This week in Reading The Wheel of Time we’ll be covering chapters 25 and 26 of Crossroads of Twilight, in which Perrin is no closer to rescuing his wife than he was when we saw him last. He is closer to running out of food, however, which means Traveling to a town where they can buy more. It’s a gross town. And a very creepy town.
You don’t need Perrin’s wolf senses to tell that something is very wrong in So Habor. But it helps.
The men Perrin sent after the people from Malden have returned, but the only helpful information they were able to obtain was a map; the only people the Shaido allowed to flee were the young and the old and the sick, who were no use as gai’shain.
The map was a puzzle, with its maze of streets and the lady’s fortress and the great cistern in the northeast corner. It tantalized him with possibilities. But they were possibilities only if he found a solution to the greater puzzle that was not shown on the map, the huge mass of Shaido surrounding the walled town, not to mention four or five hundred Shaido Wise Ones who could channel. So the map went back into his sleeve, and he continued to pace.
Perrin has been counting the days by making knots in a length of cord, which he touches from time to time as though it can connect him to Faile. Perrin has started to rely on Berelain as one person he can talk to about missing her. He doesn’t understand what changed, exactly, but Berelain has stopped smelling like she thinks of him as prey and now only smells of sympathy.
Arganda comes into the tent, looking as exhausted and haggard as Perrin feels. He has brought money from his Queen’s strongbox to add to what Perrin and Berelain have contributed, because the camp is starting to run out of food; the surrounding area has mostly been hunted clean, and the supplies they came with are very low. Perrin and Berelain are taking a party of Mayener and Tarabon soldiers, along with the Aes Sedai and their Warders, to find a town where they can buy food. Perrin is worried about leaving Arganda behind, and also about Aram, who isn’t allowed to come on this trip as punishment for getting into a fight with two Ghealdanin soldiers. Aram has become increasingly sullen and snappish, and Arganda is becoming increasingly frantic at not being able to rescue his Queen. Perrin asks Dannil to keep an eye on both of them.
Masuri and Seonid are the last to join the mounted party, but as they strike out, Perrin notices movement in the trees—a watcher racing to tell Masema about their departure. When they reach the clearing where Neald and the carts and drivers are waiting, Perrin is surprised to see Balwer waiting for him.
Balwer has taken all of Faile’s people under his wing since her disappearance, and has them watching and eavesdropping everywhere in the camp. He asks permission to visit “a friend” and promises to be responsible for his two companions.
On the other side of the gateway, Perrin starts to notice that the countryside seems abandoned. The farmhouses are all dark, and there is snow on the road. Suddenly, Masuri spots one of the Seanchan creatures circling high above, with a human riding on its back. Everyone watches until the thing flies out of sight, but Perrin assures the others that it has nothing to do with them.
The town, when they reach it, proves to be protected by massive stone walls with towers, and Perrin reflects that So Habor would have little to fear from the Prophet’s men or any other bandits. Neald jokes that he’s relieved to see people on the walls, proving that there’s someone alive in this country, but his grin looks forced.
Leaving the carts and the Two Rivers men behind, Perrin and his party ride down until they reach the walls, as Perrin tries to quell his growing unease. There is a sour smell to the air that no one else seems to notice. Gallenne calls up to the men on the walls, formally announcing Berelain, Perrin, and the Aes Sedai. It’s an impressive recital of names and titles, but when he’s finished there is a long pause.
“How do we know you’re alive?” a hoarse voice shouted down at last.
Berelain blinked in surprise, but no one laughed. It was fool talk, yet Perrin thought the hair on the back of his neck really was standing stiff. Something was very wrong, here.
Seonid responds sternly, and after a moment the gates are opened and the stench gets immediately worse, plenty strong enough for everyone to smell it. A shifty man in filthy clothes pokes Perrin in the leg to see if he’s real, then tells them stammeringly that the Lord of So Habor is away. He directs them to the Golden Barge where they can find the grain merchants.
Perrin tells his companions that they should find somewhere else, but Berelain answers that there is nowhere else, that they are already here, and that she’s sure been to towns that smelled worse than this. Balwer quickly leads his protegés down a side street.
Perrin tells himself that it’s only imagination that makes it feel like the buildings might fall down on his head at any moment and the colors are too dim. He does notice that the village is also too quiet; there is no sound of people talking, not in the streets or the shops, and everyone seems to be hurrying away from something.
