Chapter 13

Relics of Ages Past

"Aes Sedai have tried to remove the taint for centuries, but they realized it was impossible. Did you truly restore that man's mind?" Sheraine asked as we settled in for the night. After getting the lay of the land and bartering for some food as well, I'd flown us directly back to our camp on top of the pillar-like hill. It's hard to have a good conversation when you're going a hundred miles an hour without anything between you and the wind.

"I freed him of the corruption that had settled on his soul," I said as the strips of bacon sizzled in the pan I held above the fire.

"If you can do this, could you do the same as you did in Falme? Cleanse saidin in an area?"

I let out a breath. "You felt what happened when I did use it. Morden wasn't important, but even without using its name, the Dark One turned its attention towards me. If I try to cleanse saidin or just remove what corruption has accumulated in Rand's soul, I risk a direct clash with the Dark One." I grimaced. "I fear I'll lose that one at this moment. As a champion of the Creator herself, Rand has some advantages I lack and he needs to grow much more before he's ready."

Whatever had happened was far more intense than the flashes I remembered from the books whenever someone used the Dark One's name. Was I just more sensitive, or was it the use of my divine powers that had enabled it to intrude into reality a little deeper?

Sheraine frowned. "You weren't afraid of drawing his attention at Falme."

"Oh, I was," I said as I added some of the greens we'd gathered ourselves before we'd gotten ambushed. "Which is why I waited until its attention was fully on Rand. Between that and the Heroes of the Horn running around, I had enough distractions that I got away with what I did. It was still a gamble," I admitted.

"Speaking of gambles," Gemiad said. "What are the odds that these people just happen to know about the Portal Stone you're looking for? How many are there?"

"I don't know how many there are, and I'm not sure this is the one we're looking for. But even if it isn't, it should give me a solid location of where we can find the right Stone. I'm more worried about our food situation, we didn't get that much food."

Not surprising, the patrol of the Stalking Panther tribe, the name of their people apparently, had traveled light. So rather than offering their own supplies they'd helped us forage. Even then, we still didn't have enough food to last a week.

"This Portal Stone is also used as a marker of their border with their neighbors to the southeast," Sheraine said. "While I don't trust their own description of this Bloodhawk tribe, just having the Panthers as neighbors will have made them wary of outsiders." She grimaced as she worked her injured thigh and tried to rub some of the stiffness away.

"They told us there were only a few times a year that any sort of peaceful contact between tribes was possible," I said. "And that it happened at specific places requiring specific rituals. That does explain the welcome the Sea Folk received. But it also means that I don't think we can expect a better welcome from anybody else in this region than what we already got from the Stalking Panthers."

"Not unless you want to drop in as a dragon again," Gemiad said.

"Ha, tempting. But we got lucky. They froze rather than act in their panic."

"Which is a dangerous gamble when there are so many wilders around," Sheraine said. "I hadn't expected that without Aes Sedai to teach them how to wield the One Power. Even the man appeared to have had some training." She shuddered. "And without Aes Sedai to control such matters, they must be using the One Power against each other."

"Which means most, if not all, tribes have at least one channeler," I said. Not that surprising when you considered how the Aiel and the Ath'an Miere managed to find all of their channelers. In many ways, and despite what Sheraine and other Aes Sedai believed, it was the Westlands that were the least organized when it came to channelers. "Looks like dinner is ready. Let's eat!"

VVVV

As it turned out, the Portal Stone they had directed us to wasn't the one I was looking for, but it did give me the exact heading I needed for the right Portal Stone.

We flew over a chaotic geographic tapestry. Once, the land looked like it had been folded up until it broke and it had left a maze of stone and earth. Then a perfectly flat mesa towering five hundred meters over its surroundings that had to be the size of New York. We flew over another jungle, which then gave way to grassland, which turned into a lake of bubbling magma before it turned into a forest of fast-growing bamboo at the edge of a lake it took us three hours to cross. At least three large herds of hippos had claimed the shallower portions of the lake while one of the smaller islands was entirely occupied by sunning alligators.

We flew high but couldn't miss the little signs of human occupation, though never actual people. Any sign of smoke I steered well clear of. But we also saw carved totems here and there, some painted, others charred and cracked by fire. Ruins of piled-up stone, scattered as if by a giant's rampage. A flat segment of perfectly smooth road that began at a crater lake only to end up buried in desert sand.

