The Path of Daggers

to show so many teeth? To stand together? A man might find himself in a duel for a look — though they had begun to learn challenging a Guardsman was just a slower way of cutting your own throat — but he had seen nobles of this so-called nation trying to sell each other and their Queen for the mere suggestion that their own lands might be protected and perhaps those of their neighbor added to them.

Nadoc, a big man with a deceptively mild face, twisted in his saddle to watch the raken. 'I don’t like marching blind,' he muttered. 'Not when the Altarans have managed to put forty thousand men up here. Forty, at least.'

Jadranka snorted so hard that his tall white gelding shifted. Jadranka was the senior of the three captains behind Karede, having served as long as Karede himself. A short thin man with a prominent nose and such airs you might have thought him of the Blood. That horse would stand out at a mile. 'Forty thousand or a hundred, Nadoc, they’re scattered from here to the end of the range, too far apart to support one another. Stab my eyes, likely half are dead already. They must be tangling with outposts everywhere. That’s why we aren’t getting reports. We’re just expected to sweep up the remnants.'

Karede swallowed a sigh. He had hoped Jadranka was not a fool atop his airs. Praise of victors spread quickly, whether they were an army or half a Banner. It was the rare defeats that were swallowed in silence and forgotten. So much silence was… ominous.

'That last report didn’t sound like remnants to me,' Nadoc persisted. He was no fool. 'There are five thousand men not fifty miles ahead of us, and I doubt we’ll take them with brooms.'

Jadranka snorted again. 'We’ll crush them, with swords or brooms. The Light burn my eyes, I can hardly wait for a decent engagement. I told the scouts to press on until they found them. I won’t have them slipping away from us.'

'You did what?' Karede said softly.

Soft or not, his words jerked every eye toward him. Though Nadoc and a few of the others had to struggle to stop gaping at Jadranka. Scouts told to press ahead, scouts told what to look for. What had gone unseen for those orders?

Before anyone could open his mouth shouts rose from the men in the pass, screams and the shrieks of horses.

Karede pressed the leather tube of the looking glass to his eye. Along the pass ahead of him, men and horses were dying under a hail of what he thought must be crossbow bolts, the way they hammered through steel breastplates, exploded through chests protected by mail. Hundreds were down already, hundreds more sagging wounded in their saddles or afoot and running from horses thrashing on the ground. Too many were running. Even as he looked, men still mounted whirled their horses to try fleeing back up the pass. Where in the Light were the sul’dam! He could not find them. He had faced rebels who had sul’dam and damane, and they always had to be killed as fast as possible. Maybe the locals had learned that.

Suddenly, shockingly, the ground began to erupt in roaring fountains all along the writhing snake of his command, fountains that flung men and horses into the air as easily as dirt and stones. Lightning flashed out of the sky, blue-white bolts shattering earth and men alike. Other men simply exploded, ripped to shreds by nothing he could see. Did the locals have damane of their own? No, it would be those Aes Sedai.

'What are we going to do?' Nadoc said. He sounded shaken. As well he might.

'Do you think to abandon your men?' Jadranka snarled. 'We rally them and attack, you—!' He cut off, gurgling, as Karede’s swordpoint went neatly into his throat. There were times fools could be tolerated, and times not. As the man toppled from his saddle, Karede deftly wiped his blade on the gelding’s white mane before the animal bolted. There were times for a little show, too.

'We rally what can be rallied, Nadoc,' he said as if Jadranka had never spoken. As if he had never been. 'We save what can be saved, and fall back.'

Turning to ride down into the pass where lightnings flashed and thunders roared, he ordered Anghar, a steady-eyed young man with a fast horse, to ride east and report what had transpired here. Perhaps a flier would see and perhaps not, though Karede suspected he knew why they flew low, now. He suspected the High Lady Suroth and the generals in Ebou Dar already knew what was occurring up here, too. Was today the day he died for the Empress? He dug his heels into his horse’s flanks.

From the flat, thinly treed ridge, Rand peered westward over the forest before him. With the Power in him — life, so sweet; vileness, oh, so vile — he could see individual leaves, but it was not enough. Tai’daishar stamped a hoof. The jagged peaks behind, to either side, and all around overtopped the ridge by a mile or more, but the ridge stood well above the treetops below, a rolling wooded valley over a league in length and nearly as wide. All was still down there. As quiet as the Void he floated in. Quiet for the moment, anyway. Here and there plumes of smoke rose from where two or three trees in a clump burned like torches. Only the general wet stopped them turning the valley into a conflagration.

Flinn and Dashiva were the only Asha’man still with him. All the rest were down in the valley. The pair stood a little way from him at the edge of the trees, holding their horses by the reins and staring at the forest below. Well, Flinn stared, as intently as Rand himself. Dashiva glanced occasionally, twisting his mouth, sometimes muttering to himself in a way that made Flinn shift his feet and eye him sideways. The Power filled both men, nearly to overflowing, but for a change, Lews Therin said nothing. The man seemed increasingly to have gone back into hiding over the last few days.

In the sky there was actually sunlight, and the scattered clouds were gray. It was five days since Rand had brought his small army to Altara, five days since he had seen his first Seanchan dead. He had seen quite a few since. Thought slid across the surface of the Void. He could feel the heron branded into his palm pressing against the Dragon Scepter through his glove. Silent. There were none of the flying creatures to be seen. Three of those had died, slashed from the sky by lightning, before their riders learned to stay clear. Bashere was fascinated by the creatures. Quiet.

'Perhaps it is finished, my Lord Dragon.' Ailil’s voice was calm and cool, but she patted her mare’s neck, though the animal did not need soothing. She eyed Flinn and Dashiva sideways and straightened, unwilling to reveal a shred of unease in front of them.

Rand found himself humming and stopped abruptly. That was Lews Therin’s habit, looking at a pretty woman, not his. Not his! Light, if he started taking on the fellow’s mannerisms, and when he was not there, at that…!

Abruptly, hollow thunder boomed up the valley. Fire fountained out of the trees a good two miles away or more, then again, and again, again. Lightning streaked down into the forest not far from where the tall flames had bloomed, single slashes like jagged blue-white lances. A flurry of lightning bolts and fire, and all was still again. No trees had caught fire, this time.

Some of that had been saidin. Some of it.

Shouts rose, dim and distant, from another part of the valley, he thought. Too far for even his saidin-enhanced ears to hear the crash of steel. Despite everything, not all of the fighting was being done by Asha’man and Dedicated and Soldiers.

Anaiyella let out a long breath she must have been holding since the exchange with the Power began. Men fighting with steel did not disturb her. Then she patted her mount’s neck. The gelding had only flickered an ear. Rand had noticed that about women. Quite often, when a woman was agitated, she tried to soothe others whether they required soothing or not. A horse would do. Where was Lews Therin?

Irritably he leaned forward to study the forest canopy again. A good many of those trees were evergreens — oak and pine and leatherleaf — and despite the late drought, they made an effective screen, even to his intensified vision. As if idly, he touched the narrow bundle under his stirrup leather. He could take a hand. And strike blindly. He could ride down into the woods. And be able to see ten paces at most. Down there, he would be little more effective than one of the Soldiers.

A gateway opened among the trees a little way along the ridge, silvery slash widening into a hole that showed different trees and thick winter brown underbrush. A copper-skinned Soldier with a thin mustache on his upper lip and a small pearl in his ear exited afoot and let the gateway vanish. He was shoving a