When they reach the inn, Perrin, Berelain, and Annoura go inside. Despite the gilded sign and the quality of the interior, the inn is cold and dark, without even a fire in the fireplace, and the group of eleven merchants seem startled to see them. Annoura demands to know what has happened in the town, but doesn’t get an answer.
The merchants brighten somewhat when they learn that their visitors are looking to buy grain and other supplies. Perrin leans against the wall and watches, having agreed to let Berelain do the negotiating. They show her samples of the grain, and Perrin notices that they aren’t bargaining as enthusiastically as Perrin is used to. Eventually, he comes over to inspect the grain himself, and the box, and declares that he wants to see the grain in the warehouses.
One of the merchants, Mistress Arnon, blusters and acts offended, but Berelain chimes in that she was just about to suggest a visit to the warehouses. The merchants drag their heels, pretending to have forgotten workers to lift the bars on the warehouses, and then to have forgotten a lantern, but Perrin’s strength and Annoura’s channeling quickly overcome this difficulty. Inside smells of barley, and of rats and cats.
There were always rats in grain barns, and cats to hunt them. It was comforting, and normal. Almost enough to soothe his uneasiness. Almost. He smelled something else, a smell he should know. A fierce yowl deep in the warehouse turned to rising cries of pain that died abruptly. Apparently the rats of So Habor sometimes hunted back. Perrin’s hackles stirred again, but surely there was nothing here the Dark One would want to spy on. Most rats were just rats.
When Perrin cuts into one of the sacks of barley, he finds it full of weevils, despite the fact it’s too cold for the insects to live. Berelain alters her offer to the merchants to account for the quality of the goods and to ensure that the barley is winnowed before purchase. Suddenly, a man’s scream draws them back outside where they find Kireyin, one of the Ghealdan officers, who claims to have seen a man walk through the wall. Perrin thinks he might be drunk, but Seonid, who has been out looking around the town, arrives and tells him that she saw the same thing.
“The dead are walking in So Habor. Lord Cowlin fled the town for fear of his wife’s spirit. It seems there was doubt as to how she died. Hardly a man or woman in the town has not seen someone dead, and a good many have seen more than one. Some say people have died from the touch of someone dead. I cannot verify that, but people have died of fright, and others because of it.”
She adds that people have been striking out at anything that surprises them, occasionally killing a loved one instead of hitting something already dead. She has no idea what is happening, or why, but she wants Perrin to leave one Aes Sedai behind to help.
Perrin needs every asset he has for Faile, and replies that So Habor must face its dead alone. Privately, he thinks that even fear of ghosts doesn’t explain everything that is wrong with the town.
They just did not seem to care anymore. And weevils thriving in winter, in freezing cold? There was worse wrong in So Habor than spirits walking, and every instinct told him to leave at a dead run, without looking back. He purely wished that he could.
I knew it. I just knew that the ghost thing from chapter 10 was going to come back. When Elayne was visiting House Matherin, the maid Elsie thought she saw the Lord’s deceased grandmother. Elayne dismissed the girl as a ninny, but I was quite certain that someone else would be seeing ghosts before too long, because I know that Jordan never puts anything in randomly—all those little clues and moments always come back.
It was quite a rollercoaster to read this section, especially for two pretty short chapters. But I really enjoyed the way the descriptions were written, and trying to puzzle out what was going on as more and more details were revealed.
My initial thought was that perhaps there was some direct connection between the town of So Habor and the area where House Matherin is, but a glance at the map showed me that House Matherin is on the wrong side of Andor and So Habor isn’t anywhere near even being on, say, the same road or the same river.
My next suspicion was that the strangeness had something to do with the Seanchan. The appearance of a raken above the party as they emerged from the gateway briefly made for a nice little red herring, and a Seanchan attack and takeover could possibly have explained the empty farmhouses and the way the man who poked Perrin’s leg stammered and licked his lips when asked about the Lord’s location. Granted, the Seanchan haven’t traditionally bothered farmers or any of the other ordinary citizenry, as long as those folks haven’t actively resisted Seanchan rule, and it’s not terribly like them to rule with fear or from the shadows, but they did recently suffer an unprecedented defeat at the hands of men who can channel. They have reasons to try sneaking around instead. And while they are (aside from the whole slavery thing) usually strict but just as rulers, if it served their interests I wouldn’t necessarily see them balking at harsh or even inhumane treatment of prisoners. (Again, the slavery thing.)
