Dedication
For Alan Layton Who was cheering for Dalinar (And me) Before Stormlight even existed.
Preface and Acknowledgments
Welcome to Oathbringer! It’s been a long road, creating this book. I thank you for your patience. Stormlight books are a huge undertaking—which you might be able to infer from the large list of people below.
If you haven’t had the chance to read Edgedancer—a separate Stormlight novella taking place between books two and three—I’d recommend it to you now. Find it sold on its own, or in the story collection Arcanum Unbounded, which has novellas and novelettes from all across the Cosmere. (The universe in which this series, Mistborn, Elantris, Warbreaker, and others take place.)
That said, as always, every series is written so it can be read and enjoyed on its own, without knowledge of these other series or books. If you’re intrigued, you can find a longer explanation I’ve written at brandonsanderson.com/cosmere.
Now, on to the parade of names! As I often say, though my name goes on the cover, there are tons of people involved in bringing you these books. They deserve my most hearty of thanks, and yours as well, for their tireless work across the three years it took to write this novel.
My main agent for these books (and everything else) is the wonderful Joshua Bilmes, of JABberwocky. Others at the agency who worked on them include Brady McReynolds, Krystyna Lopez, and Rebecca Eskildsen. Special thanks also go to John Berlyne, my UK agent, of Zeno—along with all of the sub-agents who work with us around the world.
My editor at Tor on this project was the ever-brilliant Moshe Feder. Special thanks to Tom Doherty, who has believed in the Stormlight project for years, and Devi Pillai, who provided essential publishing and editorial aid during the course of the novel’s creation.
Others at Tor who provided help include Robert Davis, Melissa Singer, Rachel Bass, and Patty Garcia. Karl Gold was our Production Manager and Nathan Weaver the Managing Editor, with Meryl Gross and Rafal Gibek in trade production. Irene Gallo was our Art Director, Peter Lutjen the cover designer, Greg Collins the interior designer, and Carly Sommerstein our proofreader.
At Gollancz/Orion (my UK publisher) thanks goes to Gillian Redfearn, Stevie Finegan, and Charlotte Clay.
Our copyeditor on this book was Terry McGarry, who has done excellent work on many of my novels. The ebook was prepared by Westchester Publishing Services, along with Victoria Wallis and Christopher Gonzalez at Macmillan.
Many people at my own company worked long hours to produce this book. A Stormlight novel is “crunch time” for us here at Dragonsteel, and so make sure to give the team a thumbs-up (or, in Peter’s case, a block of cheese) next time you meet them. Our manager and Chief Operations Officer is my lovely wife, Emily Sanderson. Vice President and Editorial Director is the Insistent Peter Ahlstrom. Art Director is Isaac Stʒwart.
Our shipping manager (and the one who ships you all our signed books and T-shirts via the brandonsanderson.com store) is Kara Stewart. Continuity editor—and holy keeper of our internal continuity wiki—is Karen Ahlstrom. Adam Horne is my executive assistant and publicity/marketing director. Emily’s assistant is Kathleen Dorsey Sanderson and our executive minion is Emily “Mem” Grange.
The audiobook was read by my personal favorite audiobook narrators, Michael Kramer and Kate Reading. Thanks again, guys, for making time in your schedule for this!
Oathbringer continues the tradition of filling The Stormlight Archive with beautiful art. We again have a fantastic cover illustration by Michael Whelan, whose attention to detail has given us an incredibly accurate rendition of Jasnah Kholin. I love that she gets a place to shine on the cover of this book, and I continue to feel honored and grateful that Michael takes time away from his gallery work to paint the world of Roshar.
It takes a variety of artists to recreate the styles found in the ephemera of another world, so this time around we’ve worked with even more artists than before. Dan dos Santos and Howard Lyon are responsible for the paintings of the Heralds on the front and back endpapers. I wanted these to have a style evoking classical paintings of the Renaissance and the later Romantic era, and both Dan and Howard exceeded expectations. These pieces are not only great art for a book, they are great art period, deserving of a place in any gallery.
I should note that Dan and Howard also contributed their talents to the interior art, for which I’m also grateful. Dan’s fashion pieces are good enough to be cover art, and Howard’s linework for some of the new chapter icons is something I hope to see more of in future volumes.
Ben McSweeney joins us again, providing nine pieces of art from Shallan’s sketchbook. Between a cross-continent move, a demanding day job, and the needs of a growing family, Ben has been ever consistent in delivering top-notch illustrations. He is a great artist and a quality human being.
Also lending their talents to this volume with full-page illustrations are Miranda Meeks and Kelley Harris. Both have done fantastic work for us in the past, and I think you’ll love their contributions this time around.
In addition, a variety of wonderful people helped behind the scenes as consultants or facilitated other aspects of the art in this book: The David Rumsey Map Collection, Brent at Woodsounds Flutes, Angie and Michelle at Two Tone Press, Emily Dunlay, David and Doris Stewart, Shari Lyon, Payden McRoberts, and Greg Davidson.
My writing group for Oathbringer (and they often read submissions each week at 5–8x the normal size) included Karen Ahlstrom, Peter Ahlstrom, Emily Sanderson, Eric James Stone, Darci Stone, Ben Olsen, Kaylynn ZoBell, Kathleen Dorsey Sanderson, Alan “Leyten from Bridge Four” Layton, Ethan “Skar from Bridge Four” Skarstedt, and Ben “Don’t put me in Bridge Four” Olsen.
Special thanks go to Chris “Jon” King for feedback on some particularly tricky scenes involving Teft, Will Hoyum for some advice on paraplegics, and Mi’chelle Walker for some special advisement on passages involving specific mental health issues.
Beta readers included (take a deep breath) Aaron Biggs, Aaron Ford, Adam Hussey, Austin Hussey, Alice Arneson, Alyx Hoge, Aubree Pham, Bao Pham, Becca Horn Reppert, Bob Kluttz, Brandon Cole, Darci Cole, Brian T. Hill, Chris “Jon” King, Chris Kluwe, Cory Aitchison, David Behrens, Deana Covel Whitney, Eric Lake, Gary Singer, Ian McNatt, Jessica Ashcraft, Joel Phillips, Jory Phillips, Josh Walker, Mi’chelle Walker, Kalyani Poluri, Rahul Pantula, Kellyn Neumann, Kristina Kugler, Lyndsey “Lyn” Luther, Mark Lindberg, Marnie Peterson, Matt Wiens, Megan Kanne, Nathan “Natam” Goodrich, Nikki Ramsay, Paige Vest, Paul Christopher, Randy MacKay, Ravi Persaud, Richard Fife, Ross Newberry, Ryan “Drehy” Dreher Scott, Sarah “Saphy” Hansen, Sarah Fletcher, Shivam Bhatt, Steve Godecke, Ted Herman, Trae Cooper, and William Juan.
Our beta reader comment coordinators were Kristina Kugler and Kellyn Neumann.
Our gamma readers included many of the beta readers again, plus: Benjamin R. Black, Chris “Gunner” McGrath, Christi Jacobsen, Corbett Rubert, Richard Rubert, Dr. Daniel Stange, David Han-Ting Chow, Donald Mustard III, Eric Warrington, Jared Gerlach, Jareth Greeff, Jesse Y. Horne, Joshua Combs, Justin Koford, Kendra Wilson, Kerry Morgan, Lindsey Andrus, Lingting Xu, Loggins Merrill, Marci Stringham, Matt Hatch, Scott Escujuri, Stephen Stinnett, and Tyson Thorpe.
As you can see, a book like this is a huge undertaking. Without the efforts of these many people, you’d be holding a far, far inferior book.
As always, some final thanks go to my family: Emily Sanderson, Joel Sanderson, Dallin Sanderson, and Oliver Sanderson. They put up with a husband/father who is often off in another world, thinking about highstorms and Knights Radiant.
Finally, thanks to you all, for your support of these books! They don’t always come out as quickly as I’d like, but that is in part because I want them to be as perfect as they can get. You hold in your hands a volume I’ve been preparing and outlining for almost two decades. May you enjoy your time in Roshar.
Journey before destination.
Map of Roshar
Prologue: To Weep
SIX YEARS AGO
Eshonai had always told her sister that she was certain something wonderful lay over the next hill. Then one day, she’d crested a hill and found humans.
She’d always imagined humans—as sung of in the songs—as dark, formless monsters. Instead they were wonderful, bizarre creatures. They spoke with no discernible rhythm. They wore clothing more vibrant than carapace, but couldn’t grow their own armor. They were so terrified of the storms that even when traveling they hid inside vehicles.
Most remarkably, they had only one form.
She first assumed the humans must have forgotten their forms, much as the listeners once had. That built an instant kinship between them.
Now, over a year later, Eshonai hummed to the Rhythm of Awe as she helped unload drums from the cart. They’d traveled a great distance to see the human homeland, and each step had overwhelmed her further. That experience culminated here, in this incredible city of Kholinar and its magnificent palace.
This cavernous unloading dock on the western side of the palace was so large, two hundred listeners had packed in here after their first arrival, and still hadn’t filled the place. Indeed, most of the listeners couldn’t attend the feast upstairs—where the treaty between their two peoples was being witnessed—but the Alethi had seen to their refreshment anyway, providing mountains of food and drink for the group down here.
She stepped out of the wagon, looking around the loading dock, humming to Excitement. When she’d told Venli she was determined to map the world, she’d imagined a place of natural discovery. Canyons and hills, forests and laits overgrown with life. Yet all along, this had been out here. Waiting just beyond their reach.
Along with more listeners.
When Eshonai had first met the humans, she’d seen the little listeners they had with them. A hapless tribe who were trapped in dullform. Eshonai had assumed the humans were taking care of the poor souls without songs.
Oh, how innocent those first meetings had been.
Those captive listeners had not been merely some small tribe, but instead representative of an enormous population. And the humans had not been caring for them.
The humans owned them.
A group of these parshmen, as they were called, clustered around the outside of Eshonai’s ring of workers.
“They keep trying to help,” Gitgeth said to Curiosity. He shook his head, his beard sparkling with ruby gemstones that matched the prominent red colors of his skin. “The little rhythmless ones want to be near us. They sense that something is wrong with their minds, I tell you.”
Eshonai handed him a drum from the back of the cart, then hummed to Curiosity herself. She hopped down and approached the group of parshmen.
“You aren’t needed,” she said to Peace, spreading her hands. “We would prefer to handle our own drums.”
The ones without songs looked at her with dull eyes.
“Go,” she said to Pleading, waving toward the nearby festivities, where listeners and human servants laughed together, despite the language barrier. Humans clapped along to listeners singing the old songs. “Enjoy yourselves.”
A few looked toward the singing and cocked their heads, but they didn’t move.
“It won’t work,” Brianlia said to Skepticism, resting her arms across a drum nearby. “They simply can’t imagine what it is to live. They’re pieces of property, to be bought and sold.”
What to make of this idea? Slaves? Klade, one of the Five, had gone to the slavers in Kholinar and purchased a person to see if it truly was possible. He hadn’t even bought a parshman; there had been Alethi for sale. Apparently the parshmen were expensive, and considered high-quality slaves. The listeners had been told this, as if it were supposed to make them proud.
She hummed to Curiosity and nodded to the side, looking toward the others. Gitgeth smiled and hummed to Peace, waving for her to go. Everyone was used to Eshonai wandering off in the middle of jobs. It wasn’t that she was unreliable.… Well, perhaps she was, but at least she was consistent.
Regardless, she’d be wanted at the king’s celebration soon anyway; she was one of the best among the listeners at the dull human tongue, which she’d taken to naturally. It was an advantage that had earned her a place on this expedition, but it was also a problem. Speaking the human tongue made her important, and people who grew too important couldn’t be allowed to go off chasing the horizon.
She left the unloading bay and walked up the steps into the palace proper, trying to take in the ornamentation, the artistry, the sheer overwhelming wonder of the building. Beautiful and terrible. People who were bought and sold maintained this place, but was that what freed the humans to create great works like the carvings on the pillars she passed, or the inlaid marble patterns on the floor?
She passed soldiers wearing their artificial carapace. Eshonai didn’t have armor of her own at the moment; she wore workform instead of warform, as she liked its flexibility.
Humans didn’t have a choice. They hadn’t lost their forms as she’d first assumed; they only had one. Forever in mateform, workform, and warform all at once. And they wore their emotions on their faces far more than listeners. Oh, Eshonai’s people would smile, laugh, cry. But not like these Alethi.
The lower level of the palace was marked by broad hallways and galleries, lit by carefully cut gemstones that made light sparkle. Chandeliers hung above her, broken suns spraying light everywhere. Perhaps the plain appearance of the human bodies—with their bland skin that was various shades of tan—was another reason they sought to ornament everything, from their clothing to these pillars.
Could we do this? she thought, humming to Appreciation. If we knew the right form for creating art?
The upper floors of the palace were more like tunnels. Narrow stone corridors, rooms like bunkers dug into a mountainside. She made her way toward the feast hall to check if she was needed, but stopped here and there to glance into rooms. She’d been told she could wander as she pleased, that the palace was open to her save for areas with guards at the doors.
She passed a room with paintings on all the walls, then one with a bed and furniture. Another door revealed an indoor privy with running water, a marvel that she still didn’t understand.
She poked through a dozen rooms. As long as she reached the king’s celebration in time for the music, Klade and the others of the Five wouldn’t complain. They were as familiar with her ways as everyone else. She was always wandering off, poking into things, peeking into doors …
And finding the king?
Eshonai froze, the door cracked open, allowing her to see into a lush room with a thick red rug and bookshelves lining the walls. So much information just lying around, casually ignored. More surprisingly, King Gavilar himself stood pointing at something on a table, surrounded by five others: two officers, two women in long dresses, and one old man in robes.
Why wasn’t Gavilar at the feast? Why weren’t there guards at the door? Eshonai attuned Anxiety and pulled back, but not before one of the women prodded Gavilar and pointed toward Eshonai. Anxiety pounding in her head, she pulled the door closed.
A moment later a tall man in uniform stepped out. “The king would like to see you, Parshendi.”
She feigned confusion. “Sir? Words?”
“Don’t be coy,” the soldier said. “You’re one of the interpreters. Come in. You aren’t in trouble.”
Anxiety shaking her, she let him lead her into the den.
“Thank you, Meridas,” Gavilar said. “Leave us for a moment, all of you.”
They filed out, leaving Eshonai at the door attuning Consolation and humming it loudly—even though the humans wouldn’t understand what it meant.
“Eshonai,” the king said. “I have something to show you.”
He knew her name? She stepped farther into the small, warm room, holding her arms tightly around her. She didn’t understand this man. It was more than his alien, dead way of speaking. More than the fact that she couldn’t anticipate what emotions might be swirling in there, as warform and mateform contested within him.
More than any human, this man baffled her. Why had he offered them such a favorable treaty? At first it had seemed an accommodation between tribes. That was before she’d come here, seen this city and the Alethi armies. Her people had once possessed cities of their own, and armies to envy. They knew that from the songs.
That had been long ago. They were a fragment of a lost people. Traitors who had abandoned their gods to be free. This man could have crushed the listeners. They’d once assumed that their Shards—weapons they had so far kept hidden from the humans—would be enough to protect them. But she’d now seen over a dozen Shardblades and suits of Shardplate among the Alethi.
Why did he smile at her like that? What was he hiding, by not singing to the rhythms to calm her?
“Sit, Eshonai,” the king said. “Oh, don’t be frightened, little scout. I’ve been wanting to speak to you. Your mastery of our language is unique!”
She settled on a chair while Gavilar reached down and removed something from a small satchel. It glowed with red Stormlight, a construction of gemstones and metal, crafted in a beautiful design.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked, gently pushing it toward her.
“No, Your Majesty.”
“It’s what we call a fabrial, a device powered by Stormlight. This one makes warmth. Just a smidge, unfortunately, but my wife is confident her scholars can create one that will heat a room. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? No more smoky fires in hearths.”
It seemed lifeless to Eshonai, but she didn’t say so. She hummed to Praise so he’d feel happy telling her of this, and handed it back.
“Look closely,” King Gavilar said. “Look deep into it. Can you see what’s moving inside? It’s a spren. That is how the device works.”
Captive like in a gemheart, she thought, attuning Awe. They’ve built devices that mimic how we apply the forms? The humans did so much with their limitations!
“The chasmfiends aren’t your gods, are they,” he said.
“What?” she asked, attuning Skepticism. “Why ask that?” What a strange turn in the conversation.
“Oh, it’s merely something I’ve been thinking about.” He took the fabrial back. “My officers feel so superior, as they think they have you figured out. They think you’re savages, but they are so wrong. You’re not savages. You’re an enclave of memories. A window into the past.”
He leaned forward, the light from the ruby leaking between his fingers. “I need you to deliver a message to your leaders. The Five? You’re close to them, and I’m being watched. I need their help to achieve something.”
She hummed to Anxiety.
“Now, now,” he said. “I’m going to help you, Eshonai. Did you know, I’ve discovered how to bring your gods back?”
No. She hummed to the Rhythm of the Terrors. No …
“My ancestors,” he said, holding up the fabrial, “first learned how to hold a spren inside a gemstone. And with a very special gemstone, you can hold even a god.”
“Your Majesty,” she said, daring to take his hand in hers. He couldn’t feel the rhythms. He didn’t know. “Please. We no longer worship those gods. We left them, abandoned them.”
“Ah, but this is for your good, and for ours.” He stood up. “We live without honor, for your gods once brought ours. Without them, we have no power. This world is trapped, Eshonai! Stuck in a dull, lifeless state of transition.” He looked toward the ceiling. “Unite them. I need a threat. Only danger will unite them.”
“What…” she said to Anxiety. “What are you saying?”
“Our enslaved parshmen were once like you. Then we somehow robbed them of their ability to undergo the transformation. We did it by capturing a spren. An ancient, crucial spren.” He looked at her, green eyes alight. “I’ve seen how that can be reversed. A new storm that will bring the Heralds out of hiding. A new war.”
“Insanity.” She rose to her feet. “Our gods tried to destroy you.”
“The old Words must be spoken again.”
“You can’t…” She trailed off, noticing for the first time that a map covered the table nearby. Expansive, it showed a land bounded by oceans—and the artistry of it put her own attempts to shame.
She rose and stepped to the table, gaping, the Rhythm of Awe playing in her mind. This is gorgeous. Even the grand chandeliers and carved walls were nothing by comparison. This was knowledge and beauty, fused into one.
“I thought you’d be pleased to hear that we are allies in seeking the return of your gods,” Gavilar said. She could almost hear the Rhythm of Reprimand in his dead words. “You claim to fear them, but why fear that which made you live? My people need to be united, and I need an empire that won’t simply turn to infighting once I am gone.”
“So you seek for war?”
“I seek for an end to something that we never finished. My people were Radiant once, and your people—the parshmen—were vibrant. Who is served by this drab world where my people fight each other in endless squabbles, without light to guide them, and your people are as good as corpses?”
She looked back at the map. “Where … where is the Shattered Plains? This portion here?”
“That is all of Natanatan you gesture toward, Eshonai! This is the Shattered Plains.” He pointed at a spot not much bigger than his thumbnail, when the entire map was as large as the table.
It gave her a sudden dizzying perspective. This was the world? She’d assumed that in traveling to Kholinar, they’d crossed almost as far as the land could go. Why hadn’t they shown her this before!
Her legs weakened, and she attuned Mourning. She dropped back into her seat, unable to stand.
So vast.
Gavilar removed something from his pocket. A sphere? It was dark, yet somehow still glowed. As if it had … an aura of blackness, a phantom light that was not light. Faintly violet. It seemed to suck in the light around it.
He set it on the table before her. “Take that to the Five and explain what I told you. Tell them to remember what your people once were. Wake up, Eshonai.”
He patted her on the shoulder, then left the room. She stared at that terrible light, and—from the songs—knew it for what it was. The forms of power had been associated with a dark light, a light from the king of gods.
She plucked the sphere off the table and went running.
* * *
When the drums were set up, Eshonai insisted on joining the drummers. An outlet for her anxiety. She beat to the rhythm in her head, banging as hard as she could, trying with each beat to banish the things the king had said.
And the things she’d just done.
The Five sat at the high table, the remnants of their final course uneaten.
He intends to bring back our gods, she’d told the Five.
Close your eyes. Focus on the rhythms.
He can do it. He knows so much.
Furious beats pulsing through her soul.
We have to do something.
Klade’s slave was an assassin. Klade claimed that a voice—speaking to the rhythms—had led him to the man, who had confessed his skills when pressed. Venli had apparently been with Klade, though Eshonai hadn’t seen her sister since earlier in the day.
After a frantic debate, the Five had agreed this was a sign of what they were to do. Long ago, the listeners had summoned the courage to adopt dullform in order to escape their gods. They’d sought freedom at any cost.
Today, the cost of maintaining that freedom would be high.
She played the drums. She felt the rhythms. She wept softly, and didn’t look as the strange assassin—wearing flowing white clothing provided by Klade—left the room. She’d voted with the others for this course of action.
Feel the peace of the music. As her mother always said. Seek the rhythms. Seek the songs.
She resisted as the others pulled her away. She wept to leave the music behind. Wept for her people, who might be destroyed for tonight’s action. Wept for the world, which might never know what the listeners had done for it.
Wept for the king, whom she had consigned to death.
The drums cut off around her, and dying music echoed through the halls.
Part One: United
1. Broken and Divided
I’m certain some will feel threatened by this record. Some few may feel liberated. Most will simply feel that it should not exist.
Dalinar Kholin appeared in the vision standing beside the memory of a dead god.
It had been six days since his forces had arrived at Urithiru, legendary holy tower city of the Knights Radiant. They had escaped the arrival of a new devastating storm, seeking refuge through an ancient portal. They were settling into their new home hidden in the mountains.
And yet, Dalinar felt as if he knew nothing. He didn’t understand the force he fought, let alone how to defeat it. He barely understood the storm, and what it meant in returning the Voidbringers, ancient enemies of men.
So he came here, into his visions. Seeking to pull secrets from the god—named Honor, or the Almighty—who had left them. This particular vision was the first that Dalinar had ever experienced. It began with him standing next to an image of the god in human form, both perched atop a cliff overlooking Kholinar: Dalinar’s home, seat of the government. In the vision, the city had been destroyed by some unknown force.
The Almighty started speaking, but Dalinar ignored him. Dalinar had become a Knight Radiant by bonding the Stormfather himself—soul of the highstorm, most powerful spren on Roshar—and Dalinar had discovered he could now have these visions replayed for him at will. He’d already heard this monologue three times, and had repeated it word for word to Navani for transcription.
This time, Dalinar instead walked to the edge of the cliff and knelt to look out upon the ruins of Kholinar. The air smelled dry here, dusty and warm. He squinted, trying to extract some meaningful detail from the chaos of broken buildings. Even the windblades—once magnificent, sleek rock formations exposing countless strata and variations—had been shattered.
The Almighty continued his speech. These visions were like a diary, a set of immersive messages the god had left behind. Dalinar appreciated the help, but right now he wanted details.
He searched the sky and discovered a ripple in the air, like heat rising from distant stone. A shimmer the size of a building.
“Stormfather,” he said. “Can you take me down below, into the rubble?”
You are not supposed to go there. That is not part of the vision.
“Ignore what I’m supposed to do, for the moment,” Dalinar said. “Can you do it? Can you transport me to those ruins?”
The Stormfather rumbled. He was a strange being, somehow connected to the dead god, but not exactly the same thing as the Almighty. At least today he wasn’t using a voice that rattled Dalinar’s bones.
In an eyeblink, Dalinar was transported. He no longer stood atop the cliff, but was on the plains down before the ruins of the city.
