Lord of Chaos

"There’s also a rumor the Lord Dragon was in the town yesterday," Edorion said, as softly as the street noise would allow.

"The biggest thing that happened yesterday," Mat said wryly, "was I had my first bath in a week. Now come on. It’s going to take half what daylight is left to finish this as it is."

He would have given a pretty to find out how that rumor began. Only off by a half day, and there certainly had been no one to see. It had been the small hours of morning when a slash of light suddenly appeared in his room at The Golden Stag. He had thrown himself desperately across the four-posted bed, one boot on and one half off, pulling the knife he wore hanging between his shoulder blades before he realized it was Rand, stepping out of one of those bloody holes in nothing, apparently from the palace in Caemlyn by the columns visible before the opening winked out. It was startling, him coming in the middle of the night, without any Aiel, and popping right into Mat’s room, which last still made the hair on Mat’s neck stand up. That thing could have sliced him in two had he been standing in the wrong place. He did notlike the One Power. The whole thing had been very strange.

"Make haste slowly, Mat," Rand said, striding up and down. He never looked in Mat’s direction. Sweat slicked his face, and his jaw was tight. "He has to see it coming. Everything depends on it."

Seated on his bed, Mat jerked his boot the rest of the way off and dropped it on the scrap of rug Mistress Daelvin had given him. "I know," he said sourly, pausing to rub an ankle he had cracked on a bedpost. "I helped make the bloody plan, remember?"

"How do you know you’re in love with a woman, Mat?" Rand did not stop his striding, and he dropped it in as if it fit what he had been saying.

Mat blinked. "How in the Pit of Doom should I know? That’s one snare I’ve never put a foot in. What brought that on?"

But Rand only moved his shoulders as though shrugging something off. "I’ll finish Sammael, Mat. I promised that; I owe it to the dead. But where are the others? I need to finish them all."

"One at a time, though. " He barely managed to keep the question out of that; there was no telling what Rand might take into his head these days.

"There are Dragonsworn in Murandy, Mat. In Altara, too. Men sworn to me. Once Illian is mine, Altara and Murandy will drop like ripe plums. I’ll make contact with the Dragonsworn in Tarabon – and in Arad Doman – and if the Whitecloaks try to keep me out of Amadicia, I’ll crush them. The Prophet has Ghealdan primed, and Amadicia almost, so I hear. Can you imagine Masema as the Prophet? Saldaea will come to me; Bashere is sure of it. All the Borderlands will come. They have to! I am going to do it, Mat. Every land united before the Last Battle. I’m going to do it!" Rand’s voice had taken on a feverish tone.

"Sure, Rand," Mat said slowly, depositing his other boot beside the first. "But one thing at a time, right?"

"No man should have another man’s voice in his head, " Rand muttered, and Mat’s hands froze in the act of tugging off a woolen stocking. Oddly, he found himself wondering whether the pair had another day’s wear in them. Rand knew something of what had happened inside thatter’angreal in Rhuidean – knew he had somehow gained knowledge of soldiering, anyway – but not the whole of it. Mat thought not the whole of it. Not about other men’s memories. Rand did not seem to notice anything out of the ordinary. He just scrubbed fingers through his hair and went on. "He can be gulled, Mat – Sammael always thinks in straight lines – but is there any opening he can slip through? If there’s any mistake, thousands will die. Tens of thousands. Hundreds will anyway, but I don’t want it to be thousands."

Mat grimaced so fiercely that a sweaty-faced hawker trying to sell him a dagger, the hilt half-covered in colorful glass "gems" nearly dropped the thing burying himself in the crowd. It had all been like that with Rand, bouncing from the invasion of Illian to the Forsaken to women – Light, Rand was the one who always had the way with women, him and Perrin – from the Last Battle to the Maidens of the Spear to things Mat hardly understood, seldom listening to Mat’s replies and sometimes not even waiting for them. Hearing Rand talk about Sammael as if he knew the man was more than just disconcerting. He knew Rand would go mad eventually, but if madness was creeping in already...

And what of the others, those fools Rand was gathering who wantedto cha

Only he had as much choice as a leaf in a whirlpool. He was ta’veren, but Rand was more so. Nothing in the Prophecies of the Dragon about Mat Cauthon, but he was caught, a shoat under a fence. Light, but he wished he had never seen the Horn of Valere.

It was with a grim face that he stalked through the next dozen taverns and common rooms, circling out from The Golden Stag. They were really no different from the first, packed tables full of men drinking and dicing and arm-wrestling, musicians often as not drowned out by the uproar, Redarms quashing fights as soon as they began, a gleeman reciting The Great Huntin one – that was popular even without Hunters about – in another a short, pale-haired woman singing a slightly bawdy song somehow made bawdier by her round face of wide-eyed i

His bleak mood held when he left The Silver Horn – idiotic name! – and its i

A crowd of townspeople, short, drably clothed Cairhienin and a sprinkling of taller Andorans in brighter colors, made an expressionless ring around two tall lean men with curled mustaches, long Murandian coats in bright silk, and swords with ornate, gilded pommels and quillons. The fellow in a red coat stood gri

Mat held on to his temper; he reminded himself that he did not know what had started all this. "Easy with the boy," he said, laying a hand on yellow-coat’s arm. "What did he do to deserve —?"

"He touched me horse!" the man snapped in a Mindean accent, shaking off Mat’s hand. Mindeans boasted – boasted! – that they had the worst tempers of anyone in Murandy. "I’ll break his ski

Without another word Mat brought the butt of his spear up hard, straight between the fellow’s legs. The Murandian’s mouth opened, but no sound came out.. His eyes rolled up till almost nothing showed but white. The boy darted off as the man’s legs folded, depositing him on knees and face in the street. "No, you won’t," Mat said.