“About Lews Therin? You never seem interested in anything else. Now, he would be a pet. I would make him the centerpiece of every display. Not that he is handsome enough, normally, but who he is makes up for that.” Smiling into her goblet again, she added in a murmur that would have been inaudible without saidin in him, “And I do like them tall.”

It was an effort not to stand up as straight as he could. He was not short, but it rankled that his height did not match his ability. Lews Therin had been a head taller than he; so was al’Thor. There was always an assumption that the taller man was the better. It took another effort not to touch the scar that slanted across his face from hairline to square-cut beard. Lews Therin had given him that; he kept it for a reminder. He suspected she had misunderstood his question on purpose, to bait him. “Lews Therin is long dead,” he said harshly. “Rand al’Thor is a jumped-up farmboy, a choss-hauler who has been lucky.”

Graendal blinked at him as if surprised. “Do you really think so? There has to be more than luck behind him. Luck could not have carried him so far, so fast.”

Sammael had not come to talk about al’Thor, yet ice formed at the base of his spine. Thoughts he had forced himself to dismiss came oozing back. Al’Thor was not Lews Therin, but al’Thor was Lews Therin’s soul reborn, as Lews Therin himself had been the rebirth of that soul. Sammael was neither philosopher nor theologian, yet Ishamael had been both, and he claimed to have divined secrets hidden in that fact. Ishamael had died mad, true, but even when he was still sane, back when it seemed they surely would drive Lews Therin Telamon to defeat, he claimed this struggle had gone on since the Creation, an endless war between the Great Lord and the Creator using human surrogates. More, he avowed that the Great Lord would almost as soon have turned Lews Therin to the Shadow as have broken free. Maybe Ishamael had been a little mad then, too, but there had been efforts to turn Lews Therin. And Ishamael said that it had happened in the past, the Creator’s champion made a creature of the Shadow and raised up as the Shadow’s champion.

There were unsettling implications in those claims, ramifications Sammael did not want to consider, but the thing that shoved itself to the front of his mind was the possibility that the Great Lord might really want to make al’Thor Nae’blis. It could not happen in a vacuum. Al’Thor would need help. Help—that could explain his supposed luck so far. “Have you learned where al’Thor is hiding Asmodean? Or anything of Lanfear’s whereabouts? Or Moghedien’s?” Of course, Moghedien always hid herself; the Spider was forever popping up just when you were sure she was finally dead.