We were now flying over that desert. Tall dunes of reddish sand snaked their ways across the landscape, the only speck of life a few plants huddled around a watering hole barely an arm's width wide.

"Is this what the Aiel Waste looks like?" Gemiad wondered as we looked through the viewing window in the belly of the airship. The wheel lock kept it on its current heading and I was more worried about missing the Portal Stone right now. If my calculations were right, we should see it today. Or maybe tomorrow if I'd overestimated our speed.

I shook my head. "The parts I saw were dry, but it had a little more hardy plant life as well as gulches and canyons. This is just sand and even more sand. This looks more like the description I've heard of the southernmost region called the Termool. Not even the Aiel can survive there."

"We won't either for much longer," Gemiad said, studying the speck of green one could charitably call an oasis. "Water isn't the problem, but food is. If this desert doesn't end tomorrow, or we don't find the Portal Stone, we'll have to turn back."

"We're almost there," I promised her. "And it should only take a couple of hours at most once we're there for me to find everything I came here looking for. Both the cache and the Night Road."

"But you won't leave, right?"

I frowned at her. "What do you mean? You just pointed out that we can't stay. Ah, you mean…" I sighed. "No, I have no intention of just opening the Night Road and leaving this world. I won't abandon you and everybody else while you're facing the Last Battle. I won't even be opening the Night Road without more preparations, it is far too dangerous."

Gemiad crossed her arms. "How so?"

"Because I don't know what's on the other side of the gate. Could be perfectly safe, there could be defenses that will kill anything trying to cross, or an army of creatures far more deadly than Trollocs just waiting to invade." Having Uncreated get into this world would be a disaster.

"And that's your way home?" Gemiad said aghast.

"The first step, yes. But I'll probably have to navigate several Night Roads and figuring out what path will lead me home … I don't know if it's even possible."

"Then why try? Why not stay here? If it's not about avoiding the Last Battle and you don't even know if your family will still be there if you even find your world?"

I stared out over the desert. "I didn't have these powers back home. Now that I do, there is a chance. A hope. I might-" I broke off when I spotted something on the horizon, off to our left. It was a rock formation, about fifty meters tall, but instinct told me the side we could see had been carved. "I think we might have found it."

I went up to the pilot house and disengaged the lock. It still took us almost two hours to reach the formation. I needed the others to announce when we reached as I couldn't see it from up here, but even before that I got some details from Sheraine and Gemiad.

A face had been carved into the side of the rock formation at some point, one with a helmet of some sort. And someone else had later hacked away at it, turning the eyes into craters and obliterating the lower jaw. On top of the rock was indeed a Portal Stone, and it could only be the one I was looking for.

Securing the airship was a little hard, the top of the formation was flat and hard. No trees or boulders that the anchors could bite into or wrap around. In the end, I had to resort to carving some anchor points out of the rock myself.

"So, where is this Night Road you are looking for?"

Even from down here atop the rock formation we could still see quite far, and what there was around us was pretty much nothing. "A little hard to say." I consulted my compass. "This Portal Stone was two-point-twenty-three miles south by southwest from Nol Caimaine." I pointed in its direction, but all that was left of its crystal arcology was a fine sparkling dust among the grains of sand. "The entrance to the Night Road was southeast of the city, one-point-two miles from its river dock." That river was also gone.

There was a great dune blocking our view of the actual area, a sand devil dancing its way along the top of the ridge and heading north. The plaintive cries of a bird chick somewhere close by was the only sound piercing the mournful song of the desert wind. High above, hidden in the glare of the noon sun, its mother answered its young.

"But I want to see if the cache mentioned in the travelogue is here, first. There might be something useful in there."

Sheraine looked around with a doubtful expression. She no longer needed the crutch, but she still favored the leg. "From your description, this traveler came here during the Breaking, when Nol Caimaine still stood. However deeply buried it was, it surely won't have survived all this destruction?"

"Oh, it's not buried," I said as we walked closer to the Portal Stone. It stood at the edge of the cliff, a part of the bowl the pillar stood in hanging out in the air. The steps leading down barely had any color left, the symbols on the pillar worn down to vague impressions by the wind. "Or you could say it's not buried in the ground. It's buried in the Pattern."

"Should we think of reality like a roll of fabric again?" Gemiad asked.

