The plump-facedsul’dam walked by them with barely a glance, strolling down the tunnel. Herdamane peered intently at every woman they passed, though, sensing whether she could channel, and Mat held his breath when she paused beside the last mounteddamane with a slight frown. Even with his luck, he would not bet against the Seanchan recognizing an Aes Sedai’s ageless face if they looked inside that hood. There were Aes Sedai held asdamane, but what were the odds that all three of Egeanin’s would be? Light, what were the odds one of the low Blood would own three?
The plump-faced woman made a clicking sound, as you might to a pet dog, and twitched thea’dam, and thedamane followed her on. They were looking formarath’damane trying to escape the leash, notdamane. Mat still thought he might choke. The sound of dice rolling had started up again in his head, loud enough to rival the occasional rumble of distant thunder. Something was going to go wrong; he knew it.
The officer of the guards, a burly Seanchan with tilted eyes like a Saldaean but pale honey-brown skin, bowed courteously and invited Egeanin into the guardhouse, to have a cup of spiced wine while a clerk wrote down the information about thedamane. Every guardhouse Mat had ever seen was a stark place, yet the lamplight glowing in the arrowslits made this one seem almost inviting. A pitcherplant probably looked inviting to a fly, too. He had been glad of the rain dripping from the hood of his cloak and running down his face. It disguised the sweat of nerves. He held one of his throwing knives, resting flat atop the long bundle draped in front of his saddle. With it lying flat like that, none of the soldiers should notice. He could feel the woman inside the cloth breathing under his hands, and his shoulders were knotted from waiting for her to cry out for help. Selucia kept her mount close to him, peer?ing at him from the shelter of her hood with her golden braid tucked out of sight, never even glancing away when thesul’dam anddamane walked by. A shout from Selucia would have put theweasel in the chicken run as much as one from Tuon. He thought the threat of the knife had held both women silent - they had to believe he was desperate enough or crazy enough to use it - but he still could not be sure. There was so much about night he could not be sure of, so much off-balance and askew.
He remembered holding his breath, wondering when someone would notice that the bundle he carried was richly embroidered and question why he was letting it get soaked with rain, wonder?ing and cursing himself for grabbing a wall hanging because it had been close to hand. In memory, everything slowed. Egeanin stepped down, tossing her reins to Domon, who took them with a bow from his saddle. Domon’s hood was pushed back just enough to show that his head was shaved on one side and his remaining hair gathered in a braid that hung to his shoulder. Raindrops dripped from the stocky Illianer’s short beard, yet he managed the proper stiff-necked arrogance of aso’jhin, hereditary upper servant to one of the Blood and thus almost equal to the Blood. Definitely higher than any common soldier. Egeanin glanced back toward Mat and his burden, her face a frozen mask that could pass for hau?teur if you did not know she was horrified by what they were doing. The tallsul’dam and herdamane turned briskly back up the tunnel, finished with their inspection. Vanin, just behind Mat leading one of the strings of packhorses and as always sitting his horse like a sack of suet, leaned from his saddle and spat. Mat did not know why that hung in his memory, but it did. Vanin spat, and trumpets sounded, thin and sharp in the distance far behind them. From south of the city, where men had been planning to fire Seanchan supplies stored along theBay Road.
The officer of the guard hesitated at the sound of the trumpets, but suddenly a bell pealed loudly in the city itself, then another, and then it seemed hundreds were clanging alarm in the night as the black sky split with more lightning than any storm had ever birthed, silver-blue streaks stabbing down inside the walls. They bathed the tunnel in flickering light. That was when the shouting started, amid the explosions back in the city, and the screaming.
For a moment, Mat had cursed the Windfinders for moving sooner than he had been promised. But the dice in his head had stopped, he realized. Why? It made him want to curse all over again,but there was no time for even that. In the next instant the officer was hurriedly urging Egeanin back into her saddle and on her way, hurriedly shouting orders to the men boiling out of the guardhouse, directing one into the city at a run to see what the alarm was while he arrayed the rest against any threat from inside or out. The plump-faced woman ran to place herself and herdamam with the soldiers, along with another pair of women linked by ana’dam, who came running from the guardhouse. And Mat and the others galloped out into the storm, carrying with them three Aes Sedai, two of them escapeddamane, and the kidnapped heir to the Seanchan Crystal Throne, while behind them a far worse storm broke over Ebou Dar.Lightning bolts more numerous than blades of grass. . . .
With a shiver, Mat pulled himself back to the present. Egeanin scowled at him, and gave him an exaggerated pull. “Lovers arm-in?-arm don’t hurry,” he muttered. “They . . . stroll.” She sneered. Domon had to be blinded by love. That, or he had taken too many thumps on the head.
