The Dragon Reborn (98 page)

For some reason he found himself giving them the grin that had so often sent his mother after that switch.
Burn me, if they can do this, I don’t see how anybody ever locked them in that cell in the first place!
“What I understand is that I got you out of something you couldn’t get yourselves out of, and you all have as much gratitude as a bloody Taren Ferry man with a toothache!”

“You are right,” Nynaeve said, and his boots suddenly hit the floor so hard his teeth jarred. But he could move again. “As much as it pains me to say it, Mat, you are right.”

He was tempted to answer something sarcastic, but there was barely enough apology in her voice as it was. “Now can we go? With the fighting going on, Sandar thinks he and I can take you out by a small gate near the river.”

“I am not leaving just yet, Mat,” Nynaeve said.

“I mean to find Liandrin and skin her,” Egwene said, sounding almost as if she meant it literally.

“All I want to do,” Elayne said, “is pound Joiya Byir till she squeals, but I will settle for any of them.”

“Are you all deaf?” he growled. “There is a battle going on out there! I came here to rescue you, and I mean to rescue you.” Egwene patted his cheek as she walked by him, and so did Elayne. Nynaeve merely sniffed. He stared after them with his mouth hanging open. “Why didn’t you say something?” he growled at the thief-catcher.

“I saw what speaking earned you,” Sandar said simply. “I am no fool.”

“Well, I am not staying in the middle of a battle!” he shouted at the women. They were just disappearing through the small, barred door. “I am leaving, do you hear?” They did not even look back.
Probably get themselves killed out there! Somebody will stick a sword in them while they’re looking the other way!
With a snarl, he put his quarterstaff across his shoulder and started after. “Are you going to stand there?” he called to the thief-catcher. “I did not come this far to let them die now!”

Sandar caught up to him in the room with the whips. The three women were already gone, but Mat had a feeling they would not be too hard to find.
Just find the men bloody hanging in midair! Bloody women!
He quickened his pace to a trot.

Perrin strode down the halls of the Stone grimly, searching for some sign of Faile. He had rescued her twice more, now, breaking her out of an iron cage once, much like the one that had held the Aiel in Remen, and once breaking open a steel chest with a falcon worked on its side. Both times she had melted into air after saying his name. Hopper trotted by his side, sniffing the air. As sharp as Perrin’s nose was, the wolf’s was sharper; it had been Hopper who led them to the chest.

Perrin wondered whether he was ever going to free her in truth. There had not been any sign in a long time, it seemed. The halls of the Stone were empty, lamps burning, tapestries and weapons hanging on the walls, but nothing moved except himself and Hopper.
Except I think that was Rand
. It had only been a glimpse, a man running as if chasing someone.
It could not be him. It couldn’t, but I think it was
.

Hopper quickened his steps suddenly, heading for another set of tall doors, these clad in bronze. Perrin tried to match the pace, stumbled, and fell to his knees, throwing out a hand to catch himself short of dropping on his face. Weakness washed through him as if all his muscles had gone to
water. Even after the feeling receded, it took some of his strength with it. It was an effort to struggle to his feet. Hopper had turned to look at him.

You are here too strongly, Young Bull. The flesh weakens. You do not care to hold on to it enough. Soon flesh and dream will die together
.

“Find her,” Perrin said. “That is all I ask. Find Faile.”

Yellow eyes met yellow eyes. The wolf turned and trotted to the doors.
Beyond here, Young Bull
.

Perrin reached the doors and pushed. They did not budge. There seemed to be no way to open them, no handles, nothing to grip. There was a tiny pattern worked into the metal, so fine his eyes almost did not see it. Falcons. Thousands of tiny falcons.

She has to be here. I do not think I can last much longer
. With a shout, he swung his hammer against the bronze. It rang like a great gong. Again he struck, and the peal deepened. A third blow, and the bronze doors shattered like glass.

Within, a hundred paces from the broken doors, a circle of light surrounded a falcon chained to a perch. Darkness filled all the rest of that vast chamber, darkness and faint rustlings as of hundreds of wings.

