“After you, sister,” Seaine said, channeling a small ball of light. By protocol, she should have preceded the other woman, but she could not bring herself to do that.
Zerah did not hesitate in going down. Logically, she had nothing to fear from a Sitter, a White Sitter. Logically, Seaine would tell her what she wanted when the time was ripe, and it would be nothing she could not do. Illogically, Seaine’s stomach fluttered like a huge moth. Light, she held saidar and the other woman did not. Zerah was weaker in any case. There was nothing to fear. Which did nothing to quiet those fluttering wings in her middle.
Down they climbed and down, past doors letting onto basements and subbasements, until they reached the very lowest level, below even where the Accepted were tested. The dark hallway was lit only by Seaine’s small light. They held their skirts high, but their slippers kicked up small clouds of dust however carefully they stepped. Plain wooden doors lined the smooth stone walls, many with great lumps of rust for hinges and locks.
“Sitter,” Zerah asked, finally showing doubt, “whatever can we be after down here? I don’t believe anyone has been this deep for years.”
Seaine was sure her own visit, a few days earlier, had been the first to this level in at least a century. That was one of the reasons she and Pevara had chosen it. “Just in here,” she said, swinging open a door that moved with only a little squealing. No amount of oil could loosen all the rust, and efforts to use the Power had been useless. Her abilities with Earth were better than Pevara’s, but that was not saying very much.
Zerah stepped in, and blinked in surprise. In an otherwise empty room, Pevara sat behind a sturdy if rather worn table with three small benches around it. Getting those few pieces down unseen had been difficult — especially when servants could not be trusted. Clearing out the dust had been much simpler if no more pleasant, and smoothing the dust in the hall outside, necessary after every visit, had been simply onerous.
“I was about to give up sitting here in the dark,” Pevara growled. The glow of saidar surrounded her as she lifted a lantern from beneath the table and channeled it alight, casting as much illumination as the roughwalled former storeroom deserved. Somewhat plump and normally pretty, the Red Sitter looked a bear with two sore teeth. “We want to ask you a few questions, Zerah.” And she shielded the woman as Seaine shut the door.
Zerah’s shadowed face remained utterly calm, but she swallowed audibly. “About what, Sitters?” There was the faintest tremor in the younger woman’s voice, as well. It could be simply the mood of the Tower, though.
“The Black Ajah,” Pevara replied curtly. “We want to know whether you’re a Darkfriend.”
Amazement and outrage shattered Zerah’s calm. Most would have taken that for sufficient denial without her snapped “I don’t have to take that from you! You Reds have been setting up false Dragons for years! If you ask me, there’s no need to look further than the Red quarters to find Black sisters!”
Pevara’s face darkened with fury. Her loyalty to her Ajah was strong, which went without saying, but worse, she had lost her entire family to Darkfriends. Seaine decided to step in before Pevara resorted to brute force. They had no proof. Not yet.
“Sit, Zerah,” she said with as much warmth as she could muster. “Sit down, sister.”
Zerah turned toward the door as though she might disobey an order from a Sitter — and of her own Ajah! — but at last she settled onto one of the benches, stiffly, sitting right at the edge.
Before Seaine had finished taking a seat that placed Zerah between them, Pevara laid the ivorywhite Oath Rod on the battered tabletop. Seaine sighed. They were Sitters, with a perfect right to use any ter’angreal they wished, but she had been the one to filch it — she could not help thinking of it as filching when she had observed none of the proper procedures — and the whole time, in the back of her head, she had been sure she would turn to find longdead Sereille Bagand standing here, ready to haul her off to the Mistress of Novices’ study by her ear. Irrational, but no less real.
“We want to make sure you tell the truth,” Pevara said, still sounding like an angry bear, “so you will swear an oath on this, and then I’ll ask again.”
“I should not be subjected to this,” Zerah said with an accusing look at Seaine, “but I will reswear all of the Oaths, if that’s what it needs to satisfy you. And I will demand an apology from you both, afterward.” She hardly sounded like a women shielded and asked such a question. Almost contemptuously, she reached for the slim, footlong rod. It shone in the dim light of the lantern.
“You’ll swear to obey the two of us absolutely,” Pevara told her, and that hand snatched back as if from a coiled viper. Pevara went right on, even sliding the Rod closer to the woman with two fingers. “That way, we can tell you to answer truthfully and know you will, and if you give the wrong answer, we can know you’ll be obedient and helpful in helping us hunt down your Black sisters. The Rod can be used to free you of the oath, if you give the right answer.”
“To free —?” Zerah exclaimed. “I’ve never heard of anyone being loosed from an oath on the Oath Rod.”
“That is why we are taking all these precautions,” Seaine told her. “Logically, a Black sister must be able to lie, which means she must have freed of at least that Oath and likely all three. Pevara and I tested, and found the procedure much the same as taking an oath.” She did not mention how painful it had been, though, leaving the pair of them weeping. She also did not mention that Zerah would not be freed of her oath whatever her answer, not until the search for the Black Ajah came to a conclusion. For one thing, she could not be allowed to run off and complain about this questioning, which she most certainly would, with every right, if she was not of the Black. If.
Light, but Seaine wished they had found a sister from another Ajah who fit the criteria they had set. A Green or a Yellow would have done quite nicely. That lot were overweening at the best of times, and of late...! No. She was not going to fall prey to the sickness spreading through the Tower. Yet she could not help the names that flashed through her head, a dozen Greens, twice as many Yellows, and every one long past due taking down a few rungs. Sniff at a Sitter?
“You freed yourselves from one of the Oaths?” Zerah sounded startled, disgusted, uneasy, all at the same time. Perfe
