On blackmail: yup it is rightly gratuitous. I apologize for that! I'm not that frequent at fanfic, this is my first since 2002, and my first one posted to WOT... it dismayed me that decent pieces of work un-updated for months had no reviews at all. The reason I ceased writing FF before was because I thought the community callous and I did not like it. Still, other less experienced writers benefit from having people with years of experience around. Now that I'm sure at least one person is reading, thank you very much and please read on. As long as I know I have one reader, I will finish this story. Forgive me my paranoia.
On Ghedlyn: I did toy with the idea of making her a Brown. However, her history dictates otherwise. In reality, the qualities ascribed to a White are required side-by-side with the qualities of a Brown... otherwise, the true scientist is incomplete.
Again, I do not own any of the Wheel of Time and my story is in greatest respect and admiration for Robert Jordan.
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Weaving LuckChapter 2: Pseudolink
By viggen
The two horses galloped and skidded in the increasing mire, headed as quickly as possible in any direction away. Unseasonable heat, now broken by squawling rain, winnowed down the formerly lush landscape until it became starkly passable. This far south, wilting trees horribly yellowed spoke of the drought so recently past. The two horses labored in breathing through the cutting wet, prancing over rolling hills and across newly revived streams. Recently solid footing had become treacherous.
Tavis kept a close eye on their path in addition to his ward. Ghedlyn never proved her mettle as an athlete and frequently made spectacular falls from the back of her horse. The last such ride, she managed to spill herself before a fist of hungry Trollocs at full sprint. Not the most auspicious fumble for an Aes Sedai to make. She spent the first hours of this flight trying to properly lodge her skinny feet in the stirrups and she bounced around so violently that she would probably be limping for days. Tavis had already caught her twice before she bucked free of the saddle when Lorentz leaped across the currents on a swelling river. Tavis could sense her mortal fear and confusion wrapped up in a ball in the back of his head. He drew the horses back to a walk twice for as long as he thought prudent, resting them before continuing on, hoping beyond hope that his Aes Sedai would calm herself back to full lucidity. The drumming rain prevented clear conversation and he doubted Ghedlyn could manage it even if she heard him. Of all the Aes Sedai he had met and served in his considerable career, none had needed warding as much as this tiny woman.
The girl they saved from the rabble of soldiers and strange channeling women clung white knuckled to his saddle in a muddy lump. She had not spoken a word but for when they first started out, and only then to ask, "Is that an Aes Sedai?"
Tavis flicked the reins and heeled Farstrider, then answered, "She wears the ring, yes."
She made no further comment, though Tavis sometimes thought she might be crying. Difficult to tell under the deluge of rain.
The blond woman in the blue dress with the silver collar around her neck made even less of herself than the girl with Tavis on Farstrider. She lay across Lorentz' saddle ahead of Ghedlyn like a sack of flour, not stirring in the slightest. While they rode, he brought Farstrider close beside Lorentz to check, thinking she might be dead, but found her pinched blue eyes open and blinking. He wondered what could possibly have happened to sap her will for struggle. He wished he knew what she said when she fell. After seeing the women in gray, he had his suspicions about the leash, though he could not be certain. So many questions to ask in so little time.
He did not like it at all; the fewer conflicts in which Ghedlyn ended up embroiled, the better for everyone involved. Romanda Sedai had made his duty perfectly clear. One day, they would need to return to the White Tower, to be sure. If only that choice were his to make and not Ghedlyn's. They two would continue along her meandering path until that sometime day finally came. As long as he could protect her, he would be there for her.
With the torrential downpour, at least he did not have to worry overly much about leaving tracks. Runnels of water up and down slopes deepened to gulleys in the face of the worsening flood. The horses labored across fresh swales, leaving behind no signs that might telegraph a heading. Tavis wondered if the creator were not drowning the world in effort to start anew.
When darkness finally began to fall, Tavis found a shallow recess in the lee of a hill that looked relatively dry and drew rein. He dared not risk Ghedlyn crashing through a thick branch in the dark, or some other painful mistake he knew she might commit. In his experience, a warder's greatest enemy was benign carelessness.
He helped the girl to the ground, then began to set up a camp. Soon, he had Ghedlyn settled by a small fire and set about hobbling the horses. The woman in blue lay in a fetal position in the deepest part of the hollow, shivering. The young girl helped him bring saddle bags off the horses, her eyes still downcast. He staked up a large skin from the side of the hill to give them added shelter -a small comfort in the monumental rain. For a time, he considered asking Ghedlyn to set wards or weave a cloak of light, then thought better of it.
