"Mat?" Noal asked.
Teeth still clenched against the pain, Mat forced himself to reach back and snatch his hat off the white floor. He was not leaving his hat, burn him. It was a bloody good hat.
He stumbled to his feet.
"Your eye, Mat…" Thom said.
"Doesn't matter," Mat said. Burn me for a fool. A bloody, goat-headed fool. He could barely think through the agony.
His other eye blinked tears of pain. It really did seem he had lost half of the light of the world. It was like looking through a window with one half blackened. Despite the blazing pain in his left socket, he felt as he should be able to open his eye.
But he could not. It was gone. And no Aes Sedai channeling could replace that.
He pulled on his hat, defiantly ignoring the pain. He pulled the brim down on the left, shading the empty socket, then bent down and picked up his ashandarei, stumbling but managing it.
"I should have been the one to pay," Thom said, voice bitter. "Not you, Mat. You didn't even want to come."
"It was my choice," Mat said. "And I had to do it, anyway. It's one of the answers I was told by the Aelfinn when I first came. I'd have to give up half the light of the world to save the world. Bloody snakes."
"To save the world?" Thom asked, looking down at Moiraine's peaceful face, her body wrapped in the patchwork cloak. He had left his pack on the floor.
"She has something yet to do," Mat said. The pain was retreating somewhat. "We need her, Thom. Burn me, but it's probably something to do with Rand. Anyway, this had to happen."
"And if it hadn't?" Thom asked. "She said she saw…"
"It doesn't matter," Mat said, turning toward the doorway. The Eelfinn were still overwhelmed. One would think they had been the ones to lose an eye, looking at those expressions! Mat set his pack on his shoulder, leaving Thom's where it sat. He could not carry two, not and be able to fight.
"Now I've seen something," Noal said, looking over the room and its occupants. "Something no man has ever seen, I warrant. Should we kill them?"
Mat shook his head. "Might break our bargain."
"Will they keep it?" Thom asked.
"Not if they can wiggle out of it," Mat said, then winced again. Light, but his head hurt! Well, he could not sit around and cry like he had lost his favorite foal. "Let's go."
They made their way out of the grand hall. Noal carried a torch, though he had reluctantly left his staff behind, favoring his shortsword.
There were no openings in the hallway this time, and Mat heard Noal muttering at that. It felt right. He had demanded a straight pathway back. The Eelfinn were liars and cheats, but they seemed to be liars and cheats like the Aes Sedai. Mat had made his demands carefully this time, rather than spouting out whatever occurred to him.
The hallway went on for a long while. Noal was growing more and more nervous; Mat kept on forward, footsteps in time with his throbbing skull. How would missing an eye change how he fought? He would have to be more careful of that left side. And he would have trouble judging distance now. In fact, he had that trouble now—walls and floor were disturbingly hard to judge.
Thom clutched Moiraine close to his chest, like a miser holding his gold. What was she to him, anyway? Mat had assumed that Thom was along for the same reason that Mat was—because it felt as if it needed to be done. That tenderness in Thom's face was not what Mat had expected to see.
The hallway ended abruptly in a five-sided arch. The room beyond appeared to be the one with the melted slag on the floor. No signs of the fight before were visible, no blood on the floor.
Mat took a deep breath and led the way through. He tensed as he saw Eelfinn here, crouching or standing in the shadows, hissing and growling. They did not move, did not strike, though some yipped quietly. Shadows made them seem even more like foxes. If Mat looked right at one, he could almost mistake them for ordinary men and women, but the way they moved in darkness, sometimes on all fours… No man walked like that, with the anxious tension of a chained predator. Like an angry hound, separated from you by a fence and fiercely eager to get to your throat.
But they held to their bargain. None attacked, and Mat began to feel right good about himself once they reached the other side of the room. He had beaten them. Last time, they had gotten the better end, but that was only because they had fought like cowards, punching a man who did not know the fight had started.
This time he had been ready. He had shown them that Matrim Cauthon was no fool.
They entered a corridor with the faintly glowing white steam at the top. The floor was of those black, interlocking triangles, curved on the sides like scales. Mat began to breathe easier as they entered one of the rooms with the twisting steam rising from the corners, though his eye socket still hurt like the nethers of a freshly gelded stallion.
He stopped in the center of the room, but then continued forward. He had demanded a straight pathway. That was what he would get. No doubling back and forth this time. "Blood and bloody ashes!" Mat said, realizing something as he walked.
"What?" Thom asked, looking up from Moiraine with alarm.
"My dice," Mat said. "I should have included getting my dice back in the bargain."
"But we discovered you don't need them to guide us."
"It's not about that," Mat grumbled. "I like those dice." He pulled his hat down again, looking down the hallway ahead. Was that motion he saw? All the way in the distance, a good dozen rooms away? No, it must be a trick of the shadows and the shifting steam.
"Mat," Noal said. "I've mentioned that my Old Tongue isn't what it once was. But I think I understood what you said. The bargain you made."
"Yes?" Mat said, only half-listening. Had he been speaking in the Old Tongue again? Burn him. And what was that down the hallway?
"Well," Noal said, "you said—as part of the bargain—something like 'you foxes can't knock us down or try to kill us or anything.'"
"Sure did," Mat said.
"You said foxes, Mat," Noal said. "The foxes can't hurt us."
"And they let us pass."
"But what about the others?" Noal asked. "The Aelfinn? If the Eelfinn can't hurt us, are the Aelfinn required to leave us be as well?"
The shadows in the far-distant corridor resolved into figures carrying long, sinuous bronze swords with curving blades. Tall figures, wearing layers of yellow cloth, the hair on their heads straight and black. Dozens of them, who moved with an unnatural grace, eyes staring forward. Eyes with pupils that were vertical slits.
Bloody and bloody ashes!
"Run!" Mat yelled.
"Which direction?" Noal asked, alarmed.
"Any direction!" Mat yelled. "So long as it's away from them!"
CHAPTER 55
Aloud boom shook the hallways, making the entire structure rumble. Mat stumbled, leaning against the wall for support as smoke and chips of rock sprayed out of the opening behind them.
He ducked his head around and looked down the hallway as Thom and Noal ran onward, Thom clutching Moiraine. Noal had tossed his torch aside and gotten out a drum to try to soothe the Aelfinn. That had not worked, and so Mat had turned to the exploding cylinders and nightflowers.
Light, but the cylinders were deadly! He saw corpses of Aelfinn lying scattered through the hallway, their glistening skin ripped and torn, evil-looking smoke steaming from their blood. Others slid out of doorways and alcoves, pushing through the smoke. They walked on two legs, but they seemed to slither as they walked, waving back and forth through the hallway, their hissing growing angrier and angrier.