This week in Reading The Wheel of Time, we find out a little bit more about what the man who calls himself Bors is up to, Sammael finds out something that might just mess up Rand’s entire plan, and Mat gets manhandled by Aes Sedai and Queen alike.
Also, he leaves a letter for Nynaeve and Elayne that he specifically tries to word “reasonably” and in a way that won’t “put their backs up” and which is pretty much guaranteed to do exactly that.
Jaichim Carridin is frustrated by ants walking on his report to Pedron Niall. Killing one of them smudges a word so he shoves the paper aside. He wants a drink, but the woman who calls herself Lady Shiaine is there, so he refrains. She begins to tell him that she needs more money, and he interrupts, alluding to her habit of spending the funds he provides on gambling and jewelry and pointing out that she has yet to produce any results for him.
She doesn’t know that he is aware of her true name, Mili Skane, and her history. She turned to the Dark after going to the White Tower and being told she couldn’t channel. She is an incredible assassin and adept at finding people. She commands a circle of Darkfriends in Ebou Dar, but has been ordered by someone much higher to obey Carridin.
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Mili tries to defend herself, but he tells her not to make excuses, and warns her of how far she could fall if she fails to find the cache of angreal. Of course, he is well aware of how far he himself could fall for that same failure; he turns away to be sure she doesn’t see any of that fear in his eyes.
He looks down in disgust at the throngs below, thinking of starting a few riots to thin out the rabble but ultimately decides not to, since rioting and chaos would interfere with the work of the Darkfriends in the city. Suddenly, he catches sight of Mat below, talking with an old man, and he suddenly experiences the agony-filled vision that he received from Ishamael when he was first ordered to hunt for the three boys from Emond’s Field.
When he comes back to himself the scene in the street has changed, and Mat is no longer there. He turns to continue upbraiding Shiaine, only to find her seemingly frozen in place in the act of rising from her chair. Sammael is also in the room.
Hurriedly moving from the window, he dropped to his knees before the Chosen. He despised the Tar Valon witches; indeed, he despised anyone who used the One Power, meddling with what had broken the world once, wielding what mere mortals should not touch. This man used the Power, too, but the Chosen could not be called mere mortals. Perhaps not mortals at all. And if he served well, neither would he be.
Carridin tells Sammael that he saw Mat Cauthon, and is surprised when Sammael appears taken aback for a moment. Nevertheless, Sammael instructs Carridin to forget about Mat as unimportant, and not to look for him or kill him unless Matt gets in the way of the search for the cache of angreal that Sammael has told Carridin to find. The Whitecloak makes his own excuses, mentioning the Aes Sedai in the city, and after a moment’s reflection Sammael decides to send someone to deal with the Aes Sedai problem. He also reminds Carridin of the price his family paid when Carridin failed Ishamael, describing in brutal detail how Carridin’s sister Vanora was given to the Myrddraal and then eventually to the Trollocs. Only Sammael’s protection keeps Carridin from the same fate, and he continues to talk about the horrors committed by the Myrddraal to drive home to Carridin the price of failure.
Sammael opens a gateway, astounding Carridin, and departs. The moment he is gone Shiaine moves again, calling him Bors before she realizes that he has moved from where he was and giving a start. Carridin tells her about Mat Cauthon—she clearly recognizes the name but claims that she has only heard of it because Mat is associated with Rand al’Thor. Carridin orders her to put her entire circle to looking for Mat. When she starts to question this, he grabs her bodily and throws her down onto the surface of his desk, threatening her with her own knife. He tells her that she is an insect, and crushes one of the ants under his thumb to drive his point home.
“I live to serve and obey, master,” she breathed. She had said that to Old Cully every time he saw them together, but never before to him.
“And this is how you will obey…” No one survived disobedience. No one.
Mat has never gone into the Tarasin Palace through the front entrance, the way a lord would, but this time he marches right up the wide steps to the golden front doors and, greeting the guards politely, informs them that he has a message to deliver for Nynaeve Sedai and Elayne Sedai. The man in charge is clearly distressed by Mat’s arrival, but after studying his clothes he opens a small door within the big one and ushers Mat inside respectfully, turning him over to a startled maid who escorts him down the corridors to be turned over to another servant, and then another, and then another.