Ghedlyn caught him as he dropped down to sit by the fire. Her dark brown eyes could not quite meet his, though her beautiful lips worked as if she wanted to ask a question. She drew his color shifting cloak aside and pressed her palm into a gap in his tunic. He tensed his thick jaw, but counted the wound nothing; he had seen worse getting her through in the Aiel war. Her touch met fresh blood. No surprise that she had noticed.
"It is not logical..." she muttered, "not logical." Her quaking fingers probed the wound and she tilted her head to the side and blinked.
Tavis gasped aloud when an ice cold shock flooded through him, reaching from the balls of his feet in a swelling to the top of his head. "The wound is not..." he breathed out as she released him. He swore to himself not to regret the hunger he knew would come later, "Thank you."
She vaguely nodded, drawing back in shivers, never once looking him directly in the eye. Her head turned side to side in a darting motion and her lips moved momentarily, though no words came out. She drew her legs in until she sat with her chin resting on her knees. He sensed her fear ease somewhat, though her tongue might remain planted yet for hours.
He patted her on the shoulder and cringed when she twitched, "Please get some sleep, and try not to think about what happened. We will get through this."
Ghedlyn stared into the fire without moving.
The muddy girl crouched across from Tavis, watching the Aes Sedai holding her knees to her chin.
"She has the ageless face," the girl exclaimed softly, "but she does not look like any Aes Sedai I have ever seen."
Tavis grunted a short laugh, "Forgive me, I do not have the pleasure of your acquaintance."
"Maray," the girl supplied. Her bright green eyes were still red from tears, but she spoke solidly. The strength in her appeared plainly on her face, even covered as it was in mud.
"Tavis," the warder responded, "she is Ghedlyn Sedai. You will have to forgive me, Maray, I am afraid we have little in the way of comfort to offer you."
"More than usual," the girl shrugged. She looked as if she were used to the hollow boniness of an empty stomach.
"Well and good," he nodded, adjusting his bracers. "Now, will you please tell me what my lady and I have stumbled into."
Maray divided a long gaze between Tavis and Ghedlyn, hesitant on moving her attention from the Aes Sedai. "You do not know of the Seanchan?"
"Should we?" Tavis looked at her sideways, "Ghedlyn Sedai and I don't often visit towns or villages or larger cities. Any news we receive at all is generally sorely out of date."
"That woman!" Maray suddenly snapped, thrusting a mud encrusted finger at the blond woman with the collar. "Bloody Seanchan sul'dam!"
Ghedlyn jumped at Maray's outburst and squeezed her eyes closed.
"Oh ho," Tavis nodded to himself, wondering if bringing this... Seanchan... along had been such a good idea. He had been hoping for information rather than further complications. Once you landed in a fire, there generally was no way out but through. He immediately decided that Maray lacked compatibility with their other guest.
"Took my sister away, stupid daughter of a goat!" the dirty young girl shouted shrilly, tears streaming from her bright green eyes and over the smudges on her cheeks. She sprang fiercely to her feet and kicked the prone woman in the side as hard as she possibly could. With a grunt, the Seanchan woman doubled herself more completely into a ball. Her back began to shiver. Maray already wound up for a second kick before Tavis sprang over the fire and lifted her away from the woman with his thick arms. "Lemme go! She deserves it!" Maray immediately began to struggle against him.
"Please, hold on," the warder begged the girl, "I brought her here because I thought she might need help."
The muddy girl continued to struggle against him by flailing into his shins with her heels, "In the middle of a fight where you killed like five of her friends, you thought she needed help!"
"Something very strange happened when I locked that collar around her throat," Tavis explained calmly. "When I picked her up, she would have bit me and kicked me like a feral animal. But, then I locked the collar onto her and I felt her fighting spirit flee. I've never felt anyone fall into despair so quickly. That thing is some form of ter'angreal, I would wager, and I have a duty to make certain it finds its way to responsible hands at the White Tower. At the very least, I have to find out what this woman said as I dropped her."
Ghedlyn watched them in bewilderment. Tavis felt something from her not unlike a dawning revelation, as if she verged on becoming inspired. She stared unblinking at the blond woman, stared at the length of delicately worked silver attached to the collar on the woman's neck.
Maray finally relaxed enough for Tavis to let her feet back to the ground, "She would put that collar on your Aes Sedai's neck without a second thought. She deserves to be staked out in the rain."
"This woman is a soldier," Tavis said, "I know soldiers when I see them. You have to forgive soldiers for following orders. No one deserves to be staked anywhere over fighting for what they believe in. Will you give me your oath that you will not strike out at her again?"
"She bloody well deserves it," the girl insisted.
"I will not release you until you give me an oath."
Maray humphed in annoyance, "I swear on the Light not to kill her now."
"Not hurt," Tavis prompted.
"And I also swear not to hurt her," the girl droned, "happy now?"
Tavis carefully let her go, "I hold you to your word. If you break it, I will not hesitate to stake you out in the rain."
