PROLOGUE
Chapter 1: Lament for the Long Night
Three millennia ago.
With an arid gasp, the last of the mules fell dead. The woman known as Mother looked around her, and saw only an ocean of sand as far as the eye could see in every direction. That was when she knew she had found the perfect place.
She raised a hand, and her trudging flock drew up, grateful for the respite. Uncaring, perhaps for the reason why. A dust-devil swirled, kicking up the abrasive mica sand, and Mother bent down, scooping up a handful.
The people watched, mutely, swathed in their protective cadin'sor clothing, shoufa dust veils up against the stinging sand as Mother let it slowly trickle through her fingers.
Amongst the hard-edged glitter of the mica, there were minute crystalline flakes of white that her callused fingers crumbled to powder. Coral sand. Many turns of the Wheel ago, this land had been under the ocean, populated by parrot fishes. Some day in an Age to come, maybe, the seas would reclaim it once more.
That did not matter. What did was that this ground had been untouched by the Breaking and its aftershocks. It was virgin ground. A place, perhaps, that had not felt a human footfall till they came there.
Her name was Latra Posae Decumae, and today was her naming-day. She was six hundred and eighty-three years old. She was Aes Sedai. The Book of the Nym contended that the lot of Man was three score years and ten. The Servants of All were held to be an exception, lives lived in vigour and strength into the centuries.
She and her followers had spent the last seventy years on the run. As for the common folk, in this troubled time, their lives were apt to be violent, brutal and short.
They had called it the Breaking of the World, or simply The Breaking. Words were insufficient, lives were short and memory faded. If humanity re-established civilization – if the world itself did not founder like a stricken ship – their descendants would know little of the cataclysm their world had endured. It would be to them a shadow upon their collective consciousness. A cresting wave, sweeping away everything that had come before. A world of light and reason, scoured away.
It had begun with Lews Therin Telamon's attempt to seal the Dark One from the World. Latra clicked her tongue irritably at his memory. He had been a hard-headed, arrogant demagogue with a glib tongue and a handsome face. By instinct, the Dragon was a patrician, choosing to lead by example and sponsorship. But where charm or diplomacy failed him, he was high-handed, aloof. Self-righteous.
When push came to shove, the 'Lord of the Morning' was a ruthless autocrat, riding roughshod over democracy, relying on his charisma and charm for his mandate. And his friends and allies amongst the Hall of Servants were men of the same stamp. Barid Bel. Duram Laddel. Tel Janin.
Yet somehow as the Dark One rose, and his former friends were subverted and fell, Lews Therin had remained true to the Light. Grudgingly, she conceded that he rose to the task as if born to it.
In another season, she might have been the first to raise the cry: sic semper tyrannis! and plunge the knife. But despot or not, he had been the man the times required. He had proved himself an able strategist and commander, the equal of the wealth of military talent the Dark One had at his disposal – Demandred, Be'lal, Sammael, Rahvin.
Yet the greatest thing the Lord of the Morning had done was to stiffen the backbone of a soft, timid and frightened people, children huddling in the dark, watching the candles of hope being snuffed out, one by one.
He held the Lightfriends together as the world they had known slid into fear and despair. His certainty had been their greatest asset, and he had not wavered, not once. Not when his friend Elan Morin had stood in the Hall of Servants itself and proclaimed the sure and certain end of the Wheel, of time itself, and his own new allegiance to the Dark One. Not even when Tel Janin had betrayed the supposedly impregnable Gates of Hevan, the great fortress-complex of cuendillar-ribbed plasteel with its laser batteries, electronic firewalls and perfect forward-security Galois-group encryption, protected from channelling and even Gateways by the city of Satelle's Ogier stedding.
Latra Posae remembered only too well the fate of the city of her birth. A man-made massif, Satelle, a sculpted hive of humanity. The Gates of Hevan grown up around it like an oyster shell, over the fifty-year respite allocated by the mercies of the Light; builded by men of craft, far-sighted artisans, against this inevitable day, as the world slid irrevocably into madness and the Shadow waxed. A transparent armour, hermetically sealing away a pearl of great price, a spiny geodesic, bristling with upthrust towers and armament emplacements, like a viral capsid.
Inside the Gates, every available inch surrounding the gigantic hive was terraced with hydroponic gardens, layer stacked upon layer under the convex surface of the dome. There were no herds of livestock within. With space at a premium, flora trumped fauna, acreage of soya beans providing protein and lipid sufficient to purpose in lieu of meat and milk. Any shortfall was amply made up by vat-grown meat brewed within the city – genetically-engineered bacteria containing multiple copies of the desired plasmid overexpressing the required protein, which was then harvested and purified.
In the fields, brown-smocked Da'shain Aiel gardened with hoe and mattock whilst Ogier tended under the oversight of the Nym, Ayahuastha, keening the Song of Growing to bring forth bounty.
The Ogier stedding kept the blight at bay. There was no rot or corruption within Satelle, even though in the outside world, the Shadow's touch was rife, and even Aes Sedai Keepings were wont to fail. The blessing of the Light, vouchsafed by the Green Man. Nobody would starve within Satelle, come what may.
The endless checkerboard fields also served another, grimmer purpose. Blotting out the uninterrupted vista of charnel horror – all too evident through the transparent barrier – from the witness of the beleaguered citizens of Satelle.
The fortress metropolis was like to be their tomb. Surrounded by a moat of Trollocs and Myrddraal. Inhuman enemies, as far as the eye could see, spanning from horizon to horizon, pressing forward into the interminable hail of missiles and strobing ruby pulses of laser light as fast as they could be cut down in mindless death. Shadowspawn of every stripe lumbering up a crumbling, subsiding dune of their dead and dying to hurl themselves bodily against unyielding glass. Rifled slugs chewed their ranks apart, and gouting explosions flung corpses high into the air with haphazard abandon. Forced forward into the meat-grinder, not by the Myrddraal lash, but the sheer pressure of the bodies behind.
The Dreadlords directing the assault were happy to take the appalling losses. Every Trolloc cut down by a laser drained another quanta of energy from the city's reserves. Every Mryddraal, preferentially targeted by the firecomputer's visual-recognition software, stopped a half-dozen 50cal rounds, from the defender's finite supply, flailed by a scourge of lead before succumbing, twitching in a macabre dance of death. The garrison would run out of bullets before the Lord of the Grave ran out of warm bodies.
In time, the Gates of Hevan would be left only sporadic use of the laser armament for defence, powered by photovoltaic cells, which would mean they could only kill Shadowspawn and once-men during the daylight hours. Eventually, the cells themselves would fail.
Fail, as all things of men seemed doomed to in these dying days.
Here and there, lumpen outcroppings thrust up from the plain, ten or twelve yards in height, of mottled grey, fabricated from something that resembled chewed waxen paper. The cafar hives were given a respectful berth by the other creatures of the Shadow, the ground within twenty yards around each left clear despite the claustrophobic press of sweating bodies.
The sting of the grey and black-banded wasps carried a lethal neurotoxin, gifting an agonized, lingering end, whereas the prick of a queen's ovipositor yielded far worse than the surety of mere madness and death. Awareness trapped within the confines of your mind, you would look out upon the world without agency, even as your body was set to task, slaved by an alien taskmaster. Unable to so much as blink, let alone sleep, drink or eat, driven with inhuman purpose until every last drop of vigour was eked from you. Only then would you would finally be permitted to fall, a husk discarded.
Approaching a cafar nest was tantamount to suicide for any save their creator, but otherwise, bloodwrasps left Darkfriends and creations of the Shadow well alone. The same was decidedly not the case for other human beings, still less Ogier, which sent the swarms into a mindless killing-frenzy.
That was the bloodwrasps' purpose. To winnow out Friends of the Light, would-be infiltrators and saboteurs brave or foolhardy enough to walk into an army of Shadowspawn. Part of it anyway.
The chittering wasps were augmented, allowing them to perform their primary function. Their tiny brains programmed to store and relate a limited amount of what they heard, possesseing sufficient faculties to record and parse that which was recognisably human speech. Cafar swarmsfunctioned as a biological computer, their hierarchy dividing computational tasks efficiently amongst the collective, capable of machine-learning.
A bloodwrasp swarm comprising one or two nests was able to accomplish little. Thousands upon thousands of swarms in concert, however, could function as the nodes of a computer system, enabling massively-parallel processing, able to be set to any task imaginable, from cryptanalysis to running the infrastructure for mass surveillance, juxtaposing snippets of seemingly unconnected information and snatches of overheard conversation to piece together the most labyrinthine conspiracy. A purpose their creator, Aginor found most useful, enabling the unworldly academic to maintain his standing amongst the scheming ranks of the Forsaken.
Here, all that immense computational power had been brought to bear, hundreds of thousands of swarms focused upon a single task: brute-forcing the passkey for the Gates of Hevan. The defenders observed the tumescent gray hives with ill-concealed unease, and forked fingers to avert the Evil Eye, more so than for any other Shadowspawn, or even the Dreadlord channellers, despite the overwhelming probability that guessing the passphrase would take tens, even hundreds of thousands of years. It might fall in the next five minutes, too. The next hour. The plexiglass gates rolling up, the Shadowspawn rolling in. The Dark One's luck was proverbial.
Five minutes or fifty thousand years, the Shadow waited. Bent upon the end of all things. That inhuman patience was proverbial, too.
Not just Shadowtwisted answered the bidding of the Lord of the Grave. Atha'an Shadar crewed the Shadow's artillery parks. Once-men, Darkfriend traitors who had cast off their humanity like an ill-fitting cloak. A phalanx of cold-wrought steel from the forges of Thakan'dar rose above the enemy ranks, the long, rifled barrels lofting a steady barrage of DU darts in graceful parabolic arcs to impact flush, perpendicular to the surface of the barrier. The ozone sizzle and hum of maglev generators, charging the thick neodymium coils that impelled railgun munitions, cast-iron battering-rams the length of tree-trunks, in flat trajectories to thwack against the sides of the reinforced dome at half-hourly intervals.
If the Gates of Hevan were truly impervious to the One Power, the siegecraft of evil men could still bring them low, eventually, the yards-thick plexiglass already pitted by the ceaseless impacts, the transparent barrier striated by the tell-tale crosshatching of stress fractures, as though scored repeatedly by a sharp blade.
On the other side, defending the dome, legions of Da'shain and soldiers on track-mounted articulated platforms aimed gouting hoses, the hydrants spraying gallons of fast-acting epoxy contact adhesive to stiffen, seal and patch the weakened sections as best they could, buying time for the plasteel polymer of the barrier to slowly self-heal.
The enemy without had already learned the hard way not to use their megawatt lasers. Fused glassy pockmarks, still too hot to walk upon, marred the plain where the reflected beams had scorched and seared, the splayed fingers of an outstretched, pleading hand. The crystalline matrix of the dome, permeable to most visible wavelengths of light, had a high refractive index in the optimal frequency bands for laser weaponry, the tightly-focused beams meeting the dome, only to rebound viciously into the Shadowspawn ranks, splintered chevrons of flickering crimson fire, a diffraction pattern searing the ground in charred furrows, the work of a mad ploughhand.
The earth rumbled with muffled thunder as Dreadlords hammered the earth with weaves of Earth and Fire, breaking ground, and armoured 'dozers driven by Darksworn Once-Men, toiled alongside full-grown jumara and Worms, gouging the ground in an effort to undermine the city walls.
Evidence of their burrowing labours manifested in the form of molehills of displaced rubble and soil, spoil-heaps hundreds of feet high, and lumpen ridges traversing the plain. Mercifully, the chthonic horrors themselves were hid from view, their crawl and writhe shut up in the bowels of earth. Their task, a futile one. They would find the dome was a sphere. As above, so below.
The air battening with Draghkar. Flapping crows and ravens, teeming in their millions, come to claim their pound of flesh.
Somewhere, out there beyond the curvature of the horizon, lay armed camps. The Shadow's breeding pens where captured humans were reared for meat, fodder for Casin Hob'steeming legions. This was humanity's designated place in a world ruled by the Lord of the Grave.
Death had come to the realms of men, and the bill was long overdue.
The tower of guard had been formidably garrisoned. Hundreds of thousands of human soldiers, trained to the top of their bent, to defend a city of five million people. Men and women in sleek, black-lacquered ceramite armour, with argon shocklances, pulseswords and energy shields, hard faces masked behind smokeglass-visored, insectile helms with their built-in comms antennae and voice mandibles.
