“Easy with it. Easy, I said! You motherless weasels knock a lens out of alignment, and I will knock your brainless heads backward to front. Fasten it tight, Jol. Tight! If it falls while the Lord Dragon is looking through it, you both had better jump after it. Not just for him. You break my work and you will wish you had broken your fool skulls.”

Jol and the other fellow, Cail, worked on, quickly but not very visibly perturbed. They had had years to grow used to Kin Tovere’s way of talking. It had been finding a craftsman who made lenses and looking glasses—and his two apprentices—among the refugees that had first given Rand the idea for this tower.

At first none of the three noticed they were not alone. The clan chiefs climbed on silent feet, and Tovere’s harangue was enough to cover the sound of Rand’s boots. Rand himself was startled when Lan’s head popped through the open trap after Bael; boots or no, the Warder made no more noise than the Aiel. Even Han stood a head taller than the Cairhienin.

When they finally did see the new arrivals, the two apprentices gave wide-eyed starts as if they had never seen an Aiel before, then bent themselves in half bowing to Rand and stayed that way. The lensmaker jerked almost as much at the sight of the Aiel, but made a more restrained bow, wiping his head again in the middle of it.

“Told you I would have the second finished today, my Lord Dragon.” Tovere managed to get respect into his tone without making his voice one bit less gruff. “A wonderful thought, this tower. I would never have conceived it, but once you started asking how far you could see with a looking glass . . . Give me time, and I will make you one to see Caemlyn from here. If the tower is built high enough,” he added judiciously. “There are limits.”

“What you’ve done already is more than enough, Master Tovere.” More than Rand had hoped for, certainly. He had already had a look through the first looking glass.

Jol and Cail were still bent at right angles, heads down. “Perhaps you had best take your apprentices below,” Rand said. “So we don’t get crowded.”

There was room for four times as many, but Tovere immediately poked Cail’s shoulder with a thick finger, “Come along, you ham-fisted stableboys. We are in the Lord Dragon’s way.”