“Thank you,” Dalinar said, striding the short remaining distance to the ruins.
Only six days had passed since their discovery of Urithiru. Six days since the awakening of the Parshendi, who had gained strange powers and glowing red eyes. Six days since the arrival of the new storm—the Everstorm, a tempest of dark thunderheads and red lightning.
Some in his armies thought that it was finished, the storm over as one catastrophic event. Dalinar knew otherwise. The Everstorm would return, and would soon hit Shinovar in the far west. Following that, it would course across the land.
Nobody believed his warnings. Monarchs in places like Azir and Thaylenah admitted that a strange storm had appeared in the east, but they didn’t believe it would return.
They couldn’t guess how destructive this storm’s return would be. When it had first appeared, it had clashed with the highstorm, creating a unique cataclysm. Hopefully it would not be as bad on its own—but it would still be a storm blowing the wrong way. And it would awaken the world’s parshman servants and make them into Voidbringers.
What do you expect to learn? the Stormfather said as Dalinar reached the rubble of the city. This vision was constructed to draw you to the ridge to speak with Honor. The rest is backdrop, a painting.
“Honor put this rubble here,” Dalinar said, waving toward the broken walls heaped before him. “Backdrop or not, his knowledge of the world and our enemy couldn’t help but affect the way he made this vision.”
Dalinar hiked up the rubble of the outer walls. Kholinar had been … storm it, Kholinar was … a grand city, like few in the world. Instead of hiding in the shadow of a cliff or inside a sheltered chasm, Kholinar trusted in its enormous walls to buffer it from highstorm winds. It defied the winds, and did not bow to the storms.
In this vision, something had destroyed it anyway. Dalinar crested the detritus and surveyed the area, trying to imagine how it had felt to settle here so many millennia ago. Back when there had been no walls. It had been a hardy, stubborn lot who had grown this place.
He saw scrapes and gouges on the stones of the fallen walls, like those made by a predator in the flesh of its prey. The windblades had been smashed, and from up close he could see claw marks on one of those as well.
“I’ve seen creatures that could do this,” he said, kneeling beside one of the stones, feeling the rough gash in the granite surface. “In my visions, I witnessed a stone monster that ripped itself free of the underlying rock.
“There are no corpses, but that’s probably because the Almighty didn’t populate the city in this vision. He just wanted a symbol of the coming destruction. He didn’t think Kholinar would fall to the Everstorm, but to the Voidbringers.”
Yes, the Stormfather said. The storm will be a catastrophe, but not nearly on the scale of what follows. You can find refuge from storms, Son of Honor. Not so with our enemies.
Now that the monarchs of Roshar had refused to listen to Dalinar’s warning that the Everstorm would soon strike them, what else could Dalinar do? The real Kholinar was reportedly consumed by riots—and the queen had gone silent. Dalinar’s armies had limped away from their first confrontation with the Voidbringers, and even many of his own highprinces hadn’t joined him in that battle.
A war was coming. In awakening the Desolation, the enemy had rekindled a millennia-old conflict of ancient creatures with inscrutable motivations and unknown powers. Heralds were supposed to appear and lead the charge against the Voidbringers. The Knights Radiant should have already been in place, prepared and trained, ready to face the enemy. They were supposed to be able to trust in the guidance of the Almighty.
Instead, Dalinar had only a handful of new Radiants, and there was no sign of help from the Heralds. And beyond that, the Almighty—God himself—was dead.
Somehow, Dalinar was supposed to save the world anyway.
The ground started to tremble; the vision was ending with the land falling away. Atop the cliff, the Almighty would have just concluded his speech.
A final wave of destruction rolled across the land like a highstorm. A metaphor designed by the Almighty to represent the darkness and devastation that was coming upon humankind.
Your legends say that you won, he had said. But the truth is that we lost. And we are losing.…
The Stormfather rumbled. It is time to go.
“No,” Dalinar said, standing atop the rubble. “Leave me.”
But—
“Let me feel it!”
The wave of destruction struck, crashing against Dalinar, and he shouted defiance. He had not bowed before the highstorm; he would not bow before this! He faced it head-on, and in the blast of power that ripped apart the ground, he saw something.
A golden light, brilliant yet terrible. Standing before it, a dark figure in black Shardplate. The figure had nine shadows, each spreading out in a different direction, and its eyes glowed a brilliant red.
Dalinar stared deep into those eyes, and felt a chill wash through him. Though the destruction raged around him, vaporizing rocks, those eyes frightened him more. He saw something terribly familiar in them.
This was a danger far beyond even the storms.
This was the enemy’s champion. And he was coming.
UNITE THEM. QUICKLY.
Dalinar gasped as the vision shattered. He found himself sitting beside Navani in a quiet stone room in the tower city of Urithiru. Dalinar didn’t need to be bound for visions any longer; he had enough control over them that he had ceased acting them out while experiencing them.
He breathed deeply, sweat trickling down his face, his heart racing. Navani said something, but for the moment he couldn’t hear her. She seemed distant compared to the rushing in his ears.
“What was that light I saw?” he whispered.
I saw no light, the Stormfather said.
“It was brilliant and golden, but terrible,” Dalinar whispered. “It bathed everything in its heat.”
Odium, the Stormfather rumbled. The enemy.
The god who had killed the Almighty. The force behind the Desolations.
“Nine shadows,” Dalinar whispered, trembling.
Nine shadows? The Unmade. His minions, ancient spren.
Storms. Dalinar knew of them from legend only. Terrible spren who twisted the minds of men.
Still, those eyes haunted him. As frightening as it was to contemplate the Unmade, he feared that figure with the red eyes the most. Odium’s champion.
Dalinar blinked, looking to Navani, the woman he loved, her face painfully concerned as she held his arm. In this strange place and stranger time, she was something real. Something to hold on to. A mature beauty—in some ways the picture of a perfect Vorin woman: lush lips, light violet eyes, silvering black hair in perfect braids, curves accentuated by the tight silk havah. No man would ever accuse Navani of being scrawny.
“Dalinar?” she asked. “Dalinar, what happened? Are you well?”
“I’m…” He drew in a deep breath. “I’m well, Navani. And I know what we must do.”
Her frown deepened. “What?”
“I have to unite the world against the enemy faster than he can destroy it.”
He had to find a way to make the other monarchs of the world listen to him. He had to prepare them for the new storm and the Voidbringers. And, barring that, he had to help them survive the effects.
But if he succeeded, he wouldn’t have to face the Desolation alone. This was not a matter of one nation against the Voidbringers. He needed the kingdoms of the world to join him, and he needed to find the Knights Radiant who were being created among their populations.
Unite them.
“Dalinar,” she said, “I think that’s a worthy goal … but storms, what of ourselves? This mountainside is a wasteland—what are we going to feed our armies?”
“The Soulcasters—”
“Will run out of gemstones eventually,” Navani said. “And they can create only the basic necessities. Dalinar, we’re half frozen up here, broken and divided. Our command structure is in disarray, and it—”
“Peace, Navani,” Dalinar said, rising. He pulled her to her feet. “I know. We have to fight anyway.”
She embraced him. He held to her, feeling her warmth, smelling her perfume. She preferred a less floral scent than other women—a fragrance with spice to it, like the aroma of newly cut wood.
“We can do this,” he told her. “My tenacity. Your brilliance. Together, we will convince the other kingdoms to join with us. They’ll see when the storm returns that our warnings were right, and they’ll unite against the enemy. We can use the Oathgates to move troops and to support each other.”
The Oathgates. Ten portals, ancient fabrials, were gateways to Urithiru. When a Knight Radiant activated one of the devices, those people standing upon its surrounding platform were brought to Urithiru, appearing on a similar device here at the tower.
They only had one pair of Oathgates active now—the ones that moved people back and forth between Urithiru and the Shattered Plains. Nine more could theoretically be made to work—but unfortunately, their research determined that a mechanism inside each of them had to be unlocked from both sides before they’d work.
If he wanted to travel to Vedenar, Thaylen City, Azimir, or any of the other locations, they’d first need to get one of their Radiants to the city and unlock the device.
“All right,” she said. “We’ll do it. Somehow we’ll make them listen—even if they’ve got their fingers planted firmly in their ears. Makes one wonder how they manage it, with their heads rammed up their own backsides.”
He smiled, and suddenly thought himself foolish for idealizing her just earlier. Navani Kholin was not some timid, perfect ideal—she was a sour storm of a woman, set in her ways, stubborn as a boulder rolling down a mountain and increasingly impatient with things she considered foolish.
He loved her the most for that. For being open and genuine in a society that prided itself on secrets. She’d been breaking taboos, and hearts, since their youth. At times, the idea that she loved him back seemed as surreal as one of his visions.
A knock came at the door to his room, and Navani called for the person to enter. One of Dalinar’s scouts poked her head in through the door. Dalinar turned, frowning, noting the woman’s nervous posture and quick breathing.
“What?” he demanded.
“Sir,” the woman said, saluting, face pale. “There’s … been an incident. A corpse discovered in the corridors.”
Dalinar felt something building, an energy in the air like the sensation of lightning about to strike. “Who?”
“Highprince Torol Sadeas, sir,” the woman said. “He’s been murdered.”
2. One Problem Solved
I needed to write it anyway.
“Stop! What do you think you’re doing?” Adolin Kholin strode over to a group of workers in crem-stained work outfits who were unloading boxes from the back of a wagon. Their chull twisted, trying to search out rockbuds to munch on. Fruitlessly. They were deep within the tower, for all the fact that this cavern was as large as a small town.
The workers had the decency to look chagrined, though they probably didn’t know what for. A flock of scribes trailing Adolin checked the contents of the wagon. Oil lamps on the ground did little to push back the darkness of the enormous room, which had a ceiling that went up four stories.
“Brightlord?” one of the workers asked, scratching at his hair beneath his cap. “I was just unloadin’. That’s what I think I was doin’.”
“Manifest says beer,” Rushu—a young ardent—told Adolin.
“Section two,” Adolin said, rapping the knuckles of his left hand against the wagon. “Taverns are being set up along the central corridor with the lifts, six crossroads inward. My aunt expressly told your highlords this.”
The men just stared at him blankly.
“I can have a scribe show you. Pick these boxes back up.”
The men sighed, but started reloading their wagon. They knew better than to argue with the son of a highprince.
Adolin turned to survey the deep cavern, which had become a dumping ground for both supplies and people. Children ran past in groups. Workers set up tents. Women gathered water at the well in the center. Soldiers carried torches or lanterns. Even axehounds raced this way and that. Four entire warcamps full of people had frantically crossed the Shattered Plains to Urithiru, and Navani had struggled to find the right spot for them all.
For all the chaos, though, Adolin was glad to have these people. They were fresh; they hadn’t suffered the battle with the Parshendi, the attack of the Assassin in White, and the terrible clash of two storms.
The Kholin soldiers were in terrible shape. Adolin’s own sword hand was wrapped and still throbbing, his wrist broken during the fighting. His face had a nasty bruise, and he was one of the more lucky ones.
“Brightlord,” Rushu said, pointing at another wagon. “That looks like wines.”
“Delightful,” Adolin said. Was nobody paying attention to Aunt Navani’s directives?
He dealt with this wagon, then had to break up an argument among men who were angry they had been set to hauling water. They claimed that was parshman work, beneath their nahn. Unfortunately, there were no parshmen any longer.
Adolin soothed them and suggested they could start a water haulers’ guild if forced to continue. Father would approve that for certain, though Adolin worried. Would they have the funds to pay all these people? Wages were based on a man’s rank, and you couldn’t just make slaves of men for no reason.
Adolin was glad for the assignment, to distract him. Though he didn’t have to see to each wagon himself—he was here to supervise—he threw himself into the details of the work. He couldn’t exactly spar, not with his wrist in this shape, but if he sat alone too long he started thinking about what had happened the day before.
Had he really done that?
Had he really murdered Torol Sadeas?
It was almost a relief when at long last a runner came for him, whispering that something had been discovered in the corridors of the third floor.
Adolin was certain he knew what it was.
* * *
Dalinar heard the shouts long before he arrived. They echoed down the tunnels. He knew that tone. Conflict was near.
He left Navani and broke into a run, sweating as he burst into a wide intersection between tunnels. Men in blue, lit by the harsh light of lanterns, faced off against others in forest green. Angerspren grew from the floor like pools of blood.
A corpse with a green jacket draped over the face lay on the ground.
“Stand down!” Dalinar bellowed, charging into the space between the two groups of soldiers. He pulled back a bridgeman who had gotten right up in the face of one of Sadeas’s soldiers. “Stand down, or I’ll have you all in the stockade, every man!”
His voice hit the men like stormwinds, drawing eyes from both sides. He pushed the bridgeman toward his fellows, then shoved back one of Sadeas’s soldiers, praying the man would have the presence of mind to resist attacking a highprince.
Navani and the scout stopped at the fringes of the conflict. The men from Bridge Four finally backed down one corridor, and Sadeas’s soldiers retreated up the one opposite. Just far enough that they could still glare at one another.
“You’d better be ready for Damnation’s own thunder,” Sadeas’s officer shouted at Dalinar. “Your men murdered a highprince!”
“We found him like this!” Teft of Bridge Four shouted back. “Probably tripped on his own knife. Serves him well, the storming bastard.”
“Teft, stand down!” Dalinar shouted at him.
The bridgeman looked abashed, then saluted with a stiff gesture.
Dalinar knelt, pulling the jacket back from Sadeas’s face. “That blood is dried. He’s been lying here for some time.”
“We’ve been looking for him,” said the officer in green.
“Looking for him? You lost your highprince?”
“The tunnels are confusing!” the man said. “They don’t go natural directions. We got turned about and…”
“Thought he might have returned to another part of the tower,” a man said. “We spent last night searching for him there. Some people said they thought they’d seen him, but they were wrong, and…”
And a highprince was left lying here in his own gore for half a day, Dalinar thought. Blood of my fathers.
“We couldn’t find him,” the officer said, “because your men murdered him and moved the body—”
“That blood has been pooling there for hours. Nobody moved the body.” Dalinar pointed. “Place the highprince in that side room there and send for Ialai, if you haven’t. I want to have a better look.”
* * *
Dalinar Kholin was a connoisseur of death.
Even since his youth, the sight of dead men had been a familiar thing to him. You stay on the battlefield long enough, and you become familiar with its master.
So Sadeas’s bloodied, ruined face didn’t shock him. The punctured eye, smashed up into the socket by a blade that had been rammed into the brain. Fluid and blood had leaked out, then dried.
A knife through the eye was the sort of wound that killed an armored man wearing a full helm. It was a maneuver you practiced to use on the battlefield. But Sadeas had not been wearing armor and had not been on a battlefield.
Dalinar leaned down, inspecting the body lit by flickering oil lanterns as it lay on the table.
“Assassin,” Navani said, clicking her tongue and shaking her head. “Not good.”
Behind him, Adolin and Renarin gathered with Shallan and a few of the bridgemen. Across from Dalinar stood Kalami; the thin, orange-eyed woman was one of his more senior scribes. They’d lost her husband, Teleb, in the battle against the Voidbringers. He hated to call upon her in her time of grief, but she insisted that she remain on duty.
Storms, he had so few high officers left. Cael had fallen in the clash between Everstorm and highstorm, almost making it to safety. He’d lost Ilamar and Perethom to Sadeas’s betrayal at the Tower. The only highlord he had left was Khal, who was still recuperating from a wound he’d taken during the clash with the Voidbringers—one he’d kept to himself until everyone else was safe.
Even Elhokar, the king, had been wounded by assassins in his palace while the armies were fighting at Narak. He’d been recuperating ever since. Dalinar wasn’t certain if he would come to see Sadeas’s body or not.
Either way, Dalinar’s lack of officers explained the room’s other occupants: Highprince Sebarial and his mistress, Palona. Likable or not, Sebarial was one of the two living highprinces who had responded to Dalinar’s call to march for Narak. Dalinar had to rely on someone, and he didn’t trust most of the highprinces farther than the wind could blow them.
Sebarial, along with Aladar—who had been summoned but had not yet arrived—would have to form the foundation of a new Alethkar. Almighty help them all.
“Well!” said Palona, hands on hips as she regarded Sadeas’s corpse. “I guess that’s one problem solved!”
Everyone in the room turned toward her.
“What?” she said. “Don’t tell me you weren’t all thinking it.”
“This is going to look bad, Brightlord,” Kalami said. “Everyone is going to act like those soldiers outside and assume you had him assassinated.”
“Any sign of the Shardblade?” Dalinar asked.
“No, sir,” one of the bridgemen said. “Whoever killed him probably took it.”
Navani rubbed Dalinar on the shoulder. “I wouldn’t have put it as Palona did, but he did try to have you killed. Perhaps this is for the best.”
“No,” Dalinar said, voice hoarse. “We needed him.”
“I know you’re desperate, Dalinar,” Sebarial said. “My presence here is sufficient proof of that. But surely we haven’t sunk so far as to be better off with Sadeas among us. I agree with Palona. Good riddance.”
Dalinar looked up, inspecting those in the room. Sebarial and Palona. Teft and Sigzil, the lieutenants from Bridge Four. A handful of other soldiers, including the young scout woman who had fetched him. His sons, steady Adolin and impenetrable Renarin. Navani, with her hand on his shoulder. Even the aging Kalami, hands clasped before her, meeting his eyes and nodding.
“You all agree, don’t you?” Dalinar asked.
Nobody objected. Yes, this murder was inconvenient for Dalinar’s reputation, and they certainly wouldn’t have gone so far as to kill Sadeas themselves. But now that he was gone … well, why shed any tears?
Memories churned inside Dalinar’s head. Days spent with Sadeas, listening to Gavilar’s grand plans. The night before Dalinar’s wedding, when he’d shared wine with Sadeas at a rowdy feast that Sadeas had organized in his name.
It was hard to reconcile that younger man, that friend, with the thicker, older face on the slab before him. The adult Sadeas had been a murderer whose treachery had caused the deaths of better men. For those men, abandoned during the battle at the Tower, Dalinar could feel only satisfaction at finally seeing Sadeas dead.
That troubled him. He knew exactly how the others were feeling. “Come with me.”
He left the body and strode out of the room. He passed Sadeas’s guards, who hurried back in. They would deal with the corpse; hopefully he’d defused the situation enough to prevent an impromptu clash between his forces and theirs. For now, the best thing to do was get Bridge Four away from here.
Dalinar’s retinue followed him through the halls of the cavernous tower, bearing oil lamps. The walls were twisted with lines—natural strata of alternating earthy colors, like those made by crem drying in layers. He didn’t blame the soldiers for losing track of Sadeas; it was strikingly easy to get lost in this place, with its endless passageways all leading into darkness.
Fortunately, he had an idea of where they were, and led his people to the outer rim of the tower. Here he strode through an empty chamber and stepped out onto a balcony, one of many similar ones that were like wide patios.
Above him rose the enormous tower city of Urithiru, a strikingly high structure built up against the mountains. Created from a sequence of ten ringlike tiers—each containing eighteen levels—the tower city was adorned with aqueducts, windows, and balconies like this one.
The bottom floor also had wide sections jutting out at the perimeter: large stone surfaces, each a plateau in its own right. They had stone railings at their edges, where the rock fell away into the depths of the chasms between mountain peaks. At first, these wide flat sections of stone had baffled them. But the furrows in the stone, and planter boxes on the inner edges, had revealed their purpose. Somehow, these were fields. Like the large spaces for gardens atop each tier of the tower, this area had been farmed, despite the cold. One of these fields extended below this balcony, two levels down.
Dalinar strode up to the edge of the balcony and rested his hands on the smooth stone retaining wall. The others gathered behind him. Along the way they’d picked up Highprince Aladar, a distinguished bald Alethi with dark tan skin. He was accompanied by May, his daughter: a short, pretty woman in her twenties with tan eyes and a round face, her jet-black Alethi hair worn short and curving around her face. Navani whispered to them the details of Sadeas’s death.
Dalinar swept his hand outward in the chill air, pointing away from the balcony. “What do you see?”
The bridgemen gathered to look off the balcony. Their number included the Herdazian, who now had two arms after regrowing the one with Stormlight. Kaladin’s men had begun manifesting powers as Windrunners—though apparently they were merely “squires.” Navani said it was a type of apprentice Radiant that had once been common: men and women whose abilities were tied to their master, a full Radiant.
The men of Bridge Four had not bonded their own spren, and—though they had started manifesting powers—had lost their abilities when Kaladin had flown to Alethkar to warn his family of the Everstorm.
“What do I see?” the Herdazian said. “I see clouds.”
“Lots of clouds,” another bridgeman added.
“Some mountains too,” another said. “They look like teeth.”
“Nah, horns,” the Herdazian argued.
“We,” Dalinar interrupted, “are above the storms. It’s going to be easy to forget the tempest the rest of the world is facing. The Everstorm will return, bringing the Voidbringers. We have to assume that this city—our armies—will soon be the only bastion of order left in the world. It is our calling, our duty, to take the lead.”
“Order?” Aladar said. “Dalinar, have you seen our armies? They fought an impossible battle only six days ago, and despite being rescued, we technically lost. Roion’s son is woefully underprepared for dealing with the remnants of his princedom. Some of the strongest forces—those of Thanadal and Vamah—stayed behind in the warcamps!”
“The ones who did come are already squabbling,” Palona added. “Old Torol’s death back there will only give them something else to dissent about.”
Dalinar turned around, gripping the top of the stone wall with both hands, fingers cold. A chill wind blew against him, and a few windspren passed like little translucent people riding on the breeze.
“Brightness Kalami,” Dalinar said. “What do you know of the Desolations?”
“Brightlord?” she asked, hesitant.
“The Desolations. You’ve done scholarly work on Vorin theory, yes? Can you tell us of the Desolations?”
Kalami cleared her throat. “They were destruction made manifest, Brightlord. Each one was so profoundly devastating that humankind was left broken. Populations ruined, society crippled, scholars dead. Humankind was forced to spend generations rebuilding after each one. Songs tell of how the losses compounded upon one another, causing us to slide farther each time, until the Heralds left a people with swords and fabrials and returned to find them wielding sticks and stone axes.”
“And the Voidbringers?” Dalinar asked.
“They came to annihilate,” Kalami said. “Their goal was to wipe humankind from Roshar. They were specters, formless—some say they are spirits of the dead, others spren from Damnation.”
“We will have to find a way to stop this from happening again,” Dalinar said softly, turning back to the group. “We are the ones this world must be able to look to. We must provide stability, a rallying point.
“This is why I cannot rejoice to find Sadeas dead. He was a thorn in my side, but he was a capable general and a brilliant mind. We needed him. Before this is through, we’ll need everyone who can fight.”
“Dalinar,” Aladar said. “I used to bicker. I used to be like the other highprinces. But what I saw on that battlefield … those red eyes … Sir, I’m with you. I will follow you to the ends of the storms themselves. What do you want me to do?”
“Our time is short. Aladar, I name you our new Highprince of Information, in command of the judgment and law of this city. Establish order in Urithiru and make sure that the highprinces have clearly delineated realms of control within it. Build a policing force, and patrol these hallways. Keep the peace, and prevent clashes between soldiers like the one we avoided earlier.
“Sebarial, I name you Highprince of Commerce. Account our supplies and establish marketplaces in Urithiru. I want this tower to become a functioning city, not just a temporary waystop.
“Adolin, see that the armies are put into a training regimen. Count the troops we have, from all the highprinces, and convey to them that their spears will be required for the defense of Roshar. So long as they remain here, they are under my authority as Highprince of War. We’ll crush their squabbling beneath a weight of training. We control the Soulcasters, and we control the food. If they want rations, they’ll have to listen.”