Four-armed ShivaSuits stalked out their restless malevolence, warding the dome's perimeter. Avatars of an archaic goddess of death, unlovely pylons of sculpted heartstone rearing twenty feet high. Their gantries, a wickerwork lattice, fitted for sacrificial rites, the sere white of bleached bone.
The powerful principal hydraulic limbs of each war-walker were articulated by a female pilot, her cuendillar PowerFists gripping warscythe and powermace with augmented might, whilst her gunner hefted a lascannon and flamethrower in the other pair of ceramite gauntlets.
The ShivaSuit operators and their co-pilots were former Amayar coralsingers, who had renounced the Water Way. Their cheeks smeared with their own blood before every battle, the Lost warred with pitiless ferocity, as though to make up for their former pacifism, for all that they would not touch a sword.
Life is an illusion, the Amayar believed. A nightmare, which they would one day wake from. The Lost had embraced the macabre reality of this world with a whole heart. Fouled themselves with it, steeping their hands elbow-deep in warm, wet blood.
No love. No hope. No fear. That was their creed. Despair gave them indurate strength as dark as the Shadow itself.
Given a free hand, the Lost Warriors would have thrown the gates wide and stormed out into the death they embraced with every breath, reaping forward towards the black banner of Ba'alzemon until they were dragged down. They cared not for their own lives, or the lives of anyone else for that matter. Only to fight Shai'tan. They knew no calling but black-handed death.
Small wonder, after all their peoples had endured at the hands of the Shadow, who persecuted those sworn to peace above all others, and with hideous cruelty.
The relentless war-walkers terrified the men they served alongside, almost as much as the Shadowsworn they faced. But the Lost knew duty, and their oath was as strong as that of any Ogier.
The Treebrothers were here, too, shoulder to shoulder with short-lived humans for the first time in living memory. Hundreds of burly Ogier, each standing as tall as a man on horseback, armed with black-cleaving double-headed axes and chainrifles machined in Satelle's armouries. The alantin had mustered to war only after interminable deliberation, but wholeheartedly. Oh, yes. They would have no truck with Leafblighter. For the implacable Gardeners, it was war unyielding. Root and branch.
Up axes, and clear the field!
None of these formidable obstacles had deterred Tel Janin Aellinsar, Satelle native, from the consummate treachery. Nor the appalling amorality of the act he contemplated in betraying his own city to the Shadow. The cadet Rodholder's perfidy was motivated by nothing more than envy, having been passed over for promotion by his rival, Lews Therin Telamon.
Man's envy of his fellow, a thing to be feared. It had brought low many strong places since the beginning of the world.
Whilst assuming the façade of a punctilious and dedicated military professional, the Betrayer of Hope and a select cadre of Darkfriend hackers unleashed a swarm of viruses, co-opting the 'Internet of Things' from within Satelle itself to sink their tendrils deep into the city, a persistent, silent encroachment seeping into every electronic crevice. Subverting infrastructure and personal devices, penetrating into the ubiquitous Cloud, seeking paydirt.
His goal was unfettered access into the lives of the sysadmins who had what he needed. From there, Tel Janin depended upon the foibles of human nature to do the rest of his work for him, the inevitably porous membrane between the personal and work lives of the men and women who maintained the command centre of the Rorn M'Doi. A place informally known as 'the Pentagon' for no apparent reason by the eWarriors, cryptarchs and tech servitors stationed there, as all such places had been designated since time out of mind.
There was no hope of hacking into the hardened military intranet itself, of course, a segregated and formidably-protected system running the keygen computers controlling the portals and fire-solution batteries for the laser armaments and artillery. With his middling security clearance, the stocky blademaster with his sneering gash of a mouth could not override the mainframe safeguards. Nor was that necessary to Tel Janin's dark design, as he waited with terse patience, counting the days. Hand idly caressing the sabre-scar Lews Therin had given him as he stalked out his rounds.
The Shadow never slept.
Hollow heart feeling the interminable ache of separation from saidin. Yes, that was the worst of his injuries by the hand of the Dragon, being condemned to serve long years in a purgatory where he could not so much as sense the True Source. Another affront to lay against Lews Therin. But he would be avenged.
Tel Janin never forgot a slight.
Eventually, his machinations paid dividends. A flash music device was the inocuous instrument, carried to work within the Pentagon by an unwitting cryptanalysis tech. Plugged in to charge, the Trojan malware infecting it proved sufficient to compromise the lighting system for the Gates of Hevan.
Oh, a simple thing. Carrying the Shadow down into the Rorn M'Doi itself, the command hub where the encryption-key generating engines were housed, controlling the portals to the city.
Ten long seconds of pitch-darkness before the backup generators kicked in proved ample time for a flood of Myrddraal to twist themselves into being within the beating heart of the Lightfriend fortress, spilling over the panicked defenders in a riptide of black Thakan'dar steel.
Appropriately, considering his unconscionable lapse, the hapless tech servitor had been the first man in Setalle to perish. Headphones over his ears, eyes closed, he never even noticed the Light leave him. The dull click drowned by the music dinning in his ears, fingers thrumming the desk as he beat out the hypnotic rhythm of the organ solo from Joar Addam Nessosin's 'Rites of Love'. Mercifully oblivious to the gaunt, hard shadow rearing up behind him, bleakest ebony resolving from ambient black. The Myrddraal's corpse-white lips split in a grim-cleaving sneer as its long iron speared down.
At least it was quick. A mercy any man might wish for, his blood expunging his guilt.
The first of millions. There would be no survivors.
The Lurks, cold and calculating as any man, and surpassingly cruel, opened the great gates to the teeming hordes of Shadowspawn without. The breached city a dining-table spread before them, the Trollocs and Halfmen glutted themselves on Satelle.
It was unimaginable, that depredation. Unspeakable. An orgy of torment and degradation, perpetrated by the Shadowtwisted and their once-human cohorts, vying with each other in violence.
Tel Janin, the worst of them all. Festooned in feastday viscera, a screeching maenad loosed to ravage and slaughter. Running amok, unleashing his blademaster skills, cutting down defenceless victims with a heron-mark sword of steel. A Power-wrought blade that gave the lie to the Way of the Leaf, hewing men without notching or even dulling that peerless ebon edge. His pent hate, all that taut, controlled rage denied for so long, a razor stropped by their helpless plight. Enervated by the few foes he faced with the skills to put his to mortal test.
This was what Tel Janin lived for! The ultimate wager, life and death balanced upon the blade's edge. Man against man, until the weaker was dismembered by the stronger. His chattels, yours to enjoy, the firstfruits of victory. Taking a man's portion from the trencher with your good right hand.
Oh, would that he had Lews Therin's neck under his edge! For this was no bloodless tournament. Man's martial nature shackled by gentility and constraint. This was his domain, not Lews Therin's.
No rules. No escape. No mercy. No tricks of the One Power. Only the savage satiation of heavy blade carving meat, upon the banqueting table of the Great Lord.
And in this contest, Tel Janin was sure, it would be he who would stand triumphant at the end. He would slay the Dragon. He would be Nae'blis, as he had been promised. First among men, under the auspices of the Lord of the Grave.
Only, he had forsaken that identity. Sloughed his humanity to be reborn in blood and gore. Clawing his way to the world from the violated body of the city that bore him, accompanied by her screams. Tethered to the Dark One by an umbreakable umbilicus of nightmare black. From then on he would be known as Sammael. Destroyer of Hope. The name of an immortal demon, not a living man of flesh and blood.
Culan Cuhan, First Rodholder of the Air, had been sent to relieve the city by the Dragon. His armada of MetalHawks and bombers had been intended to crush the forces of the Shadow, smearing them like a bluebottle against the unbreakable walls of Satelle. He had arrived to find nobody to rescue. None left living to fight for. Only a charnel city of the dead.
The Light help him, he had wanted to see for himself.
Grimacing, Culan knuckled the small of his back, kneading his spine, the rigid, knotted muscles of his quads, through his fleece-lined leathers. His oxygen mask on its rubber strap lay heavy upon his breast, a dead weight.
At thirty years of age, his body was that of a hale man twenty years his senior. His short, trim frame, all lean, pared muscle, bearing the wear of work. Taut hours spent cooped in the cockpit of his MetalHawk fighter, contorted by g-forces, made men old before their time, despite diligent application, all the rigours of training and callisthenics intended to keep his body pliant and supple, in the way of good steel.
The Aramaellin caught his reflection, dim in the convex sheen of the Gate's plexiglass dome, marking a stranger. Shorn hair, iron-tinged, with the worn band his goggle-strap had furrowed, the hadori, marking a man's pledge to fight the Shadow. His vocation, since he reached his majority, at the age of fifteen.
He owned a weathered countenance, hewn by the wind of high places. Almond eyes, bold in a a gaunt-hollowed face, sound as good teak. That distant gaze seared by conflagration, the imprint of the napalm clusters he sowed from above with a free hand. Crysanthemum blooms of amber fire that a man saw, even in his dreams.
Those eyes, guarded. Wary. Humanity, sensitivity, walled away, that he might do his work. Culan Cuhan had fashioned of himself a tool, mind and body. He was what his men needed him to be. That was all there was to it.
There was no glory to be found in his task. Only a long acquaintanceship with death. A familiarity engendered. The Aiel were right. Slaying even Shadowspawn marred a man's spirit and soul. Soiled hands and heart. The cost would come later, he knew. If he lived long enough to count it.
His gaze tracked over the scattered bodies. Here, at an open portal upon the threshold of the Gates of Hevan, sprawled the half-dismembered carcass of a ShivaSuit, like a butchered heron. Plucked limb from limb by hands both strong and savage. That was the only way to stop them, short of the One Power. Swarm them, drag them down, rive them apart to get at the pilots in their orbs, where they floated dreamless in the suspension of clear electro-amniotic fluid that seamlessly integrated man with machine. Cracking apart the hard carapace to get at the soft meat inside, like a fisherman shelling mussels.
The unbreakable cuendillar limbs lay like clean-gnawed bones, an anatomy lesson, the articulation and hydraulic tendons between mangled and stripped. The raking talons of one of those long limbs, spurred with Power-wrought steel like a fighting-cock, embedded the body of a Myrddraal, staking the Eyeless to the ground.
Culan gave the Lurk a careful look. It was dead, but sometimes Myrddraal didn't let a little thing like that stop them flailing about.
The headless torso of the War Walker, mostly intact, was wedged deeply into a veritable hillock of assorted Shadowspawn. There was even a Darkhound corpse in there, Culan Cuhan noted with approbation, irreal in death. Living shadow pinned to an artist's canvas in stilled silhoutte by a blow from a Power-infused mace. Very little short of Balefire could kill a Darkhound. Nothing in his MetalHawk's arsenal could, that was for certain. Canister could rip one to shreds, and it would merely meld back together.
But Balefire was forbidden. There had been no armistice, no truce with the Shadow, but both sides had simply ceased using it after seeing the consequences. Reality mired in a snarl of broken causality as the Pattern snarled and yawed under the strain of cities being seared from the map.
One of the Lost women had somehow contrived to drag herself out of the pile, her left leg ending in a ragged stump below the knee. How she had managed that, the Light alone knew. Her fair skin was slicked in an afterbirth of blood and suspension fluid that was drying to a cracked gloss, the surface of an oil painting. She was slight, with severely-cropped ash-blonde hair that only served to offset a freckled, fine-boned face Culan would have deemed delicate, were her bared teeth not buried in the throat of a goat-headed Trolloc corpse.
The victorious Shadowspawn had not desecrated her body. Not out of respect, but most likely because, even dead, they were afraid to go anywhere near her.
You can burn them, men cautioned, speaking of the Lost Ones, but walk wide around the ashes.
Culan Cuhan shrugged off his thigh-length trenchcoat with the stiff red-and-white epaulettes of a Rodholder upon both shoulders. Once, they had been cause for pride. Increasingly, he felt their weight mounting. Pressing down upon him.
He knelt beside the stricken soldier, draping the threadbare garment over her. The old leather of the greatcoat was distressed, the stitching frayed on one sleeve, but the crane of the Air Cavalry, stencilled upon the back of the greatcoat in gold, yet flew serene over a crimson field. It was fitting.
Her stilled gaze, sapphire blue, was imbued with a restless rapture that made the Rodholder shiver.
Culan Cuhan peeled off his taut flight gloves of supple calfskin, folding them neatly over his bare forearm. Gently closed her eyes with the tips of his fingers.
