A Crown of Swords (110 page)

“Take care of yourselves, and look sharp,” he said. “You know what’s out there. There’s a storm coming.” Now why had he said that? “Move. We’re wasting light.”

The wind still blew strongly, sweeping dust across the Mol Hara Square with its statue of a long-dead queen posing above the fountain, but there was no other sign of a storm. Nariene had been noted for her honesty, but not enough to have been depicted completely bare-chested. The afternoon sun burned high in a sky without a cloud, but people rushed through the square as quickly as they had in the morning cool. That was gone, wind or no, down here on the ground. The paving stones seemed a griddle under his boots.

Glaring across the square at The Wandering Woman, Mat headed toward the river. Olver had not gone off with the street urchins half as often while they were staying at the inn; he had been too content ogling the serving girls and Setalle Anan’s daughters. So much for the dice telling him he had to move into the palace. Anything he had done since leaving—anything he wanted to do, he amended, thinking of Tylin and her eyes; and her hands—any of it could have been done just as well from there. Those dice spun now, and he wished they would just go away.

He tried to move quickly, dodging impatiently around trundling carts and wagons, cursing at lacquered sedan chairs and coaches that nearly ran him down, eyes darting in search of a red coat close to the ground, but the bustle in the streets slowed him to a meander. Which was just as well, in truth. No point dashing by the boy without seeing him. Wishing he had brought Pips out of the palace stables, he frowned at the people streaming past; a man on horseback could have moved no faster in the throng, but up in the saddle, he could have seen farther. Then again, asking questions from a saddle would have been awkward; not many folk actually rode inside the city, and some people had a tendency to shy away from anyone on a horse.

Always the same question. The first time he asked was at a bridge just below the Mol Hara, of a fellow selling honey-baked apples from a tray hanging from a strap around his neck. “Have you seen a boy, about so high, in a red coat?” Olver liked sweets.

“Boy, my Lord?” the fellow said, sucking his few remaining teeth. “Seen a thousand boys. Don’t remember no coat, though. Would my Lord like one apple, or two?” He scooped up two with bony fingers and pushed them at Mat; the way they gave under his fingers, they were softer than any baking could account for. “Did my Lord hear about the riot?”

“No,” Mat said sourly, and pushed on. At the other end of the bridge, he stopped a plump woman with a tray of ribbons. Ribbons held no fascination for Olver, but her red petticoats flashed beneath a skirt sewn up nearly to her left hip, and the cut of her bodice revealed rounded cleavage to equal Riselle’s. “Have you seen a boy . . . ?”

He heard about the riot from her, too, and from half the people he asked. That rumor, he suspected had begun with events at a certain house in the Rahad that very morning. A wagon driver with her long whip coiled around her neck even told him the riot had been across the river, once she allowed as how she never noticed boys unless they ran under her mules. A square-faced man who sold honeycomb—incredibly dry-looking honeycomb—said the riot had been down near the light tower at the end of the Bay Road, on the eastern side of the mouth of the bay, which was about as likely a place for rioting as the middle of the bay itself. There were always a thousand rumors in any city, if you listened, and he was forced to listen to snatches of all of them, it seemed. One of the most remarkably pretty women he had ever seen, standing outside a tavern—Maylin was a serving girl at The Old Sheep, but her only task seemed to be standing outside to attract customers, which she certainly did—told him there had been a battle that morning, in the Cordese Hills west of the city, she thought. Or maybe in the Rhannon Hills, across the bay. Or maybe. . . . Remarkably pretty, Maylin, but not very bright; Olver might have watched her for hours, so long as she never opened her mouth. But she could not remember seeing any boy in a. . . . What color coat had he said, again? He heard about riots and battles, he heard about enough strange things seen in the sky or the hills to populate the Blight. He heard that the Dragon Reborn was about to descend on the city with thousands of men who could channel, that the Aiel were coming, an army of Aes Sedai—no, it was an army of Whitecloaks; Pedron Niall was dead, and the Children intended to avenge him, though why in Ebou Dar was not exactly clear. You might have thought the city would be hip-deep in panic with all the tales floating around, but the fact was, even those who told a tale usually only half-believed it. So, he heard all sorts of nonsense, but not a word about any boy in a red coat.