“And us?” the scruffy lieutenant of Bridge Four asked.
“Continue to explore Urithiru with my scouts and scribes,” Dalinar said. “And let me know the moment your captain returns. Hopefully he will bring good news from Alethkar.”
He took a deep breath. A voice echoed in the back of his mind, as if distant. Unite them.
Be ready for when the enemy’s champion arrives.
“Our ultimate goal is the preservation of all Roshar,” Dalinar said softly. “We’ve seen the cost of division in our ranks. Because of it, we failed to stop the Everstorm. But that was just the trial run, the sparring before the real fight. To face the Desolation, I will find a way to do what my ancestor the Sunmaker failed to do through conquest. I will unify Roshar.”
Kalami gasped softly. No man had ever united the entire continent—not during the Shin invasions, not during the height of the Hierocracy, not during the Sunmaker’s conquest. This was his task, he was increasingly certain. The enemy would unleash his worst terrors: the Unmade and the Voidbringers. That phantom champion in the dark armor.
Dalinar would resist them with a unified Roshar. Such a shame he hadn’t found a way to somehow convince Sadeas to join in his cause.
Ah, Torol, he thought. What we could have done together, if we hadn’t been so divided.…
“Father?” A soft voice drew his attention. Renarin, who stood beside Shallan and Adolin. “You didn’t mention us. Me and Brightness Shallan. What is our task?”
“To practice,” Dalinar said. “Other Radiants will be coming to us, and you two will need to lead them. The knights were once our greatest weapon against the Voidbringers. They will need to be so again.”
“Father, I…” Renarin stumbled over the words. “It’s just … Me? I can’t. I don’t know how to … let alone…”
“Son,” Dalinar said, stepping over. He took Renarin by the shoulder. “I trust you. The Almighty and the spren have granted you powers to defend and protect this people. Use them. Master them, then report back to me what you can do. I think we’re all curious to find out.”
Renarin exhaled softly, then nodded.
3. Momentum
THIRTY-FOUR YEARS AGO
Rockbuds crunched like skulls beneath Dalinar’s boots as he charged across the burning field. His elites pounded after him, a handpicked force of soldiers both lighteyed and dark. They weren’t an honor guard. Dalinar didn’t need guards. These were simply the men he considered competent enough not to embarrass him.
Around him, rockbuds smoldered. Moss—dried from the summer heat and long days between storms this time of year—flared up in waves, setting the rockbud shells alight. Flamespren danced among them. And, like a spren himself, Dalinar charged through the smoke, trusting in his padded armor and thick boots to protect him.
The enemy—pressed on the north by his armies—had pulled back into this town just ahead. With some difficulty Dalinar had waited, so he could bring his elites in as a flanking force.
He hadn’t expected the enemy to fire this plain, desperately burning their own crops to block the southern approach. Well, the fires could go to Damnation. Though some of his men were overwhelmed by the smoke or heat, most stayed with him. They’d crash into the enemy, pressing them back against the main army.
Hammer and anvil. His favorite kind of tactic: the type that didn’t allow his enemies to get away from him.
As Dalinar burst from the smoky air, he found a few lines of spearmen hastily forming ranks on the southern edge of the town. Anticipationspren—like red streamers growing from the ground and whipping in the wind—clustered around them. The low town wall had been torn down in a contest a few years back, so the soldiers had only rubble as a fortification—though a large ridge to the east made a natural windbreak against the storms, which had allowed this place to sprawl almost like a real city.
Dalinar bellowed at the enemy soldiers, beating his sword—just an ordinary longsword—against his shield. He wore a sturdy breastplate, an open-fronted helm, and iron-reinforced boots. The spearmen ahead of him wavered as his elites roared from amid the smoke and flame, shouting a bloodthirsty cacophony.
A few of the spearmen dropped their weapons and ran. Dalinar grinned. He didn’t need Shards to intimidate.
He hit the spearmen like a boulder rolling through a grove of saplings, his sword tossing blood into the air. A good fight was about momentum. Don’t stop. Don’t think. Drive forward and convince your enemies that they’re as good as dead already. That way, they’ll fight you less as you send them to their pyres.
The spearmen thrust their spears frantically—less to try to kill, more to try to push away this madman. Their ranks collapsed as too many of them turned their attention toward him.
Dalinar laughed, slamming aside a pair of spears with his shield, then disemboweling one man with a blade deep in the gut. The man dropped his spear in agony, and his neighbors backed away at the horrific sight. Dalinar came in with a roar, killing them with a sword that bore their friend’s blood.
Dalinar’s elites struck the now-broken line, and the real slaughter began. He pushed forward, keeping momentum, shearing through the ranks until he reached the back, then breathed deeply and wiped ashen sweat from his face. A young spearman wept on the ground nearby, screaming for his mother as he crawled across the stone, trailing blood. Fearspren mixed with orange, sinewy painspren all around. Dalinar shook his head and rammed his sword down into the boy’s back as he passed.
Men often cried for their parents as they died. Didn’t matter how old they were. He’d seen greybeards do it, same as kids like this one. He’s not much younger than me, Dalinar thought. Maybe seventeen. But then, Dalinar had never felt young, regardless of his age.
His elites carved the enemy line in two. Dalinar danced, shaking off his bloodied blade, feeling alert, excited, but not yet alive. Where was it?
Come on.…
A larger group of enemy soldiers was jogging down the street toward him, led by several officers in white and red. From the way they suddenly pulled up, he guessed they were alarmed to find their spearmen falling so quickly.
Dalinar charged. His elites knew to watch, so he was rapidly joined by fifty men—the rest had to finish off the unfortunate spearmen. Fifty would do. The crowded confines of the town would mean Dalinar shouldn’t need more.
He focused his attention on the one man riding a horse. The fellow wore plate armor obviously meant to resemble Shardplate, though it was only of common steel. It lacked the beauty, the power, of true Plate. He still looked like he was the most important person around. Hopefully that would mean he was the best.
The man’s honor guard rushed to engage, and Dalinar felt something stir inside him. Like a thirst, a physical need.
Challenge. He needed a challenge!
He engaged the first member of the guard, attacking with a swift brutality. Fighting on a battlefield wasn’t like dueling in an arena; Dalinar didn’t dance around the fellow, testing his abilities. Out here, that sort of thing got you stabbed in the back by someone else. Instead, Dalinar slammed his sword down against the enemy, who raised his shield to block. Dalinar struck a series of quick, powerful blows, like a drummer pounding out a furious beat. Bam, bam, bam, bam!
The enemy soldier clutched his shield over his head, leaving Dalinar squarely in control. Dalinar raised his own shield before him and shoved it against the man, forcing him back until he stumbled, giving Dalinar an opening.
This man didn’t get a chance to cry for his mother.
The body dropped before him. Dalinar let his elites handle the others; the way was open to the brightlord. Who was he? The highprince fought to the north. Was this some other important lighteyes? Or … didn’t Dalinar remember hearing something about a son during Gavilar’s endless planning meetings?
Well, this man certainly looked grand on that white mare, watching the battle from within his helm’s visor, cape streaming around him. The foe raised his sword to his helm toward Dalinar in a sign of challenge accepted.
Idiot.
Dalinar raised his shield arm and pointed, counting on at least one of his strikers to have stayed with him. Indeed, Jenin stepped up, unhooked the shortbow from his back, and—as the brightlord shouted his surprise—shot the horse in the chest.
“Hate shooting horses,” Jenin grumbled as the beast reared in pain. “Like throwing a thousand broams into the storming ocean, Brightlord.”
“I’ll buy you two when we finish this,” Dalinar said as the brightlord tumbled off his horse. Dalinar dodged around flashing hooves and squeals of pain, seeking out the fallen man. He was pleased to find the enemy rising.
They engaged, sweeping at one another, frantic. Life was about momentum. Pick a direction and don’t let anything—man or storm—turn you aside. Dalinar battered at the brightlord, driving him backward, furious and persistent.
He felt like he was winning the contest, controlling it, right up until he slammed his shield at the enemy and—in the moment of stress—felt something snap. One of the straps that held the shield to his arm had broken.
The enemy reacted immediately. He shoved the shield, twisting it around Dalinar’s arm, snapping the other strap. The shield tumbled free.
Dalinar staggered, sweeping with his sword, trying to parry a blow that didn’t come. The brightlord instead lunged in close and rammed Dalinar with his shield.
Dalinar ducked the blow that followed, but the backhand hit him solidly on the side of the head, sending him stumbling. His helm twisted, bent metal biting into his scalp, drawing blood. He saw double, his vision swimming.
He’s coming in for the kill.
Dalinar roared, swinging his blade up in a lurching, wild parry that connected with the brightlord’s weapon and swept it completely out of his hands.
The man instead punched Dalinar in the face with a gauntlet. His nose crunched.
Dalinar fell to his knees, sword slipping from his fingers. His foe was breathing deeply, cursing between breaths, winded by the short, frantic contest. He reached to his belt for a knife.
An emotion stirred inside Dalinar.
It was a fire that filled the pit within. It washed through him and awakened him, bringing clarity. The sounds of his elites fighting the brightlord’s honor guard faded, metal on metal becoming clinks, grunts becoming merely a distant humming.
Dalinar smiled. Then the smile became a toothy grin. His vision returned as the brightlord—knife in hand—looked up and started, stumbling back. He seemed horrified.
Dalinar roared, spitting blood and throwing himself at the enemy. The swing that came at him seemed pitiful and Dalinar ducked it, ramming his shoulder against his foe’s lower body. Something thrummed inside Dalinar, the pulse of the battle, the rhythm of killing and dying.
The Thrill.
He knocked his opponent off balance, then went searching for his sword. Dym, however, hollered Dalinar’s name and tossed him a poleaxe, with a hook on one side and a broad, thin axe blade on the other. Dalinar seized it from the air and spun, hooking the brightlord around the ankle with the axehead, then yanked.
The brightlord fell in a clatter of steel. Before Dalinar could capitalize on this, two men of the honor guard managed to extricate themselves from Dalinar’s men and come to the defense of their brightlord.
Dalinar swung and buried the axehead into one guard’s side. He ripped it free and spun again—smashing the weapon down on the rising brightlord’s helm and sending him to his knees—before coming back and barely catching the remaining guard’s sword on the haft of the poleaxe.
Dalinar pushed upward, holding the poleaxe in two hands, sweeping the guard’s blade into the air over his head. Dalinar stepped forward until he was face-to-face with the fellow. He could feel the man’s breath.
He spat blood draining from his nose into the guard’s eyes, then kicked him in the stomach. He turned toward the brightlord, who was trying to flee. Dalinar growled, full of the Thrill. He swung the poleaxe with one hand, hooking the spike into the brightlord’s side, and yanked, dropping him yet again.
The brightlord rolled over. He was greeted by the sight of Dalinar slamming his poleaxe down with both hands, driving the spike right through the breastplate and into his chest. It made a satisfying crunch, and Dalinar pulled it out bloodied.
As if that blow had been a signal, the honor guard finally broke before his elites. Dalinar grinned as he watched them go, gloryspren popping up around him as glowing golden spheres. His men unhooked shortbows and shot a good dozen of the fleeing enemy in the back. Damnation, it felt good to best a force larger than your own.
Nearby, the fallen brightlord groaned softly. “Why…” the man said from within his helm. “Why us?”
“Don’t know,” Dalinar said, tossing the poleaxe back to Dym.
“You … you don’t know?” the dying man said.
“My brother chooses,” Dalinar said. “I just go where he points me.” He gestured toward the dying man, and Dym rammed a sword into the armored man’s armpit, finishing the job. The fellow had fought reasonably well; no need to extend his suffering.
Another soldier approached, handing Dalinar his sword. It had a chip the size of a thumb right in the blade. Looked like it had bent as well. “You’re supposed to stick it into the squishy parts, Brightlord,” Dym said, “not pound it against the hard parts.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Dalinar said, tossing the sword aside as one of his men selected a replacement from among the fallen.
“You … all right, Brightlord?” Dym asked.
“Never been better,” Dalinar said, voice faintly distorted by the clogged nose. Hurt like Damnation itself, and he drew a small flock of painspren—like little sinewy hands—up from the ground.
His men formed up around him, and Dalinar led the way farther down the street. Before too long, he could make out the bulk of the enemy still fighting ahead, harried by his army. He halted his men, considering his options.
Thakka, captain of the elites, turned to him. “Orders, sir?”
“Raid those buildings,” Dalinar said, pointing at a line of homes. “Let’s see how well they fight while they watch us rounding up their families.”
“The men will want to loot,” Thakka said.
“What is there to loot in hovels like these? Soggy hogshide and old rockbud bowls?” He pulled off his helm to wipe the blood from his face. “They can loot afterward. Right now I need hostages. There are civilians somewhere in this storming town. Find them.”
Thakka nodded, shouting the orders. Dalinar reached for some water. He’d need to meet up with Sadeas, and—
Something slammed into Dalinar’s shoulder. He caught only a brief sight of it, a black blur that hit with the force of a roundhouse kick. It threw him down, and pain flared up from his side.
He blinked as he found himself lying on the ground. A storming arrow sprouted from his right shoulder, with a long, thick shaft. It had gone straight through the chain mail, just to the side of where his cuirass met his arm.
“Brightlord!” Thakka said, kneeling, shielding Dalinar with his body. “Kelek! Brightlord, are you—”
“Who in Damnation shot that?” Dalinar demanded.
“Up there,” one of his men said, pointing at the ridge above the town.
“That’s got to be over three hundred yards,” Dalinar said, shoving Thakka aside and standing. “That can’t—”
He was watching, so he was able to jump out of the way of the next arrow, which dropped a mere foot from him, cracking against the stone ground. Dalinar stared at it, then started shouting. “Horses! Where are the storming horses!”
A small group of soldiers came trotting forward, bringing all eleven horses, which they’d guided carefully across the field. Dalinar had to dodge another arrow as he seized the reins of Fullnight, his black gelding, and heaved himself into the saddle. The arrow in his arm was a cutting pain, but he felt something more pressing drawing him forward. Helping him focus.
He galloped back the way they’d come in, getting out of the archer’s sight, trailed by ten of his best men. There had to be a way up that slope.… There! A rocky set of switchbacks, shallow enough that he didn’t mind running Fullnight up them.
Dalinar worried that by the time he reached the top, his quarry would have escaped. However, when he eventually burst onto the top of the ridge, an arrow slammed into his left breast, going straight through the breastplate near the shoulder, nearly throwing him from the saddle.
Damnation! Dalinar hung on somehow, clenching the reins in one hand, and leaned low, peering ahead as the archer—still a distant figure—stood upon a rocky knob and launched another arrow. And another. Storms, the fellow was quick!
He jerked Fullnight to one side, then the other, feeling the thrumming sense of the Thrill surge within him. It drove away the pain, let him focus.
Ahead, the archer finally seemed to grow alarmed, and leaped from his perch to flee.
Dalinar charged Fullnight over that knob a moment later. The archer turned out to be a man in his twenties wearing rugged clothing, with arms and shoulders that looked like they could have lifted a chull. Dalinar had the option of running him down, but instead galloped Fullnight past and kicked the man in the back, sending him sprawling.
As Dalinar pulled up his horse, the motion sent a spike of pain through his arm. He forced it down, eyes watering, and turned toward the archer, who lay in a heap amid spilled black arrows.
Dalinar lurched from the saddle, an arrow sprouting from each shoulder, as his men caught up. He seized the archer and hauled the fellow to his feet, noting the blue tattoo on his cheek. The archer gasped and stared at Dalinar. He expected he was quite a sight, covered in soot from the fires, his face a mask of blood from the nose and the cut scalp, stuck with not one but two arrows.
“You waited until my helm was off,” Dalinar demanded. “You are an assassin. You were set here specifically to kill me.”
The man winced, then nodded.
“Amazing!” Dalinar said, letting go of the fellow. “Show me that shot again. How far is that, Thakka? I’m right, aren’t I? Over three hundred yards?”
“Almost four,” Thakka said, pulling over his horse. “But with a height advantage.”
“Still,” Dalinar said, stepping up to the lip of the ridge. He looked back at the befuddled archer. “Well? Grab your bow!”
“My … bow?” the archer said.
“Are you deaf, man?” Dalinar snapped. “Go get it!”
The archer regarded the ten elites on horseback, grim-faced and dangerous, before wisely deciding to obey. He picked up an arrow, then his bow—which was made of a sleek black wood Dalinar didn’t recognize.
“Went right through my storming armor,” Dalinar muttered, feeling at the arrow that had hit him on the left. That one didn’t seem too bad—it had punctured the steel, but had lost most of its momentum in doing so. The one on his right, though, had cut through the chain and was sending blood down his arm.
He shook his head, shading his eyes with his left hand, inspecting the battlefield. To his right, the armies clashed, and his main body of elites had come up to press at the flank. The rearguard had found some civilians and was shoving them into the street.
“Pick a corpse,” Dalinar said, pointing toward an empty square where a skirmish had happened. “Stick an arrow in one down there, if you can.”
The archer licked his lips, still seeming confused. Finally, he took a spyglass off his belt and studied the area. “The one in blue, near the overturned cart.”
Dalinar squinted, then nodded. Nearby, Thakka had climbed off his horse and had slid out his sword, resting it on his shoulder. A not-so-subtle warning. The archer drew his bow and launched a single black-fletched arrow. It flew true, sticking into the chosen corpse.
A single awespren burst around Dalinar, like a ring of blue smoke. “Stormfather! Thakka, before today, I’d have bet you half the princedom that such a shot wasn’t possible.” He turned to the archer. “What’s your name, assassin?”
The man raised his chin, but didn’t reply.
“Well, in any case, welcome to my elites,” Dalinar said. “Someone get the fellow a horse.”
“What?” the archer said. “I tried to kill you!”
“Yes, from a distance. Which shows remarkably good judgment. I can make use of someone with your skills.”
“We’re enemies!”
Dalinar nodded toward the town below, where the beleaguered enemy army was—at long last—surrendering. “Not anymore. Looks like we’re all allies now!”
The archer spat to the side. “Slaves beneath your brother, the tyrant.”
Dalinar let one of his men help him onto his horse. “If you’d rather be killed, I can respect that. Alternatively, you can join me and name your price.”
“The life of my brightlord Yezriar,” the archer said. “The heir.”
“Is that the fellow…?” Dalinar said, looking to Thakka.
“… That you killed down below? Yes, sir.”
“He’s got a hole in his chest,” Dalinar said, looking back to the assassin. “Tough break.”
“You … you monster! Couldn’t you have captured him?”
“Nah. The other princedoms are digging in their heels. Refuse to recognize my brother’s crown. Games of catch-me with the high lighteyes just encourage people to fight back. If they know we’re out for blood, they’ll think twice.” Dalinar shrugged. “How about this? Join with me, and we won’t pillage the town. What’s left of it, anyway.”
The man looked down at the surrendering army.
“You in or not?” Dalinar said. “I promise not to make you shoot anyone you like.”
“I…”
“Great!” Dalinar said, turning his horse and trotting off.
A short time later, when Dalinar’s elites rode up to him, the sullen archer was on a horse with one of the other men. The pain surged in Dalinar’s right arm as the Thrill faded, but it was manageable. He’d need surgeons to look at the arrow wound.
Once they reached the town again, he sent orders to stop the looting. His men would hate that, but this town wasn’t worth much anyway. The riches would come once they started into the centers of the princedoms.
He let his horse carry him in a leisurely gait through the town, passing soldiers who had settled down to water themselves and rest from the protracted engagement. His nose still smarted, and he had to forcibly prevent himself from snorting up blood. If it was well and truly broken, that wouldn’t turn out well for him.
Dalinar kept moving, fighting off the dull sense of … nothingness that often followed a battle. This was the worst time. He could still remember being alive, but now had to face a return to mundanity.
He’d missed the executions. Sadeas already had the local highprince’s head—and those of his officers—up on spears. Such a showman, Sadeas was. Dalinar passed the grim line, shaking his head, and heard a muttered curse from his new archer. He’d have to talk to the man, reinforce that in striking at Dalinar earlier, he’d shot an arrow at an enemy. That was to be respected. If he tried something against Dalinar or Sadeas now, it would be different. Thakka would already be searching out the fellow’s family.
“Dalinar?” a voice called.
He stilled his horse, turning toward the sound. Torol Sadeas—resplendent in golden yellow Shardplate that had already been washed clean—pushed through a cluster of officers. The red-faced young man looked far older than he had a year ago. When they’d started all this, he’d still been a gangly youth. No longer.
“Dalinar, are those arrows? Stormfather, man, you look like a thornbush! What happened to your face?”
“A fist,” Dalinar said, then nodded toward the heads on spears. “Nice work.”
“We lost the crown prince,” Sadeas said. “He’ll mount a resistance.”
“That would be impressive,” Dalinar said, “considering what I did to him.”
Sadeas relaxed visibly. “Oh, Dalinar. What would we do without you?”
“Lose. Someone get me something to drink and a pair of surgeons. In that order. Also, Sadeas, I promised we wouldn’t pillage the city. No looting, no slaves taken.”
“You what?” Sadeas demanded. “Who did you promise?”
Dalinar thumbed over his shoulder at the archer.
“Another one?” Sadeas said with a groan.
“He’s got amazing aim,” Dalinar said. “Loyal, too.” He glanced to the side, where Sadeas’s soldiers had rounded up some weeping women for Sadeas to pick from.
“I was looking forward to tonight,” Sadeas noted.
“And I was looking forward to breathing through my nose. We’ll live. More than can be said for the kids we fought today.”
“Fine, fine,” Sadeas said, sighing. “I suppose we could spare one town. A symbol that we are not without mercy.” He looked over Dalinar again. “We need to get you some Shards, my friend.”
“To protect me?”
“Protect you? Storms, Dalinar, at this point I’m not certain a rockslide could kill you. No, it just makes the rest of us look bad when you accomplish what you do while practically unarmed!”
Dalinar shrugged. He didn’t wait for the wine or the surgeons, but instead led his horse back to gather his elites and reinforce the orders to guard the city from looting. Once finished, he walked his horse across smoldering ground to his camp.
He was done living for the day. It would be weeks, maybe months, before he got another opportunity.
4. Oaths
I know that many women who read this will see it only as further proof that I am the godless heretic everyone claims.
Two days after Sadeas was found dead, the Everstorm came again.
Dalinar walked through his chambers in Urithiru, pulled by the unnatural storm. Bare feet on cold rock. He passed Navani—who sat at the writing desk working on her memoirs again—and stepped onto his balcony, which hung straight out over the cliffs beneath Urithiru.
He could feel something, his ears popping, cold—even more cold than usual—blowing in from the west. And something else. An inner chill.
“Is that you, Stormfather?” Dalinar whispered. “This feeling of dread?”
This thing is not natural, the Stormfather said. It is unknown.
“It didn’t come before, during the earlier Desolations?”
No. It is new.
As always, the Stormfather’s voice was far off, like very distant thunder. The Stormfather didn’t always reply to Dalinar, and didn’t remain near him. That was to be expected; he was the soul of the storm. He could not—should not—be contained.
And yet, there was an almost childish petulance to the way he sometimes ignored Dalinar’s questions. It seemed that sometimes he did so merely because he didn’t want Dalinar to think that he would come whenever called.
The Everstorm appeared in the distance, its black clouds lit from within by crackling red lightning. It was low enough in the sky that—fortunately—its top wouldn’t reach Urithiru. It surged like a cavalry, trampling the calm, ordinary clouds below.