May the last embrace of the Mother welcome you home, comrade.
He could only hope that had been the right thing to do, for all that her beliefs rejected a peace she no longer espoused.
Best he could do for her. Better than a death unmarked.
Culan was conscious that he was stalling, afraid to go further. To set foot under the transparent dome where the Shadow had been. His mouth fouled with the taste of it, even from afar. Putrefaction, the indescribable reek of offal exposed to the air. The sickly-sweet aroma of charred flesh rising above. He knew well enough what that was. His gorge rose, as he gagged, affronted, stomach heaving because of the obscene familiarity. It smelled so much like roast pork.
That was not the worst of it. Not by half. He could smell the violence. The acrid tang of fear. Feel it. His bones thrummed with that malign resonance, like a tuning fork, struck upon.
It should be black in there, Culan thought. Black as Sheol. But this was a darkness of the soul. He could see clearly enough, for all that. Would that he could not.
The courage of the Lost woman, a spur impelling him. Driving him in. He owed it to her, to bear witness. To all of them.
Culan armoured himself in the Oneness, drawing the Void about him. He would need it, where he was going. Bleak thoughts flickered around its edges, just out of eyesight, mocking him with false hope. Perhaps they missed some. Perhaps somebody survived. Hiding. Else injured and bleeding out under a heap of dead. Someone he could hope to help. An ember of life to bear out of Satelle. But in his true heart he knew it was not so.
Come and see, the Shadow beckoned, daring him to brave the night alone.
He slowly stood and entered.
Some time passed.
Culan Cuhan wandered the ghastly, gutted fane in wrack's aftermath. Numbed, and sere of eye.
Here was paradox. Or perhaps contradiction, giving the lie to the notion of souls: Man is mere flesh. Take, eat.
Come, see! The Shadow's voice, soft and rotten as mildewed calico, came from Culan's right hand. He turned, slowly. Heart lurching in his chest, blood frozen to black ice in his veins.
There was an ... apparition there, beside him. Seen out of the corner of his eye. There. Not there. Real, and not. He might have passed his hand through it.
A daguerrotype of humanity, slick under his gaze. A twisted reflection in some impossibly warped mirror, subtly misaligned with the world of light and life. Brought into being under his eye, a transubstantiation through blood and belief.
A Myrddraal, or the archetype of all Halfmen, turning to him. It moved with an assured deliberation, flowing around reality, like a pool of quicksilver spilling over a lip. The dragging, inescapable quality of nightmare made flesh.
The Shadowman was a head taller than any Culan had ever seen, with its hanging-man cloak that no wind stirred the funereal sable of tarnish upon argent. A hue as much felt as seen, the soft, flaking texture of corruption under your fingers. Its blank-screaming face inclined gravely to him, avid gaze pinioning his.
The look of the Eyeless is fear, men said. Paralyzing its prey, as a weasel hypnotises a rabbit. But Culan felt nothing. He was empty of all. A vessel waiting to be filled.
I am Shaidar Haran, the Myrddraal told him. The voice, loud in his mind, bypassing his ears. You will come with me.
The moving finger, writes; and having writ, moves on. He was a blackboard, the Myrddraal, chalk scraping upon it. Splintered fingernails, bearing down, evoking a scream that bored a hole through the marrow of his soul.
Shaidar Haran. Hand of the Dark. Myrddraal did not have names. Personalities. They were alike, one with another. Facsimilies of cruelty. But not this one. A thought Culan Cuhan registered in distant abstraction, the camera of ear and eye faithfully recording, mind still assimilating, an irrelevance, except the revenant before him. It was the realest thing he had ever experienced.
The Eyeless was beside him. It had not walked to him. It was simply here, as it had been there, without troubling with the intervening space, carpeted with ephemera just like him. Man made meat, a deconstructed dish laid out by an epicure. Dismembered corpses. A child's doll, headless, its smock bearing the whorls of one brief, bloodied fingerprint in snatched red exclamation. An upended Trolloc cookpot of dull black iron spilling grease-glistening stew in which a woman's hand floated, her ring finger stripped of meat by sharp teeth.
Obedient, Culan put out his own hand, trusting infant to an authoritative stranger, and Shaidar Haran took it. Took him. A sickening instant of deadweight and pressure, and Culan briefly shuddered, spasming in that grip.
Come, that voice bored into the space between his ears. We have much to see.
Some time later, Culan paused under a chora. Shaidar Haran was gone, now, if that apparition had ever been there in the first place. His work done here. Culan Cuhan had not even noticed the Eyeless leave.
He had much to think upon.
Myrddraal had herded people out here. Da'shain. They had.. They had stripped the white blossoms from the tree. All of them. Heaped the white trefoil flowers in an untidy, man-high pile. Or forced the Aiel to do it. Yes, that was more likely. A refined cruelty, forcing them to defile something they held sacred.
There were new blossoms upon the branches, now. New fruit.
Another pile beneath the tree, this one much larger, buzzed by lazy, glutted flies.
Aiel. You could hit an Aiel, and he would ask you how he offended. Beat him, and he would not raise so much as a finger to defend himself.
Culan Cuhan looked up. Seeking the heavens from the bowels of Sheol. Blood dripped slow upon his face. The dawn rent in slivers, rendered through a patchwork quilt, the gardens of vines stacked above intertwined with fat, glossy entrails, silken like a serpent's cast skin, draped in endless layers. Horror, heaped upon horror.
The dawn percolating down into these endless depths, a shepherd's warning, the concave top of the bowl above daubed bloody crimson with desperate handprints and obscene Trolloc glyphs. The forked trident of the Ko'bal, rendered in blood. The dagger-pierced skull of the Bhan'sheen smeared in excrement. As for the burning man of the She'dim…. Trollocs could be frighteningly literal at times.
Interspersing the semi-literate Black Speech of beasts, the vaunting of cruel beings that had once been men. Erudite Mryddraal script, in plainsong, prose and High Chant, a paean extolling the glories of Ba'alzemon, the bleak promise of dark prophecy.
Day, but no Light.
Humour is the unexpected juxtaposition of incongruities. So is horror. It was the mindfulness of that ubiquitous violence that unmanned Culan Cuhan. Broke a hard man, as wrought iron is broken, by the sharp tap of a hammer.
Culan fell to his knees. His laughter, a scream. Tears streaming down his face.
His subordinates had to restrain him. Wrestle his heron-mark blade away from him, before he used it upon himself. The Rodholder tried to use it on them, then. Poorly, rudimentary hacking. The Blademaster couldn't even remember the most elementary forms. They'd disarmed him as simply as an unruly child. Bound his hands behind his back, treating him firmly but gently. They understood this malady. They had seen it many times before.
They burned the broken city behind them when they left. Reduced it thoroughly, leaving a glazed cairn of fused silica to mark where Satelle once stood.
After, Culan Cuhan had resigned his commission, Latra Posae remembered. His last act as a sober man. Wandered into the Blight to die, alone, in that most profound perversion of creation.
This is my garden, the broken man said, as he walked into the virulent green, its maw opening wide to devour him like a pitcher plant.
Latra sniffed dismissively. Coward's way out. The waste of a well-trained man of the sword, the grossest dereliction of duty imaginable.
Hope seemed to die that day, though. Would have, had it not been for the Dragon.
Latra Posae allowed herself a rueful grimace. Yes, it was the all-too-human failings of Lews Therin that had made him the most powerful advocate for the Light. To wit, his pig-headed obstinacy and refusal to budge!
Latra Posae had been his rival from the very beginning. They were opposites in every way. He was a young man born to privilege, cocksure and dashing. She had grown up a hiverat, a whore's get from the Pipes, the squalid subterranean underbelly of Satelle. Malnourished, feral, she had never seen the Sun, knowing only the groping, fitful light of neon tubes.
Then the Aes Sedai descended from the realm of fabled day to the labyrinth of caverns, testing for boys and girls born with the spark, and her life had changed irrevocably. Statuesque men and dazzling women who glowed where there was no light, picking through the human detritus with all the disdain of women combing for head-lice, lighting upon pallid Latra, slat-thin, sharp-sullen, with sudden wonder dawning upon those somehow ageless faces. Clucking over her at the same time, as though disappointed in her for the condition she found herself in.
They took her away with them. Latra had no choice in the matter. She hated them for that, the stripping-away of her autonomy, even though it was only the freedom to beg, sell her body, or starve in the clammy, frigid dark. But even in that honed hate, there was a new thought, shrewd. A bright and auspicious gleam: They need what I have. I can use them, even as they use me.
And she had.
Latra Posae was already two hundred years old by the time that she first met Lews Therin. Life had taught her to watch her back, keep a tight fist on her credits, and to keep a sharp knife within easy reach. Lews by contrast had been affable, open and generous. The only similarities evident between them were their strength and genius in the One Power. That, and their political acumen.
They had disliked each other upon sight, and the diffidence and mistrust had only deepened with association over the years. Their animus had polarised the Hall, her ajah representing the conservative faction over time coming to represent the female Servants of All, and Lews Therin's becoming dominated by male Aes Sedai.
The division along the lines of gender was unparalleled in history, if not downright antithetical. Ajah usually coalesced around a theme, an informal gathering of Aes Sedai with a shared interest in a problem or cause. By their nature, they tended to be either short-lived or relatively small in number, or both. To have the Hall devolve into two opposing, militant political parties, divided along the lines of gender, was disquieting, to say the least.
Appalled moderates on either side of the Hall had tried for a hundred years to arrest the worrying trend, but by then the mistrust was inculcated, a dark seed germinating. The cruel irony at its heart was the pioneering work carried out by Latra Posae and Lews Therin – their only collaboration, and their greatest achievement.
Together, they had worked out the mechanics of linking to form Circles, and to grow Circles beyond the principal prime of thirteen women by adding male Aes Sedai. They had also discovered some very unsavoury .. possibilities. Secrets that they had both agreed to Seal to the Seat, about linking with others against their will, based upon their research into the Ring of Tamyrlin.
The twisted ring appeared to be formed of black jet, and it was surprisingly heavy. It was the symbol of the T'amyrlin Seat, the First Among Servants. By custom older than law, it was never worn on the T'Amyrlin's finger, but around his neck on a silver chain.
The Ring of Tamyrlin was the oldest known created object in existence, and one of the strangest. For the Ring was both angreal and ter'angreal. In the first instance, it was a mighty angreal for both men and women, allowing either saidin or saidar to be channelled, augmenting the wielder's strength exponentially.
The second property, known to few, was the reason it was never worn, and seldom used. Its wielder could co-opt a linked Circle, if the bearer was close enough to the one who directed the flows. Supposedly, the Ring of Dominion had been created by the first man and woman who had ever learned to channel. And currently, it was worn by Lews Therin Telamon, strongest of the strong.
Glowing with pride, the duo published the sanitized version of their findings, thinking only of the wonderful vista of opportunities their work had opened up. The Circles allowed the wielding of truly astonishing quantities of the Power, with a control, sophistication and dexterity that was undreamed-of. Men and women, working together with the Power to do things undreamed of… What fools they had been, the pair of them.
Before, men and women who channelled were regarded as roughly equal, with a few caveats. The theory of working with saidin and saidar had diverged. The two halves of the One Power were held to be incongruent. The rules that applied to working with saidar just didn't hold when applied to the male half of the Power, and vice versa. What the two of them had discovered suggested a structure, and a primacy about the use of the One Power, which in turn caused a number of disquieting theological questions about the relative place of men and women, and the Creator's intent regarding the use of the One Power.
Latra Posae pursed her lips dismissively as she considered that nonsense. The upshot had been mutual mistrust between men and women Aes Sedai fostered by paranoia about what the linking process entailed, particularly about who controlled the Great Circles. Some fools held it a point of doctrine that men and women should be equally able to control a Circle of any size and composition, regardless of the evidence to the contrary.
Latra had been very glad that they'd at least had the common-sense to bury the darker fruits of their labours. Those might have seen them stilled and executed.
Never forget the Law Of Unintended Consequences. Two of the 'bridge-builders' – a male Aes Sedai, Beidomon Abernathy, and a female Aes Sedai named Mierin Eronaille – had sought to find a way whereby men and women could channel an undivided Power. It would heal the divide between men and women who could channel, and usher in a new era.