He took a step into the room, and a falcon stooped out of the murk, talons scoring his face as it passed. He threw an arm across his eyes—talons tore at his forearm—and staggered toward the perch. Again and again the birds came, falcons diving, striking him, tearing him, but he lumbered on with blood pouring down his arms and shoulders, that one arm protecting the eyes he had fixed on the falcon on the perch. He had lost the hammer; he did not know where, but he knew that if he went back to search, he would die before he found it.

As he reached the perch, the slicing talons drove him to his knees. He peered up under his arm at the falcon on the perch, and she stared back with dark, unblinking eyes. The chain that held her leg was fastened to the perch with a tiny lock shaped like a hedgehog. He seized the chain with both hands, careless of the other falcons that now became a whirlwind of cutting talons around him, and with his last strength snapped it. Pain and the falcons brought darkness.

He opened his eyes to stinging agony, as if his face and arms and shoulders had been sliced with a thousand knives. It did not matter. Faile was kneeling over him, those dark, tilted eyes filled with worry, wiping his face with a cloth already soaked in his blood.

“My poor Perrin,” she said softly. “My poor blacksmith. You are hurt so badly.”

With an effort that cost more pain, he turned his head. This was the private dining room in the Star, and near one leg of the table lay a wooden carving of a hedgehog, broken in half. “Faile,” he whispered to her. “My falcon.”

Rand was still in the Heart of the Stone, but it was different. There were no men fighting here, no dead men, no one at all but himself. Abruptly the sound of a great gong rang through the Stone, then again, and the very stones beneath his feet resonated. A third time the booming came, but cut off abruptly, as if the gong had shattered. All was still.

Where is this place?
he wondered.
More important, where is Ba’alzamon?

As if to answer him, a blazing shaft like the one Moiraine had made shot out of the shadows among the columns, straight toward his chest. His wrist twisted the sword instinctively; it was instinct as much as anything else that made him loose flows from
saidin
into
Callandor
, a flood of the Power that made the sword blaze brighter even than that bar streaking at him. His uncertain balance between existence and destruction wavered. Surely that torrent would consume him.

The shaft of light struck the blade of
Callandor
—and parted on its edge, forking to stream past on either side. He felt his coat singe from its near passage, smelled the wool beginning to burn. Behind him, the two prongs of frozen fire, of liquid light, struck huge redstone columns; where they struck, stone ceased to exist, and the burning bars bored through to other columns, severing those instantaneously as well. The Heart of the Stone rumbled as columns fell and shattered in clouds of dust, sprays of stone fragments. What fell into the light, however, simply—was not, anymore.

A snarl of rage came from the shadows, and the blazing shaft of pure white heat vanished.

Rand swung
Callandor
as if he were striking at something in front of him. The white light obscuring the blade extended, blazed ahead, and sheared through the redstone column that hid the snarl. The polished stone sliced like silk. The severed column trembled; part of it tore loose and dropped from the ceiling, smashing into huge, jagged chunks on the floor. As the rumbling faded, he heard beyond it the sound of boots on stone. Running.

Callandor
at the ready, Rand hurried after Ba’alzamon.

The tall archway leading out of the Heart collapsed as he reached it, the entire wall falling in clouds of dust and rock as if to bury him, but he threw the Power at it, and all became dust floating in the air. He ran on. He was not sure what he had done, or how, but he had no time to think on it. He ran after Ba’alzamon’s retreating footsteps, echoing down the halls of the Stone.

Myrddraal and Trollocs leaped out of thin air, huge bestial shapes and eyeless faces distorted with a rage to kill, in hundreds, so they jammed the hall before him and behind, scythelike swords and blades of deadly black steel seeking his blood. Without knowing how, he turned them to vapor that parted before him—and vanished. The air around him suddenly became choking soot, clogging his nostrils, shutting off breath, but he made it fresh air again, a cool mist. Flames leaped from the floor beneath his feet, spurted from the walls, the ceiling, furious jets that flashed tapestries and rugs, tables and chests to wisps of ash, flung ornaments and lamps ahead of them as drops of molten, burning gold; he smashed the fires flat, hardened them into a red glaze on the rock.

