He let go of the thing he had made, with a grim smile. A purple bar of light still seemed to cross his vision in afterimage.
Across the great chamber a piece of one of the columns crashed to the floor tiles. Where that bar of light — or whatever it had been; not light, exactly — had swung, neat slices were gone from the columns. A gaping swath cut half the width of the wall behind them.
“Did any of them bite you, or bleed on you?”
He spun at the sound of Moiraine's voice; absorbed in what he had done, he had not heard her come up the stairs. She stood clutching her skirts with both hands, peering at him, face lost in moonshadow. She would have sensed the things the same way he did, but to be here so quickly she must have run. “The Maidens let you pass? Have you become Far Dareis Mai, Moiraine?”
“They grant me some privileges of a Wise One,” she said in a rush, impatience raw in her usually melodious voice. “I told the guards I had to speak with you urgently. Now, answer me! Did the Darkhounds bite you, or bleed on you? Did their saliva touch you?”
“No,” he answered slowly. Darkhounds. The little he knew he had gotten from old stories, the sort used to frighten children in the southlands. Some grownups believed, too. “Why should a bite worry you? You could Heal it. Does this mean the Dark One is free?” Enclosed in the Void as he was, even fear was distant.
The tales he had heard said the Darkhounds ran the night in the Wild Hunt, with the Dark One himself the hunter; they left no print on even the softest dirt, only on stone, and they would not stop until you faced and defeated them or put running water between you. Crossroads were supposed to be particularly dangerous places to meet them, and the time just after sunset or just before sunrise. He had seen enough old stories walking by now to believe that any of it could be true.
“No, not that, Rand.” She seemed to be regaining her selfcontrol; her voice was silver chimes again, calm and cool. “They are only another kind of Shadowspawn, something that should never have been made. But their bite is death as surely as a dagger in the heart, and I do not think I could have Healed such a wound before it killed you. Their blood, even their saliva, is poison. A drop on the skin can kill, slowly, with great pain at the end. You are lucky there were only three: Unless you killed more before I arrived? Their packs are usually larger, as many as ten or twelve, or so say the scraps left from the War Of the Shadow.”
Larger packs. He was not the only target in Rhuidean for one of the Forsaken…
“We must speak of what you used to kill them,” Moiraine began, but he was already running as hard as he could, ignoring her cries to know where he was going and why.
Down flights of stairs, through darkened corridors where sleepy Maidens, roused by the pounding boots, peered at him in consternation from moonlit rooms. Through the front doors, where Lan stood restlessly with the two women on guard, his colorshifting Warder's cloak about his shoulders, making parts of him seem to blend into the night.
“Where is Moiraine?” he shouted as Rand dashed by, but Rand leaped down the broad steps two at a time without replying.
The halfhealed wound in his side clenched like a fist, pain he was only vaguely aware of inside the Void, by the time he reached the building he sought. It stood at the very edge of Rhuidean, far from the plaza, as far from the camp Moiraine shared with the Wise Ones as it was possible to be and remain in the city. The upper floors had collapsed in a mound of rubble that fanned out onto the cracked earth beyond the pavement. Only the bottom two floors remained whole. Refusing his body's efforts to hunch over around the pain, he went in, still at a dead run.
Once the great antechamber, encircled by a stone balcony, had been tall; now it was taller, open to the night sky, its pale stone floor strewn with rubble from the collapse. In the moonshadows beneath the balcony, three Darkhounds were up on their hind legs, clawing and chewing at a bronzeclad door that shivered under their assault. The smell of burned sulfur hung strong in the air.
Remembering what had happened before, Rand darted to one side as he channeled, the shaft of liquid white fire streaking by the door as it destroyed the Shadowspawn. He had tried to make it less this time, to confine the destruction to the Darkhounds, but the thick wall at the far end of the chamber had a shadowed hole in it. Not all the way through, he thought — it was hard to tell by moonlight — but he would have to fine his control of this weapon.
The bronze sheathing on the door was tattered and torn as though the teeth and toenails of the Darkhounds really had been steel; lamplight shone through a number of small holes. There were pawprints in the floorstones, but surprisingly few. Releasing saidin, he found a place where he would not cut his hand to shreds and pounded on the door. Suddenly the pain in his side was very real and present; he took a deep breath and tried to thrust it away. “Mat? It's me, Rand! Open up, Mat!”