Of course, the idea itself was nothing new. Every girl or boy who began to channel had the same notion, and were rudely – and sometimes terminally – disabused of the notion that the two halves of the Power were anything alike. For example, a man could pull heat out of an object and transfer it to another. If a woman tried the same thing, she would spontaneously self-combust. Even when the Power was used to do similar things – to Travel, for example – the process was radically different.
Before she herself was born, it had been mathematically proved that saidin and saidar were themutually-orthogonal forces driving ta'maral'ailen, the Weave of the Pattern. The work she had done with Lews Therin was a practical demonstration of the fact, as well as the implied corollary, that the two forces were meant to work together, in harness, for maximal efficacy. The force-multipliers showed that beyond all doubt, did they not? Well. What was done was done.
Anyway, Beidomon was a strange wisp of a fellow, who preferred the confines of pen and paper to the coruscating surge of the Power within him. He had the prescience to ask a different question, one nobody else had thought to ask: What if there was another Power, a third Power that both men and women alike could use? He had been derided for this, of course. On the surface, it was a ridiculous supposition. Pure conjecture.
Stung by their mockery, he had withdrawn to his rooms in a draughty attic, and remained incommunicado for months. His only contact with the outside world was through his faithful manservant, a taciturn Da'shain Aiel. A year passed. Then he emerged into the light, waving a sheaf of papers under the nose of his detractors. He had done it, he said. Mathematical proof that a third power, a True Power existed to be tapped. "Look, you fumblers! Read the damn paper. It's bloody well there!"
"Show us some concrete proof, then" had been the consensus of a vexed and somehow browbeaten Hall of the Servants, who had no wish to try and wade through a hundred-page dissertation in Beidomon's spidery scrawl, written in the abstract language of Lie Groups. On actual paper, of all things! What in the Light was wrong with a simple eDocument published to the Cloud, with permissions Sealed to the Hall?
At least the convocation was quorate. Barely. Half the Sitters were present – in person as stipulated, but there were many empty chairs amongst the shawled Aes Sedai ranks in the middle and upper concourses of the ovoid amphitheatre. Even many of those attendees were present only in holographic form, opaque projections that cast no shadow under the ambient no-light produced by standing flows of the One Power illuminating the Hall of the Servants.
Lews Therin himself bore a rumpled look that suggested he'd slept in his clothes far away from his quarters to avoid being accosted by the theorist!
Deferential Da'shain attendents in gray livery with the Fang and Flame insignia proud upon their breast, wove deft between the empty chairs and 'through' the holographically present to bring snacks and hot and cold beverages to the seated Aes Sedai
Some of the 'electronic attendees' were 'e-nulled' – fuzzed outlines elliptic curve key-encrypted to conceal their identity from prying eyes. A common practice of late, Latra Posae reflected with distaste, for those who wished to observe without being observed. But at least no outsider, no wilder, would be able to eavesdrop in this fashion. Their presence here, prohibited by custom and law. The identity of every Aes Sedai was stored on the Cloud, their ePresent holographic image the uplinked projection of a secure data stream where the individual's private key was a function of the Fourier transform of their ara'i – the unique energy signature of each channeller.
The Cloud. The summation of humanity's knowledge, and the infrastructure supporting it. Exponentially expanding, self-aware – and transient. Nothing written down, nothing stored, and nothing backed-up. Humanity's knowhow, a stratospheric Tower of Babel, all enabled by technology that nobody truly understood.
That technology, something to be used and exploited, a landscape to become lost in, a building whose original blueprints had long since been mislaid, the whole architecture riddled with backdoors, secret passages, minefields and sudden dead-ends. The underpinning axioms of information themselves bearing the scars of errors built upon and untruths maliciously introduced by hackers and anarchists of every stripe. A structure that nobody was able to erect from first principles, patched and patched again like a gleeman's cloak. The foundations below lost from sight, beneath the clouds, load-bearing support girders groaning under the accumulated weight.
A person's memories might be their own. The information they depended on, that their minds accessed via neural synaptic links, all cloud-stored and communally owned. The inferences and the use they put that acquired knowledge to would be an individual's own intellectual property, but the reservoir of data, a trove held in common. For the most part. A vast database of knowledge, countless trillions of lives, on tap, freely available to all.
That more than compensated for the flawed, unwieldy information infrastructure, and provided the robustness the Cloud needed. An open-source knowledge base, which self-pruned and self-regulated, which patched its own bugs, identified its own limitations and gaps, and filled them. Researchers, such as those at the prestigious Collam Daan, were instrumental in advancing progress, but a indefatigable army of billions of people all did their modest part, often by nothing more than idly querying some obscure 'fact', and highlighting errata online.
There was one unavoidable, implicit problem.
Nothing was concrete. Nothing was built to last. Pioneers at the gleaming cutting-edge of research were fractal outcroppings of academe, yearning stalagmites reaching ever higher even as they drew increasingly further apart, one from another. Experts in increasingly rarified disciplines of research, increasingly unable to comprehend each other, let alone inform the ignorant laity, whose lives of indolent leisure were enabled and enfeebled by the technocracy they embraced.
The whole edifice top-heavy, teetering, and ripe for its inevitable fall. If it ever collapsed, nothing tangible would remain. Vague conceptions only, even in the minds of the learned. Ephemera. Impressionistic paintings instead of a botanist's sketches. Metaphors about vehicle maintenance instead of a mechanic's manual. Without the data reservoir, many fine minds would be stranded, remembering little of their academic pursuits. All their vocabulary and trained intellect remaining intact, but their residual knowledge, scattered islands, with too few cognitive bridges to make sense of the whole ensemble.
That was the trouble with standing upon the shoulders of giants.
The sculpted terraces of the Hall of the Servants canted sharply downwards, the foreswept wings of the Dove of Peace, enfolding. Row upon row of robed figures precipitously overhanging the speaker's roster, where it faced the Tamyrlin Seat, standing proud upon its plinth of black basalt under the eyes of the Light. This conformation, optimising seating and proximity to the speaker, an impossibility with traditional building materials, was enabled by maglev technology, as was the 'artificial gravity' preventing the Aes Sedai toppling from their niches onto the floor far below. The scaffoldless concourse, delicate feathers of cueran – commonly known as 'plasteel' – was in truth neither plastic nor steel, formed of long-chain silicon polymers, far stronger than either and comparatively inexpensive. Humanity had been long since weaned from its dependance upon crude oil.
Change was ever painful, bringing death, hardship and eventually innovation.
Ribbed pillars of the same matt-white cueran tapered to their asymptotic limit fathoms above, the space between the pillars spanned by a taut melding of flowmetal, the mercury-gallium sculpting a four-dimensional dynamic painting, Merishelle Telyn Moerelle's 'Fall of Man'. Stark black and white, sere lines of chalk, brimming oils and sleek sable ink melding and flowing, growing, writhing, living and finally dying as the tale wove itself onwards to its inevitable conclusion, of unrelieved black.
An evocation of an age of wonders – and a warning. There was a starkness that approached bathos in that cadenza. An acnowledgement of the futility of life.
It had been an age of mythology, a time when the rival states of Moskva and Merica had brought humanity to the brink of the cosmos. An epoch of fable. Hlenn of the Strong Arm, aided by the sun-God Apollo, planting the Red, White and Blue standard of Merica on the Moon, bearing their banner across the airless wastes of sky. A constellation of stars and the proud red bars of the Rodholder claiming another world for all eternity.
An impossibility – except Latra Posae had seen the proof of it with her own eyes, using a lens of the One Power. The becalmed banner, bleached almost white, hanging eerily motionless, flying forever over the breathless black basalt of the Tranquil Sea.
An age of hubris. Humanity had not managed to outrun its prediliction for antagonism, animalistic rutting and posturing. Tribalism. The causes of war long forgotten, but not the names of the protagonists. A Queen, Aelsibeth Regina, and two statesmen (Kings?), bearing the unlikely names (or were they titles? Sobriquets?) of 'The Donald', and Wladimir Putin.
The past is a strange country, reflected Latra Posae. They do things differently, there.
Those infamous names would never fade, however. Nor the memory of the weapons of mass destruction with which they made good upon their threats. Thermobaric lances arcing halfway around the world, and the spreading mushroom clouds that followed in their wake, welling up black and bilious as squid-ink. The crematorium pall of ashes blotting out the Sun for two long Ages.
Weapons changed, age by age, but Mankind did not. The horrors of 'nukular missiles', repudiated, disavowed forever by men of reason, the secrets of their fabrication lost in time, only to be replaced by those of genetic manipulation and information technology.
The arcane labours that had allowed the survivors to emerge from the radioactive ashes of Armageddon, the ceaseless striving to master the secrets of the human genome and sculpt a new David from the lumpen block of humanity, had awakened a latent potential in Man that nobody truly understood. The One Power. An ability to tap into the forces that gave directionality to the universe itself – the arrow of entropy and time that pointed from past to future, and an innate quality of the human spirit and will.
The One Power. Presenting a far greater potential for devastation than any 'nukular missile', any genetically engineered virus or memetic plague.
"Have you even read the abstract? …Why do I even bother?!" Beidomon Abernathy barked across the Hall with all the injured dignity of a vexed wheaten terrier, knuckles whitening on the lectern as perspiration raised a sheen on the crown of his bald head. "Look. The Pattern's a manifold. A Lie Group, and the Powers you know are in its tangent space. Its Lie Algebra… which acts upon it…"
Confronted with a sea of blank faces, the Keeper of the Ninth Repository sighed, ponderously, exasperated, and was about to roll up his papers and storm off in dudgeon, when something happened. An innocuous moment that changed the course of the Pattern forever, bringing incalculable sorrow in its wake.
Beidomon noticed a young woman in the front row. Very young indeed, very tall and extravagantly beautiful, a fact not lost upon the scholar. There was an imperious, even haughty cast to her face, high cheekbones, face as white as ivory. Dark, deep eyes that were somehow ageless. She wore no cosmetics, nor stood in need of such augmentation. Hair like a raven's wing, lips as red as the raven's blood.
The dark-haired woman was simply, though becomingly, clad, a dress of multi-layered white streith that hinted at the intimate hue of a woman's body beneath without explicitly revealing it, and her only adornment was the Great Serpent ring on her finger. Very young to be a full Aes Sedai.
She was scribbling away with a stylus on the fuzzed outline of a hPage hanging in front of her, a holographic tablet securely uplinking her notes with the Cloud, whilst simultaneously recording audio and video of Beidomon's lecture, the tablet parsing both speech and text, memetically searching for appropriate references for elucidation and further research by context.
Taking notes, by the Light! The only one out of all those gathered there.
As Beidomon faltered, she looked up from her writing and gave him an apologetic smile, and a thumbs-up, apparently eager to hear him continue. Very well, mused the scholar, and his anxiety and even his defensive abrasiveness was alleviated. An audience of one is better than no audience at all.
Invigilating the lectern in front of him, Beidomon quickly called up the information on the young Aes Sedai, facial recognition software instantly identifying her as Mierin Eronaille. Beidomon called her down to him, for all the world like a magician's assistant, and wonder of wonders she came, with none of the coltish self-consciousness the scholar had come to expect from the artless young. Nor was the brief interlude a trial for the assembly, the comely young woman's gliding progress followed with much male admiration, not to mention female envy.
As Mierin Eronaille reached the lip of the terrace, liquid SmartMetal accreated before her, pooling out from below the balustrade into a step that formed a level outcropping, and hardened under her assured stride. Not the One Power at work, but more magnetic levitation technology. Quicksilver runnels of the mercury alloy streamed around the edges of the newly-formed platform to form the next, and then the next.
As she approached the floor, the courteous academic offered a gracious arm, which Mierin accepted with the assurance of a woman taking no more than her due. The mercury stairway immediately liquefied behind her, pooling and rolling back into the well in the balcony whence it had issued, impelled by powerful electromagnets.
Beidomon – or Mierin at least – had their attention. The Keeper intended to keep it, continuing with greater assurance. "Ok. The Age Lace for Dummies. If I must." He sighed. "Think of the very fabric of space and time as a mere piece of cloth. May I?
The fastidious scholar held out a hand to Mierin, and she produced a neatly-folded and – he was relieved to find – clean handkerchief. "This is your Pattern – time and space. This representation is limited and misleading in many respects, but it will serve for now. Care to help me hold it tight, my dear?" he addressed Mierin.
