He stopped in the center of the room, but then continued forward. He had demanded a straight pathway. That was what he would get. No doubling back and forth this time. “Blood and bloody ashes!” Mat said, realizing something as he walked.

“What?” Thom asked, looking up from Moiraine with alarm.

“My dice,” Mat said. “I should have included getting my dice back in the bargain.”

“But we discovered you don’t need them to guide us.”

“It’s not about that,” Mat grumbled. “I like those dice.” He pulled his hat down again, looking down the hallway ahead. Was that motion he saw? All the way in the distance, a good dozen rooms away? No, it must be a trick of the shadows and the shifting steam.

“Mat,” Noal said. “I’ve mentioned that my Old Tongue isn’t what it once was. But I think I understood what you said. The bargain you made.”

“Yes?” Mat said, only half-listening. Had he been speaking in the Old Tongue again? Burn him. And what was that down the hallway?

“Well,” Noal said, “you said—as part of the bargain—something like ‘you foxes can’t knock us down or try to kill us or anything.’”

“Sure did,” Mat said.

“You said foxes, Mat,” Noal said. “The foxes can’t hurt us.”

“And they let us pass.”

“But what about the others?” Noal asked. “The Aelfinn? If the Eelfinn can’t hurt us, are the Aelfinn required to leave us be as well?”

The shadows in the far-distant corridor resolved into figures carrying long, sinuous bronze swords with curving blades. Tall figures, wearing layers of yellow cloth, the hair on their heads straight and black. Dozens of them, who moved with an unnatural grace, eyes staring forward. Eyes with pupils that were vertical slits.

Bloody and bloody ashes!

“Run!” Mat yelled.

“Which direction?” Noal asked, alarmed.

“Any direction!” Mat yelled. “So long as it’s away from them!”

Chapter 55

The One Left Behind

A loud boom shook the hallways, making the entire structure rumble. Mat stumbled, leaning against the wall for support as smoke and chips of rock sprayed out of the opening behind them.

He ducked his head around and looked down the hallway as Thom and Noal ran onward, Thom clutching Moiraine. Noal had tossed his torch aside and gotten out a drum to try to soothe the Aelfinn. That had not worked, and so Mat had turned to the exploding cylinders and nightflowers.

Light, but the cylinders were deadly! He saw corpses of Aelfinn lying scattered through the hallway, their glistening skin ripped and torn, evillooking smoke steaming from their blood. Others slid out of doorways and alcoves, pushing through the smoke. They walked on two legs, but they seemed to slither as they walked, waving back and forth through the hallway, their hissing growing angrier and angrier.