Looking over the jumble, she sighed. The room was no larger than the one where their bodies lay sleeping in Salidar, but searching through all that... "It will take weeks."

"We could try again. It might at least show which things to look through." Elayne sounded as doubtful as Nynaeve felt.

Still, it was as good a suggestion as any. Nynaeve closed her eyes, and once more came the shift.

When she looked again, she was standing at the end of the aisle away from the door, facing a square wooden chest taller than her waist. The iron straps seemed all rust, and the chest itself looked to have spent the last twenty years being beaten with hammers. A less likely repository for anything useful, especially a ter’angreal, Nynaeve could not imagine. But Elayne was standing right beside her, staring at the same chest.

Nynaeve put a hand on the lid – the hinges would open smoothly – and pushed it up. There was not even the hint of a squeal. Inside, two heavily rusted swords and an equally brown breastplate with a hole eaten through it lay atop a tangle of cloth-wrapped parcels and what seemed to be the refuse from somebody’s old clothespress and a couple of kitchens.

Elayne fingered a small kettle with a broken spout. "Not weeks, but the rest of the night, anyway."

"Once more?" Nynaeve suggested. "It could not hurt." Elayne shrugged. Eyes shut. Need.

Nynaeve reached out, and her hand came down on something hard and rounded, covered with crumbling cloth. When she opened her eyes, Elayne’s hand was right next to hers. The younger woman’s grin nearly split her face in two.

Getting it out was not easy. It was not small, and they had to shift tattered coats and dented pots and parcels that crumbled to reveal figurines and carved animals and all sorts of rubbish. Once they had it out, they had to hold it between them, a wide flattish disc wrapped in rotted cloth. With the cloth stripped away, it turned out to be a shallow bowl of thick crystal, more than two feet across and carved deeply inside with what appeared to be swirling clouds.

"Nynaeve," Elayne said slowly, "I think this is... "

Nynaeve gave a start and nearly dropped her side of the bowl as it suddenly turned a pale watery blue and the carved clouds shifted slowly. A heartbeat later, the crystal was clear again, the carved clouds still. Only she was certain the clouds were not the same as they had been.

"It is," Elayne exclaimed. "It’s a ter’angreal. And I will bet anything it has something to do with weather. But I’m not quite strong enough to work it by myself."

Gulping a breath, Nynaeve tried to make her heart stop pounding. "Don’t do that! Don’t you realize you could still yourself, meddling with a ter’angrealwhen you don’t know what it does?"

The fool girl had the nerve to give her a surprised stare. "That iswhat we came to look for, Nynaeve. And do you think there is anyone who knows more about ter’angrealthan I do?"

Nynaeve sniffed. Just because the woman was right did not mean she should not have given a little warning. "I’m not saying it isn’t wonderful if this can do something about the weather – it is – but I don’t see how it can be what we need. This won’t shift the Hall one way or the other about Rand."

"‘What you need isn’t always what you want,’ " Elayne quoted. "Lini used to say that when she wouldn’t let me go riding, or climb trees, but maybe it holds here."

Nynaeve sniffed again. Maybe it did, but right now she wanted what she wanted. Was that so much to ask?

The bowl faded out of their hands, and it was Elayne’s turn to give a start, muttering about never getting used to that. The chest was closed, too.

"Nynaeve, when I channeled into the bowl, I felt... Nynaeve, it isn’t the only ter’angrealin this room. I think there are angreal, too, maybe even sa’angreal."

"Here?" Nynaeve said incredulously, staring around the cluttered little room. But if one, why not two? Or ten, or a hundred? "Light, don’t channel again! What if you make one of them do something by accident? You could still – "

"I do know what I am doing, Nynaeve. Really, I do. The next thing wehave to do is find out exactly where this room is."

That proved to be no easy task. Though the hinges seemed solid masses of rust, the door was no impediment, not in Tel’aran’rhiod. The problems began after that. The dim narrow corridor outside had only one small window at its end, and that showed nothing but a peeling white-plastered wall across the street. Climbing down cramped flights of stone-faced stairs did no good. The street outside could have been the first they had seen in this quarter of the city, wherever that was, all the buildings as near alike as made no difference. The tiny shops along the street had no signs, and the only thing marking inns were blue-painted doors. Red seemed to indicate a tavern.

Nynaeve strode off searching for some landmark, something to pinpoint their location. Something to say what the city was. Every street she came to seemed like the last, but she quickly found a bridge, plain stone, unlike the others she had seen, and lacking statues. The center of its arch showed her only the canal, meeting others in both directions, more bridges, more buildings with flaking white plaster.

Suddenly she realized she was alone. "Elayne." Silence, except for the echo of her voice. "Elayne? Elayne!"

The golden-haired woman popped around a corner near the foot of the bridge. "There you are," said Elayne. "This place makes a rabbit warren look well planned. I turned my head for an instant, and you were gone. Did you find anything?"

"Nothing." Nynaeve glanced down the canal again before joining Elayne. "Nothing at all useful."

"At least we can be sure where we are. Ebou Dar. It must be." Elayne’s short coat and wide trousers became a green silk gown with spills of lace dangling over her hands, a, high elaborately embroidered collar, and a narrow neckline deep enough to show considerable cleavage. "I can’t think of another city with so many canals except Illian, and this is certainly not Illian."

"I should hope not," Nynaeve said faintly. It had never even occurred to her that a blind search might take them into Sammael’s lair. Her own dress had changed, she realized, to a deep blue silk suitable for traveling, complete with a linen dustcloak. She made the cloak vanish, but left the rest.

"You would like Ebou Dar, Nynaeve. Ebou Dari Wise Women know more about herbs than anybody. They can cure anything. They have to, because Ebou Dari fight duels over a sneeze, noble or common, men or women." Elayne giggled. "Thorn says there used to be leopards here, but they left because they found Ebou Dari too touchy to live with."

"That’s all very well," Nynaeve told her, "but they can run each other through as much as they want for all I care. Elayne, we might as well have put the rings away and just slept. I couldn’t walk back to that room from here if I was to receive the shawl when I got there. If only there was some way to make a map... " She grimaced. As well ask for wings in the waking world; if they could take a map out of Tel’aran’rhiod, they could take the bowl.

"Then we will just have to come to Ebou Dar and search," Elayne said firmly. "In the real world. At least we know what partof the city to look in."

Nynaeve brightened. Ebou Dar lay only a few hundred miles down the Eldar from Salidar. "That sounds a very good notion. And it will get us away before everything falls on our heads."

"Really, Nynaeve. Is that still the most important thing to you?"

"It is one important thing. Can you think of anything else to do here?" Elayne shook her head. "Then we might as well go back. I’d like a little real sleep tonight." There was no telling how much time had passed in the waking world while you were in Tel’aran’rhiod; sometimes an hour there was an hour here, sometimes a day, or more. Luckily, it did not seem to work the other way, or at least not as much anyway, or you might starve to death sleeping.