If Mat had thought his skin crawled before, now he was sure it was writhing. He made himself go closer. Carefully — careful to say nothing that even sounded like a question — he laid the situation before them. The Whitecloaks, certainly in his home village, surely hunting friends of his, maybe hunting him. One of his friends going to face the Whitecloaks, another not. His family, not likely in danger, but with the bloody Children of the bloody Light around... A ta'veren pulling at him so he could hardly move. He saw no reason to give names, or mention that Rand was the Dragon Reborn. His first question — and the other two, for that matter — he had worked out before going down to the Great Hold. “Should I go home to help my people?” he asked finally.
Three sets of slitted eyes lifted from him — reluctantly, it seemed— and studied the air above his head. Finally the woman on the left said, “You must go to Rhuidean.”
As soon as she spoke their eyes all dropped to him again, and they leaned forward, breathing deeply again, but at that moment a bell tolled, a sonorous brazen sound that rolled through the room. They swayed upright, staring at one another, then at the air over Mat's head again.
“He is another,” the woman on the left whispered. “The strain. The strain.”
“The savor,” the man said. “It has been long.”
“There is yet time,” the other woman told them. She sounded calm — they all did — but there was a sharpness to her voice when she turned back to Mat. “Ask. Ask.”
Mat glared up at them furiously. Rhuidean? Light! That was somewhere out in the Waste, the Light and the Aiel knew where. That was about as much as he knew. In the Waste! Anger drove questions about how to get away from Aes Sedai and how to recover the lost parts of his memory right out his head. “Rhuidean!” he barked. “The Light burn my bones to ash if I want to go Rhuidean! And my blood on the ground if I will! Why should I? You are not answering my questions. You are supposed to answer, not hand me riddles!”
“If you do not go to Rhuidean,” the woman on the right said, “you will die.”
The bell tolled again, louder this time; Mat felt its tremor through his boots. The looks the three shared were plainly anxious. He opened his mouth, but they were only concerned with each other.
“The strain,” one of the women said hurriedly. “It is too great.”
“The savor of him,” the other woman said on her heels. “It has been so very long.”
Before she was done the man spoke. “The strain is too great. Too great. Ask. Ask!”
“Burn your soul for a craven heart,” Mat growled, “I will that! Why will I die if I do not go to Rhuidean? I very likely will die if I try. It makes no—”
The man cut him off and spoke hurriedly. “You will have sidestepped the thread of fate, left your fate to drift on the winds of time, and you will be killed by those who do not want that fate fulfilled. Now, go. You must go! Quickly!”
The yellowclad guide was suddenly there at Mat's side, tugging at his sleeve with those toolong hands.
Mat shook him off. “No! I will not go! You have led me from the questions I wanted to ask and given me senseless answers. You will not leave it there. What fate are you talking about? I will have one clear answer out of you, at least!”
A third time the bell sounded mournfully, and the entire room trembled.
“Go!” the man shouted. “You have had your answers. You must go before it is too late!”
Abruptly a dozen of the yellowclad men were around Mat, seeming to appear out of the air, trying to pull him toward the door. He fought with fists, elbows, knees. “What fate? Burn your hearts, what fate?” It was the room itself that pealed, the walls and floor quivering, nearly taking Mat and his attackers off their feet. “What fate?”
The three were on their feet atop the pedestals, and he could not tell which shrieked which answer.
“To marry the Daughter of the Nine Moons!”
“To die and live again, and live once more a part of what was!”
“To give up half the light of the world to save the world!”
Together they howled like steam escaping under pressure. “Go to Rhuidean, son of battles! Go to Rhuidean, trickster! Go, gambler! Go!”
Mat's assailants snatched him into the air by his arms and legs and ran, holding him over their heads. “Unhand me, you whitelivered sons of goats!” he shouted, struggling. “Burn your eyes! The Shadow take your souls, loose me! I will have your guts for a saddle girth!” But writhe and curse as he would, those long fingers gripped like iron.
Twice more the bell tolled, or the palace did. Everything shook as in an earthquake; the walls rang with deafening reverberations, each louder than the last. Mat's captors stumbled on, nearly falling but never stopping their pellmell race. He did not even see where they were taking him until they suddenly stopped short, heaving him into the air. Then he saw the twisted doorway, the ter'angreal, as he flew toward it.
White light blinded him; the roar filled his head till it drove thought away.
He fell heavily onto a dusty floor in dim light and rolled up against the barrel holding his lamp in the Great Hold. The barrel rocked, packets and figurines toppling to the floor in a crash of breaking stone and ivory and porcelain. Bounding to his feet, he threw himself back at the stone doorframe. “Burn you, you can't throw me —!”
He hurtled through — and stumbled against the crates and barrels on the other side. Without a pause, he turned and leaped at it again. With the same result. This time he caught himself on the barrel holding his lamp, which nearly fell onto the already shattered things littering the floor under his boots. He grabbed it in time, burning his hand, and fumbled it back to a steadier perch.
