The Great Hunt (30 page)

“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. The bundle of Thom Merrilin’s cloak made a mound behind his saddle.

Loial led his big mount over to him; with the Ogier standing on the ground, Loial’s head came almost to Rand’s shoulder, and him in his saddle. Loial still looked puzzled.

“You think we should stay here?” Rand said. “Try again to use the Stone? If the Darkfriends are here, in place, we have to find them. We can’t leave the Horn of Valere in Darkfriend hands; you heard the Amyrlin. And we have to get that dagger back. Mat will die without it.”

Loial nodded. “Yes, Rand, we do. But, Rand, the Stones. . . .”

“We will find another. You said they were scattered all over, and if they’re all like this—all this stonework around them—it should not be too hard to find one.”

“Rand, that fragment said the Stones came from an older Age than the Age of Legends, and even the Aes Sedai then did not understand them, though they used them, some of the truly powerful did. They used them with the One Power, Rand. How did you think to use this Stone to take us back? Or any other Stone we find?”

For a moment Rand could only stare at the Ogier, thinking faster than he ever had in his life. “If they are older than the Age of Legends, maybe the people who built them didn’t use the Power. There must be another way. The Darkfriends got here, and they certainly couldn’t use the Power. Whatever this other way is, I will find it out. I will get us back, Loial.” He looked at the tall stone column with its odd markings, and felt a prickle of fear.
Light, if only I
don’t
have to use the Power to do it.
“I will, Loial, I promise. One way or another.”

The Ogier gave a doubtful nod. He swung up onto his huge horse and followed Rand up the steps to join Hurin among the blackened trees.

The land stretched out, low and rolling, sparsely forested here and there with grassland between, crossed by more than one stream. In the middle distance Rand thought he could see another burned patch. It was all pale, the colors washed. There was no sign of anything made by men except the stone circle behind them. The sky was empty, no chimney smoke, no birds, only a few clouds and the pale yellow sun.

Worst of all, though, the land seemed to twist the eye. What was close at hand looked all right, and what was seen straight ahead in the distance. But whenever Rand turned his head, things that appeared distant when seen from the corner of his eye seemed to rush toward him, to be nearer when he stared straight at them. It made for dizziness; even the horses whickered nervously and rolled their eyes. He tried moving his head slowly; the apparent movement of things that should have been fixed was still there, but it seemed to help a little.

“Did your piece of a book say anything about this?” Rand asked.

Loial shook his head, then swallowed hard as if he wished he had kept it still. “Nothing.”

“I suppose there’s nothing to do for it. Which way, Hurin?”

“South, Lord Rand.” The sniffer kept his eyes on the ground.

“South, then.”
There has to be a way back besides using the Power.
Rand heeled Red’s flanks. He tried to make his voice lighthearted, as if he saw no difficulty at all in what they were about. “What was it Ingtar said? Three or four days to that monument to Artur Hawkwing? I wonder if that exists here, too, the way the Stones do. If this is a world that
could
be, maybe it’s still standing. Wouldn’t that be something to see, Loial?”

They rode south.

CHAPTER
14

Wolfbrother

“G
one?” Ingtar demanded of the air. “And my guards saw nothing. Nothing! They cannot just be gone!”

Listening, Perrin hunched his shoulders and looked at Mat, who stood a little way off frowning and muttering to himself. Arguing with himself was how Perrin saw it. The sun was peeking over the horizon, past time for them to have been riding. Shadows lay long across the hollow, stretched out and thinned, but still like the trees that made them. The packhorses, loaded and on their lead line, stamped impatiently, but everyone stood by his mount and waited.

Uno came striding up. “Not a goat-kissing track, my Lord.” He sounded offended; failure touched on his skill. “Burn me, not so much as a flaming hoof scrape. They just bloody vanished.”

“Three men and three horses do not just vanish,” Ingtar growled. “Go over the ground again, Uno. If anyone can find where they went, it’s you.”

“Maybe they just ran away,” Mat said. Uno stopped and glared at him.
Like he’d cursed an Aes Sedai
, Perrin thought wonderingly.

“Why would they run away?” Ingtar’s voice was dangerously soft. “Rand, the Builder, my sniffer—my sniffer!—why would any of them run, much less all three?”

Mat shrugged. “I don’t know. Rand was. . . .” Perrin wanted to throw something at him, hit him, anything to stop him, but Ingtar and Uno were watching. He felt a flood of relief when Mat hesitated, then spread his hands and muttered, “I don’t know why. I just thought maybe they had.”

Ingtar grimaced. “Ran away,” he growled as if he did not believe it for an instant. “The Builder can go as he will, but Hurin would not run away. And neither would Rand al’Thor. He would not; he knows his duty, now. Go on, Uno. Search the ground again.” Uno gave a half bow and hurried away, sword hilt bobbing over his shoulder. Ingtar grumbled, “Why would Hurin leave like that, in the middle of the night, without a word? He knows what we’re about. How am I to track this Shadow-spawned filth without him? I would give a thousand gold crowns for a pack of trail hounds. If I did not know better, I would say the Darkfriends managed this so they can slip east or west without me knowing. Peace, I don’t know if I
do
know better.” He stumped off after Uno.