Maray glowered at him, but nodded. She wrapped her arms around herself and started to sit, glaring emerald daggers at the back of the woman lying nearby. For the first time, Tavis really looked at her. Her patchy clothes hung loosely over too skinny limbs; whether she wore the remains of breeches or a dress, he could not tell. Her hair straggled to the lower part of her back in a haystack thatch whose color defied guessing. The grime did not disguise the scars lining her arms and legs. When he watched her running from the soldiers before, he never thought her feet might be bare. She shivered and glowered at him again.
Tavis took off his color shifting cloak, then carefully draped it over her shoulders.
"Wait," she protested, green eyes wide.
He shook his head, "No, you need it more than I. We have no other clothes to give you."
Ghedlyn had sat forward on her knees by the fire, hands to the ground. Between her fingers, she held a piece of wood which she used to scratch peculiar symbols into the mushy earth. Every so often, a trail of water would leak down the hill and streamed over her efforts, but she kept on without noticing. She might fill the entire hollow with those scrawlings before she exhausted herself to the point of asleep.
Tavis chuckled. At least her fear had abated enough to permit her return to her single-minded pursuit. He opened a saddle bag and found a packet of dried beef left over from their village stop. He forced a piece into Ghedlyn's free hand, which went without a look into her mouth. He put another piece into the insensate fingers of the woman with the collar. Finally, he passed the remains to Maray, "Here, a little bit left."
The girl accepted uncertainly, "What will you eat?"
"Nothing it seems," Tavis sighed, seating himself, "rabbit tomorrow, perhaps."
Maray stared across the fire at Tavis. The warder grinned slightly and gestured her to eat. She took small bites, her eyes straying every so often to the working Aes Sedai. Ghedlyn veritably flew through her ministrations, wood rasping across earth. Tavis felt from her a growing excitement.
"Tell me about these Seanchan," Tavis asked, sparing a glance for Ghedlyn's deft hands soaring over the ground. "About that collar."
"Sul'dam use it to control damane," Maray glared at the ground. "It is called an a'dam."
"The women in gray are damane?" he asked.
Maray nodded carefully, "Seanchan make slaves of every woman they find who can channel. Put the a'dam on them and treat them like animals. Bloody sul'dam make women into weapons. Every woman they find who is able."
"Erroneous," Ghedlyn interjected abruptly, not glancing up from her scribing. It could be difficult sometimes to know what she responded to, but she continued in her stilted monotone, "I can feel it in her. This woman here can supply semiphase delay while pseudo-linked. It made an asymmetry when I saw channeling from... from... from the damane."
Maray glanced at Tavis, "Pseudo-linked?"
Tavis faced Ghedlyn, "I'm afraid that made little sense Ghedlyn Aes Sedai. Could you please explain more carefully."
With a stray finger, still absorbed in her scribbles, Ghedlyn absently touched the silver leash and the bracelet end of the a'dam, "Metal here contains a weave. It is a link, but it is not -a maybe link, a pseudo-link. It has the same dynamical symmetric properties as sisters joining weaves to channel in a circle, but is forcibly directional. Each sister in the circle reinforces phases to increase channeling intensity in non-linear fashion. A link cannot form unless all participants form a saidar phase space. A pseudo-link cannot form unless both participants form phase space. It is here..." she pointed to a particular string of symbols before her, as if anyone would understand what she referred to.
"What is she saying?" Maray demanded, "that made no better sense."
The warder slowly nodded, understanding what his Aes Sedai had said. It occurred to him that he had spent too many years looking over her shoulder, "She means that both sul'dam and damane must be able to channel to make this ter'angreal work."
Maray stared at him incredulously, "That cannot be. Sul'dam are treated like queens, damane like pets. They turned Ebou Dar upside down and put the collar on every woman they could find who can channel. Just snapped it on and dragged them away." Her eyes defocused as her voice broke.
Tavis looked consideringly at the sul'dam lying in the back of the hollow, brushing his chin with the tips of his fingers. "And they were trying to collar you."
The mud ensconced girl gave a faint shrug, "I am useless. I cannot do anything."
"Three women channeling," Tavis muttered to himself. Ghedlyn had lapsed back into the silence of her work and did not appear ready to offer any further pearls of wisdom, "one wild. Maray, did these Seanchan put their a'dam on your sister?"
Green eyes flashed wide at him, then looked sharply away. "Yes," she wrapped herself closely in the color shifting cloak and lay with her back to the fire. Her stifled sobbing begged no further discourse.