Eventually, Mat becomes frustrated and demands to know how far he has to go to leave a note, and how hard can it be to find two Aes Sedai. A voice with an Illianer accent answers him, and he turns to seem himself being studied by two Aes Sedai he doesn’t know. He asks if they are friends of Nynaeve and Elayne, and is dismayed when they introduce themselves as Joline and Teslyn.
Mat’s stomach tightened. Nine Aes Sedai in the palace, and he had to walk into the two who followed Elaida. And one of them Red.
Mat knows that Teslyn is a sitter, though he can’t imagine what a Sitter would be doing here. They recognize him as well, and begin to insinuate things about Nynaeve and Elayne’s choices as well as his own—Joline even remarks that he should never have been allowed to leave the Tower. Encountering Aes Sedai who know about the Horn of Valere is not something Mat wanted to happen, though since the dice are still tumbling in his head he knows this isn’t the dangerous encounter his luck was predicting.
A moment later, Mat finds himself caught between Joline and Teslyn on one side and three other sisters on the other. One is either Adeleas or Vandene—the two sisters look so similar that Mat can never tell them apart. Another is a brown named Sareitha Tomares, and the third is no other than Merilille, who Mat knows is in charge of the Salidar embassy. They regard each other like “two cats with a paw on the same mouse”—literally, as Vandene/Adeleas and Teslyn both take hold of his coat.
Mat’s attempts to diffuse the situation with charm and humor fail spectacularly, and he’s considering trying to pry their hands from his clothing when suddenly the servant who had been escorting Mat comes running up from somewhere to tell them that the queen has summoned Mat. Adeleas releases Mat on Merilille’s command, but it’s a long, tense moment before Teslyn does the same, with another warning for Mat.
Once out of sight, Mat compliments the servant, an older woman named Laren, on her clever deception, only to learn that he really has been summoned by Tylin.
He makes an elaborate bow and greeting when he is presented to the Queen, but accidentally does it in the Old Tongue. The dice are still spinning in his head—this encounter still isn’t the life-threatening danger the dice always seem to warn of. Teslyn has writing implements and a table and instructs Mat to write out his message, which Mat attempts to do in a way that won’t put Nynaeve and Elayne’s backs up. When he suddenly remembers the signet ring he bought while pursuing the Darkfriend woman, he pulls it out and uses it to seal the letter.
For the first time he got a good look at what he had bought. Inside a border of large crescents, a running fox seemed to have startled two birds into flight. That made him grin. Too bad it was not a hand, for the Band, but appropriate enough. … the medallion had made him fond of foxes.
When Mat turns back around he’s startled by Tylyn who has come up right behind him—his knuckles actually brush her chest before he stumbles backward. She tells him, still standing very close to him, all the things she has learned about him from Elayne and Nynaeve, including what she has deduced from what they haven’t said. That he is “an untamed rogue, a gambler and chaser after women,” that he is a ta’veren who makes Aes Sedai uneasy. As she talks, asking Mat how he will bend the pattern in Ebou Dar, she touches his cheek and trails her fingers over his lips and down to rest against his neck.
She smiled, a faint curl of her lips that did not lessen the predatory gleam in her eyes. The hair on his head tried to stand up.
Tylin moves away a moment before the door swings open, and Mat realizes she saw it begin to move in the reflection of the mirror. Beslan, Tylin’s son, comes in, limping slightly, to report that he won his duel but that he accidentally killed his opponent after intending only to wound him, which was more than the offense was worth. Tylin warns him to be brief in paying his condolences to the widow, lest she decide he should pay for the bereavement by becoming her next husband. Then she introduces Beslan to Mat, and suggests that they go to the Swovan Night dances together. Mat tries to get out of it, but Beslan seems interested, and before Mat knows it Tylin has arranged for them to attend all of the festivals. Beslan calls it hunting, and when Mat hopes that means for girls, Beslan answers that it can mean a girl or a fight—whichever dance you are dancing at the time is the most fun, after all.
Mat managed a weak laugh. This Beslan was mad, him and his mother both.
Alright. How do I say this… delicately?
Darkfriends are idiots.
Granted, when one first becomes a Darkfriend, one doesn’t know anything about the power structure, or what might be asked of them. I imagine that none of the Darkfriends we’ve encountered so far ever expected to actually meet one of the Forsaken, or to be caught up in the events directly preceding the Last Battle. It’s a good time to remind myself that until very recently, there were parts of the world that viewed Trollocs and Myrddraal as nothing more than bogeymen, as creatures of distant legend rather than a real and current danger. The initial approach to joining the Dark is probably little more than whispered temptations and promises of power, and even now there are probably plenty of Darkfriends out there who are regular people going about their regular lives with very little idea of the machinations and currents sweeping people like Carridin around.
