The messenger arrived at dawn, just as the group was saddling horses for the Blight.
Spencer had been checking his Codex Inventory one final time — four slots occupied with supplies, the fifth reserved — when the Shienaran soldier burst into the courtyard, armor clattering, face pale with the kind of news that changes everything.
"Lord Agelmar," the soldier gasped. "The patrols captured someone on the southern road. A peddler. He was asking about travelers from the Two Rivers."
Spencer's blood went cold.
Fain. They caught Padan Fain.
Moiraine's silver-blue thread pulsed with sudden, sharp attention. "Where is this peddler now?"
"The dungeons, Aes Sedai. Lord Agelmar thought you'd want to see him before you departed."
"He was right." Moiraine turned to the group, her ageless face revealing nothing of the calculation happening behind her eyes. "We delay our departure by one hour. I must see this prisoner."
---
The dungeons of Fal Dara were carved into bedrock beneath the fortress.
Spencer followed Moiraine down stone stairs that spiraled into darkness, torches guttering in brackets worn smooth by generations of hands. Lan walked behind them, his gray-green thread coiled tight with readiness. Lord Agelmar had stayed above — he had a fortress to command — but his curiosity had been evident.
"You wish to observe," Moiraine said without turning. It wasn't a question.
"My impressions might be useful." Spencer kept his voice neutral. "I sensed this man's corruption in Emond's Field. Seeing him now might reveal how it's progressed."
"Or it might reveal something about you." Moiraine's thread rippled with that patient, dangerous suspicion she'd been cultivating since Winternight. "Very well. Observe. But say nothing to the prisoner."
They reached the lowest level. Cells lined both walls, most empty, their iron doors hanging open on rusted hinges. One cell, at the corridor's end, was occupied.
The thing inside looked up as they approached.
---
Thread Sight nearly buckled.
Spencer had seen Fain's corruption before — back in Emond's Field, the oily black tendrils wrapped around the peddler's original thread. But that had been at a distance, glimpsed through crowds and chaos. This was different. This was a close examination of something that shouldn't exist.
Fain's thread was a nightmare.
The original white had been completely consumed, replaced by interlocking layers of incompatible infection. Shadow-black corruption coiled through the core — the Dark One's touch, the same signature Spencer had seen on Trollocs and Myrddraal. But wrapped around that darkness, fighting it, feeding on it, was the curdled green-gold of Shadar Logoth.
Two kinds of evil, merged into one vessel. Each trying to devour the other. Neither succeeding.
[Skill Archive: Recording. Category: Corruption Pattern — Dual Source. Entry: Fain Hybrid Infection. Comprehension: 0.]
Mordeth merged with Fain. The entity from Shadar Logoth found a new body, a new soul to corrupt. And the Dark One's touch was already there.
They're both eating him alive. And somehow, he's surviving.
Fain sat in the corner of his cell, knees drawn to his chest, head tilted at an angle that made him look like a broken doll. His eyes — bright with madness, gleaming with intelligence that had nothing wholesome behind it — found Spencer through the bars.
And he smiled.
---
"There you are."
Fain's voice was wrong. It held harmonics that shouldn't exist — the scratchy wheeze of the peddler Spencer remembered, overlaid with something older, something that spoke from the depths of Shadar Logoth's corrupted memory.
"The stitch that doesn't match. The patch on the Pattern that shouldn't be."
Spencer's heart stopped.
Ba'alzamon's words. From the dream. From when the Dark One addressed me directly.
Fain knows. The Shadow's network identified me, and they shared the intelligence with their pet monster.
"You are not to speak to—" Moiraine began.
"Oh, I'm not speaking to you, Aes Sedai." Fain's smile widened, revealing teeth that seemed too sharp. "I'm speaking to him. The anomaly. The Dark One told me about you, carpenter. A thread that doesn't belong in the weaving. A consciousness that arrived from somewhere the Pattern cannot explain."
Spencer said nothing. His hands were steady — through sheer force of will — but inside, everything was screaming.
"Did you think you could hide?" Fain rose smoothly, crossing to the bars with a predator's grace. His corruption-thread reached toward Spencer, tasting the Codex's presence the same way Mordeth had in that dead city. "The Shadow sees everything eventually. And you... you're interesting. Different. A tool that doesn't fit the Great Lord's design, but might be made to fit."
"Silence." Moiraine's voice carried the weight of command, and Power flowed from her — a ward that pressed Fain back from the bars, sealing the cell with layers of Spirit.
Fain laughed as he retreated. The sound followed Spencer up the stairs, all the way to the courtyard, all the way into the light.
---
Spencer found a water basin near the stables and scrubbed his hands until they were raw.
The sensation of Fain's corruption-thread reaching for him wouldn't fade. It was like the memory of fingers brushing his skin — intimate, violating, impossible to shake.
The Shadow knows about me. Ba'alzamon told Fain. They're tracking me.
I'm not invisible anymore. I never was.
His hands finally stopped shaking. He dried them on his travel cloak and turned to find Lan watching from the stable doorway.
"You heard something down there," Lan said. "Something that frightened you."
"Fain knows what I am. Or thinks he does."
"And what is that?"
An anomaly. A transmigrator. A consciousness from another world, merged with a system that edits the Pattern.
"Something that doesn't belong." Spencer met Lan's pale eyes without flinching. "Something the Shadow has noticed."
"The Shadow notices everyone eventually." Lan's voice held no comfort, because Lan wasn't a man who offered false comfort. "What matters is what you do when it sees you."
"What do you do?"
"Keep fighting." Lan's thread pulsed with the iron resolve of a man who'd spent his entire life at war. "The Shadow will take everything from you if you let it. The only choice is whether to die standing or kneeling."
"Standing sounds better."
"It is." Lan stepped aside, gesturing toward the horses. "Moiraine says we ride in ten minutes. Whatever Fain told you, whatever the Shadow knows — it doesn't change the mission. The Eye still needs reaching."
Spencer nodded and walked past the Warder, Fain's laughter still echoing in the back of his mind.
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