"A tapestry or a blanket works to," I said with a hint of a smile. "But if I understood the translation right, the traveler created a pocket in reality itself. Then he hid the opening. He anchored that opening to the Portal Stone to provide it stability, but that's also the weakness."

Find the lock!

I drew my power up as I breathed in, then sent out feelers that probed the space around the Portal Stone. Reality felt rigid within the borders of that depression as if it had been fastened to scaffolding and braced. I could almost see the structure, but it wasn't what I was looking for.

I was looking for something else, something that had been added later. Something less sturdy than this. And there it was, a thread leading to nowhere. "I think I've got it, might want to step back."

"Why?" Sheraine still took a step back.

"Because there's no mention of any security measures in the travelogue. And I don't know if that means they didn't add any or they didn't want to share how they safeguarded their possessions. Here goes."

Free for the Taking!

I pushed the Effort into the empty space and found resistance even as my power shifted and probed. It was trying to pick a lock made to resist such attempts by reconfiguring itself. Only my nature allowed me to understand some of what it did; it was a work of art. But when you had the equivalent of a couple of nukes in your pocket, it didn't matter how clever the locksmith had been.

The sound of crystal shattering echoed across the desert. Space to the right of the Portal Stone swirled before unfolding like a bag being turned inside out. One moment, the spot had been empty. One blink of the eye later, there was a foot locker-sized chest made out of a copper alloy gleaming in the desert sun.

The chest had clearly seen some use, there were scratches and dents all over, as well as a couple of faded labels and words etched in an alien language scrawled on the lid.

"What are you expecting to find in there?" Gemiad asked.

"Travel supplies, but supplies meant to help a traveler of the Night Roads. So probably a weapon that would make even a Power-wrought sword look like a toothpick. Maybe some clothes or armor. Hopefully, something that helps with navigating Night Roads and finding their entrances. And almost certainly, things I haven't even thought of. Or nothing, if the traveler or someone else who read the same text I have already got here."

However, that seemed unlikely, given that the spatial pocket had been intact and locked. And nothing had exploded or shot at them. "Right, time to see what we got."

I walked over, studying the lock on the chest itself. It was a simple thing, a combination lock, though the symbols were just as alien as the writing on the chest, but clearly from a very different language. Or they were numbers. Either way, this wasn't an obstacle.

Then I smelled flowers, coming from my left. I looked over my shoulder at Sheraine. "Something wrong?"

"I don't know. And neither do you. If this chest has truly been left alone for thousands of years, its contents might have become unstable. I've heard horror stories of what happens when someone tries to use a damaged ter'angreal. Can you guarantee me that whatever is in that chest won't be just as dangerous?"

I shrugged. "I don't think that will be a problem. The chest itself is perfectly mundane. If anything inside was unstable, it should have gone off the moment I emptied the spatial pocket." I returned my attention to the chest and gave it a nudge with my will.

The universal code is freedom

The combination lock spun on its own, wedges popping away from the lock's ring like it was a reverse stargate. A few moments later the lid swung away and something jumped into the air. It hung in the air for a moment, a twisted constellation of black metal rings the size of a basketball, densely inscribed with glowing symbols.

Before anyone could speak, a sphere of glowing light pulsed out from the orb passing harmlessly over us only to stop once it reached a radius of about five meters. "What is that?" Sheraine asked, one hand pointing at the metal rings, which were rotating faster now.

I didn't waste any words but called upon a miracle.

Mark the Maker

The orb's mystery unfolded and I gasped as a war flashed before my mind's eye like no other. Warmachines strode, flew, swam. People, many human, many not, bedecked in bright armor, naked save for war paint, or wearing a living suit chanted, screamed, gestured in silence as they fought, bled, died.

And at the center were titans, their clash not a battle but a natural disaster. One word and time fled, one sweep of an arm and a sun was born, one strike of an axe and a sea's worth of water sprang from the ground.

But at the center of the vision was this orb, three people caught in its light shell. They hammered on the light without avail, a spell bounced off the metal sphere itself and ricocheted through the sphere until it was blocked by an interposed shield.

Then, space itself twisted and everything was gone.

"It's a trap!"

I turned away and scooped up both women, already gathering my power as my wings snapped out.

No shield shall bar-

Space twisted and the light vanished, the sun vanished. We vanished.