"Be careful," Mat warned when Vanin stood. It was not that he was worried, really. Vanin moved ith surprising lightness for such a fat man. He was the best horsethief in two countries at the least, and could slip by even a Warder unseen, but... "They’re a nasty lot. Whitecloaks or Darkfriends, either one." The man only grunted and motioned for Corevin to gather his shirt and coat and come along.

"My Lord?" Harnan said as they left. "My Lord, I heard there was a fog in the Rahad yesterday."

On the point of turning away, Mat stopped. Harnan looked worried, and nothing much worried him. "What do you mean, a fog?" In this heat, fog thick as porridge would not last a heartbeat.

The file leader shrugged uncomfortably and peered into his mug. "A fog. I heard there was... things... in it." He looked up at Mat. "I heard people just disappeared. And some was found eaten, parts of them."

Mat managed not to shiver. "The fog’s gone, isn’t it? You weren’t in it. Worry when you are. That’s all you can do." Harnan frowned doubtfully, but that was the pure truth. These bubbles of evil — that was what Rand called them, what Moiraine had — burst where and when they chose, and there did not seem to be anything even Rand could do to stop them. Worrying about it did as much good as worrying whether a roof tile would fall on your head in the street tomorrow. Less, since you could decide to stay indoors.

There was something that was worth worrying over, though. Nalesean had left their winnings sitting upstairs. Bloody nobles tossed gold around like water. Leaving Harnan studying his mug, Mat headed for the railless stairs at the back of the room, but before he reached them, one of the serving women accosted him.

Caira was a slender, full-lipped girl with smoky eyes. "A man came in looking for you, my Lord," she said, twisting her skirts from side to side and looking up at him through long lashes. There was a certain smokiness in her voice, too. "Said he was an Illuminator, but he looked seedy to me. He ordered a meal, and left when Mistress Anan wouldn’t give it. He wanted you to pay."

"Next time, pigeon, give the meal," he told her, slipping a silver mark into the plunging neck of her dress. "I'll speak to Mistress Anan." He did want to find an Illuminator — a real one, not some fellow selling fireworks full of sawdust — but it hardly mattered now. Not with the gold lying unguarded. And fogs in the Rahad, and Darkfriends, and Aes Sedai, and bloody Tylin taking leave of her senses, and...

Caira giggled and twisted like a stroked cat "Would you like me to bring some punch to your room, my Lord? Or anything?" She smiled hopefully, invitingly.

"Maybe later," he said, tapping her nose with a fingertip. She giggled again; she always did. Caira would have her skirt sewn to show petticoats to the middle of her thigh or higher had Mistress Anan allowed it, but the innkeeper looked after her serving women almost as closely as she did her daughters. Almost. "Maybe later."

Trotting up the wide stone stairs, he put Caira out of his mind. What was he to do about Olver? The boy would find himself in real trouble one day if he thought he could treat women that way. He was going to have to keep him away from Harnan and the others as much as possible, he supposed. They were a bad influence on a boy. To have this on top of everything else! He had to get Nynaeve and Elayne out of Ebou Dar before something worse went wrong.

His room was at the front, with windows overlooking the square, and as he reached for the door, the hallway floor behind him squeaked. In a hundred inns, it would not even have registered, but the floors in The Wandering Woman did not squeak.

He looked back — and spun just in time to drop his hat and catch the descending truncheon with his left hand instead of his skull. The blow stung his hand to numbness, but he held on desperately as thick fingers dug into his throat, forcing him back against the door to his room. His head hit with a thump. Silver-rimmed black spots danced in his vision, obscuring a sweating face. All he could really see was a big nose and yellow teeth, and those seemed hazy. Suddenly he realized he was on the far edge of consciousness; those fingers were closing off blood to his brain along with air. His free hand went beneath his coat, fumbling over the hilts of his knives as though his fingers no longer remembered what they were for. The cudgel wrenched free. He could see it rising, feel it rising to smash his skull. Focusing everything, he jerked a knife from its scabbard and thrust.

His attacker let out a high-pitched scream, and Mat was vaguely aware of the club bouncing off his shoulder as it fell to the floor, but the man did not let go of his throat. Stumbling, Mat drove him back, tearing at the clutching fingers with one hand, driving his knife repeatedly with the other.

Abruptly the fellow fell, sliding from Mat’s blade. The knife nearly followed him to the floor. So did Mat. Gulping breath, sweet air, he clung to something, a doorway, to hold himself on his feet. From the floor a plain-faced man stared up at him with eyes that would never see anything again, a heavyset fellow with curled Murandian mustaches, in a dark blue coat fit for a small merchant or a prosperous shopkeeper. Not the look of a thief about him at all.

Abruptly he realized they had stumbled through an open door in their fight. It was a smaller room than Mat’s, windowless, a pair of oil lamps on small tables beside the narrow bed providing a murky illumination. A lanky, pale-haired man straightened from a large open chest, staring oddly at the corpse. The chest took up most of the free space in the room.

Mat opened his mouth to apologize for intruding so roughly, and the lanky man snatched a long dagger from his belt, a cudgel from the bed, and leaped over the chest at him, That had not been the look you gave a dead stranger. Clinging unsteadily to the doorframe, Mat threw underhanded, the hilt no sooner leaving his hand than he was scrabbling under his coat for another. His knife stuck squarely in the other man’s throat, and Mat almost fell again, this time from relief, as the man clutched himself, blood spurting between his fingers, and toppled backward into the open chest.

"It’s good to be lucky," Mat croaked.

Staggering, he retrieved his knife, wiping it clean on the fellow’s gray coat. A better coat than the other; still wool, but of a better cut. A lesser lord would not have been ashamed to wear it. Andoran, by the collar. He sank onto the bed, frowning at the man sprawled in the chest. A noise made him look up.

His manservant was in the doorway, trying unsuccessfully to hide a large black iron frying pan behind his back. Nerim kept a full set of pots, and everything else he thought a lord’s servant might need traveling, in the small room he shared with Olver next to Mat’s. He was short even for a Cairhienin, and skinny to boot. "My Lord has blood on his coat again, I fear," he murmured in melancholy tones. The day he sounded anything else, the sun would rise in the west "I do wish my Lord would be more careful of his clothes. It is so hard to remove blood without a stain, and the insects hardly need any encouragement to eat holes. This place has more insects than I have ever seen, my Lord." No mention at all of two dead men, or what he had intended with the frying pan.

That scream had drawn other attention; The Wandering Woman was not the sort of inn where screams passed unremarked. Feet pounded in the hallway, and Mistress Anan pushed Nerim firmly out of her way and raised her skirts to step around the corpse on the floor. Her husband followed her in, a square-faced, gray-haired man with the double earring of the Ancient and Honorable League of the Nets dangling from his left ear. The two white stones on the lower hoop said he owned other boats beside the one he captained. Jasfer Anan was part of the reason Mat was careful not to smile too much at any of Mistress Anan’s daughters. The man wore a work knife stuffed behind his belt and a longer, curved blade too, and his long blue-and-green vest revealed arms and chest crisscrossed with dueling scars. He was alive, though, and most of the men who had given those scars were not.