Perrin shifted uneasily. The Darkfriends were doubtless getting further away with every minute. Getting further away, and with them the Horn of Valere—and the dagger from Shadar Logoth. He did not think that Rand, whatever he had become, whatever had happened to him, would abandon that chase.
But where
did
he go, and why?
Loial might go with Rand for friendship—but why Hurin?

“Maybe he did run away,” he muttered, then looked around. No one appeared to have heard; even Mat was not paying him any mind. He scrubbed a hand through his hair. If Aes Sedai had been after him to be a false Dragon, he would have run, too. But worrying about Rand was doing nothing to help track the Darkfriends.

There was a way, perhaps, if he was willing to take it. He did not want to take it. He had been running away from it, but perhaps, now, he could no longer run.
Serves me right for what I told Rand. I wish I
could
run.
Even knowing what he could do to help—what he had to do—he hesitated.

No one was looking at him. No one would know what they were seeing even if they did look. Finally, reluctantly, he closed his eyes and let himself drift, let his thoughts drift, out, away from him.

He had tried denying it from the first, long before his eyes began to change from dark brown to burnished golden yellow. At that first meeting, that first instant of recognition, he had refused to believe, and he had run from the recognition ever since. He still wanted to run.

His thoughts drifted, feeling for what must be out there, what was always out there in country where men were few or far between, feeling for his brothers. He did not like to think of them that way, but they were.

In the beginning he had been afraid that what he did had some taint of the Dark One, or of the One Power—equally bad for a man who wanted nothing more than to be a blacksmith and live his life in the Light, and in peace. From that time, he knew something of how Rand felt, afraid of himself, feeling unclean. He was still not past that entirely. This thing he did was older than humans using the One Power, though, something from the birth of Time. Not the Power, Moiraine had told him. Something long vanished, now come again. Egwene knew, too, though he wished she did not. He wished no one did. He hoped she had not told anyone.

Contact. He felt them, felt other minds. Felt his brothers, the wolves.

Their thoughts came to him as a whirlpool blend of images and emotions. At first he had not been able to make out anything except the raw emotion, but now his mind put words to them.
Wolfbrother. Surprise. Two-legs that talks.
A faded image, dim with time, old beyond old, of men running with wolves, two packs hunting together.
We have heard this comes again. You are Long Tooth?

It was a faint picture of a man dressed in clothes made of hides, with a long knife in his hand, but overlaid on the image, more central, was a shaggy wolf with one tooth longer than the rest, a steel tooth gleaming in the sunlight as the wolf led the pack in a desperate charge through deep snow toward the deer that would mean life instead of slow death by starvation, and the deer thrashing to run in powder to their bellies, and the sun glinting on the white until it hurt the eyes, and the wind howling down the passes, swirling the fine snow like mist, and. . . . Wolves’ names were always complex images.

Perrin recognized the man. Elyas Machera, who had first introduced him to wolves. Sometimes he wished he had never met Elyas.

No
, he thought, and tried to picture himself in his mind.

Yes. We have heard of you.

It was not the image he had made, a young man with heavy shoulders and shaggy, brown curls, a young man with an axe at his belt, who others thought moved and thought slowly. That man was there, somewhere in the mind picture that came from the wolves, but stronger by far was a massive, wild bull with curved horns of shining metal, running through the night with the speed and exuberance of youth, curly-haired coat gleaming in the moonlight, flinging himself in among Whitecloaks on their horses, with the air crisp and cold and dark, and blood so red on the horns, and. . . .

Young Bull.

For a moment Perrin lost the contact in his shock. He had not dreamed they had given him a name. He wished he could not remember how he had earned it. He touched the axe at his belt, with its gleaming, half-moon blade.
Light help me, I killed two men. They would have killed me even quicker, and Egwene, but. . . .

Pushing all that aside—it was done and behind him; he had no wish to remember any of it—he gave the wolves the smell of Rand, of Loial and Hurin, and asked if they had scented the three. It was one of the things that had come to him with the change in his eyes; he could identify people by their smell even when he could not see them. He could see more sharply, too, see in anything but pitch-darkness. He was always careful to light lamps or candles, now, sometimes before anyone else thought they were needed.

From the wolves came a view of men on horses approaching the hollow in late day. That was the last they had seen or smelled of Rand or the other two.

Perrin hesitated. The next step would be useless unless he told Ingtar.
And Mat will die if we don’t find that dagger. Burn you, Rand, why did you take the sniffer?

The one time he had gone to the dungeon, with Egwene, the smell of Fain had made his hair stand on end; not even Trollocs smelled so foul. He had wanted to rip through the bars of the cell and tear the man apart, and finding that inside himself had frightened him more than Fain did. To mask Fain’s smell in his own mind, he added the scent of Trollocs before he howled aloud.