With all that being said, though, I still think that Darkfriends are pretty dumb. I can see how the dream of immortality and ruling the world under the Dark One feels attainable to certain Forsaken, like Ishamael or Lanfear—everybody else is living in a very obviously delusional state, and I think Chapter 15 is specifically designed to show us that.
The chapter is titled “Insects” because that is how Carridin thinks of other people. He uses the term “trash” in regards to the masses of people milling the streets, but he could just as well have named them “ants” or “roaches” or any other type of vermin. And he literally tells Shiaine that she is an insect, and demonstrates what could happen to her by smushing the ant. He tells her that one insect is much like another, and easily replaceable… which is exactly what Sammael just told Carridin himself.
It would make sense to me if Carridin was just too scared to even think about trying to turn away from the Dark—I know it’s said that “No man can walk so long in the Shadow that he cannot come again to the Light,” but I doubt that it would feel very possible to someone like Carridin. I think it would be hard to know if you were actually succeeding in renouncing the Dark and returning to the Creator’s hand, especially if your motivations were self-serving. Ingtar did it, but his reasons for turning to the Dark were at least selfless—he wanted to protect his people and was worn down by despair. His reasons for renouncing the Dark were the same, and while he hopes to redeem himself and be remembered well, even his self-sacrifice ultimately felt like just that—a sacrifice to protect others.
Carridin has none of those qualities. The murder of his entire family proves that: He could not exactly have prevented their gruesome demise, and he clearly regrets his sister’s death in particular, but his main focus is fear for himself, not pain over the fact that he caused Vanora to be brutally raped, tortured, and killed.
Carridin swallowed in spite of himself, and quelled a pang for Vanora… She had been his favorite sister, yet she was dead and he was not.
It isn’t clear from the narration how conscious Carridin is of the way he is mirroring his treatment under Sammael onto Shiaine. There is such a clear cycle of abuse in the hierarchy of Darkfriends, starting with the Dark One himself and spiraling down from the Forsaken to the highest ranking Darkfriends of this age, and down further to those below them, and those below them. Shiaine grovels for Old Cully, Old Cully grovels for someone else, etc.
Conscious or unconscious, it’s no coincidence that Carridin threatens Shiaine by telling her how easily she could be replaced right after Sammael points out that she could be the one to replace Carridin. Just as it is no coincidence that Carridin’s experience of Ishamael’s vision is, in many ways, similar to Demandred’s experience of hearing the Dark One’s voice in his head, although to a much lesser degree and without the accompanying experience of euphoria. This is another perspective that is easier for me to have as an outside observer than for someone in the middle of things to parse out, but Carridin, who I feel is very much in the middle of the ranks when it comes to Darkfriends in power, seems to be in a better position than most to see how impossible it would be for someone like him to ever make it to that coveted position of authority and immortality? How many Darkfriends does he believe will be so elevated? Surely he doesn’t think that he, a non-channeler, will ever surpass the Forsaken, powerful channelers from the Age of Legends who have already been serving the Dark One for a very, very long time?
Of course, the Dark One only needs his Darkfriends because he is caged, unable to touch the world (very much). I think it is very unlikely, if he was ever able to fully break free, that he would keep any of his human proxies, or need a nae’blis or anyone else to rule the world under him. Of course, who can say what a being like that really wants or would do—that’s pretty far outside of human ken, I would think—but it seems like a whole lot of hubris for any human, even a powerful channeler from the Age of Legend, to believe they would matter at all to the Dark One once he had the ability to reshape the world as he pleased.
It’s ironic that Carridin despises the Aes Sedai for being mere mortals who dare meddle with the One Power, and yet aspires to achieve a state of greater-than-mortal himself. It’s ironic that he’s frustrated by the heat and disgusted by the thriving insects when this may very well be a glimpse of the world he and the other Darkfriends are working to bring about. I’m not sure if he’s ordering Shiaine to look for Mat because he thinks he must—after being punished for failure, Carridin might not be eager to disregard the order to hunt for Mat even if Ishamael is ostensibly dead—or if he has another motivation. It’s a risky move, taking Shiaine and her whole circle off the task Sammael has set Carridin to complete. But maybe he thinks he can get away with it. Maybe he intends to throw Shiaine under the bus somehow?