A few streets from the river, he began hearing thunder, great hollow booms that seemed to roll in from the sea. People looked up curiously at the cloudless sky, scratched their heads, and went on about their business. So did he, questioning every seller of sweets or fruit he saw, and every pretty woman afoot. All to no avail. Reaching the long stone quay that ran the whole length of the river side of the city, he paused, studying the gray docks stretching out into the river and the ships tied to them. The wind blew strong, heaving vessels at their mooring lines, grinding them against the stone docks despite the bags stuffed with wool hung down between for fenders. Unlike horses, ships did not interest Olver except as a way to go from here to there, and ships were men’s business in Ebou Dar even if the lading they carried often was not. Women on these docks would either be merchants keeping an eye on their goods or hard-armed members of the cargo-loader’s guild, and there would be no sweet-sellers here.

About to turn away, he realized almost no one was moving. The docks usually bustled, yet on every ship he could see, crewmen lined the rails and had climbed into the rigging to stare toward the bay. Barrels and crates stood abandoned while shirtless men and wiry women in green leather vests crowded together at the ends of the docks to peer between the ships, south, toward the thunder. Down that way, black smoke rose in thick towering columns, slanting sharply north on the wind.

Hesitating only a moment, he trotted out along the nearest dock. At first, ships tied to the long fingers of stone to the south blocked his view of anything except the smoke. Because of the way the shoreline lay, though, each dock stuck out farther than the next down; once he pushed into the murmuring crowd at the end, the broad river made an open path of choppy green water to the wave-tossed bay.

At least two dozen ships were burning out on the wide expanse of the bay, maybe more, engulfed in flame from end to end. A number of others had already settled, only a bow or stern still above water and that sliding under. Even as he looked, the bow of a broad two-masted ship flying a large banner of red and blue and gold, the banner of Altara, suddenly flew apart with a roar, a boom like thunder, and fast-thickening tendrils of smoke wafted away on the wind as the vessel began settling by the head. Hundreds of vessels were in motion, every craft in the bay, three-masted Sea Folk rakers and skimmers and two-masted soarers, coastal ships with their triangular sails, riverships under sail or sweep, some fleeing upriver, most trying to beat out to sea. Scores of other ships swanned into the bay before the wind, great bluff-bowed vessels as tall as any of the rakers,
crashing through the rolling waves, throwing aside spray. His breath caught as he suddenly made out square, ribbed sails.

“Blood and bloody ashes,” he muttered in shock. “It’s the flaming Seanchan!”

“Who?” demanded a stern-faced woman crowded next to him. A dark blue woolen dress of fine cut marked her a merchant as much as did the leather folder she carried for her bills of lading or the guild pin over one breast, a silver quill pen. “It’s the Aes Sedai,” she announced in tones of conviction. “I know channeling when I see it. The Children of the Light will do for them, just as soon as they arrive. You’ll see.”

A lanky, gray-haired woman in a grimy green vest twisted around to confront her, fingering the wooden hilt of her dagger. “Hold your tongue about Aes Sedai, you flaming penny-grubber, or I’ll peel you and stuff a Whitecloak down your bleeding gullet!”

Mat left them waving their arms and shouting at one another, and pushed clear of the crowd, running for the quay. Already he could see three—no, four—huge creatures circling over the city to the south on great pinions like those of a bat. Figures clung to the creatures’ backs, apparently in some sort of saddles. Another flying creature appeared, and more. Below them, flame suddenly fountained above the rooftops with a roar.

People ran now, buffeting Mat as he struggled through the streets. “Olver!” he shouted, hoping to be heard above other shouts from every side, and the screams. “Olver!”

Abruptly, everybody seemed to be heading the other way, battering past him. Stubbornly he forced on against the tide. And came to a street where what all those folk fled from was made plain.