Dalinar forced himself to watch that wave of darkness flow around Urithiru’s plateau. Soon it seemed as if their lonely tower were a lighthouse looking over a dark, deadly sea.
It was hauntingly silent. Those red lightning bolts didn’t rumble with thunder in the proper way. He heard the occasional crack, stark and shocking, like a hundred branches snapping at once. But the sounds didn’t seem to match the flashes of red light that rose from deep within.
The storm was so quiet, in fact, that he was able to hear the telltale rustle of cloth as Navani slipped up behind him. She wrapped her arms around him, pressing against his back, resting her head against his shoulder. His eyes flickered down, and he noticed that she’d removed the glove from her safehand. It was barely visible in the dark: slender, gorgeous fingers—delicate, with the nails painted a blushing red. He saw it by the light of the first moon above, and by the intermittent flashes of the storm beneath.
“Any further word from the west?” Dalinar whispered. The Everstorm was slower than a highstorm, and had hit Shinovar many hours before. It did not recharge spheres, even if you left them out during the entire Everstorm.
“The spanreeds are abuzz. The monarchs are delaying a response, but I suspect that soon they’ll realize they have to listen to us.”
“I think you underestimate the stubbornness a crown can press into a man or woman’s mind, Navani.”
Dalinar had been out during his share of highstorms, particularly in his youth. He’d watched the chaos of the stormwall pushing rocks and refuse before it, the sky-splitting lightning, the claps of thunder. Highstorms were the ultimate expression of nature’s power: wild, untamed, sent to remind man of his insignificance.
However, highstorms never seemed hateful. This storm was different. It felt vengeful.
Staring into that blackness below, Dalinar thought he could see what it had done. A series of impressions, thrown at him in anger. The storm’s experiences as it had slowly crossed Roshar.
Houses ripped apart, screams of the occupants lost to the tempest.
People caught in their fields, running in a panic before the unpredicted storm.
Cities blasted with lightning. Towns cast into shadow. Fields swept barren.
And vast seas of glowing red eyes, coming awake like spheres suddenly renewed with Stormlight.
Dalinar hissed out a long, slow breath, the impressions fading. “Was that real?” he whispered.
Yes, the Stormfather said. The enemy rides this storm. He’s aware of you, Dalinar.
Not a vision of the past. Not some possibility of the future. His kingdom, his people, his entire world was being attacked. He drew a deep breath. At the very least, this wasn’t the singular tempest that they’d experienced when the Everstorm had clashed with the highstorm for the first time. This seemed less powerful. It wouldn’t tear down cities, but it did rain destruction upon them—and the winds would attack in bursts, hostile, even deliberate.
The enemy seemed more interested in preying upon the small towns. The fields. The people caught unaware.
Though it was not as destructive as he’d feared, it would still leave thousands dead. It would leave cities broken, particularly those without shelter to the west. More importantly, it would steal the parshmen laborers and turn them into Voidbringers, loosed on the public.
All in all, this storm would exact a price in blood from Roshar that hadn’t been seen since … well, since the Desolations.
He lifted his hand to grasp Navani’s, as she in turn held to him. “You did what you could, Dalinar,” she whispered after a time watching. “Don’t insist on carrying this failure as a burden.”
“I won’t.”
She released him and turned him around, away from the sight of the storm. She wore a dressing gown, not fit to go about in public, but also not precisely immodest.
Save for that hand, with which she caressed his chin. “I,” she whispered, “don’t believe you, Dalinar Kholin. I can read the truth in the tightness of your muscles, the set of your jaw. I know that you, while being crushed beneath a boulder, would insist that you’ve got it under control and ask to see field reports from your men.”
The scent of her was intoxicating. And those entrancing, brilliant violet eyes.
“You need to relax, Dalinar,” she said.
“Navani…” he said.
She looked at him, questioning, so beautiful. Far more gorgeous than when they’d been young. He’d swear it. For how could anyone be as beautiful as she was now?
He seized her by the back of the head and pulled her mouth to his own. Passion woke within him. She pressed her body to his, breasts pushing against him through the thin gown. He drank of her lips, her mouth, her scent. Passionspren fluttered around them like crystal flakes of snow.
Dalinar stopped himself and stepped back.
“Dalinar,” she said as he pulled away. “Your stubborn refusal to get seduced is making me question my feminine wiles.”
“Control is important to me, Navani,” he said, his voice hoarse. He gripped the stone balcony wall, white knuckled. “You know how I was, what I became, when I was a man with no control. I will not surrender now.”
She sighed and sidled up to him, pulling his arm free of the stone, then slipping under it. “I won’t push you, but I need to know. Is this how it’s going to continue? Teasing, dancing on the edge?”
“No,” he said, staring out over the darkness of the storm. “That would be an exercise in futility. A general knows not to set himself up for battles he cannot win.”
“Then what?”
“I’ll find a way to do it right. With oaths.”
The oaths were vital. The promise, the act of being bound together.
“How?” she said, then poked him in the chest. “I’m as religious as the next woman—more than most, actually. But Kadash turned us down, as did Ladent, even Rushu. She squeaked when I mentioned it and literally ran away.”
“Chanada,” Dalinar said, speaking of the senior ardent of the warcamps. “She spoke to Kadash, and had him go to each of the ardents. She probably did it the moment she heard we were courting.”
“So no ardent will marry us,” Navani said. “They consider us siblings. You’re stretching to find an impossible accommodation; continue with this, and it’s going to leave a lady wondering if you actually care.”
“Have you ever thought that?” Dalinar said. “Sincerely.”
“Well … no.”
“You are the woman I love,” Dalinar said, pulling her tight. “A woman I have always loved.”
“Then who cares?” she said. “Let the ardents hie to Damnation, with ribbons around their ankles.”
“Blasphemous.”
“I’m not the one telling everyone that God is dead.”
“Not everyone,” Dalinar said. He sighed, letting go of her—with reluctance—and walked back into his rooms, where a brazier of coal radiated welcome warmth, as well as the room’s only light. They had recovered his fabrial heating device from the warcamps, but didn’t yet have the Stormlight to run it. The scholars had discovered long chains and cages, apparently used for lowering spheres down into the storms, so they’d be able to renew their spheres—if the highstorms ever returned. In other parts of the world, the Weeping had restarted, then fitfully stopped. It might start again. Or the proper storms might start up. Nobody knew, and the Stormfather refused to enlighten him.
Navani entered and pulled the thick drapings closed over the doorway, tying them tightly in place. This room was heaped with furniture, chairs lining the walls, rolled rugs stacked atop them. There was even a standing mirror. The images of twisting windspren along its sides bore the distinctly rounded look of something that had been carved first from weevilwax, then Soulcast into hardwood.
They had deposited all this here for him, as if worried about their highprince living in simple stone quarters. “Let’s have someone clear this out for me tomorrow,” Dalinar said. “There’s room enough for it in the chamber next door, which we can turn into a sitting room or a common room.”
Navani nodded as she settled onto one of the sofas—he saw her reflected in the mirror—her hand still casually uncovered, gown dropping to the side, exposing neck, collarbone, and some of what was beneath. She wasn’t trying to be seductive right now; she was merely comfortable around him. Intimately familiar, past the point where she felt embarrassed for him to see her uncovered.
It was good that one of them was willing to take the initiative in the relationship. For all his impatience to advance on the battlefield, this was one area in which he’d always needed encouragement. Same as it had been all those years ago …
“When I married last,” Dalinar said softly, “I did many things wrong. I started wrong.”
“I wouldn’t say that. You married Shshshsh for her Shardplate, but many marriages are for political reasons. That doesn’t mean you were wrong. If you’ll recall, we all encouraged you to do it.”
As always, when he heard his dead wife’s name, the word was replaced to his hearing with a breezy sound of rushing air—the name couldn’t gain purchase in his mind, any more than a man could hold to a gust of wind.
“I’m not trying to replace her, Dalinar,” Navani said, suddenly sounding concerned. “I know you still have affection for Shshshsh. It’s all right. I can share you with her memory.”
Oh, how little they all understood. He turned toward Navani, set his jaw against the pain, and said it.
“I don’t remember her, Navani.”
She looked to him with a frown, as if she thought she hadn’t heard him correctly.
“I can’t remember my wife at all,” he said. “I don’t know her face. Portraits of her are a fuzzy smudge to my eyes. Her name is taken from me whenever spoken, like someone has plucked it away. I don’t remember what she and I said when we first met; I can’t even remember seeing her at the feast that night when she first arrived. It’s all a blur. I can remember some events surrounding my wife, but nothing of the actual details. It’s all just … gone.”
Navani raised her safehand fingers to her mouth, and from the way her brow knit with concern, he figured he must look like he was in agony.
He slumped down in a chair across from her.
“The alcohol?” she asked softly.
“Something more.”
She breathed out. “The Old Magic. You said you knew both your boon and your curse.”
He nodded.
“Oh, Dalinar.”
“People glance at me when her name comes up,” Dalinar continued, “and they give me these looks of pity. They see me keeping a stiff expression, and they assume I’m being stoic. They infer hidden pain, when really I’m just trying to keep up. It’s hard to follow a conversation where half of it keeps slipping away from your brain.
“Navani, maybe I did grow to love her. I can’t remember. Not one moment of intimacy, not one fight, not a single word she ever said to me. She’s gone, leaving debris that mars my memory. I can’t remember how she died. That one gets to me, because there are parts of that day I know I should remember. Something about a city in rebellion against my brother, and my wife being taken hostage?”
That … and a long march alone, accompanied only by hatred and the Thrill. He remembered those emotions vividly. He’d brought vengeance to those who had taken his wife from him.
Navani settled down on the seat beside Dalinar, resting her head on his shoulder. “Would that I could create a fabrial,” she whispered, “to take away this kind of pain.”
“I think … I think losing her must have hurt me terribly,” Dalinar whispered, “because of what it drove me to do. I am left with only the scars. Regardless, Navani, I want it to be right with us. No mistakes. Done properly, with oaths, spoken to you before someone.”
“Mere words.”
“Words are the most important things in my life right now.”
She parted her lips, thoughtful. “Elhokar?”
“I wouldn’t want to put him in that position.”
“A foreign priest? From the Azish, maybe? They’re almost Vorin.”
“That would be tantamount to declaring myself a heretic. It goes too far. I will not defy the Vorin church.” He paused. “I might be willing to sidestep it though.…”
“What?” she asked.
He looked upward, toward the ceiling. “Maybe we go to someone with authority greater than theirs.”
“You want a spren to marry us?” she said, sounding amused. “Using a foreign priest would be heretical, but not a spren?”
“The Stormfather is the largest remnant of Honor,” Dalinar said. “He’s a sliver of the Almighty himself—and is the closest thing to a god we have left.”
“Oh, I’m not objecting,” Navani said. “I’d let a confused dishwasher marry us. I just think it’s a little unusual.”
“It’s the best we’re going to get, assuming he is willing.” He looked to Navani, then raised his eyebrows and shrugged.
“Is that a proposal?”
“… Yes?”
“Dalinar Kholin,” she said. “Surely you can do better.”
He rested his hand on the back of her head, touching her black hair, which she had left loose. “Better than you, Navani? No, I don’t think that I could. I don’t think that any man has ever had a chance better than this.”
She smiled, and her only reply was a kiss.
* * *
Dalinar was surprisingly nervous as, several hours later, he rode one of Urithiru’s strange fabrial lifts toward the roof of the tower. The lift resembled a balcony, one of many that lined a vast open shaft in the middle of Urithiru—a columnar space as wide as a ballroom, which stretched up from the first floor to the last one.
The tiers of the city, despite looking circular from the front, were actually more half-circles, with the flat sides facing east. The edges of the lower levels melded into the mountains to either side, but the very center was open to the east. The rooms up against that flat side had windows there, providing a view toward the Origin.
And here, in this central shaft, those windows made up one wall. A pure, single unbroken pane of glass hundreds of feet tall. In the day, that lit the shaft with brilliant sunlight. Now, it was dark with the gloom of night.
The balcony crawled steadily along a vertical trench in the wall; Adolin and Renarin rode with him, along with a few guards and Shallan Davar. Navani was already up above. The group stood on the other side of the balcony, giving him space to think. And to be nervous.
Why should he be nervous? He could hardly keep his hands from shaking. Storms. You’d think he was some silk-covered virgin, not a general well into his middle years.
He felt a rumbling deep within him. The Stormfather was being responsive at the moment, for which he was grateful.
“I’m surprised,” Dalinar whispered to the spren, “you agreed to this so willingly. Grateful, but still surprised.”
I respect all oaths, the Stormfather responded.
“What about foolish oaths? Made in haste, or in ignorance?”
There are no foolish oaths. All are the mark of men and true spren over beasts and subspren. The mark of intelligence, free will, and choice.
Dalinar chewed on that, and found he was not surprised by the extreme opinion. Spren should be extreme; they were forces of nature. But was this how Honor himself, the Almighty, had thought?
The balcony ground its inexorable way toward the top of the tower. Only a handful of the dozens of lifts worked; back when Urithiru flourished, they all would have been going at once. They passed level after level of unexplored space, which bothered Dalinar. Making this his fortress was like camping in an unknown land.
The lift finally reached the top floor, and his guards scrambled to open the gates. Those were from Bridge Thirteen these days—he’d assigned Bridge Four to other responsibilities, considering them too important for simple guard duty, now that they were close to becoming Radiants.
Increasingly anxious, Dalinar led the way past several pillars designed with representations of the orders of Radiants. A set of steps took him up through a trapdoor onto the very roof of the tower.
Although each tier was smaller than the one below it, this roof was still over a hundred yards wide. It was cold up here, but someone had set up braziers for warmth and torches for light. The night was strikingly clear, and high above, starspren swirled and made distant patterns.
Dalinar wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that no one—not even his sons—had questioned him when he’d announced his intent to marry in the middle of the night, on the roof of the tower. He searched out Navani, and was shocked to see that she’d found a traditional bridal crown. The intricate headdress of jade and turquoise complemented her wedding gown. Red for luck, it was embroidered with gold and shaped in a much looser style than the havah, with wide sleeves and a graceful drape.
Should Dalinar have found something more traditional to wear himself? He suddenly felt like a dusty, empty frame hung beside the gorgeous painting that was Navani in her wedding regalia.
Elhokar stiffly stood at her side wearing a formal golden coat and loose takama underskirt. He was paler than normal, following the failed assassination attempt during the Weeping, where he’d nearly bled to death. He’d been resting a great deal lately.
Though they’d decided to forgo the extravagance of a traditional Alethi wedding, they had invited some others. Brightlord Aladar and his daughter, Sebarial and his mistress. Kalami and Teshav to act as witnesses. He felt relieved to see them there—he’d feared Navani would be unable to find women willing to notarize the wedding.
A smattering of Dalinar’s officers and scribes filled out the small procession. At the very back of the crowd gathered between the braziers, he spotted a surprising face. Kadash, the ardent, had come as requested. His scarred, bearded face didn’t look pleased, but he had come. A good sign. Perhaps with everything else happening in the world, a highprince marrying his widowed sister-in-law wouldn’t cause too much of a stir.
Dalinar stepped up to Navani and took her hands, one shrouded in a sleeve, the other warm to his touch. “You look amazing,” he said. “How did you find that?”
“A lady must be prepared.”
Dalinar looked to Elhokar, who bowed his head to Dalinar. This will further muddy the relationship between us, Dalinar thought, reading the same sentiment on his nephew’s features.
Gavilar would not appreciate how his son had been handled. Despite his best intentions, Dalinar had trodden down the boy and seized power. Elhokar’s time recuperating had worsened the situation, as Dalinar had grown accustomed to making decisions on his own.
However, Dalinar would be lying to himself if he said that was where it had begun. His actions had been done for the good of Alethkar, for the good of Roshar itself, but that didn’t deny the fact that—step by step—he’d usurped the throne, despite claiming all along he had no intention of doing so.
Dalinar let go of Navani with one hand and rested it on his nephew’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, son,” he said.
“You always are, Uncle,” Elhokar said. “It doesn’t stop you, but I don’t suppose that it should. Your life is defined by deciding what you want, then seizing it. The rest of us could learn from that, if only we could figure out how to keep up.”
Dalinar winced. “I have things to discuss with you. Plans that you might appreciate. But for tonight, I simply ask your blessing, if you can find it to give.”
“This will make my mother happy,” Elhokar said. “So, fine.” Elhokar kissed his mother on the forehead, then left them, striding across the rooftop. At first Dalinar worried the king would stalk down below, but he stopped beside one of the more distant braziers, warming his hands.
“Well,” Navani said. “The only one missing is your spren, Dalinar. If he’s going to—”
A strong breeze struck the top of the tower, carrying with it the scent of recent rainfall, of wet stone and broken branches. Navani gasped, pulling against Dalinar.
A presence emerged in the sky. The Stormfather encompassed everything, a face that stretched to both horizons, regarding the men imperiously. The air became strangely still, and everything but the tower’s top seemed to fade. It was as if they had slipped into a place outside of time itself.
Lighteyes and guards alike murmured or cried out. Even Dalinar, who had been expecting this, found himself taking a step backward—and he had to fight the urge to cringe down before the spren.
OATHS, the Stormfather rumbled, ARE THE SOUL OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. IF YOU ARE TO SURVIVE THE COMING TEMPEST, OATHS MUST GUIDE YOU.
“I am comfortable with oaths, Stormfather,” Dalinar called up to him. “As you know.”
YES. THE FIRST IN MILLENNIA TO BIND ME. Somehow, Dalinar felt the spren’s attention shifting to Navani. AND YOU. DO OATHS HOLD MEANING TO YOU?
“The right oaths,” Navani said.
AND YOUR OATH TO THIS MAN?
“I swear it to him, and to you, and any who care to listen. Dalinar Kholin is mine, and I am his.”
YOU HAVE BROKEN OATHS BEFORE.
“All people have,” Navani said, unbowed. “We’re frail and foolish. This one I will not break. I vow it.”
The Stormfather seemed content with this, though it was far from a traditional Alethi wedding oath. BONDSMITH? he asked.
“I swear it likewise,” Dalinar said, holding to her. “Navani Kholin is mine, and I am hers. I love her.”
SO BE IT.
Dalinar had anticipated thunder, lightning, some kind of celestial trump of victory. Instead, the timelessness ended. The breeze passed. The Stormfather vanished. All through the gathered guests, smoky blue awespren rings burst out above heads. But not Navani’s. Instead she was ringed by gloryspren, the golden lights rotating above her head. Nearby, Sebarial rubbed his temple—as if trying to understand what he’d seen. Dalinar’s new guards sagged, looking suddenly exhausted.
Adolin, being Adolin, let out a whoop. He ran over, trailing joyspren in the shape of blue leaves that hurried to keep up with him. He gave Dalinar—then Navani—enormous hugs. Renarin followed, more reserved but—judging from the wide grin on his face—equally pleased.
The next part became a blur, shaking hands, speaking words of thanks. Insisting that no gifts were needed, as they’d skipped that part of the traditional ceremony. It seemed that the Stormfather’s pronouncement had been dramatic enough that everyone accepted it. Even Elhokar, despite his earlier pique, gave his mother a hug and Dalinar a clasp on the shoulder before going below.
That left only Kadash. The ardent waited to the end. He stood with hands clasped before him as the rooftop emptied.
To Dalinar, Kadash had always looked wrong in those robes. Though he wore the traditional squared beard, it was not an ardent that Dalinar saw. It was a soldier, with a lean build, dangerous posture, and keen light violet eyes. He had a twisting old scar running up to and around the top of his shaved head. Kadash’s life might now be one of peace and service, but his youth had been spent at war.
Dalinar whispered a few words of promise to Navani, and she left him to go to the level below, where she’d ordered food and wine to be set up. Dalinar stepped over to Kadash, confident. The pleasure of having finally done what he’d postponed for so long surged through him. He was married to Navani. This was a joy that he’d assumed lost to him since his youth, an outcome he hadn’t even allowed himself to dream would be his.
He would not apologize for it, or for her.
“Brightlord,” Kadash said quietly.
“Formality, old friend?”
“I wish I could only be here as an old friend,” Kadash said softly. “I have to report this, Dalinar. The ardentia will not be pleased.”
“Surely they cannot deny my marriage if the Stormfather himself blessed the union.”
“A spren? You expect us to accept the authority of a spren?”
“A remnant of the Almighty.”
“Dalinar, that’s blasphemy,” Kadash said, voice pained.
“Kadash. You know I’m no heretic. You’ve fought by my side.”
“That’s supposed to reassure me? Memories of what we did together, Dalinar? I appreciate the man you have become; you should avoid reminding me of the man you once were.”
Dalinar paused, and a memory swirled up from the depths inside him—one he hadn’t thought of in years. One that surprised him. Where had it come from?
He remembered Kadash, bloodied, kneeling on the ground having retched until his stomach was empty. A hardened soldier who had encountered something so vile that even he was shaken.
He’d left to become an ardent the next day.
“The Rift,” Dalinar whispered. “Rathalas.”
“Dark times need not be dredged up,” Kadash said. “This isn’t about … that day, Dalinar. It’s about today, and what you’ve been spreading among the scribes. Talk of these things you’ve seen in visions.”
“Holy messages,” Dalinar said, feeling cold. “Sent by the Almighty.”
“Holy messages claiming the Almighty is dead?” Kadash said. “Arriving on the eve of the return of the Voidbringers? Dalinar, can’t you see how this looks? I’m your ardent, technically your slave. And yes, perhaps still your friend. I’ve tried to explain to the councils in Kharbranth and Jah Keved that you mean well. I tell the ardents of the Holy Enclave that you’re looking back toward when the Knights Radiant were pure, rather than their eventual corruption. I tell them that you have no control over these visions.
“But Dalinar, that was before you started teaching that the Almighty was dead. They’re angry enough over that, and now you’ve gone and defied convention, spitting in the eyes of the ardents! I personally don’t think it matters if you marry Navani. That prohibition is outdated to be sure. But what you’ve done tonight…”
Dalinar reached to place a hand on Kadash’s shoulder, but the man pulled away.
“Old friend,” Dalinar said softly, “Honor might be dead, but I have felt … something else. Something beyond. A warmth and a light. It is not that God has died, it is that the Almighty was never God. He did his best to guide us, but he was an impostor. Or perhaps only an agent. A being not unlike a spren—he had the power of a god, but not the pedigree.”
Kadash looked at him, eyes widening. “Please, Dalinar. Don’t ever repeat what you just said. I think I can explain away what happened tonight. Maybe. But you don’t seem to realize you’re aboard a ship barely afloat in a storm, while you insist on doing a jig on the prow!”
“I will not hold back truth if I find it, Kadash,” Dalinar said. “You just saw that I am literally bound to a spren of oaths. I don’t dare lie.”
“I don’t think you would lie, Dalinar,” Kadash said. “But I do think you can make mistakes. Do not forget that I was there. You are not infallible.”
There? Dalinar thought as Kadash backed up, bowed, then turned and left. What does he remember that I cannot?
Dalinar watched him go. Finally, he shook his head, and went to join the midnight feast, intent on being done with it as soon as was seemly. He needed time with Navani.
His wife.
Map of Alethkar
5. Hearthstone
I can point to the moment when I decided for certain this record had to be written. I hung between realms, seeing into Shadesmar—the realm of the spren—and beyond.
Kaladin trudged through a field of quiet rockbuds, fully aware that he was too late to prevent a disaster. His failure pressed down on him with an almost physical sensation, like the weight of a bridge he was forced to carry all on his own.
