at himself, sounding so certain. He was not certain about anything. But watching the others—Loial with his tufted ears drooping, and Hurin trying not to look at anything—he knew one of them had to seem to be sure, at least, or fear and uncertainty would break them all apart. The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills. He squeezed that thought out. Nothing to do with the Wheel. Nothing to with ta’veren, or Aes Sedai, or the Dragon. It’s just the way it is, that’s all.

  “Loial, are you done here?” The Ogier nodded, regretfully rubbing the quarterstaff. Rand turned to Hurin. “Do you still have the trail?”

  “I do, Lord Rand. I do that.”

  “Then let’s keep on with it. Once we find Fain and the Darkfriends, why, we’ll go home heroes, with the dagger for Mat, and the Horn of Valere. Lead out, Hurin.” Heroes? I’ll settle for all of us getting out of here alive.

  “I do not like this place,” the Ogier announced flatly. He held the quarterstaff as if he expected to have to use it soon.

  “As well we don’t mean to stay here, then, isn’t it?” Rand said. Hurin barked a laugh as if he had made a joke, but Loial gave him a level look.

  “As well we don’t, Rand.”

  Yet as they rode on southward, he could see that his casual assumption that they would get home had picked them both up a little. Hurin sat a bit straighter in
his saddle, and Loial’s ears did not seem so wilted. It was no time or place to let them know he shared their fear, so he kept it to himself, and fought it by himself.

  Hurin kept his humor through the morning, murmuring, “As well we don’t mean to stay,” then chuckling, until Rand felt like telling him to be quiet. Toward midday, the sniffer did fall silent, though, shaking his head and frowning, and Rand found he wished the man was still repeating his words and laughing.

  “Is there something wrong with the trail, Hurin?” he asked.

  The sniffer shrugged, looking troubled. “Yes, Lord Rand, and then again no, as you might say.”

  “It must be one or the other. Have you lost the trail? No shame if you have. You said it was weak to start. If we can’t find the Darkfriends, we will find another Stone and get back that way.” Light, anything but that. Rand kept his face smooth. “If Darkfriends can come here and leave, so can we.”

  “Oh, I haven’t lost it, Lord Rand. I can still pick out the stink of them. It isn’t that. It’s just. . . . It’s. . . .” With a grimace, Hurin burst out, “It’s like I’m remembering it, Lord Rand, instead of smelling it. But I’m not. There’s dozens of trails crossing it all the time, dozens and dozens, and all sorts of smells of violence, some of them fresh, almost, only washed out like everything else. This morning, right after we left the hollow, I could have sworn there were hundreds slaughtered right under my feet, just minutes before, but there weren’t any bodies, and not a mark on the grass but our own hoofprints. A thing like that couldn’t happen without the ground being torn up and bloodied, but there wasn’t a mark. It’s all like that, my Lord. But I am following the trail. I am. This place just has me all on edge. That’s it. That must be it.”

  Rand glanced at Loial—the Ogier did come up with the oddest knowledge, at times—but he looked as puzzled as Hurin. Rand made his voice more confident than he felt. “I know you are doing your best, Hurin. We are all of us on edge. Just follow as best you can, and we’ll find them.”

  “As you say, Lord Rand.” Hurin booted his horse forward. “As you say.”

  But by nightfall, there was still no sign of the Darkfriends, and Hurin said the trail was fainter still. The sniffer kept muttering to himself about “remembering.”

  There had been no sign. Really no sign. Rand was not as good a tracker as Uno, but any boy in the Two Rivers was expected to track well enough to find a lost sheep, or a rabbit for dinner. He had seen nothing. It was as if no living thing had ever disturbed the land before they came. There should have been something if the Darkfriends were ahead of them. But Hurin kept following the trail he said he smelled.

  As the sun touched the horizon they made camp in a stand of trees untouched by the burn, eating from their saddlebags. Flatbread and dried meat washed down with flat-tasting water; hardly a filling meal, tough and far from tasty. Rand thought they might have enough for a week. After that. . . . Hurin ate slowly, determinedly, but Loial gulped his down with a grimace and settled back with his pipe, the big quarterstaff close at hand. Rand kept their fire small and well hidden in the trees. Fain and his Darkfriends and Trollocs might be close enough to see a fire, for all of Hurin’s worries about the oddness of their trail.

  It seemed odd to him that he had begun to think of them as Fain’s Darkfriends, Fain’s Trollocs. Fain was just a madman. Then why did they rescue him? Fain had been part of the Dark One’s scheme to find him. Perhaps it had something to do with that. Then why is he running instead of chasing me? And what killed that Fade? What happened in that room full of flies? And those eyes, watching me in Fal Dara. And that wind, catching me like a beetle in pine sap. No. No, Ba’alzamon has to be dead. The Aes Sedai did not believe it. Moiraine did not believe it, nor the Amyrlin. Stubbornly, he refused to think about it any longer. All he had to think about now was finding that dagger for Mat. Finding Fain, and the Horn.

  It’s never over, al’Thor.

  The voice was like a thin breeze whispering in the back of his head, a thin, icy murmur working its way into the crevices of his mind. He almost sought the void to escape it, but remembering what waited for him there, he pushed down the desire.