They each took two corners, holding the cloth taut. From his pocket, Beidomon produced a couple of cheap glass marbles and put them onto the surface, where their weight produced circular indentations. "As you can see, mass – and energy – distort the Age Lace. For energy, think a strong ta'veren, or perhaps a singularly strong localised usage of the power – a bunch of you bright young things fooling around with a shiny new sa'angreal, say."
He smiled, avuncular. "Here's the thing. To a limited extent, one can measure the curvature and evolution of the Pattern. Only as a local phenomenon, true – it would take a concerted effort by numerous observers to make an affine chart to cover a truly representative piece of the Pattern.
Yet even at a local level, the curvature coefficients are wrong by a whole order of magnitude! The Pattern appears to be far more undulating than it should be. And what that tells us is that there is a hidden source of energy – let's call it 'dark energy' because we haven't discovered how to detect it yet! – distorting both space and time. Inference into its properties tells us it is of 'one flavour'. Meaning both men and women should be able to channel this new Source."
For the first time, Beidomon crooked an apologetic smile. "I know, there's a very obvious question. If it's there, how can we detect it? And even if we can detect it, how do we know we can channel it? As a thought experiment, I think I could tender a guess as to the answer to the first question.
Returning to my little illustration, if you have a single marble, it distorts space and time. Add a second, and they will tend to gravitate towards each other. Of course, this is a flat representation of a many-dimensional problem. If these marbles represent celestial bodies they may orbit each other, or …" He waved a hand. "Doesn't matter. Just trying to give you a flavour of the subject. I have observed that the curvature coefficient varies quite a lot in different places. Anyone want to hazard a guess as to why?"
"I think I know" Mierin ventured, unusually diffidently for such a forceful young woman. "The big discrepencies from the background are going to be where you see a lot of day-to-day high-energy use of the One Power. Such as the research centre at the Collam Daan, where angreals and sa'angreals are in everyday use, and Aes Sedai and Initiates practice linking…." She started as she realised what he was driving at "Light! We're the first marble. And our pull has drawn the source of the 'dark energy' to us. If there's anywhere in the world where it might be possible to tap into it, it has to be right under our very feet!"
Beidomon nodded appreciatively. Beautiful, and what a mind! "Exactly. One might say that the Collam Daan is a 'thin place' in the fabric of the Pattern, where the fibers have been stretched, and the 'distance' between us and the 'dark energy' is minimized.
It should be possible to bore a hole through the pattern 'here', creating a link to the dark energy. I daresay it will require a non-negligible expenditure of Power to make the Bore, but well within the sort of tolerances that a good-sized Circle or a reasonable sa'angreal can produce."
A hand arose. It was Lews Therin, lolling indolent in his curule Seat. "Boring a hole in the Pattern sounds a tad… dangerous to me. Maybe even reckless. … Might we not pop our universe like a bladder filled with air in the attempt?"
Beidomon shrugged, brightening. "A good question. Depends rather a lot on how much one trusts the mathematics behind the standard model of the multiverse. Or at least, this sheaf of it, anyway. Shouldn't have to worry about a 'black hole' opening up and sucking our world into it like a child drinking lemonade through a straw, anyway. I'd say we would be fine, really.
Look, holes in the Pattern happen all the time. When people die. Especially a married couple, for some reason. When some muttonhead starts waving Balefire around like a party-favour. Balefire's nasty stuff, and it can snarl up the Pattern something awful. This is nothing by comparison, believe me. The process I envisage is a lot more analogous to that of making a Gateway. No, all we have to worry about is the opposite. Handling the power once we breach it. A 'white hole' pouring a deluge of raw energy into our world is the worst likely eventuality."
A man stood up, beside Lews Therin, dressed head to toe in funereal black, with a sober and serious mein. Beidomon blinked. It was the young theologian Elan Morin Tedronai. Before his retreat, the young philosopher had been a man of cheerful stamp, one of the few who actively sought his company.
Now he looked haggard, gaunt. The bruised hollows under his eyes were testament to lack of sleep. But the man's eyes themselves… They were ravaged by a sorrow that had weighed upon him, fact upon remorseless fact, night upon wretched night until his despair had quelled the light in his spirit. Beidomon did not understand the cause of Elan's affliction, but from his own experience, he recognised the other man's obsession. Elan Morin had found a problem so intractable he couldn't leave it alone, couldn't think about anything else.
There was a raw edge in the young man's voice. "Have you considered the possibility that this energy, this Force is sentient?"
Beidomon essayed a laugh, which fell somewhat short of convincing. "Light, lad… No. I hadn't considered it. But then you know that I am an old heretic, unconvinced of the existence of either the Creator or his Shadow" he offered, puckishly. "Really, they should take me out back and put me down. Be a kindness to all concerned!"
"Then it is high time you consider it." Elan replied brusquely, dismissing the olive-branch of humour Beidomon tendered. "Because if you're wrong, it won't be the Creator you shall find. My philosophy tells me He stands outside his creation, not integral within it. And I don't need to measure the curvature of the Age Lace to observe the Dark One's touch on our world.
I see the inescapable certainty of Death, and the suffering that lies between. I hear the bright song of the innocent choked and cut short by the hand of the malevolent. Creation marred by sickness and plague and pestilence the One Power cannot heal."
There were angry tears in Elan's eyes, and his voice thickened with emotion. "Creation is a pocket-watch winding down. Everything subject to Entropy's heavy hand. We use and reuse the ingredients – the same tall tales and stories recycled until they become unrecognisable, or become their own antithesis."
His eyes, distant, raged across the theme above that cycled endlessly, inevitably into the black. White pastel smears rising, as megaton nukes ravaged cities, sky-scraping towers of boxy glass and steel falling inwards in shards about the mounting pyre, the ground convulsing in concentric ripples, propagating as though the land was ocean. A restless, endless whirlpool.
Elan's voice, quiet, when next he spoke. Almost gentle. "Moskva and Merica, with their lances of fire that could reach around the world, and their war with Aelsibeth, Queen of All… What passes for virtue in one generation derided as folly in the next, until all that is good is watered down, erased, abnegated, corrupted, lost!"
Elan's voice rising to a scream of pain. Lews Therin rose, seeking to place a comforting arm upon his friend's shoulder. Elan Morin struck the arm away with a clenched fist. "I neither seek nor require comfort!" he snarled into Lews Therin's face, with the ferocity of a hungry hound that has a bone torn from between its possessive jaws.
With a frisson of alarm, Beidomon saw that Elan held saidin, his ara'i an unstable stormfront. The air crackled with the potential for weaves.
"Comfort is for children! For the weak who cannot find accommodation with reality….!"
Elan paused, drew a long, shuddering breath, and with an effort, released the Power, regaining control. There were not a few relieved faces amongst the male Aes Sedai, and the females who had intuited that Elan Morin had seized saidin in his passion.
Beidomon mopped sweat from his brow with Mierin's handkerchief. Light, Elan is as strong as Lews Therin himself. If he'd started lashing about with the Power… He wouldn't have, surely. Not really. He can't be that unhinged. Can he?
Face a cold mask of correctness, Elan Morin turned, offering a courtly bow to Beidomon. "I apologise, Theorist. That was no proper question. For me, make your Bore with my blessing. If you find the Dark One, and he shatters the world, maybe it is for the best. I wonder if even that will be sufficient incentive for the Creator to deign to step down from his throne and mend his handiwork. And if the world ends… with it, an end to questions."
Time had passed. Beidomon's symposium and Elan Morin's outburst had been memorable for a time, but with no practical steps being taken in accessing the fabled 'True Power', interest had faded. There was one noteworthy change, though. Beautiful Mierin, and unworldly Beidomon were spending a lot of time together. 'Knocking boots', as one wag would have it.
A surprised Beidomon found himself roughly hailed by the younger male Aes Sedai and their prentices, who were amused and more than a little impressed at what they perceived to be his conquest. Who would have thought the old man had so much ram in his rod? "Arr gerrup, ye bad man ye!" he was hailed by one uncouth Initiate hailing from the Sand Hills overlooking the inland Andor Sea. Beidomon suffered the ragging with a sort of good-humoured bemusement.
Of course, the academic fended off any direct insinuations about what he and Mierin might be up to. "She's a proper lady, young man, and I won't hear a word otherwise! And we are just friends and colleagues." The rumour was ludicrous, impossible, risible – and so of course it was believed everywhere, lampooned, until one brave or foolish man broached the subject with Lews Therin himself, who was known to be her former lover.
"Mierin Eronaile," the Lord of the Morning had replied starchily, "desires only that which will gain her power. I only hope that, whatever the arrangement Beidomon has with her, that he finds some satisfaction in it. For you may rely upon it, gentle Mierin needs no help in looking out for herself!"
Beidomon had been right. The girl that had become the Forsaken, Lanfear, had the mechanical aptitude and intuitive brilliance with the Power to devise the weave for the Bore based upon Beidomon's mathematics.
It had been a terrible success. Black fire had consumed the Collam Daan university campus and the sphere of the Sharom that hung suspended above it by the Earth's geomagnetic field. At first, it had seemed that Beidomon's worst fears had been justified, and that a white hole had been wrenched ajar in the heart of V'saine.
The rest of the city was evacuated, and the world waited with bated breath to see if the nexus of lethiferous, hungry energy would continue to expand, consuming everything in its path. It finally halted, leaving a matt-black spherical phenomenon a mile across that radiated heat and intermittent arcs of crackling energy but appeared to be otherwise stable.
Beidomon muttered something about expected mass and event horizon radius, appearing appeased and relieved in equal measure.
Then it had turned out that it was Elan Morin that had the right of it after all, when the Dark One began to speak.
The first person to hear his voice had been Beidomon, as he pottered about outside the Bore, measuring the black-body radiation emanating from it, desperately trying to quantify the tragedy he had wrought in any currency other than human lives.
The next morning, he was found dead by his servant, with the veins of his wrists slashed open, silent screams of expiation.
His normally cluttered desk had been cleared, and laid out neatly upon it was the first page of his thesis, complete with the diagram of the Bore upon it that Mierin had sketched in her lacy, looping hand. He must have figured it was all the suicide note he needed. Poor Beidomon.
As for Mierin, well, her greatest triumph had become her blackest shame. All the work, the preparation she and Beidomon had carried out in their secret art to do something so audacious nobody else had even contemplated it, an act of metaphysical intellectual brilliance and prowess in the One Power beyond anything hitherto attempted! She should have been feted, lauded rewarded. The coveted third name that had been hitherto denied her by the envy of others because of her 'youth', her 'impetuosity' should have been a mere formality.
Instead, she had been censured in the Hall of the Servants by her former lover Lews Therin. It had been the most ignominious day of her life. She had come within a hair of being stripped of her stole and ring, of being fined. Maybe imprisoned. She retained those things – which were hers by right! – as a gift from the man whose withering words had dismissed her, had castigated her in front of the Assembly of the Hall. The man who had spurned her. And for what, pray?
She had not failed. She had succeeded beyond anyone's expectations! There had been collateral damage – a few people had died, less than a thousand all told – and some trifling destruction of property. What of it? All advances in the Power had come with people hazarding their own lives and the lives of others to ascertain the limits of what was possible!
One thing was for sure. On that day, Mierin Eronaile decided she would no longer be an Aes Sedai. But she would take what she was owed. It had been a day that nobody who was there to witness ever forgot.
Lews Therin leaned forward, looking down on her from that ostentatious throne down the bridge of his aquiline nose.
No slouching from the Dragon. No thumbing of an earlobe to indicate a man's frank appraisal of a beautiful woman. Lews Therin was all cool, sterile poise, drawn up haughty in judgement, his long-boned frame draped by the sombre angles of a high-collared Tzorii coat in charcoal weave. Winter frost fringed the burnt senna of his hair, riming him august with years.
His carriage imbued with all the implicit entitlement of the Bloodborn. More than that. An apex predator's self-assurance. Here was a man who acknowledged no equal.
Latra Posae's mouth tightened. For a brief moment she felt a moiety of pity for the accused. She quelled that with a heavy hand. The fool woman should burn for what she did!
"Mierin Eronaile Aes Sedai, the Hall of the Servants has reached a verdict."
Despite herself, the raven-haired woman thrilled at Lews Therin's voice. A soft breeze, playing upon the taut wire strings of a harp to evoke a familiar refrain. The mirrored skim of Aes Sedai composure, fresh and clear as a mountain lake, palpably rippling.
True sentiment, or feigned, nuanced inflection to elicit fond reminiscence? Latra Posae conceded either was possible with this woman.
Lews Therin was saidin itself. The unmoved mover.