After so long in the eastern part of the stormlands, he had nearly forgotten the sights of a fertile landscape. Rockbuds here grew almost as big as barrels, with vines as thick as his wrist spilling out and lapping water from the pools on the stone. Fields of vibrant green grass pulled back into burrows before him, easily three feet tall when standing at height. The field was dappled with glowing lifespren, like motes of green dust.
The grass back near the Shattered Plains had barely reached as high as his ankle, and had mostly grown in yellowish patches on the leeward side of hills. He was surprised to find that he distrusted this taller, fuller grass. An ambusher could hide in that, by crouching down and waiting for the grass to rise back up. How had Kaladin never noticed? He’d run through fields like this playing catch-me with his brother, trying to see who was quick enough to grab handfuls of grass before it hid.
Kaladin felt drained. Used up. Four days ago, he’d traveled by Oathgate to the Shattered Plains, then flown to the northwest at speed. Filled to bursting with Stormlight—and carrying a wealth more in gemstones—he’d been determined to reach his home, Hearthstone, before the Everstorm returned.
After just half a day, he’d run out of Stormlight somewhere in Aladar’s princedom. He’d been walking ever since. Perhaps he could have flown all the way to Hearthstone if he’d been more practiced with his powers. As it was, he’d traveled over a thousand miles in half a day, but this last bit—ninety or so miles—had taken an excruciating three days.
He hadn’t beaten the Everstorm. It had arrived earlier in the day, around noon.
Kaladin noticed a bit of debris peeking out of the grass, and he trudged toward it. The foliage obligingly pulled back before him, revealing a broken wooden churn, the kind used for turning sow’s milk into butter. Kaladin crouched and rested fingers on the splintered wood, then glanced toward another chunk of wood peeking out over the tops of the grass.
Syl zipped down as a ribbon of light, passing his head and spinning around the length of wood.
“It’s the edge of a roof,” Kaladin said. “The lip that hangs down on the leeward side of a building.” Probably from a storage shed, judging by the other debris.
Alethkar wasn’t in the harshest of the stormlands, but neither was this some soft-skinned Western land. Buildings here were built low and squat, sturdy sides pointed eastward toward the Origin, like the shoulder of a man set and ready to take the force of an impact. Windows would only be on the leeward—the westward—side. Like the grass and the trees, humankind had learned to weather the storms.
That depended on storms always blowing in the same direction. Kaladin had done what he could to prepare the villages and towns he passed for the coming Everstorm, which would blow in the wrong direction and transform parshmen into destructive Voidbringers. Nobody in those towns had possessed working spanreeds, however, and he’d been unable to contact his home.
He hadn’t been fast enough. Earlier today, he’d spent the Everstorm within a tomb he’d hollowed out of rock using his Shardblade—Syl herself, who could manifest as any weapon he desired. In truth, the storm hadn’t been nearly as bad as the one where he’d fought the Assassin in White. But the debris he found here proved that this one had been bad enough.
The mere memory of that red storm outside his hollow made panic rise inside him. The Everstorm was so wrong, so unnatural—like a baby born with no face. Some things just should not be.
He stood up and continued on his way. He had changed uniforms before leaving—his old uniform had been bloodied and tattered. He now wore a spare generic Kholin uniform. It felt wrong not to bear the symbol of Bridge Four.
He crested a hill and spotted a river to his right. Trees sprouted along its banks, hungry for the extra water. That would be Hobble’s Brook. So if he looked directly west …
Hand shading his eyes, he could see hills that had been stripped of grass and rockbuds. They’d soon be slathered with seed-crem, and lavis polyps would start to bud. That hadn’t started yet; this was supposed to be the Weeping. Rain should be falling right now in a constant, gentle shower.
Syl zipped up in front of him, a ribbon of light. “Your eyes are brown again,” she noted.
It took a few hours without summoning his Shardblade. Once he did that, his eyes would bleed to a glassy light blue, almost glowing. Syl found the variation fascinating; Kaladin still hadn’t decided how he felt about it.
“We’re close,” Kaladin said, pointing. “Those fields belong to Hobbleken. We’re maybe two hours from Hearthstone.”
“Then you’ll be home!” Syl said, her ribbon of light spiraling and taking the shape of a young woman in a flowing havah, tight and buttoning above the waist, with safehand covered.
Kaladin grunted, walking down the slope, longing for Stormlight. Being without it now, after holding so much, was an echoing hollowness within him. Was this what it would be like every time he ran dry?
The Everstorm hadn’t recharged his spheres, of course. Neither with Stormlight nor some other energy, which he’d feared might happen.
“Do you like the new dress?” Syl asked, wagging her covered safehand as she stood in the air.
“Looks strange on you.”
“I’ll have you know I put a ton of thought into it. I spent positively hours thinking of just how— Oh! What’s that?”
She turned into a little stormcloud that shot toward a lurg clinging to a stone. She inspected the fist-size amphibian on one side, then the other, before squealing in joy and turning into a perfect imitation of the thing—except pale white-blue. This startled the creature away, and she giggled, zipping back toward Kaladin as a ribbon of light.
“What were we saying?” she asked, forming into a young woman and resting on his shoulder.
“Nothing important.”
“I’m sure I was scolding you. Oh, yes, you’re home! Yay! Aren’t you excited?”
She didn’t see it—didn’t realize. Sometimes, for all her curiosity, she could be oblivious.
“But … it’s your home…” Syl said. She huddled down. “What’s wrong?”
“The Everstorm, Syl,” Kaladin said. “We were supposed to beat it here.” He’d needed to beat it here.
Surely someone would have survived, right? The fury of the storm, and then the worse fury after? The murderous rampage of servants turned into monsters?
Oh, Stormfather. Why hadn’t he been faster?
He forced himself into a double march again, pack slung over his shoulder. The weight was still heavy, dreadfully so, but he found that he had to know. Had to see.
Someone had to witness what had happened to his home.
* * *
The rain resumed about an hour out of Hearthstone, so at least the weather patterns hadn’t been completely ruined. Unfortunately, this meant he had to hike the rest of the way wet. He splashed through puddles where rainspren grew, blue candles with eyes on the very tip.
“It will be all right, Kaladin,” Syl promised from his shoulder. She’d created an umbrella for herself, and still wore the traditional Vorin dress instead of her usual girlish skirt. “You’ll see.”
The sky had darkened by the time he finally crested the last lavis hill and looked down on Hearthstone. He braced himself for the destruction, but it shocked him nonetheless. Some of the buildings he remembered were simply … gone. Others stood without roofs. He couldn’t see the entire town from his vantage, not in the gloom of the Weeping, but many of the structures he could make out were hollow and ruined.
He stood for a long time as night fell. He didn’t spot a glimmer of light in the town. It was empty.
Dead.
A part of him scrunched up inside, huddling into a corner, tired of being whipped so often. He’d embraced his power; he’d taken the path of a Radiant. Why hadn’t it been enough?
His eyes immediately sought out his own home on the outskirts of town. But no. Even if he’d been able to see it in the rainy evening gloom, he didn’t want to go there. Not yet. He couldn’t face the death he might find.
Instead, he rounded Hearthstone on the northwestern side, where a hill led up to the citylord’s manor. The larger rural towns like this served as a kind of hub for the small farming communities around them. Because of that, Hearthstone was cursed with the presence of a lighteyed ruler of some status. Brightlord Roshone, a man whose greedy ways had ruined far more than one life.
Moash … Kaladin thought as he trudged up the hill toward the manor, shivering in the chill and the darkness. He’d have to face his friend’s betrayal—and near assassination of Elhokar—at some point. For now, he had more pressing wounds that needed tending.
The manor was where the town’s parshmen had been kept; they’d have begun their rampage here. He was pretty sure that if he ran across Roshone’s broken corpse, he wouldn’t be too heartbroken.
“Wow,” Syl said. “Gloomspren.”
Kaladin looked up and noted an unusual spren whipping about. Long, grey, like a tattered streamer of cloth in the wind. It wound around him, fluttering. He’d seen its like only once or twice before.
“Why are they so rare?” Kaladin asked. “People feel gloomy all the time.”
“Who knows?” Syl said. “Some spren are common. Some are uncommon.” She tapped his shoulder. “I’m pretty sure one of my aunts liked to hunt these things.”
“Hunt them?” Kaladin asked. “Like, try to spot them?”
“No. Like you hunt greatshells. Can’t remember her name…” Syl cocked her head, oblivious to the fact that rain was falling through her form. “She wasn’t really my aunt. Just an honorspren I referred to that way. What an odd memory.”
“More seems to be coming back to you.”
“The longer I’m with you, the more it happens. Assuming you don’t try to kill me again.” She gave him a sideways look. Though it was dark, she glowed enough for him to make out the expression.
“How often are you going to make me apologize for that?”
“How many times have I done it so far?”
“At least fifty.”
“Liar,” Syl said. “Can’t be more than twenty.”
“I’m sorry.”
Wait. Was that light up ahead?
Kaladin stopped on the path. It was light, coming from the manor house. It flickered unevenly. Fire? Was the manor burning? No, it seemed to be candles or lanterns inside. Someone, it appeared, had survived. Humans or Voidbringers?
He needed to be careful, though as he approached, he found that he didn’t want to be. He wanted to be reckless, angry, destructive. If he found the creatures that had taken his home from him …
“Be ready,” he mumbled to Syl.
He stepped off the pathway, which was kept free of rockbuds and other plants, and crept carefully toward the manor. Light shone between boards that had been pounded across the building’s windows, replacing glass that the Everstorm undoubtedly broke. He was surprised the manor had survived as well as it had. The porch had been ripped free, but the roof remained.
The rain masked other sounds and made it difficult to see much beyond that, but someone, or something, was inside. Shadows moved in front of the lights.
Heart pounding, Kaladin rounded toward the northern side of the building. The servants’ entrance would be here, along with the quarters for the parshmen. An unusual amount of noise came from inside the manor house. Thumping. Motion. Like a nest full of rats.
He had to feel his way through the gardens. The parshmen had been housed in a small structure built in the manor’s shadow, with a single open chamber and benches for sleeping. Kaladin reached it by touch and felt at a large hole ripped in the side.
Scraping came from behind him.
Kaladin spun as the back door of the manor opened, its warped frame grinding against stone. He dove for cover behind a shalebark mound, but light bathed him, cutting through the rain. A lantern.
Kaladin stretched his hand to the side, prepared to summon Syl, yet the person who stepped from the manor was no Voidbringer, but instead a human guardsman in an old helm spotted by rust.
The man held up his lantern. “Here now,” he shouted at Kaladin, fumbling at the mace on his belt. “Here now! You there!” He pulled free the weapon and held it out in a quivering hand. “What are you? Deserter? Come here into the light and let me see you.”
Kaladin stood up warily. He didn’t recognize the soldier—but either someone had survived the Voidbringer assault, or this man was part of an expedition investigating the aftermath. Either way, it was the first hopeful sign Kaladin had seen since arriving.
He held his hands up—he was unarmed save for Syl—and let the guard bully him into the building.
6. Four Lifetimes
I thought that I was surely dead. Certainly, some who saw farther than I did thought I had fallen.
Kaladin stepped into Roshone’s manor, and his apocalyptic visions of death and loss started to fade as he recognized people. He passed Toravi, one of the town’s many farmers, in the hallway. Kaladin remembered the man as being enormous, with thick shoulders. In actuality, he was shorter than Kaladin by half a hand, and most of Bridge Four could have outmatched him for muscles.
Toravi didn’t seem to recognize Kaladin. The man stepped into a side chamber, which was packed with darkeyes sitting on the floor.
The soldier walked Kaladin along the candlelit hallway. They passed through the kitchens, and Kaladin noted dozens of other familiar faces. The townspeople filled the manor, packing every room. Most sat on the floor in family groups, and while they looked tired and disheveled, they were alive. Had they rebuffed the Voidbringer assault, then?
My parents, Kaladin thought, pushing through a small group of townspeople and moving more quickly. Where were his parents?
“Whoa, there!” said the soldier behind, grabbing Kaladin by the shoulder. He shoved his mace into the small of Kaladin’s back. “Don’t make me down you, son.”
Kaladin turned on the guardsman, a clean-shaven fellow with brown eyes that seemed set a little too close together. That rusted cap was a disgrace.
“Now,” the soldier said, “we’re just going to go find Brightlord Roshone, and you’re going to explain why you were skulking round the place. Act real nice, and maybe he won’t hang you. Understand?”
The townspeople in the kitchens noticed Kaladin finally, and pulled away. Many whispered to one another, eyes wide, fearful. He heard the words “deserter,” “slave brands,” “dangerous.”
Nobody said his name.
“They don’t recognize you?” Syl asked as she walked across a kitchen countertop.
Why would they recognize this man he had become? Kaladin saw himself reflected in a pan hanging beside the brick oven. Long hair with a curl to it, the tips resting against his shoulders. A rough uniform that was a shade too small for him, face bearing a scruffy beard from several weeks without shaving. Soaked and exhausted, he looked like a vagabond.
This wasn’t the homecoming he’d imagined during his first months at war. A glorious reunion where he returned as a hero wearing the knots of a sergeant, his brother delivered safe to his family. In his fancies, people had praised him, slapped him on the back and accepted him.
Idiocy. These people had never treated him or his family with any measure of kindness.
“Let’s go,” the soldier said, shoving him on the shoulder.
Kaladin didn’t move. When the man shoved harder, Kaladin rolled his body with the push, and the shift of weight sent the guard stumbling past him. The man turned, angry. Kaladin met his gaze. The guard hesitated, then took a step back and gripped his mace more firmly.
“Wow,” Syl said, zipping up to Kaladin’s shoulder. “That is quite the glare you gave.”
“Old sergeant’s trick,” Kaladin whispered, turning and leaving the kitchens. The guard followed behind, barking an order that Kaladin ignored.
Each step through this manor was like walking through a memory. There was the dining nook where he’d confronted Rillir and Laral on the night he’d discovered his father was a thief. This hallway beyond, hung with portraits of people he didn’t know, had been where he’d played as a child. Roshone hadn’t changed the portraits.
He’d have to talk to his parents about Tien. It was why he hadn’t tried to contact them after being freed from slavery. Could he face them? Storms, he hoped they lived. But could he face them?
He heard a moan. Soft, underneath the sounds of people talking, still he picked it out.
“There were wounded?” he asked, turning on his guard.
“Yeah,” the man said. “But—”
Kaladin ignored him and strode down the hallway, Syl flying along beside his head. Kaladin shoved past people, following the sounds of the tormented, and eventually stumbled into the doorway of the parlor. It had been transformed into a surgeon’s triage room, with mats laid out on the floor bearing wounded.
A figure knelt by one of the pallets carefully splinting a broken arm. Kaladin had known as soon as he’d heard those moans of pain where he’d find his father.
Lirin glanced at him. Storms. Kaladin’s father looked weathered, bags underneath his dark brown eyes. The hair was greyer than Kaladin remembered, the face gaunter. But he was the same. Balding, diminutive, thin, bespectacled … and amazing.
“What’s this?” Lirin asked, turning back to his work. “Did the highprince’s house send soldiers already? That was faster than expected. How many did you bring? We can certainly use…” Lirin hesitated, then looked back at Kaladin.
Then his eyes opened wide.
“Hello, Father,” Kaladin said.
The guardsman finally caught up, shouldering past gawking townspeople and waving his mace toward Kaladin like a baton. Kaladin sidestepped absently, then pushed the man so he stumbled farther down the hallway.
“It is you,” Lirin said. Then he scrambled over and caught Kaladin in an embrace. “Oh, Kal. My boy. My little boy. Hesina! HESINA!”
Kaladin’s mother appeared in the doorway a moment later, bearing a tray of freshly boiled bandages. She probably thought that Lirin needed her help with a patient. Taller than her husband by a few fingers, she wore her hair tied back with a kerchief just as Kaladin remembered.
She raised her gloved safehand to her lips, gaping, and the tray slipped down in her other hand, tumbling bandages to the floor. Shockspren, like pale yellow triangles breaking and re-forming, appeared behind her. She dropped the tray and reached to the side of Kaladin’s face with a soft touch. Syl zipped around in a ribbon of light, laughing.
Kaladin couldn’t laugh. Not until it had been said. He took a deep breath, choked on it the first time, then finally forced it out.
“I’m sorry, Father, Mother,” he whispered. “I joined the army to protect him, but I could barely protect myself.” He found himself shaking, and he put his back to the wall, letting himself sink down until he was seated. “I let Tien die. I’m sorry. It’s my fault.…”
“Oh, Kaladin,” Hesina said, kneeling down beside him and pulling him into an embrace. “We got your letter, but over a year ago they told us you had died as well.”
“I should have saved him,” Kaladin whispered.
“You shouldn’t have gone in the first place,” Lirin said. “But now … Almighty, now you’re back.” Lirin stood up, tears leaking down his cheeks. “My son! My son is alive!”
* * *
A short time later, Kaladin sat among the wounded, holding a cup of warm soup in his hands. He hadn’t had a hot meal since … when?
“That’s obviously a slave’s brand, Lirin,” a soldier said, speaking with Kaladin’s father near the doorway into the room. “Sas glyph, so it happened here in the princedom. They probably told you he’d died to save you the shame of the truth. And then the shash brand—you don’t get that for mere insubordination.”
Kaladin sipped his soup. His mother knelt beside him, one hand on his shoulder, protective. The soup tasted of home. Boiled vegetable broth with steamed lavis stirred in, spiced as his mother always made it.
He hadn’t spoken much in the half hour since he’d arrived. For now, he just wanted to be here with them.
Strangely, his memories had turned fond. He remembered Tien laughing, brightening the dreariest of days. He remembered hours spent studying medicine with his father, or cleaning with his mother.
Syl hovered before his mother, still wearing her little havah, invisible to everyone but Kaladin. The spren had a perplexed look on her face.
“The wrong-way highstorm did break many of the town’s buildings,” Hesina explained to him softly. “But our home still stands. We had to dedicate your spot to something else, Kal, but we can make space for you.”
Kaladin glanced at the soldier. Captain of Roshone’s guard; Kaladin thought he remembered the man. He almost seemed too pretty to be a soldier, but then, he was lighteyed.
“Don’t worry about that,” Hesina said. “We’ll deal with it, whatever the … trouble is. With all these wounded pouring in from the villages around, Roshone will need your father’s skill. Roshone won’t go making a storm and risk Lirin’s discontent—and you won’t be taken from us again.”
She talked to him as if he were a child.
What a surreal sensation, being back here, being treated like he was still the boy who had left for war five years ago. Three men bearing their son’s name had lived and died in that time. The soldier who had been forged in Amaram’s army. The slave, so bitter and angry. His parents had never met Captain Kaladin, bodyguard to the most powerful man in Roshar.
And then … there was the next man, the man he was becoming. A man who owned the skies and spoke ancient oaths. Five years had passed. And four lifetimes.
“He’s a runaway slave,” the guard captain hissed. “We can’t just ignore that, surgeon. He probably stole the uniform. And even if for some reason he was allowed to hold a spear despite his brands, he’s a deserter. Look at those haunted eyes and tell me you don’t see a man who has done terrible things.”
“He’s my son,” Lirin said. “I’ll buy his writ of slavery. You’re not taking him. Tell Roshone he can either let this slide, or he can go without a surgeon. Unless he assumes Mara can take over after just a few years of apprenticeship.”
Did they think they were speaking softly enough that he couldn’t hear?
Look at the wounded people in this room, Kaladin. You’re missing something.
The wounded … they displayed fractures. Concussions. Very few lacerations. This was not the aftermath of a battle, but of a natural disaster. So what had happened to the Voidbringers? Who had fought them off?
“Things have gotten better since you left,” Hesina promised Kaladin, squeezing his shoulder. “Roshone isn’t as bad as he once was. I think he feels guilty. We can rebuild, be a family again. And there’s something else you need to know about. We—”
“Hesina,” Lirin said, throwing his hands into the air.
“Yes?”
“Write a letter to the highprince’s administrators,” Lirin said. “Explain the situation; see if we can get a forbearance, or at least an explanation.” He looked to the soldier. “Will that satisfy your master? We can wait upon a higher authority, and in the meantime I can have my son back.”
“We’ll see,” the soldier said, folding his arms. “I’m not sure how much I like the idea of a shash-branded man running around my town.”
Hesina rose to join Lirin. The two had a hushed exchange as the guard settled back against the doorway, pointedly keeping an eye on Kaladin. Did he know how little like a soldier he looked? He didn’t walk like a man acquainted with battle. He stepped too hard, and stood with his knees too straight. There were no dents in his breastplate, and his sword’s scabbard knocked against things as he turned.
Kaladin sipped his soup. Was it any wonder that his parents still thought of him as a child? He’d come in looking ragged and abandoned, then had started sobbing about Tien’s death. Being home brought out the child in him, it seemed.
Perhaps it was time, for once, to stop letting the rain dictate his mood. He couldn’t banish the seed of darkness inside him, but Stormfather, he didn’t need to let it rule him either.
Syl walked up to him in the air. “They’re like I remember them.”
“Remember them?” Kaladin whispered. “Syl, you never knew me when I lived here.”
“That’s true,” she said.
“So how can you remember them?” Kaladin said, frowning.
“Because I do,” Syl said, flitting around him. “Everyone is connected, Kaladin. Everything is connected. I didn’t know you then, but the winds did, and I am of the winds.”
“You’re honorspren.”
“The winds are of Honor,” she said, laughing as if he’d said something ridiculous. “We are kindred blood.”
“You don’t have blood.”
“And you don’t have an imagination, it appears.” She landed in the air before him and became a young woman. “Besides, there was … another voice. Pure, with a song like tapped crystal, distant yet demanding…” She smiled, and zipped away.
Well, the world might have been upended, but Syl was as impenetrable as ever. Kaladin set aside his soup and climbed to his feet. He stretched to one side, then the other, feeling satisfying pops from his joints. He walked toward his parents. Storms, but everyone in this town seemed smaller than he remembered. He hadn’t been that much shorter when he’d left Hearthstone, had he?
A figure stood right outside the room, speaking with the guard with the rusty helmet. Roshone wore a lighteyes’ coat that was several seasons out of fashion—Adolin would have shaken his head at that. The citylord wore a wooden foot on his right leg, and had lost weight since Kaladin had last seen him. His skin drooped on his figure like melted wax, bunching up at his neck.
That said, Roshone had the same imperious bearing, the same angry expression—his light yellow eyes seemed to blame everyone and everything in this insignificant town for his banishment. He’d once lived in Kholinar, but had been involved in the deaths of some citizens—Moash’s grandparents—and had been shipped out here as punishment.
He turned toward Kaladin, lit by candles on the walls. “So, you’re alive. They didn’t teach you to keep yourself in the army, I see. Let me have a look at those brands of yours.” He reached over and held up the hair in front of Kaladin’s forehead. “Storms, boy. What did you do? Hit a lighteyes?”
“Yes,” Kaladin said.
Then punched him.
He bashed Roshone right in the face. A solid hit, exactly like Hav had taught him. Thumb outside of his fist, he connected with the first two knuckles of his hand across Roshone’s cheekbone, then followed through to slide across the front of the face. Rarely had he delivered such a perfect punch. It barely even hurt his fist.
Roshone dropped like a felled tree.
“That,” Kaladin said, “was for my friend Moash.”
7. A Watcher at the Rim
I did not die.
I experienced something worse.
“Kaladin!” Lirin exclaimed, grabbing him by the shoulder. “What are you doing, son?”
Roshone sputtered on the ground, his nose bleeding. “Guards, take him! You hear me!”
Syl landed on Kaladin’s shoulder, hands on her hips. She tapped her foot. “He probably deserved that.”
The darkeyed guard scrambled to help Roshone to his feet while the captain leveled his sword at Kaladin. A third joined them, running in from another room.