The initial suspicion and wariness from the guards at the gates and the sense that the people of So Habor were hiding something from their visitors fit with the idea that the town might have been taken by the Seanchan, perhaps for some kind of secret outpost or other maneuvering. But even before Kireyin’s sighting and Seonid’s explanation of what was going on in the town, I was already beginning to suspect something more sinister than the Seanchan. For one, Perrin’s wolf senses were clearly responding to something supernatural. There were shadows where they shouldn’t be, people seemed to be losing touch with reality, and they were also losing connection with basic self-care as well—Perrin notes that the people can’t be starving if they have grain to sell, but they still seem gaunt and unwashed.
Perhaps So Habor is becoming a sort of Shadar Logoth. Not one created by Mordeth, I don’t think, and not exactly like Shadar Logoth, but something similar. The vibes just feel very like Shadar Logoth: There’s the aforementioned shadows where they don’t belong, and the sense of unnatural rot and decay suggests that the city is eating itself from the inside.
The fall of Aridhol was caused by the populace (under Mordeth’s direction) turning inward, and focusing on becoming as hard and cruel as the Shadow they hoped to defeat. In time, that cruelty also became its own Evil, as dark as, if not darker than, the Shadowspawn themselves, and manifested itself in the supernatural abilities of Mordeth and in the creation of Mashadar.
I could see something similar happening in some other town or city. For example, what would happen if a town became focused on a sense of despair and hopelessness? We’ve seen individuals before now who have stopped caring for themselves even enough to accept money or food. These were some of the refugees affected by Rand’s ta’veren powers, Many people seem to be wandering aimlessly, like the woman with the baby that Elayne saw in the crowd in Caemlyn. If that effect was focused on many people in a single place, it might look the way So Habor looked. Or if some person was encouraging such an attitude, the way Mordeth encouraged the hardening of Aridhol, perhaps that would have the results we’ve seen there.
However, as good as that explanation seems in some respects, none of these hypotheses explains the ghosts. If that’s what they are. They certainly could be—the Heroes of Horn are basically ghosts, so we have precedent for that concept within this world. But the Heroes of the Horn are souls that are kept in Tel’aran’rhiod instead of going wherever all the other souls go after death and before reincarnation—the Creator’s hand, I guess. There is no in-between place, as far as we know, where a spirit might exist neither with the Creator nor within a living body. Why would the souls of ordinary people suddenly start showing up in the waking world when that doesn’t seem to be something that has ever happened before?
I believe (though I may be misremembering) that someone saw human figures as well as monstrous ones in the mist that sprang up around the rebel camps in Cairhien when Rand was visiting them, so there may be a clue there. The bubbles of Evil seem much more dramatic, but also much more short-lived, than what is happening in So Habor, but the town’s condition could be the lingering effects of one that appeared earlier. Or perhaps not every bubble comes on suddenly—perhaps some rise and burst very very slowly, and this is the first time one of our main characters has encountered such a one. If there were slow versions, those would be harder to recognize for what they are, anyway.
I like this as a theory, because there is certainly an aspect of the Dark One’s touch in the decay-like suffering of the people of So Habor. Rand often likened the taint to the feel and scent of midden heaps and other filth. And while that filth is also literal in this case, the real-world filth and the metaphysical filth seem to go hand in hand, in the same way that vermin and pest and carrion birds are the only animals that might be spies for the Dark One. Most are normal, just as most death and decay is normal, but the connection exists as well.
The presence of so many weevils when it’s too cold for them to live also reminds me that we have seen other instances where there were vermin where they shouldn’t be. The Salidar Aes Sedai found weevils in their grain, too, despite those supplies being kept inside a Keeping, and there are rats in Tar Valon. Perhaps it isn’t that the wards and weaves are failing in a general sense, as Egwene and Alviarin both seemed to suspect. Perhaps the spoilage and infestation has something to do with the Dark One being able to touch the world more directly. He might be stepping up his game from affecting the weather to causing things to decay and rot, whether that be in food, or in people’s very minds.
We also know that the Dark One gets the souls of everyone who swears to him, and that he can put those souls back into other human bodies. If he can do that, maybe he could just set them loose in the world without bodies. It is stated that people are seeing loved ones, so I don’t know if that’s too high of a percentage of Darkfriends for one town, but maybe it was already kind of a crappy place even before the ghosts. After all, it sounds like the Lord of the town murdered his wife, which doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a Darkfriend but certainly would fit if he was.