A Seanchan column rushed by, a hundred or more men in helmets like insects’ heads and armor of overlapping plates, all riding animals like cats the size of horses, but covered in bronze scales rather than fur. Leaning forward in their saddles, blue-streamered lances slanted, they galloped toward the Mol Hara without looking to either side. Though “gallop” was not quite the word for the way those creatures moved; the speed was right, but they . . . flowed. It was time to be gone; past time. As soon as he found—

As the end of column went by a flash of red, waist high, caught his eye among the crowd in the street beyond the intersection. “Olver!” He darted across almost on the heels of the last scaled creature, pushing into the crowd in time to see a wide-eyed woman snatch up a little girl in a red dress and run with the child clutched to her bosom. Wildly, Mat pressed
ahead, shouldering people aside when they bumped into him, bumping into more than a few himself. “Olver! Olver!”

Twice more he saw a column of fire rise briefly above the rooftops, and smoke drifted to the sky in a dozen places. Several times he heard those booming roars, much closer than the bay, now. Inside the city, he was sure; more than once the ground quivered beneath his boots.

And then the street was clearing again, people fleeing in every direction, down alleys and into houses and shops, for Seanchan on horses were coming. Not all were armored men; near the head of that small thicket of lances rode a dark woman in a blue dress. Mat knew the large red panels on her skirts and bosom were worked with silver lightning. A silver leash, gleaming in the sun, ran from her left wrist to the neck of a woman in gray, a
damane
, who trotted beside the
sul’dam’s
horse like a pet dog. He had seen more of Seanchan at Falme than he wanted to, but unconsciously he paused at the mouth of an alleyway, watching. The roars and fires had showed that somebody in the city was trying to fight back, at least, and now he was going to see such an attempt.

The Seanchan were not the only reason everyone else had gotten out of sight. At the other end of the street, a good hundred mounted men swung long-pointed lances down. They wore baggy white breeches and green coats, and the gold cords on the officer’s helmet glittered. With a collective shout, a hundred or more of Tylin’s soldiers hurled themselves toward the city’s attackers. They outnumbered the Seanchan in front of them by at least two to one.

“Bloody fools,” Mat muttered. “Not like that. That
sul’dam
will—”

The only movement among the Seanchan was the woman in the lightning-marked dress raising her hand to point, as one might launch a hawk, or send off a hound. The golden-haired woman at the other end of the silvery leash took a small step forward. The foxhead medallion cooled against his chest.

Underneath the head of the Ebou Dari charge, the street suddenly erupted, paving stones and men and horses flying into the air with a deafening roar. The concussion knocked Mat flat on his back, or maybe it was the way the ground seemed to leap from under his feet. He pulled himself up in time to see the front of an inn across the way suddenly collapse into the street in a cloud of dust, exposing the rooms within.

Men and horses lay everywhere, pieces of men and horses, those still alive thrashing, around a hole in the ground half as wide as the street. Screams from the wounded filled the air. Fewer than half the Ebou Dari
staggered to their feet, dazed and stumbling. Some seized up the reins of horses as wobbly-legged as they, heaving themselves into saddles, kicking the animals into some semblance of a run. Others just ran afoot. All away from the Seanchan. Steel they could face, but not this.

Running, Mat realized, seemed a particularly fine idea right then. A glance back down the alley showed dust and rubble piled at least a story high. He darted down the street ahead of the fleeing Ebou Dari, keeping as close to the walls as possible, hoping none of the Seanchan would think he was one of Tylin’s soldiers. He should never have worn a green coat.

The
sul’dam
apparently was not satisfied. The foxhead went cool again, and from behind another roar hammered him to the pavement, pavement that jumped up to meet him. Through the ringing in his ears, he heard masonry groan. Above him, the white-plastered brick wall began leaning outward.

“What happened to my bloody luck?” he shouted. He had time for that. And just time to realize, as brick and timbers crashed down on him, that the dice in his head had just stopped dead.