The great hunt - By Robert Jordan Page 0,119

shoulders quivered with aching; his stomach lurched from the feel of filth covering him, and his head. . . . He tried to steady his breathing. That had never happened before. When the void went, it went like a pricked bubble, just gone, in a twinkling. Never broken like glass. His head felt numb, as if the thousand slashes had happened so quickly the pain had not yet come. But every cut had felt as real as if done with a knife. He touched his temple, and was surprised not to see blood on his fingers.

Hurin still stood there watching him, still confident. If anything, the sniffer seemed more sure by the minute. Lord Rand was doing something. That was what lords were for. They protected the land and the people with their bodies and their lives, and when something was wrong, they set it aright and saw fairness and justice done. As long as Rand was doing something, anything, Hurin would have confidence that it would all come right in the end. That was what lords did.

Loial had a different look, a slightly puzzled frown, but his eyes were on Rand, too. Rand wondered what he was thinking.

“It was worth a try,” he told them. The rancid oil feel, inside his head—Light, it’s inside me! I don’t want it inside me!—was fading slowly, but he still thought he might vomit. “I will try again, in a few minutes.”

He hoped he sounded confident. He had no idea how the Stones worked, if what he was doing had any chance of success. Maybe there are rules for working them. Maybe you have to do something special. Light, maybe you can’t use the same Stone twice, or. . . . He cut off that line of thought. There was no good in thinking like that. He had to do it. Looking at Loial and Hurin, he thought he knew what Lan had meant about duty pressing down like a mountain.

“My Lord, I think. . . .” Hurin let his words trail off, looking abashed for a moment. “My Lord, maybe, if we find the Darkfriends, we can make one of them tell us how to get back.”

“I would ask a Darkfriend or the Dark One himself if I thought I’d get a true answer back,” Rand said. “But we are all there is. Just us three.” Just me. I’m the one who has to do it.

“We could follow their trail, my Lord. If we catch them. . . .”

Rand stared at the sniffer. “You can still smell them?”

“I can, my Lord.” Hurin frowned. “It’s faint, pale-like, like everything else here, but I can smell the trail. Right up there.” He pointed to the rim of the hollow. “I don’t understand it, my Lord, but—Last night, I could have sworn the trail went right on by the hollow back—back where we were. Well, it’s in the same place now, only here, and fainter, like I said. Not old, not faint like that, but. . . . I don’t know, Lord Rand, except that it’s there.”

Rand considered. If Fain and the Darkfriends were here—wherever here was—they might know how to get back. They had to, if they had reached here in the first place. And they had the Horn, and the dagger. Mat had to have that dagger. For that if for nothing else, he had to find them. What finally decided him, he was ashamed to realize, was that he was afraid to try again. Afraid to try channeling the Power. He was less afraid of confronting Darkfriends and Trollocs with only Hurin and Loial than he was of that.

“Then we will go after the Darkfriends.” He tried to sound sure, the way Lan would, or Ingtar. “The Horn must be recovered. If we can’t puzzle out a way to take it from them, at least we will know where they are when we find Ingtar again.” If only they don’t ask how we’re going to find him again. “Hurin, make sure it really is the trail we’re after.”

The sniffer leaped into his saddle, eager to be doing something himself, perhaps eager to be away from the hollow, and scrambled his horse up the broad, colored steps. The animal’s hooves rang loudly on the stone, but they made not a mark.

Rand stowed Red’s hobbles in his saddlebags—the banner was still there; he would not have minded if that had been left behind—then gathered his bow and quiver and climbed to the stallion’s back.