"Through the reckless and wilful endangerment of the lives of others, you occasioned the deaths of some nine hundred and twenty-seven persons, including many of your colleagues who once stood among us. We have heard the plea of your advocate, and the Hall is satisfied that the actions of yourself and your colleague were not undertaken from the desire to do harm.
We therefore find no grounds to impeach you for manslaughter, only of the lesser charge of reckless endangerment leading to death by misadventure, which gives this august body a greater degree of latitude regarding your sentencing.
Your youth is the principal mitigating factor in the assessment of this case, but against it, we must also weigh your statements in this court after the fact, which show a disquieting absence of empathy. Not a single time have you expressed remorse, or even made a statement of sympathy towards your victims. Instead, you have conducted yourself as if the main consequences of your ill-fated experiment were the inconvenience to your person and rights, and the ramifications towards your career."
The Lord of the Morning paused, the deliberate cadence of a blademaster taking guard. Eyes the buffed grey of banded agate measured the accused for the sword-stroke. That gaze held daunting weight. Long years of experience, bearing down heavy.
"Mierin Eronaille, you have earned the right to the ring and the shawl, a not inconsiderable accomplishment at any age, but you gained both as the youngest ever to take your place amongst our number. That attests not just to your strength and skill in the Power, but to the fortitude of your spirit and commendable coolness under pressure.
But being Aes Sedai is more than a matter of puissance and hardihood. Perhaps we allowed you to test for the shawl too young, were you ready or no.
No matter. An Aes Sedai you stand, an Aes Sedai you shall be judged.
As First Among Servants, it is my burden to pass sentence upon you under the Light and according to the law.
Mierin Eronaille Aes Sedai, I find you wanting. Wanting in grace, in compassion, in shouldering the burden of care. Your actions have injured and shamed us all!
In your pride and zeal for personal advancement you chose to endanger the lives of many innocents, contrary to the Law. As a consequence, many of these people are dead. Men, women and children. Whole families, Mierin! It is something you will have to carry with you all the days of your life.
I sentence you to six months of penance, allotted to you for contemplation. In this time, it is our hope that you come to terms with what you have done and accept responsibility for it.
The work chosen for you shall not be arduous or demeaning, but fitted to reflection. You shall make weekly appointments with our resident psychologist, Kamarile Maradim Nindar, which will be mandatory. It is my hope that you will not see these sessions as additional punishment, but as a genuine attempt to reach you."
Mierin Eronaille stiffened frostily. Passion inlimned in that willowy frame, her dignity, a stole drawn tight about her, onyx eyes fixed upon those of the Dragon. In them was only the frankness of anger.
"It is my belief, Mierin, that a person is not born heartless, or empty of all save pride and ambition. I think that the rude hand of circumstance has fashioned you so, but that it does not have to be this way. You can choose. The help is there. I strongly suggest you take it. Have you anything you wish to say on record?"
The woman in silver and white drew herself up. "Yes, Lews Therin Telamon, I have something to say." Her voice was thrilling, melodic. "You were not nearly so concerned about my tender youth when you pursued me like a tom cat in heat. Oh, Lews Therin, you were so punctiliously correct about it all, waiting until my eighteenth name-day before taking me to your bed. How virtuous you were – and you a mature man of two hundred and five, no less!"
Her argent voice, swift in rebuke, curt as a handprint upon cheek.
"But how many kisses had you stolen before that, Lews Therin? And did any of my peers have any other choice but to withdraw whatever suit they may have had for me, once you made your intentions for me known. How could they have contended with the great Lews Therin Telamon?"
Mierin laughed with a brittle gaiety. "Ah, Lews, I didn't mind. You could have had me any time since I turned sixteen. I was the low-hanging pear ripe to be stolen! But your seeming virtue is a vehicle for your ego. You wanted me – but you wanted more to be seen as honourable and upstanding. Your nobility is a whitewashed tomb, containing only corruption and old bones!
Where was your concern for what you see as my wounded soul when we lay together, hip to hip? Did you see me as a child then? I make no apology for bringing my complaint against you, personal as it is.
You could have – should have – recused yourself from judging my case. The whole world knows we were lovers, Lews Therin. You shame me in open court by speaking as to my sanity, intimating personal things that you only guess at. Just couldn't resist the attention, could you? The chance to dispense justice and mercy upon an old flame, leaving all the beholders seeing you as charitable and gentle. Tsag!
Let me put you straight. You know my body, because I have shared it with you. You know my heart likewise. I loved you then. I love you now. My past is my past. I do not share it with anyone, because it does not interest me to dwell upon it.
For me, my life began when I first saw you, in the orchard. If you wish to caricaturise me as a fallen woman, or as some pitiful victim in order to preserve the way you see yourself, your dignitas, I won't be made party to it.
I know you, Lews Therin. And you know me. You're ambitious. Ruthless. Manipulative! You cannot bear to lose – and you turn every relationship into a contest. Impulsive. Just like me! What I did to create the Bore was something you might have tried – if you'd had the wit. Admit it! And I daresay in your long life, you will do something that brings just as great a surfeit of grief.
Here's real love. What pains me is that you gave that up – me up – for what? Not Ilyena herself. You sacrificed me to the all-encompassing narrative. Not Lews Therin the man, but to Lews Therin Telamon, the legend. And Ilyena fits that fairy-tale far better than I. That milk-and-honey disposition matching her milk-water face, insipid blonde hair and her vapid little mind.
She is an ornament. A trophy wife. A pretty porcelain doll. And if you're honest, she's an insurance policy in case you misstep and it all comes crashing down about your ears. She has it all – family, connections, money. But she'll never challenge you. Never be your equal. She'll hide away from herself all the darkness, cruelties and conceits that are part of you whether you will it or no. Fantasy on both sides.
Whereas I darkle. I tinct. I frighten you – and myself sometimes. But I will never lie to you about myself. For I am ashamed of nothing I have done. You can have that too. Always and forever."
She smiled then, and it was a wicked smile, sharp and sweet as a briar and its fruit. Its full seductive force was directed at Lews Therin, but its effect was not lost upon any that were there that day. Ordinarily, Mierin was not given to outward displays of emotion. She took care to appear serious-minded, grave, dispassionate. Even her anger was cold. This was a woman.
Mierin's smile only widened when she caught Ilyena's pinched and possessive face glaring back at her. Sunhair's blue eyes were arctic with anger. Mierin's frigid fury overtopped it. A glacier carving its path clear, wild and untrammelled as saidar itself.
Come at me, then, if you dare, ye chit, her eyes daunted her rival. Try to take what you claim. I will teach you the meaning of sorrow!
Mierin was almost done. There was but one more thing to say. It had been a decision her mind had played with restlessly, a cat with a ball of yarn.
Slowly, and with dignity, she unfastened the shoulder-clasp on her shawl, the pure white stole of cloth that every Aes Sedai woman wore. Beneath it she wore a long, sweeping dress of virgin white silk, with a high collar. Holding the shawl out in front of her she released it to fall upon the floor with a contemptuous snap of her wrists.
"What is the meaning of this?" a thoroughly-affronted Lews Therin demanded. It was a breach of protocol in interrupting the Accused's final words after sentencing, but her inflammatory words had goaded him past enduring.
"Why, only that I have no further use for it." Mierin replied coolly. Plucking the Great Serpent ring from her finger, she tossed it underhand towards the T'amyrlin Seat, dismissively.
In the silence, she heard the heavy gold band rattle and clatter away under the benches until it was lost from her sight. She heard the collective indrawn breath of a hundred Aes Sedai. Good. To these stuffed shirts, these men of straw, what she had done had been nigh unto blasphemy.
Once, the Great Serpent Ring had been her most prized possession. Now it was nothing to her. Less than nothing. "I do not need these trinkets, nor do I desire your fellowship. From this day forward, I am no Aes Sedai. And I scorn all those who style themselves so.
You are all beneath my contempt, a puling bunch of pious hypocrites. I am stronger, shrewder and better than any of you, and like a fool I gave you my fealty, hoping that you would give me my deserts.
Well, I was a child then, to believe that you would do other than envy and fear me, denying me advancement at every turn. But that child has grown, and put away childish things. And I have come to understand that there is nothing within your gift that I cannot take for myself. Even the Ring of Tamyrlin itself if I took a mind. But fear not, Lews Therin – you may keep your bauble. I need it not!
For now, I only want but one thing. That which I am owed. The third name that you would withhold from me, I will grant myself, according to the works of my art."
To Latra Posae's intent gaze, a penumbra of shadow appeared to gather about the former Aes Sedai. An impossibility, of course, under the steady illumination of ambient light.
Yet it was so. A nimbus of annihilation crowning the other woman, the negation of saidar's halo.
In bleak counterpoint to the waxing dark, Mierin Eronaille seemed to .. sharpen. Come into keen focus. A white, lucent flame, attenuated into a bitter, whittling blade. The cold arrogance of beauty distilled to an elixir of youth in death.
It had suddenly become very, very cold in the Hall of the Servants. A chill that had stolen a march upon them all. Very cold, and as silent as the grave.
Mierin's words plunged like black stones cast into a frigid mere.
"Henceforth, I will be Mierin Eronaille LANFEAR. Daughter of the Night. And like any trueborn daughter, I acknowledge my sire. Here, in front of you all, I pledge my fealty to Shai'tan, the Great Lord, whom you superstitious cowards call the Dark One. I will leave this assembly of mediocrity where I find myself unwelcome, and go to where I am Chosen.
If there are any amongst you of a similar spirit, tired of grubbing after Lews Therin's leavings, then do as I have done. Go to the Bore and hear His voice. Bathe in His power. Farewell."
With a gesture from Lanfear, a black-within black vertical line appeared in the air in front of her. The Gateway dragged open with a guttural grinding wrench that the Aes Sedai felt rather than heard, the balescream of the Pattern tortured, rent by rough, riving hands. Latra Posae had been the first to react. "She's not channelling saidar! Whatever she's doing, stop her at once! Shield her now!"
Lews Therin hurled a shield of Spirit, aiming to sever Mierin's connection to whatever it was she was it was he couldn't see it. Mierin's face was ecstatic, that violent rapture he had only seen on her countenance in bed.
He cast the shield like a slingstone with everything he had behind it, including a goodly surfeit of anger, knowing that as he did, he stood a good chance not just of shielding her, but of severing her from the Source forever. There could be no half-measures. Mierin was deadly strong and intuitively quick with saidar. Who knew what she was capable of with this True Power?
His weave was sliced in tatters, almost contemptuously, the flows rebounding into him. Then her own shield was pushing back at him, an invisible knife he tried to parry by instinct.
Latra Posae went down. Shouting and hectoring one moment, barking orders to link with her, the next her eyes glazed over as she pitched to her knees.
Lews Therin could do nothing to help her. It was all he could do to try and keep Mierin from him. And sweet, suffering Light, it hurt!The edges of her shield felt barbed somehow. They didn't just cut into the bulwark of Spirit he strove to maintain, they felt like they were abrading his very mind.
The Dragon gritted his teeth with the effort. Concentrated. Threw her back. Her smile flashed, dazzling him with its brilliance, …and then she made a run for it.
An enormous fireball ripped up the floor where Mierin had been only a heartbeat before, scattering chips of mosaic tiles. He didn't need to look to know that the retributive weave had been a parting gift from his wife, Ilyena. But Mierin…. Lanfear, he reminded himself … had thrown herself through the Gateway like an athlete breasting the tape.
Leaving chaos, as always, in her wake. There were dead bodies in this hallowed place!Da'shain who hadn't gotten out of the way in time, or those who had been goodhearted and foolhardy enough to attempt to aid the injured during the conflict. The little people, who were always the grist in her mill, always the unfortunate casualties every time Lanfear decided to make a grand gesture. A lot of Aes Sedai looked the worse for wear, too. His brothers and sisters. There was anger in his heart. This could not stand!
Lanfear, we are done. Lews Therin swore. The next time I see you, one of us is going to die!
Latra Posae had woken angry as a bear from hibernation, with a headache that even Healing did not fully assuage. Lanfear, using the dark 'True Power', had spanked the lot them like unruly children. For her, that had been the day when the long War against the Shadow had truly begun. When the intangible evil she had sworn to oppose was made manifest to her, given a human face. And she saw only too clearly that they were not ready for what was to come.