Kaladin stepped one foot back, falling into a guard position.
“Well?” Roshone demanded, holding his handkerchief to his nose. “Strike him down!” Angerspren boiled up from the ground in pools.
“Please, no,” Kaladin’s mother cried, clinging to Lirin. “He’s just distraught. He—”
Kaladin held out a hand toward her, palm forward, in a quieting motion. “It’s all right, Mother. That was only payment for a little unsettled debt between Roshone and me.”
He met the eyes of the guards, each in turn, and they shuffled uncertainly. Roshone blustered. Unexpectedly, Kaladin felt in complete control of the situation—and … well, more than a little embarrassed.
Suddenly, the perspective of it crashed down on him. Since leaving Hearthstone, Kaladin had met true evil, and Roshone hardly compared. Hadn’t he sworn to protect even those he didn’t like? Wasn’t the whole point of what he had learned to keep him from doing things like this? He glanced at Syl, and she nodded to him.
Do better.
For a short time, it had been nice to just be Kal again. Fortunately, he wasn’t that youth any longer. He was a new person—and for the first time in a long, long while, he was happy with that person.
“Stand down, men,” Kaladin said to the soldiers. “I promise not to hit your brightlord again. I apologize for that; I was momentarily distracted by our previous history. Something he and I both need to forget. Tell me, what happened to the parshmen? Did they not attack the town?”
The soldiers shifted, glancing toward Roshone.
“I said stand down,” Kaladin snapped. “For storm’s sake, man. You’re holding that sword like you’re going to chop a stumpweight. And you? Rust on your cap? I know Amaram recruited most of the able-bodied men in the region, but I’ve seen messenger boys with more battle poise than you.”
The soldiers looked to one another. Then, red-faced, the lighteyed one slid his sword back into its sheath.
“What are you doing?” Roshone demanded. “Attack him!”
“Brightlord, sir,” the man said, eyes down. “I may not be the best soldier around, but … well, sir, trust me on this. We should just pretend that punch never happened.” The other two soldiers nodded their heads in agreement.
Roshone sized Kaladin up, dabbing at his nose, which wasn’t bleeding badly. “So, they did make something out of you in the army, did they?”
“You have no idea. We need to talk. Is there a room here that isn’t clogged full of people?”
“Kal,” Lirin said. “You’re speaking foolishness. Don’t give orders to Brightlord Roshone!”
Kaladin pushed past the soldiers and Roshone, walking farther down the hallway. “Well?” he barked. “Empty room?”
“Up the stairs, sir,” one of the soldiers said. “Library is empty.”
“Excellent.” Kaladin smiled to himself, noting the “sir.” “Join me up there, men.”
Kaladin started toward the stairs. Unfortunately, an authoritative bearing could only take a man so far. Nobody followed, not even his parents.
“I gave you people an order,” Kaladin said. “I’m not fond of repeating myself.”
“And what,” Roshone said, “makes you think you can order anyone around, boy?”
Kaladin turned back and swept his arm before him, summoning Syl. A bright, dew-covered Shardblade formed from mist into his hand. He spun the Blade and rammed her down into the floor in one smooth motion. He held the grip, feeling his eyes bleed to blue.
Everything grew still. Townspeople froze, gaping. Roshone’s eyes bulged. Curiously, Kaladin’s father just lowered his head and closed his eyes.
“Any other questions?” Kaladin asked.
* * *
“They were gone when we went back to check on them, um, Brightlord,” said Aric, the short guard with the rusty helm. “We’d locked the door, but the side was ripped clean open.”
“They didn’t attack a soul?” Kaladin asked.
“No, Brightlord.”
Kaladin paced through the library. The room was small, but neatly organized with rows of shelves and a fine reading stand. Each book was exactly flush with the others; either the maids were extremely meticulous, or the books were not often moved. Syl perched on one shelf, her back to a book, swinging her legs girlishly over the edge.
Roshone sat on one side of the room, periodically pushing both hands along his flushed cheeks toward the back of his head in an odd nervous gesture. His nose had stopped bleeding, though he’d have a nice bruise. That was a fraction of the punishment the man deserved, but Kaladin found he had no passion for abusing Roshone. He had to be better than that.
“What did the parshmen look like?” Kaladin asked of the guardsmen. “They changed, following the unusual storm?”
“Sure did,” Aric said. “I peeked when I heard them break out, after the storm passed. They looked like Voidbringers, I tell you, with big bony bits jutting from their skin.”
“They were taller,” the guard captain added. “Taller than me, easily as tall as you are, Brightlord. With legs thick as stumpweights and hands that could have strangled a whitespine, I tell you.”
“Then why didn’t they attack?” Kaladin asked. They could have easily taken the manor; instead, they’d run off into the night. It spoke of a more disturbing goal. Perhaps Hearthstone was too small to be bothered with.
“I don’t suppose you tracked their direction?” Kaladin said, looking toward the guards, then Roshone.
“Um, no, Brightlord,” the captain said. “Honestly, we were just worried about surviving.”
“Will you tell the king?” Aric asked. “That storm ripped away four of our silos. We’ll be starving afore too long, with all these refugees and no food. When the highstorms start coming again, we won’t have half as many homes as we need.”
“I’ll tell Elhokar.” But Stormfather, the rest of the kingdom would be just as bad.
He needed to focus on the Voidbringers. He couldn’t report back to Dalinar until he had the Stormlight to fly home, so for now it seemed his most useful task would be to find out where the enemy was gathering, if he could. What were the Voidbringers planning? Kaladin hadn’t experienced their strange powers himself, though he’d heard reports of the Battle of Narak. Parshendi with glowing eyes and lightning at their command, ruthless and terrible.
“I’ll need maps,” he said. “Maps of Alethkar, as detailed as you have, and some way to carry them through the rain without ruining them.” He grimaced. “And a horse. Several of them, the finest you have.”
“So you’re robbing me now?” Roshone asked softly, staring at the floor.
“Robbing?” Kaladin said. “We’ll call it renting instead.” He pulled a handful of spheres from his pocket and dropped them on the table. He glanced toward the soldiers. “Well? Maps? Surely Roshone keeps survey maps of the nearby areas.”
Roshone was not important enough to have stewardship over any of the highprince’s lands—a distinction Kaladin had never realized while he lived in Hearthstone. Those lands would be watched over by much more important lighteyes; Roshone would only be a first point of contact with surrounding villages.
“We’ll want to wait for the lady’s permission,” the guard captain said. “Sir.”
Kaladin raised an eyebrow. They’d disobey Roshone for him, but not the manor’s lady? “Go to the house ardents and tell them to prepare the things I request. Permission will be forthcoming. And locate a spanreed connected to Tashikk, if any of the ardents have one. Once I have the Stormlight to use it, I’ll want to send word to Dalinar.”
The guards saluted and left.
Kaladin folded his arms. “Roshone, I’m going to need to chase those parshmen and see if I can figure out what they’re up to. I don’t suppose any of your guards have tracking experience? Following the creatures would be hard enough without the rain swamping everything.”
“Why do they matter so much?” Roshone asked, still staring at the floor.
“Surely you’ve guessed,” Kaladin said, nodding to Syl as her ribbon of light flitted over to his shoulder. “Weather in turmoil and terrors transformed from common servants? That storm with the red lightning, blowing the wrong direction? The Desolation is here, Roshone. The Voidbringers have returned.”
Roshone groaned, leaning forward, arms wrapped around himself as if he were going to be sick.
“Syl?” Kaladin whispered. “I might need you again.”
“You sound apologetic,” she replied, cocking her head.
“I am. I don’t like the idea of swinging you about, smashing you into things.”
She sniffed. “Firstly, I don’t smash into things. I am an elegant and graceful weapon, stupid. Secondly, why would you be bothered?”
“It doesn’t feel right,” Kaladin replied, still whispering. “You’re a woman, not a weapon.”
“Wait … so this is about me being a girl?”
“No,” Kaladin said immediately, then hesitated. “Maybe. It just feels strange.”
She sniffed. “You don’t ask your other weapons how they feel about being swung about.”
“My other weapons aren’t people.” He hesitated. “Are they?”
She looked at him with head cocked and eyebrows raised, as if he’d said something very stupid.
Everything has a spren. His mother had taught him that from an early age.
“So … some of my spears have been women, then?” he asked.
“Female, at least,” Syl said. “Roughly half, as these things tend to go.” She flitted up into the air in front of him. “It’s your fault for personifying us, so no complaining. Of course, some of the old spren have four genders instead of two.”
“What? Why?”
She poked him in the nose. “Because humans didn’t imagine those ones, silly.” She zipped out in front of him, changing into a field of mist. When he raised his hand, the Shardblade appeared.
He strode to where Roshone sat, then stooped down and held the Shardblade before the man, point toward the floor.
Roshone looked up, transfixed by the weapon’s blade, as Kaladin had anticipated. You couldn’t be near one of these things and not be drawn by it. They had a magnetism.
“How did you get it?” Roshone asked.
“Does it matter?”
He didn’t reply, but they both knew the truth. Owning a Shardblade was enough—if you could claim it, and not have it taken from you, it was yours. With one in his possession, the brands on his head were meaningless. No man, not even Roshone, would imply otherwise.
“You,” Kaladin said, “are a cheat, a rat, and a murderer. But as much as I hate it, we don’t have time to oust Alethkar’s ruling class and set up something better. We are under attack by an enemy we do not understand, and which we could not have anticipated. So you’re going to have to stand up and lead these people.”
Roshone stared at the blade, looking at his reflection.
“We’re not powerless,” Kaladin said. “We can and will fight back—but first we need to survive. The Everstorm will return. Regularly, though I don’t know the interval yet. I need you to prepare.”
“How?” Roshone whispered.
“Build homes with slopes in both directions. If there’s not time for that, find a sheltered location and hunker down. I can’t stay. This crisis is bigger than one town, one people, even if it’s my town and my people. I have to rely on you. Almighty preserve us, you’re all we have.”
Roshone slumped down farther in his seat. Great. Kaladin stood and dismissed Syl.
“We’ll do it,” a voice said from behind him.
Kaladin froze. Laral’s voice sent a shiver down his spine. He turned slowly, and found a woman who did not at all match the image in his head. When he’d last seen her, she’d been wearing a perfect lighteyed dress, beautiful and young, yet her pale green eyes had seemed hollow. She’d lost her betrothed, Roshone’s son, and had instead become engaged to the father—a man more than twice her age.
The woman he confronted was no longer a youth. Her face was firm, lean, and her hair was pulled back in a no-nonsense tail of black peppered with blonde. She wore boots and a utilitarian havah, damp from the rain.
She looked him up and down, then sniffed. “Looks like you went and grew up, Kal. I was sorry to hear the news of your brother. Come now. You need a spanreed? I’ve got one to the queen regent in Kholinar, but that one hasn’t been responsive lately. Fortunately, we do have one to Tashikk, as you asked about. If you think that the king will respond to you, we can go through an intermediary.”
She walked back out the doorway.
“Laral…” he said, following.
“I hear you stabbed my floor,” she noted. “That’s good hardwood, I’ll have you know. Honestly. Men and their weapons.”
“I dreamed of coming back,” Kaladin said, stopping in the hallway outside the library. “I imagined returning here a war hero and challenging Roshone. I wanted to save you, Laral.”
“Oh?” She turned back to him. “And what made you think I needed saving?”
“You can’t tell me,” Kaladin said softly, waving backward toward the library, “that you’ve been happy with that.”
“Becoming a lighteyes does not grant a man any measure of decorum, it appears,” Laral said. “You will stop insulting my husband, Kaladin. Shardbearer or not, another word like that, and I’ll have you thrown from my home.”
“Laral—”
“I am quite happy here. Or I was, until the winds started blowing the wrong direction.” She shook her head. “You take after your father. Always feeling like you need to save everyone, even those who would rather you mind your own business.”
“Roshone brutalized my family. He sent my brother to his death and did everything he could to destroy my father!”
“And your father spoke against my husband,” Laral said, “disparaging him in front of the other townspeople. How would you feel, as a new brightlord exiled far from home, only to find that the town’s most important citizen is openly critical of you?”
Her perspective was skewed, of course. Lirin had tried to befriend Roshone at first, hadn’t he? Still, Kaladin found little passion to continue the argument. What did he care? He intended to see his parents moved from this city anyway.
“I’ll go set up the spanreed,” she said. “It might take some time to get a reply. In the meantime, the ardents should be fetching your maps.”
“Great,” Kaladin said, pushing past her in the hallway. “I’m going to go speak with my parents.”
Syl zipped over his shoulder as he started down the steps. “So, that’s the girl you were going to marry.”
“No,” Kaladin whispered. “That’s a girl I was never going to marry, no matter what happened.”
“I like her.”
“You would.” He reached the bottom of the steps and looked back up. Roshone had joined Laral at the top of the stairs, carrying the gems Kaladin had left on the table. How much had that been?
Five or six ruby broams, he thought, and maybe a sapphire or two. He did the calculations in his head. Storms … That was a ridiculous sum—more money than the goblet full of spheres that Roshone and Kaladin’s father had spent years fighting over back in the day. That was now mere pocket change to Kaladin.
He’d always thought of all lighteyes as rich, but a minor brightlord in an insignificant town … well, Roshone was actually poor, just a different kind of poor.
Kaladin searched back through the house, passing people he’d once known—people who now whispered “Shardbearer” and got out of his way with alacrity. So be it. He’d accepted his place the moment he’d seized Syl from the air and spoken the Words.
Lirin was back in the parlor, working on the wounded again. Kaladin stopped in the doorway, then sighed and knelt beside Lirin. As the man reached toward his tray of tools, Kaladin picked it up and held it at the ready. His old position as his father’s surgery assistant. The new apprentice was helping with wounded in another room.
Lirin eyed Kaladin, then turned back to the patient, a young boy who had a bloodied bandage around his arm. “Scissors,” Lirin said.
Kaladin proffered them, and Lirin took the tool without looking, then carefully cut the bandage free. A jagged length of wood had speared the boy’s arm. He whimpered as Lirin palpated the flesh nearby, covered in dried blood. It didn’t look good.
“Cut out the shaft,” Kaladin said, “and the necrotic flesh. Cauterize.”
“A little extreme, don’t you think?” Lirin asked.
“Might want to remove it at the elbow anyway. That’s going to get infected for sure—look how dirty that wood is. It will leave splinters.”
The boy whimpered again. Lirin patted him. “You’ll be fine. I don’t see any rotspren yet, and so we’re not going to take the arm off. Let me talk to your parents. For now, chew on this.” He gave the boy some bark as a relaxant.
Together, Lirin and Kaladin moved on; the boy wasn’t in immediate danger, and Lirin would want to operate after the anesthetic took effect.
“You’ve hardened,” Lirin said to Kaladin as he inspected the next patient’s foot. “I was worried you’d never grow calluses.”
Kaladin didn’t reply. In truth, his calluses weren’t as deep as his father might have wanted.
“But you’ve also become one of them,” Lirin said.
“My eye color doesn’t change a thing.”
“I wasn’t speaking of your eye color, son. I don’t give two chips whether a man is lighteyed or not.” He waved a hand, and Kaladin passed him a rag to clean the toe, then started preparing a small splint.
“What you’ve become,” Lirin continued, “is a killer. You solve problems with the fist and the sword. I had hoped that you would find a place among the army’s surgeons.”
“I wasn’t given much choice,” Kaladin said, handing over the splint, then preparing some bandages to wrap the toe. “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you sometime.” The less soul-crushing parts of it, at least.
“I don’t suppose you’re going to stay.”
“No. I need to follow those parshmen.”
“More killing, then.”
“And you honestly think we shouldn’t fight the Voidbringers, Father?”
Lirin hesitated. “No,” he whispered. “I know that war is inevitable. I just didn’t want you to have to be a part of it. I’ve seen what it does to men. War flays their souls, and those are wounds I can’t heal.” He secured the splint, then turned to Kaladin. “We’re surgeons. Let others rend and break; we must not harm others.”
“No,” Kaladin said. “You’re a surgeon, Father, but I’m something else. A watcher at the rim.” Words spoken to Dalinar Kholin in a vision. Kaladin stood up. “I will protect those who need it. Today, that means hunting down some Voidbringers.”
Lirin looked away. “Very well. I am … glad you returned, son. I’m glad you’re safe.”
Kaladin rested his hand on his father’s shoulder. “Life before death, Father.”
“See your mother before you leave,” Lirin said. “She has something to show you.”
Kaladin frowned, but made his way out of the healing chamber to the kitchens. The entire place was lit only by candles, and not many of them. Everywhere he went, he saw shadows and uncertain light.
He filled his canteen with fresh water and found a small umbrella. He’d need that for reading maps in this rain. From there, he went hiking up to check on Laral in the library. Roshone had retreated to his room, but she was sitting at a writing table with a spanreed before her.
Wait. The spanreed was working. Its ruby glowed.
“Stormlight!” Kaladin said, pointing.
“Well, of course,” she said, frowning at him. “Fabrials require it.”
“How do you have infused spheres?”
“The highstorm,” Laral said. “Just a few days back.”
During the clash with the Voidbringers, the Stormfather had summoned an irregular highstorm to match the Everstorm. Kaladin had flown before its stormwall, fighting the Assassin in White.
“That storm was unexpected,” Kaladin said. “How in the world did you know to leave your spheres out?”
“Kal,” she said, “it’s not so hard to hang some spheres out once a storm starts blowing!”
“How many do you have?”
“Some,” Laral said. “The ardents have a few—I wasn’t the only one to think of it. Look, I’ve got someone in Tashikk willing to relay a message to Navani Kholin, the king’s mother. Wasn’t that what you implied you wanted? You really think she’ll respond to you?”
The answer, blessedly, came as the spanreed started writing. “ ‘Captain?’ ” Laral read. “ ‘This is Navani Kholin. Is it really you?’ ”
Laral blinked, then looked up at him.
“It is,” Kaladin said. “The last thing I did before leaving was speak with Dalinar at the top of the tower.” Hopefully that would be enough to authenticate him.
Laral jumped, then wrote it.
“ ‘Kaladin, this is Dalinar,’ ” Laral read as the message came back. “ ‘What is your status, soldier?’ ”
“Better than expected, sir,” Kaladin said. He outlined what he’d discovered, in brief. He ended by noting, “I’m worried that they left because Hearthstone wasn’t important enough to bother destroying. I’ve ordered horses and some maps. I figure I can do a little scouting and see what I can find about the enemy.”
“ ‘Careful,’ ” Dalinar responded. “ ‘You don’t have any Stormlight left?’ ”
“I might be able to find a little. I doubt it will be enough to get me home, but it will help.”
It took a few minutes before Dalinar replied, and Laral took the opportunity to change the paper on the spanreed board.
“ ‘Your instincts are good, Captain,’ ” Dalinar finally sent. “ ‘I feel blind in this tower. Get close enough to discover what the enemy is doing, but don’t take unnecessary risks. Take the spanreed. Send us a glyph each evening to know you are safe.’ ”
“Understood, sir. Life before death.”
“ ‘Life before death.’ ”
Laral looked to him, and he nodded that the conversation was over. She packed up the spanreed for him without a word, and he took it gratefully, then hurried out of the room and down the steps.
His activities had drawn quite a crowd of people, who had gathered in the small entry hall before the steps. He intended to ask if anyone had infused spheres, but was interrupted by the sight of his mother. She was speaking with several young girls, and held a toddler in her arms. What was she doing with …
Kaladin stopped at the foot of the steps. The little boy was perhaps a year old, chewing on his hand and babbling around his fingers.
“Kaladin, meet your brother,” Hesina said, turning toward him. “Some of the girls were watching him while I helped with the triage.”
“A brother,” Kaladin whispered. It had never occurred to him. His mother would be forty-one this year, and …
A brother.
Kaladin reached out. His mother let him take the little boy, hold him in hands that seemed too rough to be touching such soft skin. Kaladin trembled, then pulled the child tight against him. Memories of this place had not broken him, and seeing his parents had not overwhelmed him, but this …
He could not stop the tears. He felt like a fool. It wasn’t as if this changed anything—Bridge Four were his brothers now, as close to him as any blood relative.
And yet he wept.
“What’s his name?”
“Oroden.”
“Child of peace,” Kaladin whispered. “A good name. A very good name.”
Behind him, an ardent approached with a scroll case. Storms, was that Zeheb? Still alive, it seemed, though she’d always seemed older than the stones themselves. Kaladin handed little Oroden back to his mother, then wiped his eyes and took the scroll case.
People crowded at the edges of the room. He was quite the spectacle: the surgeon’s son turned slave turned Shardbearer. Hearthstone wouldn’t see this much excitement for another hundred years.
At least not if Kaladin had any say about it. He nodded to his father—who had stepped out of the parlor room—then turned to the crowd. “Does anyone here have infused spheres? I will trade you, two chips for one. Bring them forth.”
Syl buzzed around him as a collection was made, and Kaladin’s mother made the trades for him. What he ended up with was only a pouch’s worth, but it seemed vast riches. At the very least, he wasn’t going to need those horses any longer.
He tied the pouch closed, then looked over his shoulder as his father stepped up. Lirin took a small glowing diamond chip from his pocket, then handed it toward Kaladin.
Kaladin accepted it, then glanced at his mother and the little boy in her arms. His brother.
“I want to take you to safety,” he said to Lirin. “I need to leave now, but I’ll be back soon. To take you to—”
“No,” Lirin said.
“Father, it’s the Desolation,” Kaladin said.
Nearby, people gasped softly, their eyes haunted. Storms; Kaladin should have done this in private. He leaned in toward Lirin. “I know of a place that is safe. For you, Mother. For little Oroden. Please don’t be stubborn, for once in your life.”
“You can take them, if they’ll go,” Lirin said. “But I’m staying here. Particularly if … what you just said is true. These people will need me.”
“We’ll see. I’ll return as soon as I can.” Kaladin set his jaw, then walked to the front door of the manor. He pulled it open, letting in the sounds of rain, the scents of a drowned land.
He paused, looked back at the room full of dirtied townspeople, homeless and frightened. They’d overheard him, but they’d known already. He’d heard them whispering. Voidbringers. The Desolation.
He couldn’t leave them like this.
“You heard correctly,” Kaladin said loudly to the hundred or so people gathered in the manor’s large entry hall—including Roshone and Laral, who stood on the steps up to the second floor. “The Voidbringers have returned.”
Murmurs. Fright.
Kaladin sucked in some of the Stormlight from his pouch. Pure, luminescent smoke began to rise from his skin, distinctly visible in the dim room. He Lashed himself upward so he rose into the air, then added a Lashing downward, leaving him to hover about two feet above the floor, glowing. Syl formed from mist as a Shardspear in his hand.
“Highprince Dalinar Kholin,” Kaladin said, Stormlight puffing before his lips, “has refounded the Knights Radiant. And this time, we will not fail you.”
The expressions in the room ranged from adoring to terrified. Kaladin found his father’s face. Lirin’s jaw had dropped. Hesina clutched her infant child in her arms, and her expression was one of pure delight, an awespren bursting around her head in a blue ring.
You I will protect, little one, Kaladin thought at the child. I will protect them all.
He nodded to his parents, then turned and Lashed himself outward, streaking away into the rain-soaked night. He’d stop at Stringken, about half a day’s walk—or a short flight—to the south and see if he could trade spheres there.
Then he’d hunt some Voidbringers.
Shallan’s Sketchbook: The Tower
8. A Powerful Lie
That moment notwithstanding, I can honestly say this book has been brewing in me since my youth.
Shallan drew.