  In the half dark of twilight, he worked the forms with his sword, the way Lan had taught, though without the void. Parting the Silk. Hummingbird Kisses the Honeyrose. Heron Wading in the Rushes, for balance. Losing himself in the swift, sure movements, forgetting for a time where he was, he worked until sweat covered him. Yet when he was done, it all came back; nothing was changed. The weather was not cold, but he shivered and pulled his cloak around him as he hunched by the fire. The others caught his mood, and they finished eating quickly and in silence. No one complained when he kicked dirt over the last fitful flames.

  Rand took the first watch himself, walking the edges of the copse with his bow, sometimes easing his sword in its scabbard. The chill moon was almost full, standing high in the blackness, and the night was as silent as the day had been, as empty. Empty was the right word. The land was as empty as a dusty milk crock. It was hard to believe there was anyone in the whole world, in this world, except for the three of them, hard to believe even the Darkfriends were there, somewhere ahead.

  To keep himself company, he unwrapped Thom Merrilin’s cloak, exposing the harp and flute in their hard leather cases atop the many-colored patches. He took the gold-and-silver flute from its case, remembering the gleeman teaching him as he fingered it, and played a few notes of “The Wind That Shakes the Willow,” softly so as not to wake the others. Even soft, the sad sound was too loud in that place, too real. With a sigh he replaced the flute and did up the bundle again.

  He held the watch long into the night, letting the others sleep. He did not know how late it was when he suddenly realized a fog had risen. Close to the ground it lay, thick, making Hurin and Loial indistinct mounds seeming to hump out of clouds. Thinner higher up, it still shrouded the land around them, hiding everything except the nearest trees. The moon seemed viewed through watered silk. Anything at all could come right up to them unseen. He touched his sword.

  “Swords do no good against me, Lews Therin. You should know that.”

  The fog swirled around Rand’s feet as he spun, the sword coming into his hands, heron-mark blade upright before him. The void leaped up inside him; for the first time, he barely noticed the tainted light of saidin.

  A shadowy figure drew nearer through the mist, walking with a tall staff. Behind it, as if the shadow’s shadow were vast, the fog darkened till it was blacker than night. Rand’s skin crawled. Closer the figure came, until it resolved into the shape of a man, clothed and gloved in black, with a black silk mask covering his face, and the shadow came with it. His staff was black, too, as if the wood had been charred, yet smooth and shining like water by moonlight. For an instant the eyeholes of the mask glowed, as if fires stood behind them rather than eyes, but Rand did not need that to know who it was.

  “Ba’alzamon,” he breathed. “This is a dream. It has to be. I fell asleep, and—”

  Ba’alzamon laughed like the roar of an open furnace. “You always try to deny what is, Lews Therin. If I stretch out my hand, I can touch you, Kinslayer. I can always touch you. Always and everywhere.”

  “I am not the Dragon! My name is Rand al’—!” Rand clamped his teeth shut to stop himself.

  “Oh, I know the name you use now, Lews Therin. I know every name you have used through Age after Age, long before you were even the Kinslayer.” Ba’alzamon’s voice began to rise in intensity; sometimes the fires of his eyes flared so high that Rand could see them through the openings in the silk mask, see them like endless seas of flame. “I know you, know your blood and your line back to the first spark of life that ever was, back to the First Moment. You can never hide from me. Never! We are tied together as surely as two sides of the same coin. Ordinary men may hide in the sweep of the Pattern, but ta’veren stand out like beacon fires on a hill, and you, you stand out as if ten thousand shining arrows stood in the s
ky to point you out! You are mine, and ever in reach of my hand!”

  “Father of Lies!” Rand managed. Despite the void, his tongue wanted to cleave to the roof of his mouth. Light, please let it be a dream. The thought skittered outside the emptiness. Even one of those dreams that isn’t a dream. He can’t really be standing in front of me. The Dark One is sealed in Shayol Ghul, sealed by the Creator at the moment of Creation. . . . He knew too much of the truth for it to help. “You’re well named! If you could just take me, why haven’t you? Because you cannot. I walk in the Light, and you cannot touch me!”

  Ba’alzamon leaned on his staff and looked at Rand a moment, then moved to stand over Loial and Hurin, peering down at them. The vast shadow moved with him. He did not disturb the fog, Rand saw—he moved, the staff swung with his steps, but the gray mist did not swirl and eddy around his feet as it did around Rand’s. That gave him heart. Perhaps Ba’alzamon really was not there. Perhaps it was a dream.

  “You find odd followers,” Ba’alzamon mused. “You always did. These two. The girl who tries to watch over you. A poor guardian and weak, Kinslayer. If she had a lifetime to grow, she would never grow strong enough for you to hide behind.”

  Girl? Who? Moiraine is surely not a girl. “I don’t know what you are talking about, Father of Lies. You lie, and lie, and even when you tell the truth, you twist it to a lie.”

  “Do I, Lews Therin? You know what you are, who you are. I have told you. And so have those women of Tar Valon.” Rand shifted, and Ba’alzamon gave a laugh, like a small thunderclap. “They think themselves safe in their White Tower, but my followers number even some of their own. The Aes Sedai called Moiraine told you who you are, did she not? Did she lie? Or is she one of mine? The White Tower means to use you like a hound on a leash. Do I lie? Do I lie when I say you seek the Horn of Valere?” He laughed again; calm of the void or no, it was all Rand could do not to cover his ears. “Sometimes old enemies fight so long that they become allies and never realize it. They think they strike at you, but they have become so closely linked it is as if you guided the blow yourself.”