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

The Fires of Heaven (The Wheel of Time #5) Page 269

Suddenly the benches shifted, flowed, changed into faceless manshapes, still as white and hardlooking as the stone. He had already learned the difficulty of changing something that Rahvin had altered. Lightning danced from his fingertips, shattering stone men to shards.

The air became water. Choking, Rand struggled to swim toward the columns; he could see the garden beyond. There must be some kind of barrier to stop all the water pouring out. Before he could channel, gold and red and white shapes were darting around him, larger than the fish in the pool had been. And with teeth. They ripped at him; blood curled up in red mist. Instinctively he flailed at the fish with his hands, but the cold part of him, deep in the Void, channeled. Balefire flared, at the barrier if there was one, at any place Rahvin might be to see this courtyard. The water roiled, throwing him around violently, as it rushed in to fill the empty tunnels carved by balefire. Flickers of gold and white and red darted at him, adding new threads of crimson to the water. Tossed about, he could not see to aim his wild bolts; they flashed in every direction. No breath left. He tried to think of air, or the water being air.

Suddenly it was. He dropped hard to the paving stones among small fish flopping about, rolled over and pushed himself up. It was all air again; even his clothes were dry. The stone ring flickered between standing untouched and lying in ruins with half the columns down. Some of the trees lay tangled atop their own stumps, then stood whole, then were fallen again. The palace behind him had holes punched in white walls, even one through a high gilded dome above, and gashes slashed across windows, some with piercework stone screens. The damage all flickered, vanishing and reappearing. Not the slow, sometime shifts of before, but constant. Damage, then none, then some, then none, then all again.

Wincing, he pressed his hand to his side, to the old, halfhealed wound. It stung as if his exertions had nearly torn it open. He stung all over, from a dozen or more bleeding bites. That had not changed. The bloody rips in his coat and breeches were still there! Had he managed to change the water back to air? Or had one of his frenzied bolts of balefire driven Rahvin off, or even killed him? It did not matter, unless it was the last.

Wiping blood out of his eyes, he studied the windows and balconies around the garden, the colonnade high on the far side. Or rather, he started to, but something else caught his eye. Below the colonnade, he could just make out the fading remnants of a weave. From there he could tell it was a gateway, but to see what kind and where it led, he had to be closer. Leaping over a jumble of worked stone that vanished while he was above it, he darted across the garden, dodging around trees fallen on the walkway. That residue was almost gone; he had to get close enough before it vanished completely.

Abruptly he fell, gravel scraping his palms as he caught himself. He could not see anything that might have tripped him. He felt woozy, almost as if he had been hit on the head. He tried to scramble to his feet, to reach that residue. And realized his body was writhing. Long hair covered his hands; his fingers seemed to be shrinking, drawing back into his hands. They were almost paws. A trap. Rahvin had not fled. The gateway had been a trap, and he had walked into it.

Desperation clung to the Void as he struggled to cling to himself. His hands. They were hands. Almost hands. He forced himself up. His legs seemed to bend wrong. The True Source receded; the Void shrank. Streaks of panic flared beyond the emotionless emptiness. Whatever Rahvin was trying to change him to, it could not channel. Saidin slipping away, thinning, thin even pulled through the angreal. The surrounding balconies stared down at him, empty, and the colonnade. Rahvin had to be at one of those stonescreened windows, but which? He had no strength for a hundred lightning bolts this time. One burst. He could manage that. If he did it quickly. Which window? He fought to be himself, fought to draw saidin into him, welcomed every stain of the taint as evidence that he still held the Power. Staggering in a crooked circle, searching vainly, he roared Rahvin's name. It sounded like a beast's roar.

Pulling Moghedien behind her, Nynaeve rounded the corner. Ahead of her, a man vanished around the next turning, the sound of his boots echoing behind. She did not know how long she had been following those boots. Sometimes they had gone silent, and she had had to wait for them to start again to gain a direction. Sometimes when they stopped things happened; she had not seen any of it, but once the palace had rung like a struck bell, and another time the hair on her head had tried to stand up as the air seemed to crackle, and another... It did not matter. This was the first time she had caught a glimpse of the man who wore those boots. She did not think it was Rand in that black coat. The height was right, but he was too large, too heavy in the chest.

She was running before she knew it. Her stout shoes had long since become velvet slippers for silence. If she could hear him, he could hear her. Moghedien's frenzied panting was louder than their footfalls.

Nynaeve reached the turn and stopped, peeking cautiously around the corner. She held saidar — through Moghedien, but it was hers — ready to channel. There was no need. The hallway was empty. A door stood far down a wall with windows filled with arabesquepierced stone, but she did not think he could have reached that. Nearer, another corridor ran off to the right. She hurried to that, looked warily again. Empty. But a staircase spiraled upward just beyond where the hallways met.

For a moment she hesitated. He had been hurrying somewhere. This corridor led back the way they had come. Would he have been running to go back? Up then.

Drawing Moghedien behind her, she climbed the steps slowly, straining to hear anything except the Forsaken's nearly hysterical breath and the blood pounding in her own ears. If she found herself face to face with him... She knew he was there already, somewhere ahead. Surprise had to be on her side.

At the first landing, she paused. The hallways here mirrored those below. They were just as empty, too, just as silent. Had he gone on up?

The stair quivered faintly beneath her feet as if the palace had been struck by a huge battering ram, then another. Again, as a bar of white fire punched through the top of one of the stonescreened windows, skewed wildly upward at an angle, then winked out as it started to slice into the ceiling.

Nynaeve swallowed, blinking in a vain effort to rid herself of the pale violet fan that hung across her vision in memory of the thing. That had to be Rand, trying to strike at Rahvin. If she was too close to him, Rand might catch her by accident. If he was flailing like that — it had had the look of flailing to her — he could catch her an