The worst was over and done, in any case. Mat hoped that get?ting out of the city had been the worst. He had not felt the dice since. They were always a bad sign. His backtrail was as muddled as he could manage, and he was sure it would take someone as lucky as he to separate the gold from the dross. The Seekers had been on Egeanin’s scent before that night, and she would be wanted on charges of stealingdamane now, as well, but the author?ities would expect her to be riding as hard as she could and already leagues from Ebou Dar, not sitting just outside the city. Nothing except a coincidence of timing connected her to Tuon. Or to Mat, and that was important. Tylin certainly would have leveled her own charges against him - no woman was going to forgive a man tying her up and shoving her under a bed, even when she had sug?gested it - yet with any luck, he was beneath suspicion for any?thing else that had happened that night. With any luck, no one except Tylin had a thought for him at all. Trussing a queen like a pig for market would be enough to get a man dead usually, but it had to count for moldy onions alongside the Daughter of the Nine Moons disappearing, and what could Tylin’s Toy have to do with that? It still irritated him that he had been seen as a hanger-on - worse, a pet! - but there were advantages.
He thought he was safe - from the Seanchan, anyway - yet one point worried him like a thorn buried in his heel. Well, several did, most growing out of Tuon herself, but this one had a particu?larly long point. Tuon’s disappearance should have been as shock?ing as the sun vanishing atnoon, but no alarm had been raised. None! No announcements of rewards or offers of ransom, no hot-eyed soldiers searching every wagon and cart within miles, gallop?ing through the countryside to root out every cubbyhole and niche where a woman might be hidden. Those old memories told him something of hunting for kidnapped royalty, yet except for the hangings and the burned ships in the harbor, from the outside Ebou Dar seemed unchanged from the day before the kidnapping. Egeanin alleged that the search would be in utter secrecy, that many of the Seanchan themselves might still not know Tuon was missing. Her explanation involved the shock to the Empire and ill omens for the Return and the loss ofsei’taer, and she sounded as if she believed every word, but Mat refused to buy a penny’s worth. The Seanchan were strange folk, but no one could be that strange. The silence of Ebou Dar made his skin prickle. He felt a trap in that silence. When they reached theGreat North Road, he was grateful that the city was hidden behind the low hills.
The road was a broad highway, a major avenue of trade, wide enough for five or six wagons abreast uncrowded, with a surface of dirt and clay that hundreds of years of use had packed nearly as hard as the occasional ancient paving stone that stuck an edge or corner inches into the air. Mat and Egeanin hurried across to the verge on the other side with Noal dogging their heels, between a merchant’s train rumbling toward the city, guarded by a scar-faced woman and ten hard-eyed men in leather vests covered with metal discs, and a string of the settlers’ oddly shaped wagons, rising to peaks at the ends, that were heading north, some pulled by horses or mules, others by oxen. Clustered between the wagons, barefoot boys used switches to herd four-horned goats with long black hair and big, dewlapped white cows. One man at the rear of the wag?ons, in baggy blue breeches and a round red cap, was leading a massive humpbacked bull by a thick cord tied to a ring in its nose. Except for his clothes, he could have been from the Two Rivers. He eyed Mat and the others, walking in the same direction, as if he might speak, then shook his head and plodded on without looking at them again. Contending with Mat’s limp, they were not moving fast, and the settlers forged ahead slowly but steadily.
Hunch-shouldered and clutching the scarf beneath her chin with her free hand, Egeanin let out a breath and loosened fingers that had begun to grip Mat’s side almost painfully. After a moment, she straightened and glared at the farmer’s departing back as though she were ready to chase after him and box his ears and his bull’s. If that were not bad enough, once the farmer was twenty or so paces away, she shifted her scowl to a company of Seanchan soldiers marching down the middle of the road at a pace that would soon overtake the settlers, perhaps two hundred men in a column four abreast followed by a motley collection of mule-drawn wagons covered with tightly lashed canvas. The middle of the road was left free for military traffic. Half a dozen well-mounted officers in thin-plumed helmets that hid all but their eyes rode at the column’s head, looking neither left nor right, red cloaks spread neatly over their horses’ cruppers. The banner following on the officers’ heels was marked with what looked like a stylized sil?ver arrowhead, or maybe an anchor, crossed by a long arrow and a jagged lightning bolt in gold, with script and numerals below that Mat could not make out as gusts swept the banner this way and that. The men on the supply wagons wore dark blue coats and breeches and square red-and-blue caps, but the soldiers were even more showy than most Seanchan, their segmented armor striped in blue banded at the bottom with silvery white and red banded with golden yellow, their helmets painted in all four colors so they resembled the faces of fearsome spiders. A large badge with the anchor - Mat thought it must be an anchor - and arrow and light?ning was fastened to the front of each helmet, and every man except the officers carried a double-curve bow at his side, with a bristling quiver at his bel