The stones around him faded almost to mist; the Stone faded. Reality trembled; he could feel it unraveling, feel himself unraveling. He was being pushed out of the here, into some other place where nothing existed at all.
Callandor
blazed in his hands like the sun till he thought it would melt. He thought he himself would melt from the surge of the One Power through him, the flood that he somehow directed into sealing up the hole that had opened around him, into holding himself on the side of existence. The Stone became solid again.

He could not even begin to imagine what it was that he did. The One Power raged inside him till he barely knew himself, till he barely was himself, till what was himself almost did not exist. His precarious stability teetered. To either side lay the endless fall, obliteration by the Power that coursed through him into the sword. Only in the dance along the razor’s sharp edge was there even an uncertain safety.
Callandor
shone in his fist until it seemed he carried the sun. Dimly within him, fluttering like a candle flame in a storm, was the surety that holding
Callandor
, he could do anything. Anything.

Through endless corridors he ran, dancing along the razor, chasing the one who would slay him, the one he must slay. There could be no other end, this time. This time one of them
must
die! That Ba’alzamon knew it as well was clear. Always he fled, always staying ahead of sight so that only the
sounds of his flight drew Rand on, but even fleeing he turned this Stone of Tear that was not the Stone of Tear against Rand, and Rand fought back with instinct and guesses and chance, fought and ran down that knife edge in perfect balance with the Power, the tool and weapon that would consume him utterly if he faltered.

Water filled the halls from top to bottom, thick and black as the bottom of the sea, choking off breath. He made it air again, unknowingly, and ran on, and suddenly the air gained weight until it seemed every inch of his skin supported a mountain, squeezing in from all directions. In the instant before he was crushed to nothingness he chose tides out of the flood of Power raging through him—he did not know how or which or why; it was too fast for thought or knowing—and the pressure vanished. He pursued Ba’alzamon, and the very air was abruptly solid rock encasing him, then molten stone, then nothing at all to fill his lungs. The ground beneath his boots pulled at him as if every pound suddenly weighed a thousand, then all weight vanished so that a step left him spinning in midair. Unseen maws gaped to rip his mind from his body, to tear away his soul. He sprang each trap and ran on; what Ba’alzamon twisted to destroy him, he made right without being aware of how. Vaguely he knew that in some way he had brought things back into natural balance, forced them into line with his own dance down that impossibly thin divide between existence and nothingness, but that knowledge was distant. All his awareness lay in the pursuit, the hunt, the death that must end it.

And then he was in the Heart of the Stone again, stalking through the rubbled gap that had been a wall. Some of the columns hung like broken teeth, now. And Ba’alzamon backed away from him, eyes burning, shadow cloaking him. Black lines like steel wires seemed to run off from Ba’alzamon into the darkness mounding around him, vanishing into unimaginable heights and distances within that blackness.

“I will not be undone!” Ba’alzamon cried. His mouth was fire; his shriek echoed among the columns. “I cannot be defeated! Aid me!” Some of the darkness shrouding him drifted into his hands, formed into a ball so black it seemed to soak up even the light of
Callandor
. Sudden triumph blazed in the flames of his eyes.

“You are destroyed!” Rand shouted.
Callandor
spun in his hands. Its light roiled the darkness, severed the steel-black lines around Ba’alzamon, and Ba’alzamon convulsed. As if there were two of him he seemed to dwindle and grow larger at the same time. “You are undone!” Rand plunged the shining blade into Ba’alzamon’s chest.

Ba’alzamon screamed, and the fires of his face flared wildly. “Fool!” he howled. “The Great Lord of the Dark can never be defeated!”

Rand pulled
Callandor
’s blade free as Ba’alzamon’s body sagged and began to fall, the shadow around him vanishing.

And suddenly Rand was in another Heart of the Stone, surrounded by columns still whole, and fighting men screaming and dying, veiled men and men in breastplates and helmets. Moiraine still lay crumpled at the base of a redstone column. And at Rand’s feet lay the body of a man, sprawled on its back with a hole burned through the chest. He might have been a handsome man in his middle years, except that where his eyes and mouth should have been were only pits from which rose tendrils of black smoke.