The Shadow Rising (The Wheel of Time #4)

The Shadow Rising (The Wheel of Time #4) Page 85

This was all useless. He was there for a reason, and he might as well get on with it. At best, getting down to where he had seen the ravens rise would take hours.

He took a step — the land around him blurred — and his foot came down near a narrow brook beneath stunted hemlock and mountain willow, with cloudcapped peaks towering above. For a moment he stared in amazement. He was at the far end of the valley from the Waygate. In fact, he was at the very spot he had been aiming for, the place where the ravens had come from, and the arrow that killed the first hawk. Such a thing had never happened to him before. Was he learning more of the wolf dream — Hopper had always said he was ignorant — or was it different this time?

He was more cautious with his next step, but it was only a step. There was no evidence of archer or ravens, no track, no feather, no scent. He was not sure what he had expected. There would be no sign unless they had been in the dream, too. But if he could find wolves in the dream, they could help him find their brothers and sisters in the waking world, and those wolves could tell him if there were Shadowspawn in the mountains. Perhaps if he were higher up they could hear him call.

Fixing his eye on the highest peak bordering the valley, just below the clouds, he stepped. The world blurred, and he was standing on the mountainside, with white billows not five spans overhead. In spite of himself, he laughed. This was fun. From here he could see the entire valley stretched out below.

“Hopper!” No answer.

He leaped to the next mountain, calling, and the next, and the next, eastward, toward the Two Rivers. Hopper did not answer. More troubling, Perrin did not sense any other wolves, either. There were always wolves in the wolf dream. Always.

From peak to peak he sped in blurred motion, calling, seeking. The mountains lay empty beneath him, except for deer and other game. Yet there were occasional signs of men. Ancient signs. Twice great carved figures took nearly an entire mountainside, and in another place strange angular letters two spans high had been incised across a cliff a shade too smooth and sheer. Weathering had worn away the figures' faces, and eyes less sharp than his might have taken the letters themselves for the work of wind and rain. Mountains and cliffs gave way to the Sand Hills, great rolling mounds sparsely covered with tough grass and stubborn bushes, once the shore of a great sea before the Breaking. And suddenly he saw another man, atop a sandy hill.

The fellow was too distant to see clearly, just a tall, darkhaired man, but plainly not a Trolloc or anything of the sort, in a blue coat with a bow on his back, stooping over something on the ground hidden by the low brush. Yet there was something familiar about him.

The wind rose, and Perrin caught his smell faintly. A cold scent, that was the only way to describe it. Cold, and not really human. Suddenly his own bow was in his hand, an arrow nocked, and the weight of a filled quiver tugged at his belt.

The other man looked up, saw Perrin. For a heartbeat he hesitated, then turned and became a streak, slashing away across the hills.

Perrin leaped down to where he had stood, stared at what had occupied the fellow, and without thought pursued, leaving the halfskinned corpse of a wolf behind. A dead wolf in the wolf dream. It was unthinkable. What could kill a wolf here? Something evil.

His prey ran ahead of him in strides that covered miles, never more than barely in sight. Out of the hills and across the tangled Westwood with its wide scattered farms, over cleared farmland, a quilt of hedged fields and small thickets, and past Watch Hill. It was odd to see the thatched village houses covering the hill with no people in the streets, and farmhouses standing as if abandoned. But he kept his eye on the man fleeing ahead of him. He had become so used to this pursuit that he felt no surprise when one leaping stride put him down on the south bank of the River Taren and the next amid barren hills without trees or grass. North and east he ran, over streams and roads and villages and rivers, intent only on the man ahead. The land grew flat and grassy, broken by scattered thickets, without any sign of man. Then something glittered ahead, sparkling in the sun, a tower of metal. His quarry sped straight for it, and vanished. Two leaps brought Perrin there as well.

Two hundred feet the tower rose, and forty thick, gleaming like burnished steel. It might as well have been a solid column of metal. Perrin walked around it twice without seeing any opening, not so much as a crack, not even a mark on that smooth, sheer wall. The smell hung here, though, that cold, inhuman stink. The trail ended here. The man — if man he was — had gone inside somehow. He only had to find the way to follow.

Stop! It was a raw flow of emotion that Perrin's mind put a word to. Stop!

He turned as a great gray wolf as tall as his waist, grizzled and scarred, alighted as if he had just leaped down from the sky. He might well have. Hopper had always envied eagles their ability to fly, and here, he could too. Yellow eyes met yellow eyes.

“Why should I stop, Hopper? He killed a wolf.”

Men have killed wolves, and wolves men. Why does anger seize your throat like fire this time?

“I don't know,” Perrin said slowly. “Maybe because it was here. I didn't know it was possible to kill a wolf here. I thought wolves were safe in the dream.”

You chase Slayer, Young Bull. He is here in the flesh, and he can kill.

“In the flesh? You mean not just dreaming? How can he be here in the flesh?”

I do not know. It is a thing dimly remembered from long ago, come again as so much else. Things of the Shadow walk the dream, now. Creatures of Heartfang. There is no safety.

