The Fires of Heaven (The Wheel of Time #5)

The Fires of Heaven (The Wheel of Time #5) Page 266

I walked this way with Elayne and Gawyn the day I met Morgase. The thought slithered painfully along the boundaries of the Void. He was cold in there, without emotion. Saidin raged and burned, but he was icy calm.

And another thought, like a stab. She lay on a floor like this, her golden hair spread as though sleeping. Ilyena Sunhair. My Ilyena.

Elaida had been there that day, too. She Foretold the pain I'd bring. She knew the darkness in me. Some of it. Enough.

Ilyena, I did not know what I was doing. I was mad! 1 am mad. Oh. Ilyena!

Elaida knew — some — but she did not tell even all of that. Better if she had told.

Oh, Light, is there no forgiveness? I did what I did in madness. Is there no mercy?

Gareth Bryne would have killed me, had he known. Morgase would have ordered my death. Morgase would be alive, perhaps. Elayne's mother alive. Aviendha alive. Mat. Moiraine. How many alive, if I had died?

I have earned my torment. I deserve the final death. Oh, Ilyena, I deserve death.

I deserve death.

Bootsteps behind him. He turned.

They came out of a broad crossing corridor not twenty paces from him, two dozen men in breastplates and helmets and the whitecollared red coats of the Queen's Guards. Except that Andor had no queen now, and these men had not served her while she lived. A Myrddraal led them, pale eyeless face like something found under a rock, overlapping plates of black armor heightening the illusion of a serpent as it moved, black cloak hanging motionless however it moved. The look of the Eyeless was fear, but fear was a distant thing in the Void. They hesitated when they saw him; then the Halfman raised its blackbladed sword. Men who had not already drawn put hands to hilts.

Rand — he thought that was his name — channeled in a way he could not remember doing before.

Men and Myrddraal stiffened where they stood. White frost grew thick on them, frost that smoked as Mat's boots had smoked. The Myrddraal's upraised arm broke off with a loud crack. When it hit the floortiles, arm and sword shattered.

Rand could feel the cold — yes, that was his name; Rand — cold like a knife as he walked past and turned the way they had come. Cold, yet warmer than saidin.

A man and a woman crouched against the wall, servants liveried in red and white, short of their middle years and holding each other as though for protection. Seeing Rand — there was more to the name; not just Rand — the man started to rise from where he had huddled away from the Myrddraalled band, but the woman hauled him back by his sleeve.

“Go in peace,” Rand said, putting out a hand. Al'Thor. Yes, Rand al'Thor. “I'll not hurt you, but you could be hurt if you stay.”

The woman's brown eyes rolled up in her head. She would have collapsed in a heap if the man had not caught her, and his narrow mouth was working rapidly, as if he was praying but could not get the words out.

Rand looked where the man was looking. His hand had stretched out of his coatsleeve far enough to bare the Dragon's golden maned head that was part of his skin. “I will not hurt you,” he said, and walked on, leaving them there. He had Rahvin to corner yet. Rahvin to kill. And then?

No sound but the click of his boots on the tiles. And deep in his head, a faint voice murmuring mournfully of Ilyena and forgiveness. He strained to feel Rahvin channeling, to feel the man filled with the True Source. Nothing. Saidin seared his bones, froze his flesh, scoured his soul, but from without it was not easy to see until you were close. A lion in high grass, Asmodean had said once. A rabid lion. Should Asmodean count among those who should not have died? Or Lanfear? No. Not —

He had only a moment's warning to throw himself flat, a hairthin slice of time between feeling flows suddenly woven and an armthick bar of white light, liquid fire, slicing through the wall, ripping across like a sword through where his chest had been. Where that bar slashed, on both sides of the hallways, wall and friezes, doors and tapestries ceased to exist. Severed wallhangings and chunks of stone and plaster broken free rained to the floor.

So much for the Forsaken fearing to use balefire. Who had told him that? Moiraine. She surely had deserved to live.

Balefire leaped from his hands, a brilliant white shaft streaking toward where that other bar had originated. The other failed even as his punched through the wall, leaving a purple afterimage fanning across his vision. He released his own flow. Had he done it finally?

Scrambling to his feet, he channeled Air, slamming ruined doors open so hard that the remnants ripped from the hinges. Inside, the room was empty. A sitting room, with chairs arrayed before a great marble fireplace. His balefire had taken a bite out of one of the arches leading to a small courtyard with a fountain, and another from one of the fluted columns along the walk beyond.

Rahvin had not gone that way, though, and he had not died in that blast of balefire. A residue hung in the air, a fading remnant of woven saidin. Rand recognized it. Different from the gateway he had made to Skim to Caemlyn, or the one to Travel — he knew now that was what he had done — into the throne room. But he had seen one like this in Tear, had made one himself.

He wove another now. A gateway, an opening at least, a hole in reality. It was not blackness on the other side. In fact, if he had not known the way was there, if he could not have seen the weave of it, he might not have known. There before him were the same arches opening onto the same courtyard and fountain, the same columned walk. For an instant the neatly rounded holes his balefire had made in arch and column wavered, filled, then were holes again. Wherever that gateway led, it was to somewhere else, a reflection of the Royal palace as once it had been a reflection of the Stone of Tear. Vaguely he regretted not talking to Asmodean about it while he had the chance, but he had never been able to speak of that day to anyone. It did not matter. On that day he had carried Callandor, but the angreal in his pocket had already proved enough to harry Rahvin.

Stepping through quickly, he loosed the weave and hurried away across the courtyard as the gateway vanished. Rahvin would have felt that gate if he was close enough and trying. The fat little stone man did not mean he could stand and wait to be attacked.

No sign of life, except for himself and one fly. That was the way it had been in Tear, too. Standlamps in the hallways stood unlit, with pale wicks that had never seen a flame, yet even in what should have been the dimmest hall there was light, seemingly coming from everywhere and nowhere. Sometimes those lamps moved, too, and other things as well. Between one glance and the next a tall lamp might have moved a foot, a vase in a niche an inch. Little things, as if someone had shifted them in the time his eyes were away. Wherever this wa