Lanfear had been but the first subverted by the Dark One, because her lust for power and dominance had been the greatest, but she would not be the last. Over the duration of the War, forty-one of the mightiest names in the Hall had gone over to the Shadow, to be rewarded with access to that blasphemous True Power. In addition to these so-called 'Chosen', over one thousand lesser Aes Sedai men and women had also turned their coats, becoming Dreadlords.
The War had been an avalanche, set in motion by the tumbling of the smallest pebble, as the firmament of the Light was challenged by the nihilist philosophy of Ishamael, the war-craft of Be'lal, Demandred and Rahvin, the hedonist seductions of Graendal. Mesaana turned the young and impressionable against their parents, sowing suspicion and fear. Semihrage broke the will of the strong with fear and pain. Aginor perverted Creation itself: his foul miscegenations hideous parodies of life.
Nothing less would have ended the strife between Latra Posae and Lews Therin. They were the hardiest among the Faithful, and the strongest of craft and will. Lews Therin was the Champion of the Light, its greatest general, and Latra Posae was the Artisan, the founder and creator of the great weapons of the Power, wrought to do no less than burn the Shadow from the Pattern itself. Artefacts that could level a city with a blow.
Together, they hunted down all those who had the effrontery to set themselves against the Light Militant. They harboured a particular vendetta against the Chosen, striking at them where they held themselves safest, in their strongholds.
Finally, only the most subtle, cunning, lucky and mighty amongst the Chosen were left. Thirteen prideful names. And the Shadow had learned to fear Latra Posae Decumae, the Cutter of Shadows, just as much as Lews Therin Telamon.
Long had Latra laboured in her secret arts to craft a weapon that even the Dark One could not stand against. It began with a Seed, a particular ter'angreal that was used to grow angreal and sa'angreal, which was created by painstakingly layering a tapestry of weaves upon each other until matter began to aggregate. Energy becoming mass.
Creating ter'angreal was hard, even for one who had the Talent as strongly as she – and she required an unparalleled degree of perfection in this instance, because the finished sa'angreal was going to be built on an unimaginable scale. The slightest flaw would therefore be magnified. Even if constructed perfectly, it would be the most dangerous object in the history of the world.
Latra Posae led a full Circle to create the Seed, time after time rejecting the ter'angreal as flawed to begin over, until she held herself satisfied. It was a mighty work of creation, and she let her instincts guide her, the weave of saidin and saidar enfolding layer upon layer like a rosebud opening for the first time.
Then the web grabbed Latra and her Circle by the scruff of the neck, as it seemed to drink in the Power with abandon, and the flowering Power began to fold in upon itself, becoming harder and sharper until at last all that was left was a single green stone that looked like a great shaped emerald. The Power vanished from Latra and the Circle with an abruptness that left them all gasping like landed carp.
Latra looked down at the perfect stone, a zygote Seed that would, when it was fully grown, be an sa'angreal of unimaginable power, able to be used by a man, or a woman. All that remained was to nurture it with the Power.
Then, to her consternation and horror, it fractured through the middle, breaking into two jagged halves.
Latra Posae felt an instant of frustration and despondency. She knew that what she had woven was as close to perfection as she was capable. Maybe the Creator cannot allow a mortal to wield power of this order of magnitude. The power to destroy His creation.
In despair, Latra closed her eyes, unwilling to show her collaborators the weakness of her tears. And for the first time in her life, she prayed. Light save us. And at that moment of her greatest doubt and trembling, when all the terrible philosophies of Elan Morin threatened to overwhelm her ordered, litigious mind the Creator spoke not.
Yet, with her eyes shut, she could still see one half of the fractured kernel, as clearly as if her eyes were open. What the..? It appeared to be a perfect multi-layered lattice of pure saidar. The Cutter of Shadows turned to the male Aes Sedai next to her, pointing at the fragment she could see with her eyes closed. "Barahir, can you see that fragment with the Power?"
"No, Latra, that I cannot," the stout Tzorii frowned, teasing his long, forked beard through his fingers in restless knots. Abruptly, his eyes widened, and he started to his feet so suddenly he overthrew his chair, a man recoiling from a roused serpent at his feet, biting off an oath between his teeth. Latra Posae was death on bad language. "….Yet I can see the other piece, with my eyes shut or no. I do believe I could see it from leagues away, it do shine so!" he pronounced, naked awe in his voice, and no little fear. Small wonder. Broken ter'angreal were notoriously dangerous objects. Yet Latra somehow knew that this – that these – were nothing of the sort.
Not one Seed but two. Not one sa'angreal but two, male and female. She had done it.
It had been an exhausting labour of three years for her Circle to draw the power and split the flows into girthy columns of pure saidin and saidar respectively to nurture the growing sa'angreal. She quickly realised that in order for the finished devices to be used safely, they would need to be buffered strongly, so that surges in the One Power would not destroy the wielder, the sa'angreal and quite likely a significant portion of the world.
To that end, she fashioned a pair of ter'angreal as Access Keys – one for a man, one for a woman. Meanwhile the two growing sa'angreal began to take shape. Their form was nothing she had intended, rather it seemed they took their own cast. They appeared like a statue of a man and a woman respectively, rendered in vitreous green crystal, each holding a sphere in one upheld hand, like Justice and the Light.
As she laboured, pouring her strength into the sa'angreal, a plan began to form. If she and Lews Therin were to take up the Access Keys to the Choedan Kal and link, they could sweep the armies of the Shadow from the face of the Earth. Then, they could create a barrier around Shayol Ghul until a way was found to seal the rift in reality forever, and banish the Dark One from the world.
For Latra Posae Decumae herself had dared pick up the gauntlet that Lanfear had thrown down. Not to pledge to the Shadow, but in her pride, she went there to try her will against His.
The Cutter of Shadows stood at the edge of the Bore, felt its foulness as the world of the tangible fell away beneath her feet into a bottomless nullity, a sump of malice and insanity that crawled and heaved and hungered.
Latra Posae knew her strength. She was old and canny, cagy and strong in craft and lore. Her resolve was granite. Then she had heard His voice. Rotted, clinging, corrosive enough to dissolve heartstone, let alone the stone of her heart.
Here was Negation. The Unhallowed, made flesh before a woman who heretofore had been agnostic, believing only in that which could be seen, measured or adduced. The things that held together. Here, she trembled and frayed, reason picked apart and stripped back by myriad infinitessimal fingernails of rasping black.
WHY HAVE YOU COME TO ME, LATRA POSAE? YOU WILL NEVER BE OF ME. DO YOU SEEK ANNIHILATION? THAT, TOO, IS IN MY GIFT. PERHAPS IT WOULD BE BETTER YOU DIE NOW, MORTAL, THAN TO SEE WHAT IS TO COME.
The magnitude of that awful voice forced her to her knees, then to her face. She did not dare look up. In her extremity of fear, she had soiled herself.
It was at that moment, her hubris in tatters, tears streaming down her face, a hammer greater than the world hanging over her head, able to destroy her beyond the hope of rebirth, maybe even salvation, Latra found the words that restored her courage. The bedrock of her soul, something truer than mere pride. She would not die cowering in abasement. Instead she found herself shouting her words into the teeth of the gale.
"Ay, I'll tell you why I have come, though I die for it, Shai'tan! I come to speak for all those who have no voice to speak for themselves. The Da'shain Aiel that you hunt for sport! The millions of prisoners Aginor breeds to fill Trolloc cookpots! You seek to torment the former for their forbearance from violence, and dehumanise the latter, but I tell you this: Their every act of kindness and decency is another arrow through your black heart!
I come to tell you that you can corrupt only the hollow ones like Mierin and Lilen. You think they are so strong because they are filled with the Creator's One Power. They are the least of us! Their hearts are broken vessels that have cracked in the kiln, and whose spirit has leached out. As for the rest of us, we will fight you until our last breath. And at the last, it will be those of us you sought to torment the most that will write your end."
Her defiant words were met by an instant of silence, then a horrible laughter that rattled her bones like a gale ripping through a picket fence.
FOR YOUR PRESUMPTION IN DEFYING ME, I WILL GIVE YOU TRUE PROPHECY. MAY IT BRING YOU ANGUISH.
YOU WILL LIVE TO SEE THE END OF EVERYTHING YOU HOLD DEAR, EVEN THE ORDER YOU BELONG TO. YOU WILL BREAK EVERY OATH, AND BETRAY EVERY VOW. YOU WILL DIE AN EXILE IN A WASTELAND EVEN I CANNOT SEE, AN HONOURLESS CREATURE HOUNDED AND HUNTED TO YOUR END.
THUS SHALL YOU END YOUR PRESUMPTUOUS LIFE, SHADAR NOR. AND YOU WILL BE REMEMBERED AS A TRAITOR.
And Latra Posae fled before the Dark One's scorn. Having measured the Enemy, she deemed him a foe beyond the scope of Man. Even with the Choedan Kal, direct confrontation was futile. No, her way was better.
Lews Therin, however, intended something far more audacious. With or without the Choedan Kal, he intended to try and knit together the ragged edges of the Bore, holding the web together with seven seals of unbreakable cuendillar to prevent the weave degrading over time.
It was a bold plan, and Latra Posae, swayed by his argument, thought it just might be feasible. It was then that the Foretelling came upon her. It told her of some dark doom that would befall them all if she took her ajah of female Aes Sedai to the Bore, to link and form the Great Circles Lews Therin intended to use to seal the Dark One from the world.
Lews Therin had not believed the veracity of her Foretelling. "You lie!" he had accused her. "Ever have you sought to wrest me from my place by wile and stratagem. You seek to deny me because your own plan has failed. But I tell you, I will not be stayed!"
Latra Posae had no choice but to withhold the aid of all the female Aes Sedai from his endeavour. Such was her standing amongst them that no female Aes Sedai, even Ilyena Therin Moerelle herself, dared lend their aid to Lews Therin.
The Foretelling had come upon her again, the resonance stronger, more undeniable a second time. It demanded of her a great betrayal. To take the newly-minted keys to the Choedan Kal, and the Ring of Tamyrlin, and to flee ahead of the coming storm. Its imperative was undeniable, and so she had been forsworn, abandoning oaths and fealty to flee, a thief in the night.
Lews Therin had been splenetic. With the Ring, Lews Therin could have forced the compliance of Latra Posae Decume and the rest of the female Aes Sedai who had abandoned him in their greatest hour of need, leaving him and the Hundred Companions to try and seal the Bore. Instead, Latra Posae had stolen it from him.
The Ring of Tamyrlin had represented the crowning achievement of his life, and Latra Posae's desertion in the face of the Enemy ranked as his greatest betrayal. The T'amyrlin pronounced a sentence of death upon her, and sent a hundred male Aes Sedai after her to impose it – a loss the forces of the Light could ill-afford to bear.
She fled from Lews Therin's wrath with her Aes Sedai followers – all female – and a band of Da'shain Aiel servants, bearing not just the Ring of Dominion, but both access keys to the Choedan Kal, as well as every female angreal and ter'angreal she could lay her grasping hands upon.
No matter. The Lord of the Morning was set upon his course. He and his Hundred Companions struck at the Bore. Without female Aes Sedai, they could not link together and weave as one. However, they brought every great male angreal and sa'angreal they had in store. What they lacked in unity, they made up for in sheer might.
Lews Therin contended in spirit with that ageless Beast alone, and as he strove, he and his Companions drew tight their webs. They walled the Dark One up behind a hundred knotted weaves, drawn tight upon the cornerstones of the cuendillar seals.
Then the Dark One retaliated. The Hundred Companions were drawing such a great magnitude of saidin through the webs that were sealing him in that Caisen Hob was able to pollute the Source of saidin itself in the instant before it was sealed off from him, tainting it with his essence. In their moment of victory, Lews Therin and the Hundred Companions were instantly stricken insane, minds and bodies alike corrupted husks, filled with torment and the need to destroy.
With the warning of the Foretelling, Latra Posae had fled far and fast, and yet even so barely escaped the cataclysm of the Breaking. She felt the Dark One's counterstrike, the world juddering like a raker without a hand on the tiller, ringing like a struck cymbal. Suddenly, a madman's hand was wrenching at the Pattern, saidar and corrupted saidin attempting to wrest control of the Weaving of the Pattern from each other. Instead of working together harmoniously, the Powers themselves were in terrible discord.
Latra Posae then understood, and trembled at the knowledge. Had she not abandoned Lews Therin, then saidar as well as saidin would have been sullied, and the Wheel itself surely would be torn from its axle and thrown down. The Dark One would have destroyed everything, including himself, rather than suffer impious binding at the hands of a mortal, no matter how powerful.