“Well, he's inside, now.” Perrin studied the featureless metal tower. “If I can find how he got in, I can put an end to him.”

Cub foolish, digging in a groundwasps' nest. This place a evil. All know this. And you would chase evil into evil. Slayer can kill.

Perrin paused. There was a sense of finality to the emotions his mind attached the word “kill” to. “Hopper, what happens to a wolf who dies in the dream?”

The wolf was silent for a time. If we die here, we die forever, Young Bull. I do not know if the same is true for you, but I believe it is.

“A dangerous place, archer. The Tower of Ghenjei is a bad place for umankind.”

Perrin whirled, halfraising his bow before he saw the woman standing a few paces away, her golden hair in a thick braid to her waist, almost the way women wore it in the Two Rivers, but more intricately woven. Her clothes were oddly cut, a short white coat and voluminous trousers of some thin pale yellow material gathered at the ankles above short boots. Her dark cloak seemed to hide something that glinted silver at her side.

She shifted, and the metallic flicker vanished. “You have sharp eyes, archer. I thought that the first time I saw you.”

How long had she been watching? It was embarrassing that she had sneaked up without him hearing. At the least Hopper should have warned him. The wolf was lying down in the knee high grass, muzzle on his forepaws, watching him.

The woman seemed vaguely familiar, though Perrin was certain he would have remembered her had he ever seen her before. Who was she, to be in the wolf dream? Or was it Moiraine's Tel'aran'rhiod, too? “Are you Aes Sedai?”

“No, archer.” She laughed. “I only came to warn you, despite the prescripts. Once entered, the Tower of Ghenjei is hard enough to leave in the world of men. Here it is all but impossible. You have a Bannerman's courage, which some say cannot be told from foolhardiness.”

Impossible to leave? The fellow — Slayer — surely had gone in. Why would he do that if he could not leave? “Hopper said it's dangerous, too. The Tower of Ghenjei? What is it?”

Her eyes widened, and she glanced at Hopper, who still lay stretched out on the grass ignoring her and watching Perrin. “You can talk to wolves? Now that is a thing long lost in legend. So that is how you are here. I should have known. The tower? It is a doorway, archer, to the realms of the Aelfinn and the Eelfinn.” She said the names as if he should recognize them. When he looked at her blankly, she said, “Did you ever play the game called Snakes and Foxes?”

“All children do. At least, they do in the Two Rivers. But they give it up when they get old enough to realize there's no way to win.”

“Except to break the rules,” she said. “ 'Courage to strengthen, fire to blind, music to daze, iron to bind.' ”

“That's a line from the game. I don't understand. What does it have to do with this tower?”

“Those are the ways to win against the snakes and the foxes. The game is a remembrance of old dealings. It does not matter so long as you stay away from the Aelfinn and the Eelfinn. They are not evil the way the Shadow is evil, yet they are so different from humankind they might as well be. They are not to be trusted, archer. Stay clear of the Tower of Ghenjei. Avoid the World of Dreams, if you can. Dark things walk.”

“Like the man I was chasing? Slayer.”

“A good name for him. This Slayer is not old, archer, but his evil is ancient.” She almost appeared to be leaning slightly on something invisible; perhaps that silver thing he had never quite seen. “I seem to be telling you a great deal. I do not understand why I spoke in the first place. Of course. Are you ta'veren, archer?”

“Who are you?” She seemed to know a lot about the tower, and the wolf dream. But she was surprised I could talk to Hopper. “I've met you before somewhere, I think.”

“I have broken too many of the prescripts already, archer.”

“Prescripts? What prescripts?” A shadow fell on the ground behind Hopper, and Perrin turned quickly, angry at being caught by surprise again. There was no one there. But he had seen it; the shadow of a man with the hilts of two swords rising above his shoulders. Something about that image teased his memory.

“He is right,” the woman said behind him. “I should not be talking to you.”

When he turned back, she was gone. As far as he could see were only grassland and scattered thickets. And the gleaming, silvery tower.

He frowned at Hopper, who finally lifted his head from his paws. “It's a wonder you aren't attacked by chipmunks,” Perrin muttered. “What did you make of her?”

Her? A she? Hopper stood, looking around. Where?

“I was talking to her. Right here. Just now.”

You made noises at the wind, Young Bull. There was no she here. None but you and I.

Perrin scratched his beard irritably. She had been there. He had not been talking to himself. “Strange things can happen here,” he told himself. “She agreed with you, Hopper. She told me to stay away from this tower.”

She is wise. There was an element of doubt in the thought; Hopper still did not believe there had been any “she.”

“I've come awfully far afield from what I intended,” Perrin muttered. He explained his need to find wolves in the Two Rivers, or the mountains above, explained about the ravens, and the Trollocs in the Ways.

When he was done, Hopper remained silent for a long time, his bushy tail held low and stiff. Finally... Avoid your old home, Young Bull. The image Perrin's mind called “home” was of the land marked by a wolfpack. There are no wolves there now. Those who were and did not flee are dead. Sla