The Gathering Storm полностью

Semirhage sat alone in the small room. They had taken away her chair and given her no lantern or candle. Blast this cursed Age and its cursed people! What she would have given for glowbulbs on the walls. During her days, prisoners hadn’t been denied light. Of course, she had locked several of her experiments away in total darkness, but that was different. It had been important to discover what effect the lack of light would have on them. These so-called Aes Sedai who held her, they had no rational reason for leaving her in darkness. They just did it to humiliate her.

She pulled her arms closer, huddling against the wooden wall. She did not cry. She was of the Chosen! So what if she had been forced to abase herself? She was not broken.

But . . . the fool Aes Sedai no longer regarded her as they had. Semirhage hadn’t changed, but they had. Somehow, in one swoop, that cursed woman with the paralis-net in her hair had unraveled Semirhage’s authority with the entire lot of them.

How? How had she lost control so quickly? She shuddered as she remembered being turned over the woman’s knees and spanked. And the nonchalance of it. The only emotion in the woman’s voice had been a slight annoyance. She’d treated Semirhage—one of the Chosen!—as if she were barely worthy of notice. That had galled more than the blows.

It would not happen again. Semirhage would be ready for the blows next time, and she would give them no weight. Yes, that would work. Wouldn’t it?

She shuddered again. She had tortured hundreds, perhaps thousands, in the name of understanding and reason. Torture made sense. You truly saw what a person was made of, in more ways than one, when you began to slice into them. That was a phrase she’d used on numerous occasions. It usually made her smile.

This time it did not.

Why couldn’t they have given her pain? Broken fingers, cuts into her flesh, coals in the pits of her elbows. She had steeled her mind to each of these things, preparing for them. A small, eager part of herself had looked forward to them.

But this? Being forced to eat food off the floor? Being treated like a child in front of those who had regarded her with such awe?

I will kill her, she thought, not for the first time. I will remove her tendons, one at a time, using the Power to heal her so that she lives to experience the pain. No. No, I’ll do something new to her. I will show her agony that hasn’t been known to anyone in any Age!

“Semirhage.” A whisper.

She froze, looking up in the darkness. That voice had been soft, like a chill wind, yet still sharp and biting. Had she imagined it? He couldn’t be there, could he?

“You have failed greatly, Semirhage,” the voice continued, so soft. A faint light shone underneath the door, but the voice came from inside her cell. The light seemed to grow brighter, and it flushed a deep red, illuminating the hem of a figure in a black cloak standing before her. She looked up. The ruddy light revealed a face of white, the color of dead skin. The face had no eyes.

She immediately knelt to the floor, prostrating herself on the aged wood. Though the figure before her looked like a Myrddraal, it was much taller and much, much more important. She shivered as she remembered the voice of the Great Lord himself, speaking to her.

When you obey Shaidar Haran, you obey me. When you disobey. . . .

“You were to capture the boy, not kill him,” the figure whispered in a hiss, like steam escaping through cracks between pot and lid. “You took his hand and nearly his life. You have revealed yourself and have lost valuable pawns. You have been captured by our enemies, and now they have broken you.” She could hear the smile on its lips. Shaidar Haran was the only Myrddraal she had ever seen bear a smile. But, then, she did not think this thing was truly a Myrddraal.

She did not reply to its charges. One did not lie, or even make excuses, before this figure.

Suddenly, the shield blocking her vanished. Her breath caught. Saidar had returned! Sweet power. However, as she reached for it, she hesitated. Those imitation Aes Sedai outside would feel it if she channeled.

A cold, long-nailed hand touched her chin. The flesh of it felt like dead leather. It rotated her face upward to meet the eyeless gaze. “You have been given one last chance,” the maggotlike lips whispered. “Do. Not. Fail.”

The light faded. The hand at her chin withdrew. She continued to kneel, fighting down terror. One last chance. The Great Lord always rewarded failure in ... imaginative ways. She had given such rewards before, and had no desire to receive them. They would make any torture or punishment these Aes Sedai could imagine look childish.