After a moment, the door opened a crack, letting out a spill of lamplight; Mat peered through doubtfully, then pulled the door wider, leaning against it as if he had run ten miles carrying a sack of rocks. Except for a silver foxhead medallion hanging around his neck, its eye shaped and shaded like the ancient Aes Sedai symbol, he was naked. The way Mat felt about Aes Sedai, Rand was surprised he had not sold the thing long since. Deeper in the room, a tall, goldenhaired woman was calmly wrapping a blanket around herself. A Maiden, by the spears and buckler lying at her feet.
Rand hastily averted his eyes and cleared his throat. “I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”
“We're fine.” Uneasily, Mat looked around the antechamber. “Now we are. You killed it, or something? I don't want to know what it was, as long as it's gone. It's bloody hard on a man sometimes, being your friend.”
Not only a friend. Another ta'veren, and perhaps a key to victory in Tarmon Gai'don; anyone who wanted to strike at Rand had reason to strike at Mat, as well. But Mat always tried to deny both things. “They're gone, Mat. Darkhounds. Three of them.”
“I told you I didn't want to know,” Mat groaned. “Darkhounds now. I can't say it isn't always something new around you. A man wouldn't get bored; not until the day he died. If I hadn't been on my feet for a drink of wine when the door started to open...” He trailed off, shivering, and scratched a red place on his right arm as he studied the ravaged metal sheathing. “You know, it's funny how the mind plays tricks. When I was putting everything I had into holding this door shut, I could have sworn one of them had chewed a hole right through it. I could see its bloody head. And its teeth. Melindhra's spear didn't even faze it.”
Moiraine's arrival was more spectacular this time, running in, skirts held up, panting and fuming. Lan was at her heels with his sword in hand and thunderclouds on his stone face, and right behind, a throng of Far Dareis Mai that spilled out into the street. Some of the Maidens wore no more than smallclothes, but every one held her spears alertly and had her shoufa wrapped around her head, black veil hiding all but her eyes, ready to kill. Moiraine and Lan, at least, looked relieved to see him standing there calmly talking to Mat, though. The Aes Sedai also looked as if she meant to have strong words with him. With the veils, it was impossible to tell what the Aiel thought.
Letting out a loud yelp, Mat darted back into his room and began hastily tugging on a pair of breeches, his capering impeded by the way he kept trying to haul at the breeches and scratch his arm at the same time. The goldenhaired Maiden watched with a broad grin that threatened to break into laughter.
“What's the matter with your arm?” Rand asked.
“I told you the mind plays funny tricks,” Mat said, still trying to scratch and pull at the same time. “When I thought that thing chewed through the door, I thought it slobbered all over my arm, too, and now it bloody itches like fire. Even looks like a burn there.”
Rand opened his mouth, but Moiraine was already pushing past him. Staring at her, Mat fell down while frantically dragging his breeches on the rest of the way, but she knelt beside him, ignoring his protests, clasping his head in her hands. Rand had been Healed before, and seen it done, but instead of what he expected, Mat only gave a shiver and lifted up the medallion by its leather thong so that it hung against his hand.
“Bloody thing is colder than ice all of a sudden,” he muttered. “What are you doing, Moiraine? If you want to do something, Heal this itch; it has my whole arm now.” His right arm was red from wrist to shoulder, and had begun to look puffy.
Moiraine stared at him with the most startled expression Rand had ever seen on her face. Maybe the only one. “I will,” she said slowly. “If the medallion is cold, take it off.”
Mat frowned at her, then finally pulled it over his head and laid it beside him. She took his head again, and he gave a shout as if he had been ducked headfirst into ice; his legs stiffened and his back arched; his eyes stared at nothing, as wide as they would go. When Moiraine took her hands away, he slumped, gulping air. The redness and swelling were gone. It took three tries before he could speak. “Blood and — Does it have to be that flaming way every flaming time? It was just a bloody itch!”
“You watch your tongue with me,” Moiraine told him, getting up, “or I will find Nynaeve and put her in charge of you.” But her heart was not in it; she could have been talking in her sleep. She was trying not to stare at the foxhead as Mat hung it back around his neck. “You will need rest,” she said absently. “Stay in bed tomorrow, if you feel like it.”