"Jordan, Robert - Wheel of Time 05 - The Fires of Heaven 2.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jordan Robert)
Egwene wondered if her friend ever thought of her as a milk-hearted wetlander. Probably not, or they would not be friends. But Aviendha had never learned to worry if what she said might hurt someone; she would probably be surprised to learn that Egwene could even think of being hurt.
"The way the Maidens make her dress," Egwene admitted reluctantly, "any man would look." Reminded that she herself was in the open without any clothes, she stumbled and almost fell as she looked around anxiously. The night was empty as far as she could make out. Even the Wise Ones were already back in their tents. Warm in their blankets. She was sweating, but the beads seemed to want to freeze as soon as they appeared.
"He belongs to Elayne," Aviendha said fiercely.
"I admit I don't know your customs fully, but ours are not the same as yours. He is not betrothed to Elayne." Why am I defending him? He's the one who ought to be switched! But honesty made her go on. "Even your Aiel men have the right to say no, if they're asked."
"You and she are near-sisters, as you and I are," Aviendha protested, slowing a step before picking it up again. "Did you not ask me to look after him for her? Do you not want her to have him?"
"Of course I do. If he wants her." That was not exactly true. She wanted Elayne to have what happiness she could, in love with the Dragon Reborn as she was, and she would do everything short of tying Rand hand and foot to see that Elayne got what she wanted. Maybe not far short, at that, if need be. Admitting it was another thing. Aiel women were far more forward than she could ever make herself be. "It would not be right, otherwise."
"He belongs to her," Aviendha said determinedly.
Egwene sighed. Aviendha simply did not want to understand any customs but her own. The Aiel woman was still shocked that Elayne would not ask Rand to marry her, that a man could ask that question. "I'm sure the Wise Ones will listen to reason tomorrow. They can't make you sleep in a man's bedchamber."
The other woman looked at her in clear surprise. For a moment her grace left her, and she stubbed a toe on the uneven ground; the mishap brought a few curses that would have made even Kadere's wagon drivers listen with interest -- and made Bair reach for the bluespine -- but she did not stop running. "I do not understand why that upsets you so," she said when the last curse died. "I have slept next to a man many times on raids, even sharing blankets for warmth if the night was very cold, but it disturbs you that I will sleep within ten feet of him. Is this part of your customs? I have noticed you will not bathe in the sweat tent with men. Do you not trust Rand al'Thor? Or is it me you do not trust?" Her voice had sunk to a concerned whisper by the end.
"Of course I trust you," Egwene protested heatedly. "And him. It's just that. . ." She trailed off, uncertain how to go on. Aiel notions of propriety were sometimes stricter than what she had grown up with, but in other ways they would have had the Women's Circle back home trying to decide whether to faint or reach for a stout stick. "Aviendha, if your honor is involved somehow. . ." This was touchy ground. "Surely if you explain to the Wise Ones, they will not make you go against your honor."
"There is nothing to explain," the other woman said flatly.
"I know I don't understand ji'e'toh. . ." Egwene began, and Aviendha laughed.
"You say you do not understand, Aes Sedai, yet you show that you live by it." Egwene regretted maintaining that lie with her -- it had been hard work to get Aviendha to call her simply Egwene, and sometimes she slipped back -- but it had to be kept with everyone if it was to hold with anyone. "You are Aes Sedai, and strong enough in the Power to overcome Amys and Melaine together," Aviendha continued, "but you said that you would obey, so you scrub pots when they say scrub pots, and you run when they say run. You may not know ji'e'toh, but you follow it."
It was not the same thing at all, of course. She gritted her teeth and did as she was told because that was the only way to learn dreamwalking, and she wanted to learn, to learn everything, more than anything else she could imagine. To even think that she could live by this foolish ji'e'toh was simply silly. She did what she had to do, and only when and because she had to.
They were coming back to where they had begun. As her foot hit the spot, Egwene said, "That's one," and ran on through the darkness with no one to see but Aviendha, no one to say whether she went back to her tent right then. Aviendha would not have told, but it never occurred to Egwene to stop short of the fifty.