In the physical reality, the Breaking manifested as a terrible tidal event. The land buckled, heaving into a rolling tsunami wave that propagated from the Bore, travelling faster than a speeding jo-car. It broke the spine of the great cities before entombing them under hundreds of yards of broken stone and earth. Time warped with the buckling of the Earth and where hours passed in one place, in another months, even years went by in others. Children fell into senescence and died to leave bleached bones in a matter of minutes.
The fabric of reality – already tottering under the damage incurred by the War of Power, weakened by balefire burning whole cities out of the Pattern – was snarling itself, fouling like a linen cloth on the frame of a spinning-mule that was galloping ahead unchecked, shaking itself apart. The Dead walked, corpse-lights on the marshes.
Latra Posae had fled far and fast. The pursuers Lews Therin sent after her – every strong male Aes Sedai that had been super-numerate to the number of male angreal the Dragon had taken to the Bore – had pursued her and her followers doggedly. She had not dared to use Gateways or Skimming, as the strongest amongst her harriers had the Talent to read residues. A man called Herne Daghain Dornat. Herne the Hunter. Instead they had fled by jo-car, the ramjet-propelled craft kept aloft by the ubiquitous maglev technology.
Latra stole a pair of snub-nosed Boxer troop transports, bluff craft with stubby gyrowings, fashioned from grey cuerin ribbed with white-gleaming cuendillar, and their sleek MetalHawk escorts, like hungry orca, impervious cuendillar bellies and matt-black Power-forged tungsten alloy skin above.
The half-dozen MetalHawks were triangular-sectioned like a plunging aran'gar dagger to avoid radio-detection. They looked like what they were. Lethal. Purposeful. War-darts, longing only to be loosed from hand, with brief, fore-raked wings, like a hummingbird, and a rudder. Each would cloak while in flight – enabled by a ter'angeal for Folded Light, fabricated at exorbitant cost to exacting specifications.
Another theft, of men and material from the all-consuming war-effort that Shadar Nor would not allow herself to grieve.
The temporal backwash from the Breaking had swept over them before the upheaval of the ground, and their transports and escort fighters broke down overnight, simultaneously, their fuel evaporated in the tanks, leaving a viscous black treacle gumming the works. What works there were. Within the seamless, Power-hardened skin of the vessels, their mechanical innards evinced the corruption of centuries, rusted and pitted with great age. Useless.
Thereafter, Latra and those who followed her had commandeered oxen and carts, mules, to drag their priceless possessions as they fled. But they had been blessed insofar as that the temporal anomalies in the Pattern had distanced them and their chasers by months of travel.
The vagaries of the temporal distortion meant that the rolling earthquake had gone before them as they fled North, and they wandered in a mad God's rock-garden. Maps made no sense, and the churning magma under the Earth's crust coursed strangely, so even a compass-needle played the traveller false.
Sometimes the land was cracked and scarred with upwellings of molten lava, like the weeping sores of a burn victim. In other places, there were verdant tracts of land that appeared to have escaped unharmed, complete with streams, rivers and growing things. They had even found an intact summer orchard, complete with a factor's office, that must have been borne like a vessel before the storm, riding the wave of the Breaking from some sultry equatorial clime, and they had gorged themselves on its fruits.
But that was before they had learned not to trust anything, no matter how enticing it first appeared. There were a hundred novel ways to die in this brave new world. The clear tourmaline streams, so tempting to thirst-cracked lips, were often poison, contaminated; turned into a corrosive slurry of sulphuric acid by volcanic activity or steeped in lethal levels of arsenic. Radiation sickness from exposed veins of uranium ore that the Breaking had brought to the surface was one of the worst ways to go.
A score of Aiel had even died crushed by a pleasure-boat as they sought a pass through some uncharted mountain range. Somehow, in the Breaking, the ship of steel had been tossed upon a mountain peak, its keel broken by the horn of rock which had gored into its belly, transfixing it in place.
They had been passing beneath when with a tortured scream of rock upon steel, the bow of the sleek yacht had chosen that moment to tear loose and drop into the defile below like a headsman's axe. Latra had seen the name stencilled upon the vessel's bow as it plummeted down upon them. The Creator's Mercy. A jest to wake you in the night screaming.
And there were things that haunted the night, the raggedness of the Pattern allowing alien creatures to touch their world from adjacent domains. Sindhol, the weft of possibilities to the woof of the Mirrors of the Wheel, realms of affine geometry and temporal possibilities rejected in the choosing of the Pattern.
The Aelfinn and Eelfinn. Snakes and Foxes. Pale, manlike forms that shunned the light, hated fire and iron, and could be charmed with music. These loathsome things were masters of their own form of representational magic. They fed upon emotion, and perhaps upon the Power as well. They had abducted Aiel, and even a couple of her Aes Sedai.
The few people they met were fleeing the fall of their own tower of Babel. They were of a dozen nations and none. The trauma of the upheavals and the eddying of time had displaced reason for many. Some sought the lighthouse of civilization as they rode the ocean of storms. Others fled its light, believing it to be a terrible fire that had burned the world.
Madmen bestrode the Breaking like colossi, wielding the One Power as a weapon. It was Latra Posae's singular grief that she could not do more to prevent it. She saw the rogue male Aes Sedai as her responsibility. Hers to punish. But the Foretelling forbade her to make a stand, not yet. It was a bitter jest indeed that she bore with her two of the most powerful weapons in existence, but must hide their light. With the World this eggshell-fragile, using the female Choedan Kal might be enough to fragment it beyond any hope of restoration.
She had begun her flight accompanied by with seventy-one female Aes Sedai – five Circles and change – and two hundred Da'shain Aiel. The men Lews Therin had sent after her were more numerous, true, but they could not link, so there was that in their favour.
Herne and his brethren were all deranged by now, many having the wasting sickness, but they had proved singularly devoted to the chase. They called themselves Herne's Hounds, or the Hounds of Tamyrlin. It seemed they had forgotten everything else that made them men, Aes Sedai – everything except Lews Therin's last command. That and the lust to course and kill.
Herne himself was changing, into something both more and less than man. A travesty of form that perfectly represented the vileness and cruelty that consumed him. The rotting sickness had him, cancers of the bone running unchecked, and his head was marred by spurs of protruding bone like antlers, pushing through his torn and lacerated scalp.
His legs lengthened, running to bare shanks of calcified bone that were inured to pain, that ate up the intervening miles in a tireless lope. The change must have caused him excruciating pain, but his animal senses only grew keener. Sharper. Like a black bear, he could scent his prey over twenty miles, further if she were injured or in pain. Oh, yes, and he could still channel. Like a black-souled tempest.
The final confrontation with the Hounds of Tamyrlin had occurred twenty days ago, when they were trekking across a huge salt-pan under a faded watercolour sky. It had been a seabed not long ago, until the cataclysm had spilt the ocean from its basin like water from an upset teacup.
A treacherous place. The brittle crust of minerals that reflected the drying sun's rays back in a blinding glare trapped a morass of mud and quicksand under the surface that could swallow a cart. Or a man. The caked surface of the salt-flats was now the unmarked grave for thirty Hounds of Tamyrlin, including Herne the Hunter himself, seventeen of her Aes Sedai sisters, and forty-five of her Aiel charges.
Now they were here. In the middle of nowhere. It might be the only place that the Breaking had not touched. The North Pole to the Bore's South. It was a place that only the desperate and the truly lost might ever find their way to. Which made it the perfect place. She looked up at her companions. Twenty-three Aes Sedai, excluding her, fifty-five Aiel. A beginning. An end.
One of the Aes Sedai broke the long silence. "Mother, why have we stopped here?"
"This is the place." Latra Posae grunted at the Tzorii woman in reply. What was her name? Aredhel. Under the shelter of her cadin'sor hood, Aredhel's braided hair was inset with hundreds of tiny cut-glass ornaments. A strange affectation for an otherwise practical woman.
Latra had once asked her why. "I began wearing the kesiera when I heard what Jaric Mondoran did to my home." she had replied. "I wear it in honour of the Da'shain Aiel who tried to heal him with the Song of Growing. He killed them all, of course, in his madness. Killed them as they continued to sing. But their sacrifice allowed everyone else to escape. The Da'shain who we despised as weak proved to be our saviours. They were the True Dedicated. Jenn Aiel." A long speech from a usually quiet woman. Quiet but dependable.
"Mother, I hardly think…" Aredhel began, falling silent at Latra's frown.
"Peace, Daughter. The Foretelling has led us to this place. Within the hour, I will die. But I have one thing I must do first. Once I am gone, it will be your task to help guide the Aiel. I lay this burden upon you, heavy though I know it to be, because of the great love you bear for them. Nine of your Sisters will remain here with you.
I ask of you a harder thing than you know, for you must put off your Great Serpent Ring and Shawl, even the name of Aes Sedai, and never use the term again. It is imperative that nobody has cause to seek amongst you for the lost treasures of the Aes Sedai.
Call yourself the Wise Ones. You shall take husbands among the Aiel." Latra chuckled grimly. "I deem this latter no hardship, for they are a comely people and enduring of spirit. You will test among your children and your children's children for those girls that can learn to channel, and apprentice them, raising them in turn as Wise Ones when they are ready. You may use the testing ter'angreal for that purpose."
Latra bent the force of her will upon a diminutive Aes Sedai, pleased to see the square-jawed young woman meet her stare for stare. A terteia, this one. A woman with sand in her craw. "Elisane Tishar, for you a different doom awaits. You shall leave the Three-Fold Land and return to the world beyond with twelve of your sisters. I regret I cannot even bequeath you the Ring of Tamyrlin as a symbol of authority. Against a hostile world, all I can spare you as a bulwark is your knowledge, and the strength of your Sisters. Together, you are thirteen – a Prime Circle, and a symbol of wholeness.
Seek out our kindred – if any survived the Breaking – and find a place to rebuild, if any goodly place yet exists in this benighted world. It falls upon your shoulders to re-establish the order of the Aes Sedai. The old has gone, beyond redemption and saving, and I Foretell that there will never again be male Aes Sedai, except but one, who will be Reborn in an Age yet to come. And yet the world needs a familiar light, that of the Servants of All, to succour them, to amend and salvage what can be saved from the shipwreck that is Mankind.
I therefore name you the Amyrlin, the Flame of the Aes Sedai, and I task you further to watch over the Seals that Lews Therin Telamon used to imprison the Dark One, if they can be found. To you and those of your line will fall the long vigil to ward against the awakening of Shai'tan."
Aredhel found the will to contradict the formidable matriarch. "Mother, this is not a place where anyone can live."
"Say you so, Daughter?" With an unaccustomed display of affection, Latra patted the younger woman's shoulder. "Mayhap this old dog has one last trick to show you."
Reluctantly, she withdrew the Tamyrlin Ring, holding it in the hollow of her hand. Such a small thing to represent her generations-long struggle with wily Lews Therin. "See that this is buried with me" she bade Aredhel. "In my papers, you will find a letter that belongs with it. You will know it when you see it. Seal the letter inside a stasis-tube and place it with my ashes and the Ring, when you put me in the ground.
Plant the chora seed above me, and task the Aiel with the tree's care. While it lives, the Tree will ward prying eyes away from the Tamyrlin Ring until it is needed once more. And now, I must bid you farewell."
With an effort, Latra Posae reached out for the Power through the augmenting Tamyrlin Ring. An almost imperceptible vibration stirred the sands, the oscillation becoming louder as the Cutter of the Shadow lensed the One Power through the powerful angreal. A small fissure a yard across cracked open in the dry ground as Latra Posae drilled through hundreds of feet of bedrock beneath the desert sands. A needle's eye in the vastness of the desert.
Latra's followers waited expectantly for a sign. Nothing. Seconds lengthened into minutes, and feet began to shuffle, and those few hopeful faces fell downcast.
Suddenly, a geyser of water sprung up from the rent she had fashioned, the pressure such that the jet of water sprang a hundred feet in the air as the spigot of earth was tapped. The shocked bystanders leapt back in alarm. A deluge of clean water sprayed the incredulous, delighted Aiel and Aes Sedai with an unexpected rainfall. "There," muttered Latra Posae Decumae to nobody in particular. "That should last you a few thousand years or so, if you look after it."
She was weary, suddenly. It looked as good a place as any to take her rest, she thought, as she laid down.
