The great hunt - By Robert Jordan Page 0,55

words on the door. Panting, he scrubbed until it was all one bloody smear, but he could not stop.

“What do you do?”

At the sharp voice behind him, he whirled, stooping to seize his sword.

A woman stood in the outer doorway, back stiff with outrage. Her hair was like pale gold, in a dozen or more braids, but her eyes were dark, and sharp on his face. She looked not much older than he, and pretty in a sulky way, but there was a tightness to her mouth he did not like. Then he saw the shawl she had wrapped tightly around her, with its long, red fringe.

Aes Sedai. And Light help me, she’s Red Ajah. “I. . . . I was just. . . . It’s filthy stuff. Vile.”

“Everything must be left exactly as it is for us to examine. Touch nothing.” She took a step forward, peering at him, and he took one back. “Yes. Yes, as I thought. One of those with Moiraine. What do you have to do with this?” Her gesture took in the heads on the table and the bloody scrawl on the walls.

For a minute he goggled at her. “Me? Nothing! I came down here to find. . . . Egwene!”

He turned to open the inner door, and the Aes Sedai shouted, “No! You will answer me!”

Suddenly it was all he could do to stand up, to keep holding the lamp and his sword. Icy cold squeezed at him from all sides. His head felt caught in a frozen vise; he could barely breathe for the pressure on his chest.

“Answer me, boy. Tell me your name.”

Involuntarily he grunted, trying to answer against the chill that seemed to be pressing his face back into his skull, constricting his chest like frozen iron bands. He clenched his jaws to keep the sound in. Painfully he rolled his eyes to glare at her through a blur of tears. The Light burn you, Aes Sedai! I won’t say a word, the Shadow take you!

“Answer me, boy! Now!”

Frozen needles pierced his brain with agony, grated into his bones. The void formed inside him before he even realized he had thought of it, but it could not hold out the pain. Dimly he sensed light and warmth somewhere in the distance. It flickered queasily, but the light was warm, and he was cold. Distant beyond knowing, but somehow just within reach. Light, so cold. I have to reach . . . what? She’s killing me. I have to reach it, or she’ll kill me. Desperately he stretched toward the light.

“What is going on here?”

Abruptly the cold and the pressure and the needles vanished. His knees sagged, but he forced them stiff. He would not fall to his knees; he would not give her the satisfaction. The void was gone, too, as suddenly as it had come. She was trying to kill me. Panting, he raised his head. Moiraine stood in the doorway.

“I asked what is going on here, Liandrin,” she said.

“I found this boy here,” the Red Aes Sedai replied calmly. “The guards are murdered, and here he is. One of yours. And what are you doing here, Moiraine? The battle is above, not here.”

“I could ask the same of you, Liandrin.” Moiraine looked around the room with only a slight tightening of her mouth for the charnel. “Why are you here?”

Rand turned away from them, awkwardly shoved back the bolts on the inner door and pulled it open. “Egwene came down here,” he announced for anyone who cared, and went in, holding his lamp high. His knees kept wanting to give way; he was not sure how he stayed on his feet, only that he had to find Egwene. “Egwene!”

A hollow gurgle and a thrashing sound came from his right, and he thrust the lamp that way. The prisoner in the fancy coat was sagging against the iron grille of his cell, his belt looped around the bars and then around his neck. As Rand looked, he gave one last kick, scraping across the straw-covered floor, and was still, tongue and eyes bulging out of a face gone almost black. His knees almost touched the floor; he could have stood anytime he wanted to.

Shivering, Rand peered into the next cell. The big man with the sunken knuckles huddled in the back of his cell, eyes as wide as they could open. At the sight of Rand, he screamed and twisted around, clawing frantically at the stone wall.

“I won’t hurt