The dusty side corridor by which they had entered, lined with wooden doors set in gray stone walls, took nearly a hundred paces to reach the much wider main hall that ran the length of the library. Their lights showed footprints overlaying footprints in the dust, most from the large boots men would wear and most themselves faded by dust. The ceiling was higher here, and some of the doors nearly large enough for a barn. The main stairs at the end, half the width of the hall, were where large things were brought down. Another flight beside them led deeper. Nynaeve took it without a pause.
Egwene followed quickly. The bluish light washed out Elayne’s face, but Egwene thought it still looked paler than it should. We could scream our lungs out down here, and no one would hear a whimper.
She felt a lightning bolt form, or the potential for one, and nearly stumbled. She had never before channeled two flows at once; it did not seem difficult at all.
The main hall of the second basement was much like the first level, wide and dusty but with a lower ceiling. Nynaeve hurried to the third door on the right and stopped.
The door was not large, but its rough wooden planks somehow gave an impression of thickness. A round iron lock hung from a length of stout chain that was drawn tight through two thick staples, one in the door, the other cemented into the wall. Lock and chain alike had the look of newness; there was almost no dust on them.
“A lock!” Nynaeve jerked at it; the chain had no give, and neither did the lock. “Did either of you see a lock anywhere else?” She pulled it again, then flung it against the door hard enough to bounce. The bang echoed down the hall. “I did not see one other locked door!” She pounded a fist on the rough wood. “Not one!”
“Calm yourself,” Elayne said. “There is no need to throw a tantrum. I could open the lock myself, if I could see how the inside of it works. We will open it some way.”
“I do not want to calm myself,” Nynaeve snapped. “I want to be furious! I want . . . !”
Letting the rest of the tirade fade from her awareness, Egwene touched the chain. She had learned more things than how to make lightning bolts since leaving Tar Valon. One was an affinity for metal. That came from Earth, one of the Five Powers few women had much strength in—the other was Fire—but she had it, and she could feel the chain, feel inside the chain, feel the tiniest bits of the cold metal, the patterns they made. The Power within her quivered in time to the vibrations of those patterns.
“Move out of my way, Egwene.”
She looked around and saw Nynaeve wrapped in the glow of saidar and holding a prybar so close in color to the blue-white of the light that it was nearly invisible. Nynaeve frowned at the chain, muttered something about leverage, and the prybar was suddenly twice as long.
“Move, Egwene.”
Egwene moved.
Thrusting the end of the prybar through the chain, Nynaeve braced it, then heaved with all her strength. The chain snapped like thread, Nynaeve gasped and stumbled halfway across the hall in surprise, and the prybar clattered to the floor. Straightening, Nynaeve stared from the bar to the chain in amazement. The prybar vanished.
“I think I did something to the chain,” Egwene said. And I wish I knew what.
“You could have said something,” Nynaeve muttered. She pulled the rest of the chain from the staples and threw open the door. “Well? Are you going to stand there all day?”
The dusty room inside was perhaps ten paces square, but it held only a heap of large bags made of heavy brown cloth, each stuffed full, tagged, and sealed with the Flame of Tar Valon. Egwene did not have to count them to know there were thirteen.
She moved her ball of light to the wall and fastened it there; she was not certain how she did it, but when she took her hand away, the light remained. I keep learning how to do things without knowing what they are, she thought nervously.
Elayne frowned at her as if considering, then hung her light on the wall, too. Watching, Egwene thought she saw what it was she had done. She learned it from me, but I just learned it from her. She shivered.
Nynaeve went straight to tumbling the bags apart and reading the tags. “Rianna. Joiya Byir. These are what we are after.” She examined the seal on one bag, then broke the wax and unwound the binding cords. “At least we know no one’s been here before us.”
Egwene chose a bag and broke the seal without reading the name on the tag. She did not really want to know whose possessions she was searching. When she upended them onto the dusty floor, they proved to be mainly old clothes and shoes, with a few ripped and crumpled papers of the sort that might hide under the wardrobe of a woman who was not too assiduous in seeing her rooms cleaned. “I don’t see anything useful here. A cloak that would not do for rags. A torn half of a map of some city. Tear, it says in the corner. Three stockings that need darnin
g.” She stuck her finger through the hole in a velvet slipper that had no mate and waggled it at the others. “This one left no clues behind.”
“Amico did not leave anything, either,” Elayne said glumly, tossing clothes aside with both hands. “It might as well be rags. Wait, here’s a book. Whoever bundled these up must have been in a hurry to toss in a book. Customs and Ceremonies of the Tairen Court. The cover is torn off, but the librarians will want it anyway.” The librarians certainly would. No one threw away books, no matter how badly damaged.
“Tear,” Nynaeve said in a flat voice. Kneeling amid the clutter from the bag she was searching, she retrieved a scrap of paper she had already thrown away. “A list of trading ships on the Erinin, with the dates they sailed from Tar Valon and the dates they were expected to arrive in Tear.”
“It could be coincidence,” Egwene said slowly.
“Perhaps,” Nynaeve said. She folded the paper and tucked it up her sleeve, then broke the seal on another bag.
When they finally finished, every bag searched twice and discarded rubbish heaped around the edges of the room, Egwene sat down on one of the empty bags, so engrossed that she barely noticed her own wince. Drawing up her knees, she studied the little collection they had made, all laid in a row.
“It is too much,” Elayne said. “There is too much of it.”
“Too much,” Nynaeve agreed.
There was a second book, a tattered, leather-bound volume entitled Observations on a Visit to Tear, with half its pages falling out. Caught in the lining of a badly torn cloak in Chesmal Emry’s bag, where it might have slipped through a rip in one of the pockets of the cloak, had been another list of trading vessels. It said no more than the names, but they were all on the other list, too, and according to that, those vessels all had sailed in the early morning after the night Liandrin and the others left the Tower. There was a hastily sketched plan of some large building, with one room faintly noted as “Heart of the Stone,” and a page with the names of five inns, the word “Tear” heading the page badly smudged but barely readable. There was. . . .