CHAPTER 6
Gateways
Rand woke in total darkness and lay there beneath his blankets trying to think of what had wakened him. It had been something. Not the dream; he had been teaching Aviendha how to swim, in a pond in the Waterwood back home in the Two Rivers. Something else. Then it came again, like a faint whiff of a foul miasma creeping under the door. Not a smell at all, really; a sense of otherness, but that was how it felt. Rank, like something dead a week in stagnant water. It faded again, but not all the way this time.
Tossing aside his blankets, he stood up, wrapping himself in saidin. Inside the Void, filled with the Power, he could feel his body shiver, but the cold seemed' in another place from where he was. Cautiously he pulled open the door and stepped out. Arched windows at either end of the corridor let in falls of moonlight. After the pitch black of his room, it was nearly like day. Nothing moved, but he could feel. . . something. . . coming closer. Something evil. It felt like the taint that roared through him on the Power.
One hand went to his coat pocket, to the small carved figure of a round little man holding a sword across his knees. An angreal; with that he could channel more of the Power than even he could safely handle unaided. He thought it would not be necessary. Whoever had sent this attack against him did not know who they were dealing with, now. They should never have let him wake.
For a moment, he hesitated. He could take the fight to whatever had been sent against him, but he thought it was still below him. Down where the Maidens were still sleeping, by the silence. With luck, it would not bother them, unless he rushed down to battle it in their midst. That would surely wake them, and they would not stand by and watch. Lan said that you should choose your ground, if you could, and make your enemy come to you.
Smiling, he raced the thud of his boots up the nearest curving stairway, on upward, until he reached the top floor. The highest level of the building was one large chamber with a slightly domed ceiling and scattered thin columns fluted in spirals. Glassless arched windows all around flooded every corner with moonlight. The dust and grit and sand on the floor still faintly showed his own footprints, from the one time he had come up here, and no other mark. It was perfect.
He channeled, and a sword was in his hands, its slightly curving, heron-marked blade seeming hammered out of fire. . He had expected Myrddraal, or something even worse than the Eyeless, but for dogs, even Shadowspawn dogs, the sword would be enough. Whoever had sent them did not know him. Lan said he had very nearly reached the level of a blademaster, now, and the Warder was sparing enough with praise to make him think he might have passed onto that level already.
With snarls like bones being ground to dust, the dogs hurtled at him from three sides, faster than galloping horses.
He did not move until they were almost on him; then he flowed, one with the sword, move to move, as though dancing. In the blink of an eye the sword form called Whirlwind on the Mountain became The Wind Blows Over the Wall became Unfolding the Fan. Great black heads flew apart from black bodies, their dripping teeth, like burnished steel, still bared as they bounced across the floor. He was already stepping from the mosaic as the dark forms collapsed in twitching, bleeding heaps.
Laughing to himself, he let the sword go, though he held on to saidin, to the raging Power, the sweetness and the taint. Contempt slid along the' outside of the Void. Dogs. Shadowspawn, certainly, but still just. . . Laughter died.
Slowly, the dead dogs and their heads were melting, settling into pools of liquid shadow that quivered slightly, as if alive. Their blood, fanned across the' floor, trembled. Suddenly the smaller pools flowed across the floor in viscous streams to merge with the larger, which oozed away from the mosaic to mound higher and higher, until the three huge black dogs stood there once more, slavering and snarling as they gathered massive haunches under them.
He did not know why he felt surprise, dim outside the emptiness. Dogs, yes, but Shadowspawn. Whoever had sent them had not been as careless as he had thought. But they still did not know him.
Instead of reaching for the sword again, he channeled as he remembered doing once long ago. Howling, the huge dogs leaped, and a thick shaft of white light shot from his hands, like molten steel, like liquid fire. He swept it across the springing creatures; for an instant they became strange shadows of themselves, all colors reversed, and then they were made of sparkling motes that broke apart, smaller and smaller, until there was nothing.
He let go of the thing he had made, with a grim smile. A purple bar of light still seemed to cross his vision in afterimage.
Across the great chamber a piece of one of the columns crashed to the floor tiles. Where that bar of light -- or whatever it had been; not light, exactly -- had swung, neat slices were gone from the columns. A gaping swath cut half the width of the wall behind them.
"Did any of them bite you, or bleed on you?"
He spun at the sound of Moiraine's voice; absorbed in what he had done, he had not heard her come up the stairs. She stood clutching her skirts with both hands, peering at him, face lost in moon-shadow. She would have sensed the things the same way he did, but to be here so quickly she must have run. "The Maidens let you pass? Have you become Far Dareis Mai, Moiraine?"