From the distance came the cries of a wolfpack, and in the hollow horses stamped and whickered fearfully. Some of the soldiers fingered their long-bladed lances and eyed the rim of the hollow uneasily. Inside Perrin’s head, it was much worse. He felt the rage of the wolves, the hate. There were only two things wolves hated. All else they merely endured, but fire and Trollocs they hated, and they would go through fire to kill Trollocs.

Even more than the Trollocs, Fain’s scent had put them into a frenzy, as if they smelled something that made Trollocs seem natural and right.

Where?

The sky rolled in his head; the land spun. East and west, wolves did not know. They knew the movements of sun and moon, the shift of seasons, the contours of the land. Perrin puzzled it out. South. And something more. An eagerness to kill the Trollocs. The wolves would let Young Bull share in the killing. He could bring the two-legs with their hard skins if he wanted, but Young Bull, and Smoke, and Two Deer, and Winter Dawn, and all the rest of the pack would hunt down the Twisted Ones who had dared come into their land. The inedible flesh and bitter blood would burn the tongue, but they must be killed. Kill them. Kill the Twisted Ones.

Their fury infected him. His lips peeled back in a snarl, and he took a step, to join them, run with them in the hunt, in the killing.

With an effort he broke the contact except for a thin sense that the wolves were there. He could have pointed to them across the intervening distance. He felt cold inside.
I’m a man, not a wolf. Light help me, I am a man!

“Are you well, Perrin?” Mat said, moving closer. He sounded the way he always did, flippant—and bitter under it, too, of late—but he looked worried. “That is all I need. Rand run off, and then you get sick. I don’t know where I’ll find a Wisdom to look after you out here. I think I have some willowbark in my saddlebags. I can make you some willowbark tea, if Ingtar lets us stay that long. Serve you right if I make it too strong.”

“I . . . I’m all right, Mat.” Shaking off his friend, he went to find Ingtar. The Shienaran lord was scanning the ground on the rim with Uno, and Ragan, and Masema. The others frowned at him as he drew Ingtar aside. He made sure Uno and the rest were too far away to hear before he spoke. “I don’t know where Rand or the others went, Ingtar, but Padan Fain and the Trollocs—and I guess the rest of the Darkfriends—are still heading south.”

“How do you know this?” Ingtar said.

Perrin drew a deep breath. “Wolves told me.” He waited, for what he was not sure. Laughter, scorn, an accusation of being a Darkfriend, of being mad. Deliberately, he tucked his thumbs behind his belt, away from the axe.
I will not kill. Not again. If he tries to kill me for a Darkfriend, I’ll run, but I won’t kill anybody else.

“I have heard of things like this,” Ingtar said slowly, after a moment. “Rumors. There was a Warder, a man called Elyas Machera, who some said could talk to wolves. He disappeared years ago.” He seemed to catch something in Perrin’s eyes. “You know him?”

“I know him,” Perrin said flatly. “He’s the one. . . . I don’t want to talk about it. I didn’t ask for it.”
That’s what Rand said. Light, I wish I were home working Master Luhhan’s forge.

“These wolves,” Ingtar said, “they will track the Darkfriends and Trollocs for us?” Perrin nodded. “Good. I will have the Horn, whatever it takes.” The Shienaran glanced around at Uno and the others still searching for tracks. “Better not to tell anyone else, though. Wolves are considered good luck in the Borderlands. Trollocs fear them. But still, better to keep this between us for the time. Some of them might not understand.”

“I would as soon nobody else ever found out,” Perrin said.

“I will tell them you think you have Hurin’s talent. They know about that; they’re easy with it. Some of them saw you wrinkling your nose back in that village, and at the ferry. I’ve heard jokes about your delicate nose. Yes. You keep us on the trail today, Uno will see enough of their tracks to confirm it
is
the trail, and before nightfall every last man will be sure you are a sniffer. I
will
have the Horn.” He glanced at the sky, and raised his voice. “Daylight is wasting! To horse!”

To Perrin’s surprise, the Shienarans seemed to accept Ingtar’s story. A few of them looked skeptical—Masema went so far as to spit—but Uno nodded thoughtfully, and that was enough for most. Mat was the hardest to convince.

“A sniffer! You? You’re going to track murderers by smell? Perrin, you are as crazy as Rand. I am the only sane one left from Emond’s Field, with Egwene and Nynaeve trotting off to Tar Valon to become—” He cut himself short with an uneasy glance for the Shienarans.

Perrin took Hurin’s place beside Ingtar as the small column rode south. Mat kept up a string of disparaging remarks, until Uno found the first tracks left by Trollocs and by men on horses, but Perrin paid him little mind. It was all he could do to keep the wolves from dashing on ahead to kill the Trollocs. The wolves cared only about killing the Twisted Ones; to them, Darkfriends were no different from any other two-legs. Perrin could almost see the Darkfriends scattering in a dozen directions while the wolves slew Trollocs, running away with the Horn of Valere. Running away with the dagger. And once the Trollocs were dead, he did not think he could interest the wolves in tracking the humans even if he had any idea which of them to track. He had a running argument with them, and sweat covered his forehead long before he got the first flash of images that turned his stomach.