Lord of Chaos (The Wheel of Time #6)

Lord of Chaos (The Wheel of Time #6) Page 145

“A few days?” Erith protested. “My Loial could be dying.”

“A few days?” Covril said on top of her. “My Loial could be—” She cut off, staring at the younger woman, lips compressed and ears quivering.

Haman frowned at them both, stroking his narrow beard irritably. “I do not know why I let myself be talked into this. I should be teaching my classes, and speaking to the Stump. If you were not such a respected Speaker, Covril. . . .”

“You mean if you were not married to my sister,” she said stoutly. “Voniel told you to do your duty, Haman.” Haman’s brows lowered till the long ends hung on his cheeks, and her ears seemed to lose most of their stiffness. “I meant to say she asked you,” she went on. Not hurriedly, exactly, not losing aplomb, but definitely not hesitating. “By the Tree and stillness, I meant no offense, Elder Haman.”

Haman harrumphed loudly—which for an Ogier meant very loudly—and turned to Rand, tugging his coat as if it had been disarrayed.

“Shadowspawn are using the Ways,” Rand said before Haman could speak. “I have set guards on the few I can reach.” Including the one outside Stedding Tsofu, plainly after their departure. These three could not have walked all the way from Stedding Tsofu after his last futile visit. “A bare handful. All of them need to be guarded, or else Myrddraal and Trollocs can come boiling out of nowhere, as far as anybody they catch is concerned. But I don’t even know where they all are.”

That would still leave gateways, of course. Sometimes he wondered why one of the Forsaken did not pour a few thousand Trollocs into the Palace by a gateway. Ten thousand, or twenty. He would be hard pressed to stop that, if he could stop it at all. It would be a slaughter at best. Well, he could do nothing about a gateway unless he was there. He could do something about the Waygates.

Haman exchanged looks with Covril. They drew aside, speaking in a whisper, and for a wonder, it was low enough that all he heard was a buzz like a huge swarm of bees on the roof. He must be right about her having some importance. A Speaker; he had heard the capital. He considered seizing saidin—he would be able to hear, then—and rejected it disgustedly. He had not sunk to eavesdropping yet. Erith divided her attention evenly between her elders and Rand, all the while unconsciously smoothing her skirts.

Rand hoped they did not inquire why he had not asked his question of the Council of Elders in Stedding Tsofu. Alar, Eldest of the Elders there, had been very firm; the Stump was meeting, and nothing so odd—so peculiar as to never have been thought of before—as handing control of the Waygates to a human could be done unless the Stump concurred. Who he was hardly seemed to matter to her any more than it did to these three.

Finally Haman came back frowning and gripping the lapels of his coat. Covril was frowning too. “This is all very hasty, very hasty,” Haman said in slow tones like gravel sliding. “I wish I could discuss it with. . . . Well, I cannot. Shadowspawn, you say? Um. Um. Very well, if there must be haste, there must be haste. Never let it be said that Ogier cannot move quickly when needs require, and perhaps they do now. You must understand, the Council of Elders in any stedding may tell you no, and so may the Stump.”

“Maps!” Rand shouted, so loudly that all three Ogier jumped. “I need maps!” He spun around looking for one of the servants who always seemed to be about, for a gai’shain, anyone. Sulin put her head into the courtyard through a doorway. She would be nearby, after everything he had told her. “Maps,” he barked at her. “I want every map in the Palace. And a pen, and ink. Now! Quickly!” She looked at him almost disparagingly—Aiel did not use maps, indeed claimed not to need them—and turned away. “Run, Far Dareis Mai!” he snapped. She looked over her shoulder at him—and ran. He wished he knew how his face looked, so he could recall it for use again.

Haman appeared as though he would be wringing his hands if his dignity had been just a little smaller. “Really, there is very little we can possibly tell you that you don’t already know. Every stedding has one just Outside.” The first Waygates could not have been made inside, with the ability to channel blocked by the stedding itself; even when Ogier were given the Talisman of Growing, and could themselves make the Ways grow to a new Waygate, the Power was still involved, if not channeling. “And all your cities that have Ogier groves. Though it does seem the city here has grown over the grove. And in Al’cair’rahienallen. . . .” He trailed off, shaking his head.

The trouble could be summed up by that name. Three thousand years ago, near enough, there had been a city called Al’cair’rahienallen, built by Ogier. Today it was Cairhien, and the grove the Ogier builders planted to remind them of their stedding was part of an estate that had belonged to the same Barthanes whose palace now housed Rand’s school. Nobody but Ogier and maybe some Aes Sedai remembered Al’cair’rahienallen. Not even Cairhienin.

Whatever Haman believed, much could change in three thousand years. Great Ogier-built cities had ceased to exist, some leaving not so much as a name behind. Great cities had risen that the Ogier had had no hand in. Amador, begun after the Trolloc Wars, was one, so Moiraine had told him, and Chachin in Kandor, and Shol Arbela in Arafel, and Fal Moran in Shienar. In Arad Doman, Bandar Eban had been built on the ruins of a city destroyed in the War of the Hundred Years, a city Moiraine knew three names for, each suspect, and itself built on the ruins of a nameless city that had vanished in the Trolloc Wars. Rand knew of a Waygate in Shienar, in the countryside near a moderate town that had kept part of the name of the huge city leveled by Trollocs, and another inside the Blight, in Shadow-murdered Malkier. Other places there had simply been change, or growth, as Haman himself had pointed out. The Waygate here in Caemlyn sat in a basement now. A well-guarded basement. Rand knew there was a Waygate in Tear, out in the great pastureland where the High Lords ran their famous horse herds. There should be one somewhere in the Mountains of Mist, where Manetheren had once stood, wherever that was. As far as stedding went, he knew where to find Stedding Tsofu. Moiraine had not considered stedding or Ogier a vital part of his education.

“You don’t know where the stedding are?” Haman said incredulously when Rand finished explaining. “Is this Aiel humor? I have never understood Aiel humor.”

“For Ogier,” Rand said gently, “it has been a long time since the Ways were made. For humans, it has bee