The other suggestion that this might be the Dark One’s touch, and perhaps a more direct touch than we’ve seen before now, is Perrin’s observation that the colors in the town seem dim. Descriptions such as “It had to be imagination. The sky was not that gray,” feel like the inverse of a channeler’s experience of having their senses heightened by touching the True Source. Perhaps this experience of everything being more vivid isn’t because their senses are being altered, but because while they are actively holding the One Power they are much more connected, literally, to the Pattern. In the same but opposite way, perhaps the Dark One’s touch is making people less connected to the Pattern, coming between it and them and the way the taint used to stand between a male channelers and the pure flow of saidin.
Finally, we’ve seen that channeling the True Power can rip a hole in the Pattern, and we also know that using balefire can erase things from the Pattern, even to the point of causing the Pattern to start unraveling in places if it is used too much. Perhaps the Dark One’s influence has a similar effect, and he can actually tear or unravel the Pattern in some way, if he gets close enough. Even a few threads might result in some very dramatic effects on reality.
Only time will tell which, if any, of these theories are heading in the right direction, but I feel pretty solidly that I’m on the right track here. Whatever is going on, I do agree with Perrin that the ghosts are only part of it, and that what’s happening in So Habor is more than just the result of the fear of seeing dead loved ones as spirits. If ghosts were the only problem, I feel like most people would just pick up and leave—yes it’s a harsh winter, but Malden isn’t that far away, and they have guards on the walls and probably men who work as protection for the merchants. If they went in large groups they’d at least have a good chance of making it to Malden without being attacked by bandits or the Prophet’s men. Not 100%, but when the alternative is ghosts I think most people would feel willing to take those odds.
It’s interesting to note that Perrin doesn’t even hesitate before deciding that he can’t spare a single Aes Sedai to help the people of So Habor. There are innocents and children in that town, but he doesn’t even consider it; he isn’t willing to risk depleting his strength of even one Aes Sedai. I don’t know what a single Aes Sedai could do, anyway, and she would probably end up subsumed by whatever is affecting the townspeople, so as a reader I was kind of relieved that he said no. But the quickness of the decision, the fact that he doesn’t consider any alternatives or have even one guilty moment when he thinks about how he can’t save everyone no matter how much it hurts is really telling about his state of mind, and about how much Faile’s loss has changed him at least for the moment. We’ll get into this more next week, because it’s going to be very important to the choices Perrin makes. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but that state of mind is so clear here, perhaps even clearer than when we’ve seen him pushing his people too hard or neglecting the growing problem of Aram.
Speaking of Aram, I’m very worried about him. His issue is not an easy one to deal with, and I don’t really know what the answer would be, but it’s clear that he needs more from Perrin than he is getting. Perrin’s plate is full to overflowing, but I think he is more responsible for Aram than for the others who follow him because Perrin was responsible in shaping the young Tinker’s new world view. He believed that he had no right to deny Aram’s desire to fight, but he did more than not deny it. He facilitated it, provided the sword and the men to train him, and gave Aram a place among his followers. Perrin might not think of himself as a Lord or a leader, but he is both, and that slightly paternal responsibility is not something he understands, or even recognizes yet, I think. Faile did, and she was able to help balance things with Aram, at least to an extent. Without her, Aram seems to be deteriorating rapidly.
Granted, so is Perrin. In some ways, it seems that the narrative is building a parallel between them; Perrin wasn’t ever a follower of the Way of the Leaf, but he has always been pacifistic in nature. He abhorred violence when he first had to engage with it, and struggled with whether or not it was morally okay for him to choose fighting. He eventually felt that it was necessary, as did Aram, but choosing violence is not the end of that journey. It is the beginning. Next week we will see Perrin reach a crossroads in his journey toward understanding his own violence, and I suspect that Aram may reach his own crossroads soon, as well. And I worry for both of them.
I’m also very curious about what conflict exists between Annoura and Berelain. And I share Perrin’s confusion over Berelain’s change in attitude towards him. I understand that she doesn’t want to distract him further when he’s already at the breaking point, and she seems to have a sense of morality around her pursuit of him that deems it unfair to chase him when Faile’s not there to fight back. Or maybe she’s just realizing how deeply Perrin loves Faile, and how nothing Berelain can do will change that.
Just one chapter next week, chapter 27, because it’s such a momentous one that I need a whole post just to talk about one moment. You know the one.