"They grant me some privileges of a Wise One," she said in a rush, impatience raw in her usually melodious voice. "I told the guards I had to speak with you urgently. Now, answer me! Did the Darkhounds bite you, or bleed on you? Did their saliva touch you?"
"No," he answered slowly. Darkhounds. The little he knew he had gotten from old stories, the sort used to frighten children in the southlands. Some grown-ups believed, too. "Why should a bite worry you? You could Heal it. Does this mean the Dark One is free?" Enclosed in the Void as he was, even fear was distant.
The tales he had heard said the Darkhounds ran the night in the Wild Hunt, with the Dark One himself the hunter; they left no print on even the softest dirt, only on stone, and they would not stop until you faced and defeated them or put running water between you. Crossroads were supposed to be particularly dangerous places to meet them, and the time just after sunset or just before sunrise. He had seen enough old stories walking by now' to believe that any of it could be true.
"No, not that, Rand." She seemed to be regaining her self-control; her voice was silver chimes again, calm and cool. "They are only another kind of Shadowspawn, something that should never have been made. But their bite is death as surely as a dagger in the heart, and I do not think I could have Healed such a wound before it killed you. Their blood, even their saliva, is poison. A drop on the skin can kill, slowly, with great pain at the end. You are lucky there were only three: Unless you killed more before I arrived? Their packs are usually larger, as many as ten or twelve, or so say the scraps left from the War Of the Shadow."
Larger packs. He was not the only target in Rhuidean for one of the Forsaken. . . .
"We must speak of what you used to kill them," Moiraine began, but he was already running as hard as he could, ignoring her cries to know where he was going and why. . .
Down flights of stairs, through darkened corridors where sleepy Maidens, roused by the pounding boots, peered at him in consternation from moonlit rooms. Through the front doors, where Lan stood restlessly with the two women on guard, his color-shifting Warder's cloak about his shoulders, making parts of him seem to blend into the night.
"Where is Moiraine?" he shouted as Rand dashed by, but Rand leaped down the broad steps two at a time without replying.
The half-healed wound in his side clenched like a fist, pain he was only vaguely aware of inside the Void, by the time he reached the building he sought. It stood at the very edge of Rhuidean, far from the plaza, as far from the camp Moiraine shared with the Wise Ones as it was possible to be and remain in the city. The upper floors had collapsed in a mound of rubble that fanned out onto the cracked earth beyond the pavement. Only the bottom two floors remained whole. Refusing his body's efforts to hunch over around the pain, he went in, still at a dead run.
Once the great, antechamber, encircled by a stone balcony, had been tall; now it was taller, open to the night sky, its pale stone floor strewn with rubble from the collapse. In the moonshadows beneath the balcony, three Darkhounds were up on their hind legs, clawing and chewing at a bronze-clad door that shivered under their assault. The smell of burned sulfur hung strong in the air.
Remembering what had happened before, Rand darted to one side as he channeled, the shaft of liquid white fire streaking by the door as it destroyed the Shadowspawn. He had tried to make it less this time, to confine the destruction to the Darkhounds, but the thick wall at the far end of the chamber had a shadowed hole in it. Not all the way through, he thought -- it was hard to tell by moonlight -- but he would have to fine his control of this weapon.
The bronze sheathing on the door was tattered and torn as though the teeth and toenails of the Darkhounds really had been steel; lamplight shone through a number of small holes. There were pawprints in the floorstones, but surprisingly few. Releasing saidin, he found a place where he would not cut his hand to shreds and pounded On the door. Suddenly the pain in his side was very real and present; he took a deep breath and tried to thrust it away. "Mat? It's me, Rand! Open up, Mat!"
After a moment, the door opened a crack, letting out a spill of lamplight; Mat peered through doubtfully, then pulled the door wider, leaning against it as if he had run ten miles carrying a sack of rocks. Except for a silver foxhead medallion hanging around his neck, its eye shaped and shaded like the ancient Aes Sedai symbol, he was naked. The way Mat felt about Aes Sedai, Rand was surprised he had not sold the thing long since. Deeper in. the room, a tall, golden-haired woman- was calmly wrapping a blanket around herself. A Maiden, by the spears and buckler lying at her feet.
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