“They cut down the grove as soon as the Ogier departed for the stedding,” Haman muttered angrily, long brows drawn down, “no more than twenty or thirty years, and extended the city.”

Rand touched the fence with a flow of Air, wondering how to get through, and blinked as the whole thing collapsed into twenty or more pieces, which fell with loud shivering clangs that made the Ogier jump. Rand shook his head. Of course. Metal that had survived so long without a spot of rust must be Power-wrought, maybe even remnants from the Age of Legends, but the joins that had held them together had long since corroded, awaiting one good shove.

Covril laid a hand on his shoulder. “I would ask you not to open it. No doubt Loial told you how—he always did show too much interest in that sort of thing—but the Ways are dangerous.”

“I can lock it,” Haman said, “so it cannot be opened again without the Talisman of Growing. Um. Um. A simple matter; simply done.” He did not seem eager, though. He certainly did not move any closer.

“It might have to be used without time for fetching anything,” Rand told him. All the Ways might have to be used, whatever the dangers. If he could cleanse them somehow. . . . That was almost as grandiose as his boast to Taim that he would cleanse saidin.

He began weaving saidin around the Waygate, using all Five Powers, even lifting the segments of fence back into place. From the first flow he channeled, the taint seemed to pulse inside him, a slowly building vibration. It must have been the evil in Shadar Logoth itself, a resonance of evil to evil. Even in the Void he felt dizzy from those reverberations, as though the world swung beneath his feet in time to them; they made him want to vomit up everything he had ever eaten. Still, he persevered. He could not send men to stand guard here any more than he could have had them search.

What he wove and then inverted was a vicious sort of trap to suit a vicious place. A ward of surpassing nastiness. Humans could cross it unharmed, perhaps even the Forsaken—he could ward against humans or Shadowspawn, not both—and even a male Forsaken could not detect it. Should any sort of Shadowspawn pass through. . . . That was the viciousness. They would not die right away; they might even live to make it beyond the city walls. Long enough for the dead to be far off, not here to frighten the next Myrddraal that came. Long enough for a Trolloc army to exit perhaps, picking up their own deaths as they did. Cruel enough for a Trolloc. Making the thing sickened him as much as the taint on saidin.