Burn me if I want to be down here in the dark, he thought, sucking his ringers. Light, the way my luck is running, it probably would have started a fire and I'd have burned to death!
He glared at the ter'angreal. Why was it not working? Maybe the folk on the other side had shut it off somehow. He understood practically nothing of what had happened. That bell, and their panic. You would have thought they were afraid the roof would come down on their heads. Come to think of it, it very nearly had. And Rhuidean, and all the rest of it. The Waste was bad enough, but they said he was fated to marry somebody called the Daughter of the Nine Moons. Marry! And to a noblewoman, by the sound of it. He would sooner marry a pig than a noblewoman. And that business about dying and living again. Nice of them to add the last bit! If some blackveiled Aielman killed him on the way to Rhuidean, he would find out how true it was. It was all nonsense, and he did not believe a word of it. Only... The bloody doorway had taken him somewhere, and they had only wanted to answer three questions, just the way Egwene had said.
“I won't marry any bloody noblewoman!” he told the ter'angreal. “I'll marry when I'm too old to have any fun, that's what! Rhuidean my bloody —!”
A boot appeared, backing out of the twisted stone doorway, followed by the rest of Rand, with that fiery sword in his hands. The blade vanished as he stepped clear, and he heaved a sigh of relief. Even in the dim light, Mat could see he was troubled, though. He gave a start when he saw Mat. “Just poking around; Mat? Or did you go through, too?”
Mat eyed him warily for a moment. At least that sword was gone. He did not seem to be channeling — though how was anybody to tell? — and he did not look particularly like a madman. In fact, he looked very much as Mat remembered. He had to remind himself they were not back home any longer, and Rand was not what he remembered. “Oh, I went through, all right. A bunch of bloody liars, if you ask me! What are they? Made me think of snakes.”
“Not liars, I think.” Rand sounded as if he wished they were. “No, not that. They were afraid of me, right from the first. And when that tolling started... The sword kept them back; they wouldn't even look at it. Shied away. Hid their eyes. Did you get your answers?”
“Nothing that makes sense,” Mat muttered. “What about you?”
Suddenly Moiraine appeared from the ter'angreal, seeming to step gracefully out of thin air, flowing out. She would be a fine one to dance with if she were not Aes Sedai. Her mouth tightened at the sight of them.
“You! You were both in there. That is why... !” She made a vexed hiss. “One of you would have been bad enough, but two ta'veren at once — you might have torn the connection entirely and been trapped there. Wretched boys playing with things you do not know the danger of. Perrin! Is Perrin in there, too? Did he share your... exploit?”
“The last I saw of Perrin,” Mat said, “he was getting ready to go bed.” Maybe Perrin would give him the lie by being the next to step out of the thing, but he might as well deflect the Aes Sedai's anger if he could. No need for Perrin to face it, too. Maybe he'll make it clear of her, at least, if he gets away before she knows what he's doing. Bloody woman! I'll wager she was noble born.
That Moraine was angry there was no doubt. The blood had drained out of her cheeks, and her eyes were dark augers boring into Rand. “At least you escaped with your lives. Who told you of this? Which one of them? I will make her wish I had peeled off her hide like a glove.”
“A book told me,” Rand said calmly. He sat down back on the edge of a crate that creaked alarmingly under his weight and crossed his arms. All very cool; Mat wished he could emulate it. “A pair of books, in fact. Treasures of the Stone and Dealings with the Territory of Mayene. Surprising what you can dig out of books if you read long enough, isn't it?”
“And you?” She shifted that drilling gaze to Mat. “Did you read it in a book, too? You?”
“I do read sometimes,” he said dryly. He would not have been averse to a little hidepeeling for Egwene and Nynaeve after what they had done to make him tell where he had hidden the Amyrlin's letter — tying him up with the Power was bad enough, but the rest! — yet it was more fun to tweak Moiraine's nose.
“Treasures. Dealings. Lots of things in books.” Luckily, she did not insist that he repeat the titles; he had not paid attention once Rand brought up books.
Instead she swung back to Rand. “And your answers?”
“Are mine,” Rand replied, then frowned. “It wasn't easy, though. They brought a... woman... to interpret, but she talked like an old book. I could hardly understand some of the words. I never considered they might speak another language.”
“The Old Tongue,” Moiraine told him. “They use the Old Tongue— a rather harsh dialect of it — for their dealings with men. And you, Mat? Was your interpreter easily understood?”
He had to work moisture back into his mouth. “The Old Tongue? Is that what it was? They didn't give me one. In fact, I never got to ask any questions. That bell started shaking the walls down, and they hustled me out like I was tracking cow manure on the rugs.” She was still staring, her eyes still digging into his head. She knew about the Old Tongue slipping out of him, sometimes. “I... almost understood a word here and there, but not to know it. You and Rand got answers. What do they get out of it? The snakes with legs. We aren't going upstairs to find ten years gone, are we, like