The two others blinked, tears streaming from Noal’s eyes, but they eventually got their bearings and glanced about. The room, like the hallways extending in all four directions, was empty.
“This doesn’t look like what you described, Mat,” Thom said. His voice echoed faintly, though the sounds seemed eerily warped. Almost like whispers thrown back at them. It made the hair on Mat’s neck rise.
“I know,” Mat said, pulling a torch from his pack. “This place doesn’t make sense. The stories agree about that, at least. Here, light this, Noal.”
Thom got out a torch of his own and both lit from Noal’s lantern. They had strikers from Aludra, but Mat wanted to save those. He had been half-afraid that in the tower, flames would go out once lit. But the lights burned steady and true. That heartened him somewhat.
“So where are they?” Thom asked, walking around the perimeter of the black room.
“They’re never here when you come through,” Mat said, holding up his own torch and inspecting a wall. Was that writing, carved into the not-stone? The unfamiliar script was so fine and delicate he could barely see it. “But watch yourself. They can appear behind you, faster than an innkeeper who heard coins clink in your pouch.”
Noal inspected the triangular opening they had come through. “Do you suppose we can use this to get back?” It resembled the stone ter’angreal Mat had stepped through before. Just a different shape.
“I hope so,” Mat said.
“Maybe we should try,” Noal said.
Mat nodded to him. He did not like being separated, but they did need to know if this was a way back or not. Noal looked determined and stepped through. He vanished.
Mat held his breath for a long moment, but the aged man did not return. Was it a trick? Had this doorway been placed here to—
Noal stumbled back into the room through the opening. Thom set his torch on the floor and dashed over to help. Noal recovered more quickly this time, blinking away the blindness. “It sealed me out,” he explained. “I had to draw another triangle to get back in.”
“At least we know we’ve got a means of escape,” Thom said.
Assuming those bloody Aelfinn or Eelfinn don’t move it, Mat thought, remembering his previous visit, the one that had ended with him being hanged. That time, the rooms and corridors had shifted mysteriously, in total defiance of what was right.
“Will you look at that?” Thom said.
Mat lowered his spear and Noal had an iron shortsword in his hand in a moment. Thom was pointing at his torch, which burned fitfully where he had set it on the floor beside one of the glowing steam vents.
The white steam pushed away from the flames, like it was being blown by a breeze. Only, no breeze ever made steam move so unnaturally. It curved around the fire in a loop. Thom stepped over and picked up the torch. He moved it toward the column of steam, and it bowed out of the way. Thom rammed the torch directly into the steam’s path, and the steam split, going around the flame and melding together into a single stream again above.
Thom glanced at the others.
“Don’t ask me,” Mat said, scowling. “I said this place doesn’t make sense. If that’s the oddest thing we see here, I’ll be a Murandian’s mustache. Come on.”
Mat picked one of the hallways and began to walk down it. The other two hurried to catch up. The steam glowed on the ceiling, bathing the black hallway with its milky light. The floor was made of interlocking triangular tiles that, once again, looked discomfortingly like scales. The corridor was wide and long, the other end distant and dark.
“To think,” Noal said, holding up his lantern, “all of this hidden in that single tower.”
“I doubt we’re in the tower anymore,” Mat said. Up ahead, he could see a slice out of the side of the wall, a kind of window. It was set a little too high up to feel natural.
“Then where….” Noal trailed off as they reached the window, which was an off-center square. Through it, they could look out at an unnatural landscape. They were up several floors in some kind of spire, but that certainly was not Andor outside.
The window looked out over a canopy of dense vegetation that was too yellow. Mat recognized the wispy trees with a drooping umbrella of branches at the top, though before he had seen them from below. The fern-like trees with their spreading fans of leaves were familiar as well, though those had deep black fruits hanging from them now. The large fruits caused the leaves to droop.
“Mercy of the Winnower,” Noal whispered, a phrase Mat had never heard before.
Noal had reason to be astonished; Mat remembered looking out at that forest for the first time, realizing that the twisted doorway had not brought him to another place, but another world entirely.
Mat looked to the side. Could he see the three spires he had noted on his first visit? They did not seem to be about, though in this place, the very next window they passed could show a different scene. They could….
He paused, then glanced sharply through the window. He could make out a spire to the left. And then he knew. He was in one of the spires he had seen in the distance during his first visit.
He stifled a shiver and turned away. At least he knew for certain he was in the same place. Did that mean that the worlds of the Aelfinn and the Eelfinn were the same? He hoped so. Moiraine had fallen through the second of the twisted red doorways, which meant she had most likely been taken by the Eelfinn, the foxes.
They were the ones who had hanged Mat; the snakes, at least, had only tossed him out of their realm without any useful answers. He bore them a grudge, but the foxes…they had refused to answer his questions, and had given him these bloody memories instead!
