The Path of Daggers (The Wheel of Time #8)

Rand shivered before he could stop himself. Mistrust of Gedwyn and Rochaid was simple sense, but was he coming down with what Nynaeve had called the dreads? A kind of madness, a crippling dark suspicion of everyone and everything? There had been a Coplin, Benly, who thought everybody was scheming against him. He had starved to death when Rand was a boy, refusing to eat for fear of poison.

Ducking low on Tai’daishar’s neck, Rand heeled the gelding through the largest gateway. Flinn’s, as it happened, but he would have ridden through one made by Gedwyn right then. He was the first onto Altaran soil.

The others followed quickly, the Asha’man first of all. Dashiva stared in Rand’s direction, frowning, and Narishma, too, but Gedwyn immediately began directing his Soldiers. One by one, they rushed forward, opened a gateway and darted through, dragging their mounts behind them. Ahead up the valley, bright flashes of light told of gateways opening and closing. The Asha’man could Travel short distances without first memorizing the ground they left from, and cover ground far faster than riding. In short order, only Gedwyn and Rochaid remained, aside from the Dedicated holding the gateways. The others would be fanning out westward, searching for Seanchan. The Saldaeans were through from Illian, and mounting. Legionmen spread into the trees at a trot, crossbows held ready. In this country, they could move as fast afoot as men on horseback.

As the rest of the army began emerging, Rand rode up the valley in the direction the Asha’man had gone. Mountains rose high behind him, a wall fronting the Deep, but west the peaks ran almost to Ebou Dar. He quickened the gelding’s pace to a canter.

Bashere caught him before he reached the pass. The man’s bay was small — most of the Saldaeans rode small horses — but quick. “No Seanchan here, it seems,” he said almost idly, stroking his mustaches with a knuckle. “But there could have been. Tenobia’s likely to have my head on a pike soon enough for following a live Dragon Reborn, much more a dead one.”

Rand scowled. Maybe he could take Flinn, to watch his back, and Narishma, and... Flinn had saved his life; the man had to be true. Men could change, though. And Narishma? Even after...? He felt cold at the risk he had taken. Not the dreads. Narishma had proved true, but it still had been a mad risk. As mad as running from stares he was not even sure were real, running to where he had no notion what was waiting. Bashere was right, but Rand did not want to talk about it further.

The slopes leading up into the pass were bare stone and boulders of all sizes, but among the natural stone lay weathered pieces of what must have once been a huge statue. Some were just recognizable as worked stone, others more so. A beringed hand nearly big as his chest, gripping a sword hilt with a broken stub of blade wider than his hand. A great head, a woman with cracks across her face and a crown that seemed to be made of upthrusting daggers, some still whole.

“Who do you think she was?” he asked. A queen, of course. Even if merchants or scholars had worn crowns in some distant time, only rulers and generals earned statues.

Bashere twisted in his saddle to study the head before speaking. “A Queen of Shiota, I’ll wager,” he said finally. “Not older. I saw a statue made in Eharon once, and it was so worn you couldn’t say whether it was man or woman. A conqueror, or they wouldn’t have shown her with a sword. And I seem to recall Shiota gave a crown like that to rulers who expanded the borders. Maybe they called it the Crown of Swords, eh? A Brown sister might be able to tell you more.”

“It isn’t important,” Rand told him irritably. They did look like swords.

Bashere went on anyway, graying eyebrows lowered, gravely serious. “I expect thousands cheered her, called her the hope of Shiota, maybe even believed she was. In her time, she might have been as feared and respected as Artur Hawkwing was later, but now even the Brown sisters may not know her name. When you die, people begin to forget, who you were and what you did, or tried to do. Everybody dies eventually, and everybody is forgotten, eventually, but there’s no bloody point dying before your time comes.”

“I don’t intend to,” Rand said sharply. He knew where he was meant to die, if not when. He thought he did.

The corner of his eye caught motion, back down where bare stone gave way to brush and a few small trees. Fifty paces away, a man stepped into the open and raised a bow, smoothly drawing fletchings to cheek. Everything seemed to happen at once.

Snarling, Rand hauled Tai’daishar around, watching the archer adjust to follow. He seized saidin and sweet life and filth poured into him together. His head spun. There were two archers. Bile rose in his throat as he fought wild, uncontrolled surges of the Power that tried to sear him to the bone and freeze his flesh solid. He could not control them; it was all he could do to stay alive. Desperately, he fought to clear his sight, to be able to see well enough to weave the flows he could barely form, with nausea flooding him as strongly as the Power. He thought he heard Bashere shout. Two archers loosed.

Rand should have died. At that range, a boy could have hit his target. Maybe being ta’veren saved him. As the archer let fly, a covey of graywinged quail burst up almost at his feet uttering piercing whistles. Not enough to throw off an experienced man, and indeed, the fellow only flinched a hair. Rand felt the wind of the arrow’s passage against his cheek.

Fireballs the size of fists suddenly struck the archer. He screamed as his arm spun away, hand still gripping the bow. Another took his left leg at the knee, and he fell shrieking.

Leaning out of his saddle, Rand vomited onto the ground. His stomach tried to heave up every meal he had ever eaten. The Void and saidin left with a sickening wrench. It was nearly more than he could manage not to fall.

When he could sit upright again, he took the white linen handkerchief Bashere silently offered, and wiped his mouth. The Saldaean frowned with concern, as well he might. Rand’s stomach wanted to find more to spew out. He thought his face must be pale. He drew a deep breath. Losing saidin that way could kill you. But he could still sense the Source; at least saidin had not burned him out. At least he could see properly; there was only one Davram Bashere. But the illness seemed a little worse each time he seized saidin.

“Let’s see if there’s enough left of this fellow to talk,” he told Bashere. There was not.

Rochaid was on his knees, calmly searching through the corpse’s torn, bloodstained coat. Besides his missing arm and leg, the dead man had a blackened hole as big as his head all the way through his chest. It was Eagan Padros; his sightless eyes stared at the sky in surprise. Gedwyn ignored the body at his feet, studying Rand instead, as cold as Rochaid. Both men held saidin. Surprisingly