Part Two

"Move, there's not much time!" Mat's cry barely rose above the deafening noise of fire and dying screams. The other members of their group, Birgitte and Juilin, came from opposite sides of the room to flank Thom. He still held the barely conscious Aes Sedai in his arms as if protecting some part of himself that had been badly wounded. Moiraine's eyes roved about the firelit room without resting in one spot for long, though it was hard to tell if she understood what was happening. The arm that held tightly around Thom's neck and back was the only other part of her body that seemed to have life left within.

Brigitte shouted above the roar of the flames as they began to move toward the south wall, "Everything is collapsing. Move fast and stay together."

Indeed, everything did seem to be collapsing. The walls and pillars around them were melting and folding in on themselves in a way that should have been utterly impossible. Large cavernous halls and smaller rooms alike would suddenly seem to become different rooms that were not on fire for an instant before changing once more. This new effect was even more dizzying to the eye, though whatever illusion the Eelfinn had put into place to confuse visitors did not seem to be working properly. If it were not for the shortcut Thom and his group had made they would have no hope of finding their way out.

Dead creatures lay scattered along their path as they ran. Others lay propped in doorways, prone and stupefied. On these Eelfinn's laps were short lengths of light iron chains. They held the creatures in place with no need to lock them to anything.

The company slowed their running enough to step carefully over the Eelfinn in doorways, not wanting to disturb them. The creatures were the only things keeping the doorways from disappearing entirely from the walls. It had been only luck that they'd found out how to open up passages in that way, after Mat tried to use a short length of chain to bind a male and force him to guide them.

Mat and the male had stumbled back into a wall that shifted to become an entrance to another room. They had to find their own way after all, but this fairly straightforward path of doorways back to the entrance was a convenient cheat. It was certainly lucky for them now, as the entire place looked on the verge of turning itself inside out.

Thom called for a brief halt in a room that was not as badly damaged as the others. The room was quiet enough to hear the reverberating chords of harp music that stubbornly resisted fading once Thom had played them, hours before. Things did not do what they should here.

He shifted Moiraine in his grasp in order to check on her breathing. She didn't seem to be doing much of it. Her head was now pressed into the front of his coat, the tendons in her neck straining with effort. Juilin pressed a hand overtop of her chest, leaning in close to listen to anything wrong there while Birgitte and Mat both stood impatiently scanning the area around them.

"It's shallow. Heart's faint." Juilin fumbled at his belt to retrieve a small flask, encumbered a bit by the few loops of chains that weighed across the front of him, "Should we try giving her some water?"

Birgitte shifted her weight from one foot to the other as she shook her head, "No food or drink in these lands." Her silver bow was knocked with a wooden arrow, it's tip wrapped in cloth that had been dipped in lamp oil. More of the wooden arrows sat in the quiver alongside her customary silver ones, though the supply of each was dwindling low.

"Something is wrong.." The sudden pronouncement from the Aes Sedai startled all of them, though it wasn't hard in the state they were in. Her voice was rough and low pitched, sounding unlike herself.

She would not say more, and it was unwise to remain still for long.

Moiraine did seem to be straining, but it was more like she was trying to keep something in rather than struggle to breathe the further along they ran. He could feel the heat of her through his coat, even hotter by proximity than the flames threatening the party all around. The feeling from her moist forehead pressing on his chest burned through the cloth as if she had a high fever, though being Aes Sedai she could not possibly be sick. It was one more thing in the plethora of worries for Thom.

Thom was at the center of the party at first, but it was difficult to see over Moiraine to the floor below while running. This had caused him to fall to the back of the group with her to avoid tripping and landing on the small woman. As fragile as she felt to him he was afraid the force would break a bone or three.

'That's all she needs,' he though ruefully, 'for this fool of a man to break her to pieces.'

The room the party had first entered through the Tower of Ghenji was still there, undamaged and seemingly untouched. The doorway out into the true world wasn't at all like the ones Mat had seen before, as he'd told them earlier, but just a flat window among a panel of others. The windows looked out into an impossible garden filled with objects that could be neither animal nor plant, and yet seemed to live. Birgitte had told them that the way leading out from the Tower of Ghenji could change at any time, but this one still had that shimmering quality about it, so it was likely it hadn't changed.

There wasn't time to decide who had to go first. Birgitte was in the lead, then Mat and Juilin. They went in one right after the other. Thom had only just leapt through the doorway into the room to see Juilin disappear in swirling white when something caught around the gleeman's foot. Moiraine tumbled out of his grasp onto the floor below as he staggered to keep from landing atop her.

Moiraine hit the floor, a rasping sound low in her throat. She scrambled backwards away from him, even then with a kind of injured feline grace. Her eyes locked on their way out. The fires had already caught up with them. The room that they were standing in began to bulge with the force on the other side.

The Eelfinn in the doorway was what had tripped them. It sat with it's hand still clutched tightly around Thom's boot, mouth moving as if trying to force words out of itself. Thom pulled his foot out of his boot - good leather that - to avoid the trouble of prying it's fingers loose. He went to Moiraine, who was staring from the Eelfinn back to the panel of windows marking their exit.

"It is wrong," She leaned on one arm with a hand to her temple as if trying not to crumple to the floor. The sudden burst of movement had taken what little was left of her stamina.

"What is, Moiraine?" He lifted her up to her feet, holding her steady with a hand around her slim waist. Time was growing short. From the look of the room it was only a minute more, perhaps less, until they were consumed by the blaze.

Moiraine shook her head, rubbing at both temples now, "Saidar...it is not right to go."

She looked like a woman at the end of a long illness, with veins standing out starkly against a sweat slicked face as pale as death itself. The air in the room began to waver with blistering heat. Flames suddenly burst out on the Eelfinn in the doorway. It began to shriek. She did not notice.

Thom pulled her with him to the exit, though it was not where it should have been. He was sure it was the window to the far right that Mat and company had gone through, and now the middle pane was the one shimmering with light.

"No, Thom. Leave me. I cannot stop what is coming..."

He could feel the waves of flame come into the room. Moiraine's hair lifted slightly, the ends of a few strands bursting alight. Something else seemed to be rushing into the room as well; some other sort of force. It was no matter that the exit had changed. They must go through it. To stay there surely meant death.

"You will not die," he promised her.

Thom leapt into the exit with her still in his grasp, holding tightly. There was no time, and no choice.