Mat and the others continued down the hallway, their footsteps echoing against the flooring. Soon, Mat began to get the sense that he was being watched. He had felt it before, on his other visits. He turned to the side, and caught a glimpse of faint motion far behind.
He spun, preparing to toss his torch aside and fight with his ashandarei, but saw nothing. The other two froze, looking about, anxious. Mat continued on sheepishly, though he felt less so after Thom did the same thing a short time later. Thom went so far as to throw a knife at a darkened patch of the wall.
The iron weapon clanked against the surface. The dull ring echoed for far too long in the hallway.
“Sorry,” Thom said.
“It’s all right,” Mat said.
“They’re watching us, aren’t they?” Noal asked. His voice was soft, faintly nervous. Light! Mat felt as if he was going to jump out of his skin and run away, leaving it behind. Compared to that, Noal seemed steady.
“I suspect they are, at that,” Mat said.
Within a few moments, they reached the end of the too-long hallway. Here, they entered a chamber that was identical to the first, save it had no doorway in the center. It split off in four directions, each corridor disappearing into the distant darkness.
They picked another direction, memorizing the path they were taking, unseen eyes scratching at their backs. His footsteps grew more hurried as they traversed the length of the hallway and entered another chamber. It was exactly like the previous one.
“Easy to be disoriented in a place like this,” Noal said. He opened his pack and got out a sheet of paper and a charcoal pencil. He made three dots on his paper, then connected them by lines, representing the corridors and rooms they’d gone through. “It’s all a matter of keeping a good map. A good map can mean life or death; you can trust me on that.”
Mat turned around, looking back the way they had come. Part of him wanted to keep going, not look backward, but he had to know. “Come on,” he said, going back the way they had come.
Thom and Noal shared looks, but once again hurried to catch up. It took them a good half-hour to retrace their steps back to the first chamber, the one that should contain the doorway. They found it empty. Those columns of steam rose from the corners. They had in the other two rooms, too.
“Impossible!” Noal said. “We retraced our steps perfectly! The way out should be here.”
In the distance—faint and almost inaudible—Mat heard laughter. A hissing, dangerous laughter. Malicious.
Mat’s skin grew icy. “Thom,” he said, “you ever hear a story about Birgitte Silverbow and her visit to the Tower of Ghenjei?”
“Birgitte?” Thom asked, looking up from his inspection—with Noal—of the floor. They seemed convinced that the doorway must have been pulled down into some hidden trapdoor. “No, can’t say that I have.”
“What about a story of a woman trapped for two months in a maze of corridors inside a fortress?”
“Two months?” Thom said. “Well, no. But there’s the tale of Elmiara and the Shadoweyes. She spent a hundred days wandering in a maze, looking for the infamous healing spring of Sund to save her lover’s life.”
That was probably it. The story had survived; it had changed forms, the way so many of them did. “She didn’t get out, did she?”
“No. She died at the end, only two steps away from the fountain, but separated from it by a wall. She could hear it bubbling; it was the last sound she heard before dying from thirst.” He glanced about uncomfortably, as if uncertain he wanted to be sharing such a story in this place.
Mat shook his head, worried. Burn him, but he hated these foxes. There had to be a way to—
“You have broken the bargain,” a soft voice said.
Mat spun and the other two cursed, standing up, hands on weapons. A figure stood in the hallway behind them. It was one of the creatures Mat remembered, perhaps the exact same one who had met him last time. Short, bright red hair sprouted from the creature’s pale scalp. A pair of ears clung to the head, slightly pointed at the tips. The figure was willowy and tall, the shoulders disproportionately wide for the waist, and it wore pale leather straps across its chest—Mat still did not want to think about what those might have been made of—and a long black kilt below.
It was the face that was most distinctive. Large, unnatural eyes, pale with a shade of iris in the center. A narrow jaw and angular features. Like a fox. One of the Eelfinn, masters of this realm.
It had come to play with the mice.
“There is no bargain this way,” Mat said, trying to keep the nervousness from his voice. “We can bloody bring what we want.”
“Having no bargain is dangerous,” the Eelfinn said in a smooth voice. “For you. Fortunately, I can take you where you desire.”
“Well, then,” Mat said. “Do it.”
“Leave your iron,” the Eelfinn said. “Your implements of music. Your fire.”
“Never,” Mat said.
The Eelfinn blinked large eyes. Slowly, deliberately. It stepped forward, footsteps soft. Mat raised his ashandarei, but the Eelfinn made no directly threatening moves. It glided around the three of them, speaking softly.
“Come now,” it said. “Can we not speak with civility? You have come to our realm seeking. We have power to grant what you wish, what you need. Why not show good faith? Leave behind your implements of fire. Those only, and I promise to lead you for a time.”