Towers of Midnight (The Wheel of Time #13)

The servant looked perplexed, but when he said nothing further, the woman retreated.

He tried to cool his rage. He wouldn’t go back, not now. Not when it would look as if he’d come crawling back at her command. She had her “careful plans and traps.” She had said she didn’t need him. She would have to do without him for a while, then.

Chapter 34

Judgment

“I want the scouts out watching,” Perrin said forcefully. “Even during the trial.”

“The Maidens won’t like this, Perrin Aybara,” Sulin said. “Not if it makes them miss the chance to dance the spears.”

“They’ll do it anyway,” Perrin said, walking through camp, Dannil and Gaul at his side. Behind followed Azi and Wil al’Seen, his two guards for the day.

Sulin inspected Perrin, then nodded. “It will be done.” She moved off.

“Lord Perrin,” Dannil asked, smelling nervous. “What’s this about?”

“I don’t know yet,” Perrin said. “Something’s wrong on the wind.”

Dannil frowned, looking confused. Well, Perrin was confused, too. Confused and increasingly certain. It seemed a contradiction, but it was true.

The camp was busy, his armies gathering to meet the Whitecloaks. Not his army, his armies. There was so much division among them. Arganda and Gallenne jostling one another for position, the Two Rivers men resenting the newer bands of mercenaries, the former refugees mashed between them all. And, of course, the Aiel, aloof and doing as they wished.

I’m going to disband them, Perrin told himself. What does it matter? It bothered him nonetheless. It was a disorderly way to run a camp.

Anyway, Perrin’s people had mostly recovered from this latest bubble of evil. None of them would probably look at their weapons again the same way, but the wounded had been Healed and the channelers were rested. The Whitecloaks had not been pleased at the delay, which had extended longer than they had probably expected. But Perrin had needed the time, for a number of reasons.

“Dannil,” he said. “My wife has you mixed up in her plots to protect me, I assume.”

Dannil started. “How—”

“She needs her secrets,” Perrin said. “I miss half of them, but this one was as plain as day. She’s not happy about this trial. What’s she got you doing? Some plan with the Asha’man to get me out of danger?”

“Something like that, my Lord,” Dannil admitted.

“I’ll go, if it turns bad,” Perrin said. “But don’t jump to it too early. I won’t have this turn into a bloodbath because one of the Whitecloaks lets out a curse at the wrong time. Wait for my signal. Understood?”

“Yes, my Lord,” Dannil said, smelling sheepish.

Perrin needed to be done with this. Free of it. Now. Because, over these last few days, it had begun to feel natural to him. I’m just a… He trailed off. Just a what? A blacksmith? Could he say that anymore? What was he?

Up ahead, Neald sat on a stump near the Traveling ground. During the last few days, the youthful Asha’man soldier and Gaul had scouted out in several directions at Perrin’s orders, to see if gateways worked if one got far enough away from camp. Sure enough, it turned out they did, though one had to go for hours to escape the effect.

Neither Neald nor Gaul had noted any sort of change other than the weave for gateways working again. There was no barrier or visible indication on this side, but if Perrin guessed right, the area where gateways didn’t work matched exactly the area covered by the dome in the wolf dream.

That was the dome’s purpose, and that was why Slayer guarded it. It wasn’t about hunting the wolves, though he surely did that with pleasure. Something was causing both the dome and the problems with the Asha’man.

“Neald,” Perrin said, walking up to the Asha’man. “Latest scouting mission went well?”

“Yes, my Lord.”

“When Grady and you were first telling me about the failing weaves, you said it had happened to you before. When was that?”

“When we tried to open the gateway to retrieve the scouting group from Cairhien,” Neald said. “We tried at first and the weaves fell apart. But we waited a little while and tried again. That time it worked.”

That was just after the first night I saw the dome, Perrin thought. It came up for a short time, then vanished. Slayer must have been testing it.

“My Lord,” Neald said, stepping close. He was a fop of a man, but he’d been reliable when Perrin needed him. “What’s going on?”

“I think someone’s setting a trap for us,” Perrin said softly. “Boxing us in. I’ve sent some others out to look for the thing causing this; it’s probably some kind of object of the One Power.” He worried that it might be hidden in the wolf dream. Could something there produce an effect in the real world? “Now, you’re sure you can’t create gateways at all? Not even to other points nearby, inside the affected area?”

Neald shook his head.

The rules are different on this side, then, Perrin thought. Or, at least, it works differently on Traveling than it does on shifting in the wolf dream. “Neald, you said with the larger gateways—using a circle—you could move the entire army through in a few hours?”

Neald nodded. “We’ve been practicing.”

“We need to be ready for that,” Perrin said, looking at the sky. He could still smell that oddity in the air. A faint staleness.

“My Lord,” Neald said. “We’ll be ready, but if we can’t create gateways, then it doesn’t matter. We could march the army out to that point beyond the effect, though, and escape from there.”

Unfortunately, Perrin suspected that wouldn’t do. Hopper had called this a thing of the deep past. That meant there was a good chance Slayer was working with the Forsaken. Or he was one of the Forsaken himself. Perrin had never considered that. Either way, the ones planning this trap would be watching. If his army tried to escape, the enemy would spring its trap or they’d move the dome.

The Forsaken had been fooling the Shaido with those boxes and had placed them here. And there was his picture, being distributed. Was it all part of this trap, whatever it was? Dangers. So many dangers hunting him.

Well, what did you expect, he thought. It&rsqu