She scraped her drawing pad with agitated, bold streaks. She twisted the charcoal stick in her fingers every few lines, seeking the sharpest points to make the lines a deep black.
“Mmm…” Pattern said from near her calves, where he adorned her skirt like embroidery. “Shallan?”
She kept drawing, filling the page with black strokes.
“Shallan?” Pattern asked. “I understand why you hate me, Shallan. I did not mean to help you kill your mother, but it is what I did. It is what I did.…”
Shallan set her jaw and kept sketching. She sat outside at Urithiru, her back against a cold chunk of stone, her toes frigid, coldspren growing up like spikes around her. Her frazzled hair whipped past her face in a gust of air, and she had to pin the paper of her pad down with her thumbs, one trapped in her left sleeve.
“Shallan…” Pattern said.
“It’s all right,” Shallan said in a hushed voice as the wind died down. “Just … just let me draw.”
“Mmm…” Pattern said. “A powerful lie…”
A simple landscape; she should be able to draw a simple, calming landscape. She sat on the edge of one of the ten Oathgate platforms, which rose ten feet higher than the main plateau. Earlier in the day, she’d activated this Oathgate, bringing forth a few hundred more of the thousands who were waiting at Narak. That would be it for a while: each use of the device used an incredible amount of Stormlight. Even with the gemstones that the newcomers had brought, there wasn’t much to go around.
Plus, there wasn’t much of her to go around. Only an active, full Knight Radiant could work the control buildings at the center of each platform, initiating the swap. For now, that meant only Shallan.
It meant she had to summon her Blade each time. The Blade she’d used to kill her mother. A truth she’d spoken as an Ideal of her order of Radiants.
A truth that she could no longer, therefore, stuff into the back of her mind and forget.
Just draw.
The city dominated her view. It stretched impossibly high, and she struggled to contain the enormous tower on the page. Jasnah had searched this place out in the hope of finding books and records here of ancient date; so far, they hadn’t found anything like that. Instead, Shallan struggled to understand the tower.
If she locked it down into a sketch, would she finally be able to grasp its incredible size? She couldn’t get an angle from which to view the entire tower, so she kept fixating on the little things. The balconies, the shapes of the fields, the cavernous openings—maws to engulf, consume, overwhelm.
She ended up with a sketch not of the tower itself, but instead a crisscrossing of lines on a field of softer charcoal. She stared at the sketch, a windspren passing and troubling the pages. She sighed, dropping her charcoal into her satchel and getting out a damp rag to wipe her freehand fingers.
Down on the plateau, soldiers ran drills. The thought of them all living in that place disturbed Shallan. Which was stupid. It was just a building.
But it was one she couldn’t sketch.
“Shallan…” Pattern said.
“We’ll work it out,” she said, eyes forward. “It’s not your fault my parents are dead. You didn’t cause it.”
“You can hate me,” Pattern said. “I understand.”
Shallan closed her eyes. She didn’t want him to understand. She wanted him to convince her she was wrong. She needed to be wrong.
“I don’t hate you, Pattern,” Shallan said. “I hate the sword.”
“But—”
“The sword isn’t you. The sword is me, my father, the life we led, and the way it got twisted all about.”
“I…” Pattern hummed softly. “I don’t understand.”
I’d be shocked if you did, Shallan thought. Because I sure don’t. Fortunately, she had a distraction coming her way in the form of a scout climbing up the ramp to the platform where Shallan perched. The darkeyed woman wore white and blue, with trousers beneath a runner’s skirt, and had long, dark Alethi hair.
“Um, Brightness Radiant?” the scout asked after bowing. “The highprince has requested your presence.”
“Bother,” Shallan said, while inwardly relieved to have something to do. She handed the scout her sketchbook to hold while she packed up her satchel.
Dun spheres, she noted.
While three of the highprinces had joined Dalinar on his expedition to the center of the Shattered Plains, the greater number had remained behind. When the unexpected highstorm had come, Hatham had received word via spanreed from scouts out along the plains.
His warcamp had been able to get out most of their spheres for recharging before the storm hit, giving him a huge amount of Stormlight compared to the rest of them. He was becoming a wealthy man as Dalinar traded for infused spheres to work the Oathgate and bring in supplies.
Compared to that, providing spheres to her to practice her Lightweaving wasn’t a terrible expense—but she still felt guilty to see that she’d drained two of them by consuming Stormlight to help her with the chill air. She’d have to be careful about that.
She got everything packed, then reached back for the sketchbook and found the scout woman flipping through the pages with wide eyes. “Brightness…” she said. “These are amazing.”
Several were sketches as if looking up from the base of the tower, catching a vague sense of Urithiru’s stateliness, but more giving a sense of vertigo. With dissatisfaction, Shallan realized she’d enhanced the surreal nature of the sketches with impossible vanishing points and perspective.
“I’ve been trying to draw the tower,” Shallan said, “but I can’t get it from the right angle.” Maybe when Brightlord Brooding-Eyes returned, he could fly her to another peak along the mountain chain.
“I’ve never seen anything like these,” the scout said, flipping pages. “What do you call it?”
“Surrealism,” Shallan said, taking the large sketchbook back and tucking it under her arm. “It was an old artistic movement. I guess I defaulted to it when I couldn’t get the picture to look how I wanted. Hardly anyone bothers with it anymore except students.”
“It made my eyes make my brain think it forgot to wake up.”
Shallan gestured, and the scout led the way back down and across the plateau. Here, Shallan noticed that more than a few soldiers on the field had stopped their drills and were watching her. Bother. She would never again return to being just Shallan, the insignificant girl from a backwater town. She was now “Brightness Radiant,” ostensibly from the Order of Elsecallers. She’d persuaded Dalinar to pretend—in public, at least—that Shallan was from an order that couldn’t make illusions. She needed to keep that secret from spreading, or her effectiveness would be weakened.
The soldiers stared at her as if they expected her to grow Shardplate, shoot gouts of flame from her eyes, and fly off to tear down a mountain or two. Probably should try to act more composed, Shallan thought to herself. More … knightly?
She glanced at a soldier who wore the gold and red of Hatham’s army. He immediately looked down and rubbed at the glyphward prayer tied around his upper right arm. Dalinar was determined to recover the reputation of the Radiants, but storms, you couldn’t change an entire nation’s perspective in a matter of a few months. The ancient Knights Radiant had betrayed humankind; while many Alethi seemed willing to give the orders a fresh start, others weren’t so charitable.
Still, she tried to keep her head high, her back straight, and to walk more like her tutors had always instructed. Power was an illusion of perception, as Jasnah had said. The first step to being in control was to see yourself as capable of being in control.
The scout led her into the tower and up a flight of stairs, toward Dalinar’s secure section. “Brightness?” the woman asked as they walked. “Can I ask you a question?”
“As that was a question, apparently you can.”
“Oh, um. Huh.”
“It’s fine. What did you want to know?”
“You’re … a Radiant.”
“That one was actually a statement, and that’s making me doubt my previous assertion.”
“I’m sorry. I just … I’m curious, Brightness. How does it work? Being a Radiant? You have a Shardblade?”
So that was where this was going. “I assure you,” Shallan said, “it is quite possible to remain properly feminine while fulfilling my duties as a knight.”
“Oh,” the scout said. Oddly, she seemed disappointed by that response. “Of course, Brightness.”
Urithiru seemed to have been crafted straight from the rock of a mountain, like a sculpture. Indeed, there weren’t seams at the corners of rooms, nor were there distinct bricks or blocks in the walls. Much of the stone exposed thin lines of strata. Beautiful lines of varied hue, like layers of cloth stacked in a merchant’s shop.
The corridors often twisted about in strange curves, rarely running straight toward an intersection. Dalinar suggested that perhaps this was to fool invaders, like a castle fortification. The sweeping turns and lack of seams made the corridors feel like tunnels.
Shallan didn’t need a guide—the strata that cut through the walls had distinctive patterns. Others seemed to have trouble telling those apart, and talked of painting the floors with guidelines. Couldn’t they distinguish the pattern here of wide reddish strata alternating with smaller yellow ones? Just go in the direction where the lines were sloping slightly upward, and you’d head toward Dalinar’s quarters.
They soon arrived, and the scout took up duty at the door in case her services were needed again. Shallan entered a room that only a day before had been empty, but was now arrayed with furniture, creating a large meeting place right outside Dalinar and Navani’s private rooms.
Adolin, Renarin, and Navani sat before Dalinar, who stood with hands on hips, contemplating a map of Roshar on the wall. Though the place was stuffed with rugs and plush furniture, the finery fit this bleak chamber like a lady’s havah fit a pig.
“I don’t know how to approach the Azish, Father,” Renarin was saying as she entered. “Their new emperor makes them unpredictable.”
“They’re Azish,” Adolin said, giving Shallan a wave with his unwounded hand. “How can they not be predictable? Doesn’t their government mandate how to peel your fruit?”
“That’s a stereotype,” Renarin said. He wore his Bridge Four uniform, but had a blanket over his shoulders and was holding a cup of steaming tea, though the room wasn’t particularly cold. “Yes, they have a large bureaucracy. A change in government is still going to cause upheaval. In fact, it might be easier for this new Azish emperor to change policy, since policy is well defined enough to change.”
“I wouldn’t worry about the Azish,” Navani said, tapping her notepad with a pen, then writing something in it. “They’ll listen to reason; they always do. What about Tukar and Emul? I wouldn’t be surprised if that war of theirs is enough to distract them even from the return of the Desolations.”
Dalinar grunted, rubbing his chin with one hand. “There’s that warlord in Tukar. What’s his name?”
“Tezim,” Navani said. “Claims he’s an aspect of the Almighty.”
Shallan sniffed as she slipped into the seat beside Adolin, setting her satchel and drawing pad on the floor. “Aspect of the Almighty? At least he’s humble.”
Dalinar turned toward her, then clasped his hands behind his back. Storms. He always seemed so … large. Bigger than any room he was in, brow perpetually furrowed by the deepest of thoughts. Dalinar Kholin could make choosing what to have for breakfast look like the most important decision in all of Roshar.
“Brightness Shallan,” he said. “Tell me, how would you deal with the Makabaki kingdoms? Now that the storm has come as we warned, we have an opportunity to approach them from a position of strength. Azir is the most important, but just faced a succession crisis. Emul and Tukar are, of course, at war, as Navani noted. We could certainly use Tashikk’s information networks, but they’re so isolationist. That leaves Yezier and Liafor. Perhaps the weight of their involvement would persuade their neighbors?”
He turned toward her expectantly.
“Yes, yes…” Shallan said, thoughtful. “I have heard of several of those places.”
Dalinar drew his lips to a line, and Pattern hummed in concern on her skirts. Dalinar did not seem the type of man you joked with.
“I’m sorry, Brightlord,” Shallan continued, leaning back in her chair. “But I’m confused as to why you want my input. I know of those kingdoms, of course—but my knowledge is an academic thing. I could probably name their primary export for you, but as to foreign policy … well, I’d never even spoken to someone from Alethkar before leaving my homeland. And we’re neighbors!”
“I see,” Dalinar said softly. “Does your spren offer some counsel? Could you bring him out to speak to us?”
“Pattern? He’s not particularly knowledgeable about our kind, which is sort of why he’s here in the first place.” She shifted in her seat. “And to be frank, Brightlord, I think he’s scared of you.”
“Well, he’s obviously not a fool,” Adolin noted.
Dalinar shot his son a glance.
“Don’t be like that, Father,” Adolin said. “If anyone would be able to go about intimidating forces of nature, it would be you.”
Dalinar sighed, turning and resting his hand on the map. Curiously, it was Renarin who stood up, setting aside his blanket and cup, then walked over to put his hand on his father’s shoulder. The youth looked even more spindly than normal when standing beside Dalinar, and though his hair wasn’t as blond as Adolin’s, it was still patched with yellow. He seemed such a strange contrast to Dalinar, cut from almost entirely different cloth.
“It’s just so big, son,” Dalinar said, looking at the map. “How can I unite all of Roshar when I’ve never even visited many of these kingdoms? Young Shallan spoke wisdom, though she might not have recognized it. We don’t know these people. Now I’m expected to be responsible for them? I wish I could see it all.…”
Shallan shifted in her seat, feeling as if she’d been forgotten. Perhaps he’d sent for her because he’d wanted to seek the aid of his Radiants, but the Kholin dynamic had always been a family one. In that, she was an intruder.
Dalinar turned and walked to fetch a cup of wine from a warmed pitcher near the door. As he passed Shallan, she felt something unusual. A leaping within her, as if part of her were being pulled by him.
He walked past again, holding a cup, and Shallan slipped from her seat, following him toward the map on the wall. She breathed in as she walked, drawing Stormlight from her satchel in a shimmering stream. It infused her, glowing from her skin.
She rested her freehand against the map. Stormlight poured off her, illuminating the map in a swirling tempest of Light. She didn’t exactly understand what she was doing, but she rarely did. Art wasn’t about understanding, but about knowing.
The Stormlight streamed off the map, passing between her and Dalinar in a rush, causing Navani to scramble off her seat and back away. The Light swirled in the chamber and became another, larger map—floating at about table height—in the center of the room. Mountains grew up like furrows in a piece of cloth pressed together. Vast plains shone green from vines and fields of grass. Barren stormward hillsides grew splendid shadows of life on the leeward sides. Stormfather … as she watched, the topography of the landscape became real.
Shallan’s breath caught. Had she done that? How? Her illusions usually required a previous drawing to imitate.
The map stretched to the sides of the room, shimmering at the edges. Adolin stood up from his seat, crashing through the middle of the illusion somewhere near Kharbranth. Wisps of Stormlight broke around him, but when he moved, the image swirled and neatly re-formed behind him.
“How…” Dalinar leaned down near their section, which detailed the Reshi Isles. “The detail is amazing. I can almost see the cities. What did you do?”
“I don’t know if I did anything,” Shallan said, stepping into the illusion, feeling the Stormlight swirl around her. Despite the detail, the perspective was still from very far away, and the mountains weren’t even as tall as one of her fingernails. “I couldn’t have created this, Brightlord. I don’t have the knowledge.”
“Well I didn’t do it,” Renarin said. “The Stormlight quite certainly came from you, Brightness.”
“Yes, well, your father was tugging on me at the time.”
“Tugging?” Adolin asked.
“The Stormfather,” Dalinar said. “This is his influence—this is what he sees each time a storm blows across Roshar. It wasn’t me or you, but us. Somehow.”
“Well,” Shallan noted, “you were complaining about not being able to take it all in.”
“How much Stormlight did this take?” Navani asked, rounding the outside of the new, vibrant map.
Shallan checked her satchel. “Um … all of it.”
“We’ll get you more,” Navani said with a sigh.
“I’m sorry for—”
“No,” Dalinar said. “Having my Radiants practice with their powers is among the most valuable resources I could purchase right now. Even if Hatham makes us pay through the nose for spheres.”
Dalinar strode through the image, disrupting it in a swirl around him. He stopped near the center, beside the location of Urithiru. He looked from one side of the room to the other in a long, slow survey.
“Ten cities,” he whispered. “Ten kingdoms. Ten Oathgates connecting them from long ago. This is how we fight it. This is how we begin. We don’t start by saving the world—we start with this simple step. We protect the cities with Oathgates.
“The Voidbringers are everywhere, but we can be more mobile. We can shore up capitals, deliver food or Soulcasters quickly between kingdoms. We can make those ten cities bastions of light and strength. But we must be quick. He’s coming. The man with nine shadows…”
“What’s this?” Shallan said, perking up.
“The enemy’s champion,” Dalinar said, eyes narrowing. “In the visions, Honor told me our best chance of survival involved forcing Odium to accept a contest of champions. I’ve seen the enemy’s champion—a creature in black armor, with red eyes. A parshman perhaps. It had nine shadows.”
Nearby, Renarin had turned toward his father, eyes wide, jaw dropping. Nobody else seemed to notice.
“Azimir, capital of Azir,” Dalinar said, stepping from Urithiru to the center of Azir to the west, “is home to an Oathgate. We need to open it and gain the trust of the Azish. They will be important to our cause.”
He stepped farther to the west. “There’s an Oathgate hidden in Shinovar. Another in the capital of Babatharnam, and a fourth in far-off Rall Elorim, City of Shadows.”
“Another in Rira,” Navani said, joining him. “Jasnah thought it was in Kurth. A sixth was lost in Aimia, the island that was destroyed.”
Dalinar grunted, then turned toward the map’s eastern section. “Vedenar makes seven,” he said, stepping into Shallan’s homeland. “Thaylen City is eight. Then the Shattered Plains, which we hold.”
“And the last one is in Kholinar,” Adolin said softly. “Our home.”
Shallan approached and touched him on the arm. Spanreed communication into the city had stopped working. Nobody knew the status of Kholinar; their best clue had come via Kaladin’s spanreed message.
“We start small,” Dalinar said, “with a few of the most important to holding the world. Azir. Jah Keved. Thaylenah. We’ll contact other nations, but our focus is on these three powerhouses. Azir for its organization and political clout. Thaylenah for its shipping and naval prowess. Jah Keved for its manpower. Brightness Davar, any insight you could offer into your homeland—and its status following the civil war—would be appreciated.”
“And Kholinar?” Adolin asked.
A knock at the door interrupted Dalinar’s response. He called admittance, and the scout from before peeked in. “Brightlord,” she said, looking concerned. “There’s something you need to see.”
“What is it, Lyn?”
“Brightlord, sir. There’s … there’s been another murder.”
9. The Threads of a Screw
The sum of my experiences has pointed at this moment. This decision.
One benefit of having become “Brightness Radiant” was that for once, Shallan was expected to be a part of important events. Nobody questioned her presence during the rush through the corridors, lit by oil lanterns carried by guards. Nobody thought she was out of place; nobody even considered the propriety of leading a young woman to the scene of a brutal murder. What a welcome change.
From what she overheard the scout telling Dalinar, the corpse had been a lighteyed officer named Vedekar Perel. He was from Sebarial’s army, but Shallan didn’t know him. The body had been discovered by a scouting party in a remote part of the tower’s second level.
As they drew nearer, Dalinar and his guards jogged the rest of the distance, outpacing Shallan. Storming Alethi long legs. She tried to suck in some Stormlight—but she’d used it all on that blasted map, which had disintegrated into a puff of Light as they’d left.
That left her exhausted and annoyed. Ahead of her, Adolin stopped and looked back. He danced a moment, as if impatient, then hurried to her instead of running ahead.
“Thanks,” Shallan said as he fell into step beside her.
“It’s not like he can get more dead, eh?” he said, then chuckled awkwardly. Something about this had him seriously disturbed.
He reached for her hand with his hurt one, which was still splinted, then winced. She took his arm instead, and he held up his oil lantern as they hurried on. The strata here spiraled, twisting around the floor, ceiling, and walls like the threads of a screw. It was striking enough that Shallan took a Memory of it for later sketching.
Shallan and Adolin finally caught up to the others, passing a group of guards maintaining a perimeter. Though Bridge Four had discovered the body, they’d sent for Kholin reinforcements to secure the area.
They protected a medium-sized chamber now lit by a multitude of oil lamps. Shallan paused in the doorway right before a ledge that surrounded a wide square depression, perhaps four feet deep, cut into the stone floor of the room. The wall strata here continued their curving, twisting medley of oranges, reds, and browns—ballooning out across the sides of this chamber in wide bands before coiling back into narrow stripes to continue down the hall that led out the other side.
The dead man lay at the bottom of the cavity. Shallan steeled herself, but even so found the sight nauseating. He lay on his back, and had been stabbed right through the eye. His face was a bloody mess, his clothing disheveled from what looked to have been an extended fight.
Dalinar and Navani stood on the ledge above the pit. His face was stiff, a stone. She stood with her safehand raised to her lips.
“We found him just like this, Brightlord,” said Peet the bridgeman. “We sent for you immediately. Storm me if it doesn’t look exactly the same as what happened to Highprince Sadeas.”
“He’s even lying in the same position,” Navani said, grabbing her skirts and descending a set of steps into the lower area. It made up almost the entire room. In fact …
Shallan looked toward the upper reaches of the chamber, where several stone sculptures—like the heads of horses—extended from the walls with their mouths open. Spouts, she thought. This was a bathing chamber.
Navani knelt beside the body, away from the blood running toward a drain on the far side of the basin. “Remarkable … the positioning, the puncturing of the eye … It’s exactly like what happened to Sadeas. This has to be the same killer.”
Nobody tried to shelter Navani from the sight—as if it were completely proper for the king’s mother to be poking at a corpse. Who knew? Maybe in Alethkar, ladies were expected to do this sort of thing. It was still odd to Shallan how temerarious the Alethi were about towing their women into battle to act as scribes, runners, and scouts.
She looked to Adolin to get his read on the situation, and found him staring, aghast, mouth open and eyes wide. “Adolin?” Shallan asked. “Did you know him?”
He didn’t seem to hear her. “This is impossible,” he muttered. “Impossible.”
“Adolin?”
“I … No, I didn’t know him, Shallan. But I’d assumed … I mean, I figured the death of Sadeas was an isolated crime. You know how he was. Probably got himself into trouble. Any number of people could have wanted him dead, right?”
“Looks like it was something more than that,” Shallan said, folding her arms as Dalinar walked down the steps to join Navani, trailed by Peet, Lopen, and—remarkably—Rlain of Bridge Four. That one drew attention from the other soldiers, several of whom positioned themselves subtly to protect Dalinar from the Parshendi. They considered him a danger, regardless of which uniform he wore.
“Colot?” Dalinar said, looking toward the lighteyed captain who led the soldiers here. “You’re an archer, aren’t you? Fifth Battalion?”
“Yes, sir!”
“We have you scouting the tower with Bridge Four?” Dalinar asked.
“The Windrunners needed extra feet, sir, and access to more scouts and scribes for maps. My archers are mobile. Figured it was better than doing parade drills in the cold, so I volunteered my company.”
Dalinar grunted. “Fifth Battalion … who was your policing force?”
“Eighth Company,” Colot said. “Captain Tallan. Good friend of mine. He … didn’t make it, sir.”
“I’m sorry, Captain,” Dalinar said. “Would you and your men withdraw for a moment so I can consult with my son? Maintain that perimeter until I tell you otherwise, but do inform King Elhokar of this and send a messenger to Sebarial. I’ll visit and tell him about this in person, but he’d best get a warning.”
“Yes, sir,” the lanky archer said, calling orders. The soldiers left, including the bridgemen. As they moved, Shallan felt something prickle at the back of her neck. She shivered, and couldn’t help glancing over her shoulder, hating how this unfathomable building made her feel.
Renarin was standing right behind her. She jumped, letting out a pathetic squeak. Then she blushed furiously; she’d forgotten he was even with them. A few shamespren faded into view around her, floating white and red flower petals. She’d rarely attracted those, which was a wonder. She’d have thought they would take up permanent residence nearby.
“Sorry,” Renarin mumbled. “Didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”
Adolin walked down into the room’s basin, still looking distracted. Was he that upset by finding a murderer among them? People tried to kill him practically every day. Shallan grabbed the skirt of her havah and followed him down, staying clear of the blood.
“This is troubling,” Dalinar said. “We face a terrible threat that would wipe our kind from Roshar like leaves before the stormwall. I don’t have time to worry about a murderer slinking through these tunnels.” He looked up at Adolin. “Most of the men I’d have assigned to an investigation like this are dead. Niter, Malan … the King’s Guard is no better, and the bridgemen—for all their fine qualities—have no experience with this sort of thing. I’ll need to leave it to you, son.”
“Me?” Adolin said.