Tavis breathed a sigh. It explained a lot. Retrieving a small sewing kit from the saddle bag, he heaved off his gray and brown tunic, intent on the blood stained hole. He had ignored the glancing slice from the seanchan weapon, but he could not afford a gaping shirt with the steadily increasing cold. The warder knew a good deal of tailoring, since he typically mended both Ghedlyn's clothing and his own. He had even clothed them both when they set out, in tans, browns and grays in an effort to help camoflage the woman he was protecting. She still insisted on wearing the white fringed cloak. At least the white color was relatively innocuous.
As he stitched, he periodically scanned the night and opened his ears to the sounds beyond the fire crackling. Out from under the skin sheltering them against the pattering rain, low clouds passed like ghosts through the weak cast of fire light. Once Ghedlyn finally exhausted herself, he would take a post outside to spend the night watching. Despite the flood, despite all the mire wiping away tracks from horses, he had a nagging sense that they were still coming. He could not explain the feel by any cognitive means, he just knew from long experience what to expect.
"This ter'angreal is imperfect," Ghedlyn said.
He glanced over at her. She no longer scratched arcanum into the ground, but sat holding the bracelet end of the a'dam leash. He could see her muddy serpent ring glimmering from her finger in the fire light as she turned the circular piece over and over in her hand. "What," Tavis asked, "how do you mean?"
"The weave does not balance," her deep brown eyes looked vaguely up, but did not meet his, "in use, the link will oscillate eccentrically at a high resonant frequency."
"And what does that mean?" he set his sewing down for a moment to listen.
Ghedlyn tilted her head. One of her hands toyed nervously with a strand of her long, black hair, "The ter'angreal is not perfect. The oscillation could be removed with an imbedded saidin counter-weave. Such a weave must not have been available when this ter'angreal was crafted. Most logically, it must not have been made in the Age of Legends, when usage of saidin was common. One can conclude that it is a new ter'angreal, created since that time."
"Hold on. Are you saying that these Seanchan make ter'angreal?" Tavis realized.
"It is very probable," Ghedlyn confirmed with a bob of her head. "But, I do not know. Additionally, because the required counter-weave is not present, the link is subject to interference at the resonant frequency. Under most circumstances, it will not be noticable, but it might be possible to fabricate conditions where it becomes significant. I must think about this."
"If it is flawed, why would the Seanchan use it to make a weapon out of women who channel? As a weapon, the a'dam must be reliable." Tavis gestured to the sul'dam, "That woman is a fighter, I'm sure of it. The Light knows, you don't want to trust a shoddy weapon when you are on the butcher's field. That is my personal experience."
"I do not know," the Aes Sedai admitted. "I must consider further," her eyes drooped wearily, but she blinked them back open.
"Aes Sedai have not made ter'angreal since the Age of Legends," Tavis remarked. "If the Dragon has been reborn, that kind of a skill could be very useful for Tar'mon Gai'don."
Ghedlyn nodded quickly, "It is important that I see how the Seanchan make this ter'angreal. We must meet with them, so that I can see."
Tavis chuckled, "Lady, do you have the slightest idea how insane that sounds?"
She stared at him blankly, penetrating brown eyes meeting his for that one time in ten thousand. That one look, so rarely used, penetrated him so deeply that he felt as if flayed of his skin.
"Right," he drawled, covering his shiver, "you think about that a'dam stuff, give me a month or two to think about how to do this."
"We must go soon."
"They are hunting us now," Tavis responded, "soon may not be a choice."
"We must go," she insisted.
He let out a sigh and fended her off with his hands, "We will go, just calm down about it. At the very least, do me a favor and get some sleep so that you can think about it just a little more clearly. Going against them directly is not a smart move."
----
"They are no longer moving ahead," the sul'dam bowed with the news. "Probably bedded for the night."
Seilara's burnished hazel eyes narrowed, "Are you sure this is the truth? You were lied to before."
"Absolutely, commander," Eashin adjusted the a'dam locked to her wrist. She leaned over to pet the damane who lay on the ground at her feet, "I would stake my honor on it now."
"How far?" the black-haired Seanchan battle commander demanded.
"Maybe as far as four leagues," Eashin shrugged, "it is not easy to be specific."
"If we struggle through this watershod mess all night, they will be ready to leave with the morning sun before we can reach them," Seilara turned away grumbling, "If only we had Ghrolm or Torm. Can we call support from the Fists of Heaven?"
A warrior standing nearby bowed and slurred, "Unlikely commander. Through this peasoup? We have no word if they are even flying."
"Very well," Seilara spat in anger. The day just kept getting worse, "We march through the night."
"As you wish," her petty officer darted off to his men with a quick salute. She could hear him sloshing through the mud in the dark, headed toward a crowd of smoldering torches.
"If I may, commander," Eashin bowed her head, "they will know when we are coming."
"One difficulty at a time. We can deal with that once we close their lead."
End Chapter 2
This story is copyright Greg Smith 2005
Please do not use any part of it without my permission.