The Fires of Heaven (The Wheel of Time #5) 75

Weaving a fingerthin flow of Fire, he sliced the outline of a door in one wall, widening the gap at the top. Startlingly, daylight shone through. Releasing saidin, he exchanged surprised looks with Aviendha. He knew he had lost track of time — you lost track of the year — but they could not have been inside that long. Wherever they were, it was a great distance from Cairhien.

He pushed against the block, but it did not budge until he put his back to it, dug in his heels and shoved with all of his might. Just as it occurred to him that he very probably could have done this more easily with the Power, the block toppled outward, taking him with it into cold, crisp pale daylight. Not all the way, though. It stopped at an angle, propped against snow that had built up around the hut. Lying on his back, with only a bit of his head sticking out, he could see other mounds, some smooth drifts around sparse, stunted trees that he did not recognize, others maybe burying bushes or boulders.

He opened his mouth — and forgot what he was going to say as something swept through the air not fifty feet above him, a leathery gray shape far bigger than a horse, on slowbeating widespread wings, a horny snout thrust out before and clawed feet and thin, lizardlike tail trailing behind. His head twisted on its own to follow the thing's flight over the trees. There were two people on its back; despite what seemed to be some sort of hooded garments, it was plain that they were scanning the around below. If he had had more than his head showing, if he had not been directly under the creature, they would surely have seen him.“Leave the blankets,” he said as he ducked back inside. He told her what he had seen. “Maybe they'd be friendly and maybe not, but I'd as soon not find out.” He was not sure he wanted to meet people who rode something like that in any case. If they were people. “We are going to sneak back to the gateway. As quickly as we can, but sneaking.”

For a wonder she did not argue. When he commented on it as he was helping her climb over the ice block — that was a wonder, too; she accepted his hand without so much as a glare — she said, “I do not argue when you make sense, Rand al'Thor.” That was hardly the way he remembered it.

The land around them lay flat beneath its deep blanket of snow, but to the west sharp, whitetipped mountains rose, peaks wreathed in cloud. He had no difficulty knowing they lay west, for the sun was rising. Less than half its golden ball stuck above the ocean. He stared at that. The land slanted down enough for him to see waves crashing in violent spray on a rocky, boulderstrewn shore maybe half a mile away. An ocean to the east, stretching endlessly to horizon and sun. If the snow had not been enough, that told him they were in no land he knew.

Aviendha stared at the rolling breakers and pounding waves in amazement, then frowned at him as it hit home. She might never have seen an ocean, but she had seen maps.

In her skirts the snow gave her even more trouble than it did him, and he floundered, digging his way through as much as walking, sometimes sinking to his waist. She gasped as he scooped her up in his arms, and her green eyes glared.

“We have to move faster than you can dragging those skirts,” he told her. The glare faded, but she did not put an arm around his neck, as he had halfhoped. Instead she folded her hands and put on a patient face. A bit touched with sullenness. Whatever changes what they had done might have wrought in her, she was not completely different. He could not understand why that should be a relief.

He could have melted a path through the snow as he had in the storm, but if another of those flying things came, that cleared path would lead straight to them. A fox trotted by across the snow well to his right, pure white except for a black tip to its bushy tail, occasionally eyeing him and Aviendha warily. Rabbit tracks marred the snow in places, blurred where they had leapt, and once he saw the prints of a cat that had to be as large as a leopard. Maybe there were larger animals still, maybe some flightless relative of that leathery creature. Not something he wanted to encounter, but there was always the chance the... fliers... might take the plowed furrow he was leaving now as the track of some animal.

He still made his way from tree to tree, wishing there were more of them, and closer together. Of course, if there had been, he might not have found Aviendha in the storm — she grunted, frowning up at him, and he loosened his hold on her again — but it would surely have helped now. It was because he was creeping in that way, though, that he saw the others first.

Less than fifty paces away, between him and the gateway — right at the gateway; he could feel his weave holding it — were four people on horseback and more than twenty afoot. The mounted were all women shrouded in long thick, furlined cloaks; two of them each wore a silvery bracelet on her left wrist, connected by a long leash of the same shining stuff to a bright collar tight around the neck of a grayclad, cloakless woman standing in the snow. The others afoot were men in dark leather, and armor painted green and gold, overlapping plates down their chests and the outsides of their arms and fronts of their thighs. Their spears bore greenandgold tassels, their long shields were painted in the same colors, and their helmets seemed to be the heads of huge insects, faces peering out through the mandibles. One was clearly an officer, lacking spear or shield, but with a curved, twohanded sword on his back. Silver outlined the plates of his lacquered armor, and thin green plumes, like feelers, heightened the illusion of his painted helmet. Rand knew where he and Aviendha were now. He had seen armor like that before. And women collared like that.

Setting her down behind something that looked a little like a windtwisted pine, except that its trunk was smooth and gray, streaked with black, he pointed, and she nodded silently.

“The two women on leashes can channel,” he whispered. “Can you block them?” Hurriedly he added, “Don't embrace the Source yet. They're prisoners, but they still might warn the others, and even if they don't, the women with the bracelets might be able to feel them sense you.”

She looked at him oddly, but wasted no time on foolish questions such as how he knew; they would come later, he knew. “The women with the bracelets can channel also,” she replied just as softly. “It feels very strange, though. Weak. As if they had never practiced it. I cannot see how that can be.”

Rand could. Damane were the ones who were supposed to be able to channel. If two women had somehow slipped through the Seanchan net to become sul'dam instead — and from the little he knew of them, that would not be easy, for the Seanchan tested every last woman during the years that she might first show signs of channeling — they would surely never dare to betray themselves. “Can y