Lord of Chaos (The Wheel of Time #6)

Lord of Chaos (The Wheel of Time #6) Page 110

Need. A ter’angreal. Not in Tar Valon. Need.

Shift.

Wherever they were, the dawn-lit city was certainly not Tar Valon. Not twenty paces away the broad paved street became a white stone bridge with statues at either end, arching over a stone-lined canal. Fifty paces the other way stood another. Slender, balcony-ringed towers stood everywhere, like spears driven through round slices of ornate confection. Every building was white, the doorways and windows large pointed arches, sometimes double or triple arches. On the grander buildings, long balconies of white-painted wrought iron, with intricate wrought-iron screens to hide any occupants, looked down on the streets and canals, and white domes banded with scarlet or gold rose to points as sharp as the towers.

Need. Shift.

It might as well have been a different city. The street was narrow and unevenly paved, hemmed in on both sides by buildings five and six stories high, their white plaster flaked away in many places to expose the brick beneath. There were no balconies here. Flies buzzed about, and it was hard to say whether it was still dawn because of the shadows down on the ground.

They exchanged looks. It seemed unlikely they would find a ter’angreal here, but they had gone too far to stop now. Need.

Shift.

Nynaeve sneezed before she could open her eyes, and again as soon as they were open. Every shift of her feet kicked up swirls of dust. This storeroom was not at all like that in the Tower. Chests, crates and barrels crowded the small room, piled every which way atop one another, with barely an aisle left between, and all under a thick layer of dust. Nynaeve sneezed so hard she thought her shoes would come off—and the dust vanished. All of it. Elayne wore a small smug smile. Nynaeve said nothing, only fixed the room firmly in her mind without dust. She should have thought of that.

Looking over the jumble, she sighed. The room was no larger than the one where their bodies lay sleeping in Salidar, but searching through all that. . . . “It will take weeks.”

“We could try again. It might at least show which things to look through.” Elayne sounded as doubtful as Nynaeve felt.

Still, it was as good a suggestion as any. Nynaeve closed her eyes, and once more came the shift.

When she looked again, she was standing at the end of the aisle away from the door, facing a square wooden chest taller than her waist. The iron straps seemed all rust, and the chest itself looked to have spent the last twenty years being beaten with hammers. A less likely repository for anything useful, especially a ter’angreal, Nynaeve could not imagine. But Elayne was standing right beside her, staring at the same chest.

Nynaeve put a hand on the lid—the hinges would open smoothly—and pushed it up. There was not even the hint of a squeal. Inside, two heavily rusted swords and an equally brown breastplate with a hole eaten through it lay atop a tangle of cloth-wrapped parcels and what seemed to be the refuse from somebody’s old clothespress and a couple of kitchens.

Elayne fingered a small kettle with a broken spout. “Not weeks, but the rest of the night, anyway.”

“Once more?” Nynaeve suggested. “It could not hurt.” Elayne shrugged. Eyes shut. Need.

Nynaeve reached out, and her hand came down on something hard and rounded, covered with crumbling cloth. When she opened her eyes. Elayne’s hand was right next to hers. The younger woman’s grin nearly split her face in two.

Getting it out was not easy. It was not small, and they had to shift tattered coats and dented pots and parcels that crumbled to reveal figurines and carved animals and all sorts of rubbish. Once they had it out, they had to hold it between them, a wide flattish disc wrapped in rotted cloth. With the cloth stripped away, it turned out to be a shallow bowl of thick crystal, more than two feet across and carved deeply inside with what appeared to be swirling clouds.

“Nynaeve,” Elayne said slowly, “I think this is. . . .”

Nynaeve gave a start and nearly dropped her side of the bowl as it suddenly turned a pale watery blue and the carved clouds shifted slowly. A heartbeat later, the crystal was clear again, the carved clouds still. Only she was certain the clouds were not the same as they had been.

“It is,” Elayne exclaimed. “It’s a ter’angreal. And I will bet anything it has something to do with weather. But I’m not quite strong enough to work it by myself.”

Gulping a breath, Nynaeve tried to make her heart stop pounding. “Don’t do that! Don’t you realize you could still yourself, meddling with a ter’angreal when you don’t know what it does?”

The fool girl had the nerve to give her a surprised stare. “That is what we came to look for, Nynaeve. And do you think there is anyone who knows more about ter’angreal than I do?”

Nynaeve sniffed. Just because the woman was right did not mean she should not have given a little warning. “I’m not saying it isn’t wonderful if this can do something about the weather—it is—but I don’t see how it can be what we need. This won’t shift the Hall one way or the other about Rand.”

“‘What you need isn’t always what you want,’ ” Elayne quoted. “Lini used to say that when she wouldn’t let me go riding, or climb trees, but maybe it holds here.”

Nynaeve sniffed again. Maybe it did, but right now she wanted what she wanted. Was that so much to ask?

The bowl faded out of their hands, and it was Elayne’s turn to give a start, muttering about never getting used to that. The chest was closed, too.

“Nynaeve, when I channeled into the bowl, I felt. . . . Nynaeve, it isn’t the only ter’angreal in this room. I think there are angreal, too, maybe even sa’angreal.”

“Here?” Nynaeve said incredulously, staring around the cluttered little room. But if one, why not two? Or ten, or a hundred? “Light, don’t channel again! What if you make one of them do something by accident? You could still—”

“I do know what I am doing, Nynaeve. Really, I do. The next thing we have to do is find out exactly where this room is.”

That proved to be no easy task. Though the hinges seemed solid masses of rust, the door was no impediment, not in Tel’aran’rhiod. The problems began after that. The dim narrow corridor outside had only one small window at its end, and that showed nothing but a peeling white-plastered wall across the street. Climbing down cramped flights of stone-faced stairs did no good. The street outside could have been the first they had seen in this quarter of the city, wherever that was, all the buildings as near alike as made no difference. The tiny shops along the street had no signs, and the only thing marking inns were blue-painted doors. Red se