(For that matter… does Carridin know that Ishamael was killed by Rand? The Forsaken do, of course, but I’m not sure how much information Carridin has on the subject. Sammael alludes to it when he mentions how it “seems that someone is making sure at least some of Ishamael’s commands are still carried out,” but that could be taken a number of different ways.)
I’m more than a little concerned that Sammael has found out that Mat is in Ebou Dar. If he is aware that Mat is no longer leading an army to join the other forces massing for an attack on Illian, will he figure out that Rand is trying to trick him? Rand is relying on Lews Therin’s knowledge of Sammael’s personality, but Graendal knows the man almost as well and still underestimated him in their last encounter. It’s possible Lews/Rand might, as well, especially with this new piece of information about Mat.
I think it’s fairly clear that the dice are tumbling in Mat’s head because of the encounter with Shiaine and the connection to Carridin. Of course, he doesn’t know that he was spotted so he isn’t connecting that danger, but the dice did start tumbling after he found out who was staying in the palace, so the timing fits. But he seems to be distracted by the encounters with the Aes Sedai and Tylin. I can’t really blame him, but hopefully he stays on guard regarding the woman who once tried to kill him and the Whitecloak Inquisitor she appears to be friends with.
The encounter with the Aes Sedai was pretty amusing to read, and there are lots of good details in Mat’s observations, like the way he compares Adeleas and Teslyn to two cats with their paws on the same mouse. The Aes Sedai didn’t find his little jokes at all funny, but I sure did. Like Mat, I also assumed that Tylin’s summons was specifically made to extricate Mat from the Aes Sedai—Laren probably ran straight to the Queen after Mat was cornered and reported what was going on, and Tylin issued her summons in response to that information.
Tylin might not have as much power as some rulers, but she is clearly very canny, and as wary of the Aes Sedai as she is of the Whitecloaks, or anyone else with an agenda in her land. She knows she is currently hosting both sides of the Aes Sedai divide, and would have anticipated having to navigate the friction between them. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if a few key servants were instructed to keep a discreet eye on the doings of the Aes Sedai, and to report what they could.
I don’t know if Tylin has a sexual interest in Mat or if the whole thing was entirely a ruse, but it’s certain that at least some of her behavior towards him was a cover, designed to give her a chance to learn more about him, and perhaps use him to her advantage. Perhaps the arrival of Beslan provided a different way for Tylin to tie this strange ta’veren to her, or perhaps she’ll still be interested in him in a romantic way. But I wonder what other motivations she might have with Mat. I suppose we’ll have to wait for time to tell.
The whole section of Mat leaving the letter was really fun to read. I really enjoyed the detail of him chewing thoughtfully on the pen and accidentally leaving a mark because gold is such a soft metal. It felt like such a teenager move, and part of me imagined Tylin, also in high teenager-fashion, keeping it because it has the marks of his teeth in it. It’s pinging some memory in my brain of some highschool novel in which a character did that. (Or it could have been Tina in Bob’s Burgers?) Also, I suspect that it was his ta’veren luck that made that ring stick on Mat’s finger. I wonder if it was because he was meant to have it, or because there would have been some dangerous consequence if he’d been able to follow Shiaine more closely.
I was highly amused at Mat’s decision to phrase things carefully so as not to upset Elayne and Nynaeve, and then proceeded to write “Be sensible.” Which is about the worst thing he could write, maybe after “Calm down,” or “Stop being so sensitive.” You all know I’m basically the opposite of a gender essentialist, but culturally there are some things that women hear a lot of, and which are basically guaranteed to infuriate them. “Anyway, isn’t it about time I took you back to Egwene?” isn’t much better.
Next week we’ll cover Chapters 17 and 18, but for now, I’ll just leave you with a thought that suddenly sprung to mind while writing the paragraph about Carridin carrying out Ishamael’s orders:
If the Dark One is going to reincarnate Balthamel and Aginor, he’s definitely going to reincarnate Ishamael, his favorite. Right? He probably already has, and we may have already met new Ishamael without being told who he is—a classic Jordan move.
A Happy Belated MLK day to all of you! And remember—Darkfriends are idiots.
The absolute dang hypocrisy of Jaichim Carridin has really gotten to Sylas this week. He is probably a little too worked up about it.