“You did well investigating the incident with the king’s saddle, even if that turned out to be something of a wind chase. Aladar is Highprince of Information. Go to him, explain what happened, and set one of his policing teams to investigate. Then work with them as my liaison.”
“You want me,” Adolin said, “to investigate who killed Sadeas.”
Dalinar nodded, squatting down beside the corpse, though Shallan had no idea what he expected to see. The fellow was very dead. “Perhaps if I put my son on the job, it will convince people I’m serious about finding the killer. Perhaps not—they might just think I’ve put someone in charge who can keep the secret. Storms, I miss Jasnah. She would have known how to spin this, to keep opinion from turning against us in court.
“Either way, son, stay on this. Make sure the remaining highprinces at least know that we consider these murders a priority, and that we are dedicated to finding the one who committed them.”
Adolin swallowed. “I understand.”
Shallan narrowed her eyes. What had gotten into him? She glanced toward Renarin, who still stood up above, on the walkway around the empty pool. He watched Adolin with unblinking sapphire eyes. He was always a little strange, but he seemed to know something she didn’t.
On her skirt, Pattern hummed softly.
Dalinar and Navani eventually left to speak with Sebarial. Once they were gone, Shallan seized Adolin by the arm. “What’s wrong?” she hissed. “You knew that dead man, didn’t you? Do you know who killed him?”
He looked her in the eyes. “I have no idea who did this, Shallan. But I am going to find out.”
She held his light blue eyes, weighing his gaze. Storms, what was she thinking? Adolin was a wonderful man, but he was about as deceitful as a newborn.
He stalked off, and Shallan hurried after him. Renarin remained in the room, looking down the hall after them until Shallan got far enough away that—over her shoulder—she could no longer see him.
10. Distractions
Perhaps my heresy stretches back to those days in my childhood, where these ideas began.
Kaladin leaped from a hilltop, preserving Stormlight by Lashing himself upward just enough to give him some lift.
He soared through the rain, angled toward another hilltop. Beneath him, the valley was clogged with vivim trees, which wound their spindly branches together to create an almost impenetrable wall of forestation.
He landed lightly, skidding across the wet stone past rainspren like blue candles. He dismissed his Lashing, and as the force of the ground reasserted itself, he stepped into a quick march. He’d learned to march before learning the spear or shield. Kaladin smiled. He could almost hear Hav’s voice barking commands from the back of the line, where he helped stragglers. Hav had always said that once men could march together, learning to fight was easy.
“Smiling?” Syl said. She’d taken the shape of a large raindrop streaking through the air beside him, falling the wrong way. It was a natural shape, but also completely wrong. Plausible impossibility.
“You’re right,” Kaladin said, rain dribbling down his face. “I should be more solemn. We’re chasing down Voidbringers.” Storms, how odd it sounded to say that.
“I didn’t intend it as a reprimand.”
“Hard to tell with you sometimes.”
“And what was that supposed to mean?”
“Two days ago, I found that my mother is still alive,” Kaladin said, “so the position is not, in fact, vacant. You can stop trying to fill it.”
He Lashed himself upward slightly, then let himself slide down the wet stone of the steep hill, standing sideways. He passed open rockbuds and wiggling vines, glutted and fat from the constant rainfall. Following the Weeping, they’d often find as many dead plants around the town as they did after a strong highstorm.
“Well, I’m not trying to mother you,” Syl said, still a raindrop. Talking to her could be a surreal experience. “Though perhaps I chide you on occasion, when you’re being sullen.”
He grunted.
“Or when you’re being uncommunicative.” She transformed into the shape of a young woman in a havah, seated in the air and holding an umbrella as she moved along beside him. “It is my solemn and important duty to bring happiness, light, and joy into your world when you’re being a dour idiot. Which is most of the time. So there.”
Kaladin chuckled, holding a little Stormlight as he ran up the side of the next hill, then skidded down into the next valley. This was prime farmland; there was a reason why the Akanny region was prized by Sadeas. It might be a cultural backwater, but these rolling fields probably fed half the kingdom with their lavis and tallew crops. Other villages focused on raising large passels of hogs for leather and meat. Gumfrems, a kind of chull-like beast, were less common pasture animals harvested for their gemhearts, which—though small—allowed Soulcasting of meat.
Syl turned into a ribbon of light and zipped in front of him, making loops. It was difficult not to feel uplifted, even in the gloomy weather. He’d spent the entire sprint to Alethkar worrying—and then assuming—that he’d be too late to save Hearthstone. To find his parents alive … well, it was an unexpected blessing. The type his life had been severely lacking.
So he gave in to the urging of the Stormlight. Run. Leap. Though he’d spent two days chasing the Voidbringers, Kaladin’s exhaustion had faded. There weren’t many empty beds to be found in the broken villages he passed, but he had been able to find a roof to keep him dry and something warm to eat.
He’d started at Hearthstone and worked his way outward in a spiral—visiting villages, asking after the local parshmen, then warning people that the terrible storm would return. So far, he hadn’t found a single town or village that had been attacked.
Kaladin reached the next hilltop and pulled to a stop. A weathered stone post marked a crossroads. During his youth, he’d never gotten this far from Hearthstone, though he wasn’t more than a few days’ walk away.
Syl zipped up to him as he shaded his eyes from the rain. The glyphs and simple map on the stone marker would indicate the distance to the next town—but he didn’t need that. He could make it out as a smudge in the gloom. A fairly large town, by local standards.
“Come on,” he said, starting down the hillside.
“I think,” Syl said, landing on his shoulder and becoming a young woman, “I would make a wonderful mother.”
“And what inspired this topic?”
“You’re the one who brought it up.”
In comparing Syl to his mother for nagging him? “Are you even capable of having children? Baby spren?”
“I have no idea,” Syl proclaimed.
“You call the Stormfather … well, Father. Right? So he birthed you?”
“Maybe? I think so? Helped shape me, is more like it. Helped us find our voices.” She cocked her head. “Yes. He made some of us. Made me.”
“So maybe you could do that,” Kaladin said. “Find little, uh, bits of the wind? Or of Honor? Shape them?”
He used a Lashing to leap over a snarl of rockbuds and vines, and startled a pack of cremlings as he landed, sending them scuttling away from a nearly clean mink skeleton. Probably the leavings of a larger predator.
“Hmmm,” Syl said. “I would be an excellent mother. I’d teach the little spren to fly, to coast the winds, to harass you.…”
Kaladin smiled. “You’d get distracted by an interesting beetle and fly off, leaving them in a drawer somewhere.”
“Nonsense! Why would I leave my babies in a drawer? Far too boring. A highprince’s shoe though…”
He flew the remaining distance to the village, and the sight of broken buildings at the western edge dampened his mood. Though the destruction continued to be less than he’d feared, every town or village had lost people to the winds or the terrible lightning.
This village—Hornhollow, the map called it—was in what once would have been considered an ideal location. The land here dipped into a depression, and a hill to the east cut the brunt of the highstorms. It held about two dozen structures, including two large storm sanctuaries where travelers could stay—but there were also many outer buildings. This was the highprince’s land, and an industrious darkeyes of high enough nahn could get a commission to work an unused hill out by itself, then keep a portion of the crop.
A few sphere lanterns gave light to the square, where people had gathered for a town meeting. That was convenient. Kaladin dropped toward the lights and held his hand to the side. Syl formed there by unspoken command, taking the shape of a Shardblade: a sleek, beautiful sword with the symbol of the Windrunners prominent on the center, with lines sweeping off it toward the hilt—grooves in the metal that looked like flowing tresses of hair. Though Kaladin preferred a spear, the Blade was a symbol.
Kaladin hit the ground in the center of the village, near its large central cistern, used to catch rainwater and filter away the crem. He rested the Sylblade on his shoulder and stretched out his other hand, preparing his speech. People of Hornhollow. I am Kaladin, of the Knights Radiant. I have come—
“Lord Radiant!” A portly lighteyed man stumbled out of the crowd, wearing a long raincloak and a wide-brimmed hat. He looked ridiculous, but it was the Weeping. Constant rain didn’t exactly encourage heights of fashion.
The man clapped his hands in an energetic motion, and a pair of ardents stumbled up beside him, bearing goblets full of glowing spheres. Around the perimeter of the square, people hissed and whispered, anticipationspren flapping in an unseen wind. Several men held up small children to get a better look.
“Great,” Kaladin said softly. “I’ve become a menagerie act.”
In his mind, he heard Syl giggle.
Well, best to put on a good show of it. He lifted the Sylblade high overhead, prompting a cheer from the crowd. He would have bet that most of the people in this square used to curse the name of the Radiants, but none of that was manifest now in the people’s enthusiasm. It was hard to believe that centuries of mistrust and vilification would be forgotten so quickly. But with the sky breaking and the land in turmoil, people would look to a symbol.
Kaladin lowered his Blade. He knew all too well the danger of symbols. Amaram had been one to him, long ago.
“You knew of my coming,” Kaladin said to the citylord and the ardents. “You’ve been in contact with your neighbors. Have they told you what I’ve been saying?”
“Yes, Brightlord,” the lighteyed man said, gesturing eagerly for him to take the spheres. As he did so—replacing them with spent ones he’d traded for previously—the man’s expression fell noticeably.
Expected me to pay two for one as I did at the first few towns, did you? Kaladin thought with amusement. Well, he dropped a few extra dun spheres in. He’d rather be known as generous, particularly if it helped word spread, but he couldn’t halve his spheres each time he went through them.
“This is good,” Kaladin said, fishing out a few small gemstones. “I can’t visit every holding in the area. I need you to send messages to each nearby village, carrying words of comfort and command from the king. I will pay for the time of your runners.”
He looked out at the sea of eager faces, and couldn’t help but remember a similar day in Hearthstone where he and the rest of the townspeople had waited, eager to catch a glimpse of their new citylord.
“Of course, Brightlord,” the lighteyed man said. “Would you wish to rest now, and take a meal? Or would you rather visit the location of the attack immediately?”
“Attack?” Kaladin said, feeling a spike of alarm.
“Yes, Brightlord,” the portly lighteyes said. “Isn’t that why you’re here? To see where the rogue parshmen assaulted us?”
Finally! “Take me there. Now.”
* * *
They’d attacked a grain storage just outside town. Squashed between two hills and shaped like a dome, it had weathered the Everstorm without so much as a loosed stone. That made it a particular shame that the Voidbringers had ripped open the door and pillaged what was inside.
Kaladin knelt within, flipping over a broken hinge. The building smelled of dust and tallew, but was too wet. Townspeople who would suffer a dozen leaks in their bedroom would go to great expense to keep their grain dry.
It felt odd to not have the rain on his head, though he could still hear it pattering outside.
“May I continue, Brightlord?” the ardent asked him. She was young, pretty, and nervous. Obviously she didn’t know where he fit into the scheme of her religion. The Knights Radiant had been founded by the Heralds, but they were also traitors. So … he was either a divine being of myth or a cretin one step above a Voidbringer.
“Yes, please,” Kaladin said.
“Of the five eyewitnesses,” the ardent said, “four, um, independently counted the number of attackers at … fifty or so? Anyway, it’s safe to say that they’ve got large numbers, considering how many sacks of grain they were able to carry away in such a short time. They, um, didn’t look exactly like parshmen. Too tall, and wearing armor. The sketch I made … Um…”
She tried showing him her sketch again. It wasn’t much better than a child’s drawing: a bunch of scribbles in vaguely humanoid shapes.
“Anyway,” the young ardent continued, oblivious to the fact that Syl had landed on her shoulder and was inspecting her face. “They attacked right after first moonset. They had the grain out by middle of second moon, um, and we didn’t hear anything until the change of guard happened. Sot raised the alarm, and that chased the creatures off. They only left four sacks, which we moved.”
Kaladin took a crude wooden cudgel off the table next to the ardent. The ardent glanced at him, then quickly looked back to her paper, blushing. The room, lit by oil lamps, was depressingly hollow. This grain should have gotten the village to the next harvest.
To a man from a farming village, nothing was more distressing than an empty silo at planting time.
“The men who were attacked?” Kaladin said, inspecting the cudgel, which the Voidbringers had dropped while fleeing.
“They’ve both recovered, Brightlord,” the ardent said. “Though Khem has a ringing in his ear he says won’t go away.”
Fifty parshmen in warform—which was what the descriptions sounded most like to him—could easily have overrun this town and its handful of militia guards. They could have slaughtered everyone and taken whatever they wished; instead, they’d made a surgical raid.
“The red lights,” Kaladin said. “Describe them again.”
The ardent started; she’d been looking at him. “Um, all five witnesses mentioned the lights, Brightlord. There were several small glowing red lights in the darkness.”
“Their eyes.”
“Maybe?” the ardent said. “If those were eyes, it was only a few. I went and asked, and none of the witnesses specifically saw eyes glowing—and Khem got a look right in one of the parshmen’s faces as they struck him.”
Kaladin dropped the cudgel and dusted off his palms. He took the sheet with the picture on it out of the young ardent’s hands and inspected it, just for show, then nodded to her. “You did well. Thank you for the report.”
She sighed, grinning stupidly.
“Oh!” Syl said, still on the ardent’s shoulder. “She thinks you’re pretty!”
Kaladin drew his lips to a line. He nodded to the woman and left her, striking back into the rain toward the center of town.
Syl zipped up to his shoulder. “Wow. She must be desperate living out here. I mean, look at you. Hair that hasn’t been combed since you flew across the continent, uniform stained with crem, and that beard.”
“Thank you for the boost of confidence.”
“I guess when there’s nobody about but farmers, your standards really drop.”
“She’s an ardent,” Kaladin said. “She’d have to marry another ardent.”
“I don’t think she was thinking about marriage, Kaladin…” Syl said, turning and looking backward over her shoulder. “I know you’ve been busy lately fighting guys in white clothing and stuff, but I’ve been doing research. People lock their doors, but there’s plenty of room to get in underneath. I figured, since you don’t seem inclined to do any learning yourself, I should study. So if you have questions…”
“I’m well aware of what is involved.”
“You sure?” Syl asked. “Maybe we could have that ardent draw you a picture. She seems like she’d be really eager.”
“Syl…”
“I just want you to be happy, Kaladin,” she said, zipping off his shoulder and running a few rings around him as a ribbon of light. “People in relationships are happier.”
“That,” Kaladin said, “is demonstrably false. Some might be. I know a lot who aren’t.”
“Come on,” Syl said. “What about that Lightweaver? You seemed to like her.”
The words struck uncomfortably close to the truth. “Shallan is engaged to Dalinar’s son.”
“So? You’re better than him. I don’t trust him one bit.”
“You don’t trust anyone who carries a Shardblade, Syl,” Kaladin said with a sigh. “We’ve been over this. It’s not a mark of bad character to have bonded one of the weapons.”
“Yes, well, let’s have someone swing around the corpse of your sisters by the feet, and we’ll see whether you consider it a ‘mark of bad character’ or not. This is a distraction. Like that Lightweaver could be for you…”
“Shallan’s a lighteyes,” Kaladin said. “That’s the end of the conversation.”
“But—”
“End,” he said, stepping into the home of the village lighteyes. Then he added under his breath, “And stop spying on people when they’re being intimate. It’s creepy.”
The way she spoke, she expected to be there when Kaladin … Well, he’d never considered that before, though she went with him everywhere else. Could he convince her to wait outside? She’d still listen, if not sneak in to watch. Stormfather. His life just kept getting stranger. He tried—unsuccessfully—to banish the image of lying in bed with a woman, Syl sitting on the headboard and shouting out encouragement and advice.…
“Lord Radiant?” the citylord asked from inside the front room of the small home. “Are you well?”
“Painful memory,” Kaladin said. “Your scouts are certain of the direction the parshmen went?”
The citylord looked over his shoulder at a scraggly man in leathers, bow on his back, standing by the boarded-up window. Trapper, with a writ from the local highlord to catch mink on his lands. “Followed them half a day out, Brightlord. They never deviated. Straight toward Kholinar, I’d swear to Kelek himself.”
“Then that’s where I’m going as well,” Kaladin said.
“You want me to lead you, Brightlord Radiant?” the trapper asked.
Kaladin drew in Stormlight. “Afraid you’d just slow me down.” He nodded to the men, then stepped out and Lashed himself upward. People clogged the road and cheered from rooftops as he left the town behind.
* * *
The scents of horses reminded Adolin of his youth. Sweat, and manure, and hay. Good scents. Real scents.
He’d spent many of those days, before he was fully a man, on campaign with his father during border skirmishes with Jah Keved. Adolin had been afraid of horses back then, though he’d never have admitted it. So much faster, more intelligent, than chulls.
So alien. Creatures all covered in hair—which made him shiver to touch—with big glassy eyes. And those hadn’t even been real horses. For all their pedigree breeding, the horses they’d rode on campaign had just been ordinary Shin Thoroughbreds. Expensive, yes. But by definition, therefore, not priceless.
Not like the creature before him now.
They were housing the Kholin livestock in the far northwest section of the tower, on the ground floor, near where winds from outside blew along the mountains. Some clever constructions in the hallways by the royal engineers had ventilated the scents away from the inner corridors, though that left the region quite chilly.
Gumfrems and hogs clogged some rooms, while conventional horses stabled in others. Several even contained Bashin’s axehounds, animals who never got to go on hunts anymore.
Such accommodations weren’t good enough for the Blackthorn’s horse. No, the massive black Ryshadium stallion had been given his own field. Large enough to serve as a pasture, it was open to the sky and in an enviable spot, if you discounted the scents of the other animals.
As Adolin emerged from the tower, the black monster of a horse came galloping over. Big enough to carry a Shardbearer without looking small, Ryshadium were often called the “third Shard.” Blade, Plate, and Mount.
That didn’t do them justice. You couldn’t earn a Ryshadium simply by defeating someone in combat. They chose their riders.
But, Adolin thought as Gallant nuzzled his hand, I suppose that was how it used to be with Blades too. They were spren who chose their bearers.
“Hey,” Adolin said, scratching the Ryshadium’s snout with his left hand. “A little lonely out here, isn’t it? I’m sorry about that. Wish you weren’t alone any—” He cut off as his voice caught in his throat.
Gallant stepped closer, towering over him, but somehow still gentle. The horse nuzzled Adolin’s neck, then blew out sharply.
“Ugh,” Adolin said, turning the horse’s head. “That’s a scent I could do without.” He patted Gallant’s neck, then reached with his right hand into his shoulder pack—before a sharp pain from his wrist reminded him yet again of his wound. He reached in with the other hand and took out some sugar lumps, which Gallant consumed eagerly.
“You’re as bad as Aunt Navani,” Adolin noted. “That’s why you came running, isn’t it? You smelled treats.”
The horse turned his head, looking at Adolin with one watery blue eye, rectangular pupil at the center. He almost seemed … offended.
Adolin often had felt he could read his own Ryshadium’s emotions. There had been a … bond between him and Sureblood. More delicate and indefinable than the bond between man and sword, but still there.
Of course, Adolin was the one who talked to his sword sometimes, so he had a habit of this sort of thing.
“I’m sorry,” Adolin said. “I know the two of you liked to run together. And … I don’t know if Father will be able to get down as much to see you. He’d already been withdrawing from battle before he got all these new responsibilities. I thought I’d stop by once in a while.”
The horse snorted loudly.
“Not to ride you,” Adolin said, reading indignation in the Ryshadium’s motions. “I just thought it might be nice for both of us.”
The horse poked his snout at Adolin’s satchel until he dug out another sugar cube. It seemed like agreement to Adolin, who fed the horse, then leaned back against the wall and watched him gallop through the pasture.
Showing off, Adolin thought with amusement as Gallant pranced past him. Maybe Gallant would let him brush his coat. That would feel good, like the evenings he’d spent with Sureblood in the dark calm of the stables. At least, that was what he’d done before everything had gotten busy, with Shallan and the duels and everything else.
He’d ignored the horse right up until he’d needed Sureblood in battle. And then, in a flash of light, he was gone.
Adolin took a deep breath. Everything seemed insane these days. Not just Sureblood, but what he’d done to Sadeas, and now the investigation …
Watching Gallant seemed to help a little. Adolin was still there, leaning against the wall, when Renarin arrived. The younger Kholin poked his head through the doorway, looking around. He didn’t shy away when Gallant galloped past, but he did regard the stallion with wariness.
“Hey,” Adolin said from the side.
“Hey. Bashin said you were down here.”
“Just checking on Gallant,” Adolin said. “Because Father’s been so busy lately.”
Renarin approached. “You could ask Shallan to draw Sureblood,” Renarin said. “I bet, um, she’d be able to do a good job. To remember.”
It wasn’t a bad suggestion, actually. “Were you looking for me, then?”
“I…” Renarin watched Gallant as the horse pranced by again. “He’s excited.”
“He likes an audience.”
“They don’t fit, you know.”
“Don’t fit?”
“Ryshadium have stone hooves,” Renarin said, “stronger than ordinary horses’. Never need to be shod.”
“And that makes them not fit? I’d say that makes them fit better.…” Adolin eyed Renarin. “You mean ordinary horses, don’t you?”
Renarin blushed, then nodded. People had trouble following him sometimes, but that was merely because he tended to be so thoughtful. He’d be thinking about something deep, something brilliant, and then would only mention a part. It made him seem erratic, but once you got to know him, you realized he wasn’t trying to be esoteric. His lips just sometimes failed to keep up with his brain.
“Adolin,” he said softly. “I … um … I have to give you back the Shardblade you won for me.”
“Why?” Adolin said.
“It hurts to hold,” Renarin said. “It always has, to be honest. I thought it was just me, being strange. But it’s all of us.”
“Radiants, you mean.”
He nodded. “We can’t use the dead Blades. It’s not right.”
“Well, I suppose I could find someone else to use it,” Adolin said, running through options. “Though you should really be the one to choose. By right of bestowal, the Blade is yours, and you should pick the successor.”
“I’d rather you do it. I’ve given it to the ardents already, for safekeeping.”
“Which means you’ll be unarmed,” Adolin said.
Renarin glanced away.
“Or not,” Adolin said, then poked Renarin in the shoulder. “You’ve got a replacement already, don’t you.”
Renarin blushed again.
“You mink!” Adolin said. “You’ve managed to create a Radiant Blade? Why didn’t you tell us?”
“It just happened. Glys wasn’t certain he could do it … but we need more people to work the Oathgate … so…”
He took a deep breath, then stretched his hand to the side and summoned a long glowing Shardblade. Thin, with almost no crossguard, it had waving folds to the metal, like it had been forged.
“Gorgeous,” Adolin said. “Renarin, it’s fantastic!”
“Thanks.”
“So why are you embarrassed?”
“I’m … not?”
Adolin gave him a flat stare.
Renarin dismissed the Blade. “I simply … Adolin, I was starting to fit in. With Bridge Four, with being a Shardbearer. Now, I’m in the darkness again. Father expects me to be a Radiant, so I can help him unite the world. But how am I supposed to learn?”
Adolin scratched his chin with his good hand. “Huh. I assumed that it just kind of came to you. It hasn’t?”
“Some has. But it … frightens me, Adolin.” He held up his hand, and it started to glow, wisps of Stormlight trailing off it, like smoke from a fire. “What if I hurt someone, or ruin things?”
“You’re not going to,” Adolin said. “Renarin, that’s the power of the Almighty himself.”
Renarin only stared at that glowing hand, and didn’t seem convinced. So Adolin reached out with his good hand and took Renarin’s, holding it.
“This is good,” Adolin said to him. “You’re not going to hurt anyone. You’re here to save us.”
Renarin looked to him, then smiled. A pulse of Radiance washed through Adolin, and for an instant he saw himself perfected. A version of himself that was somehow complete and whole, the man he could be.
It was gone in a moment, and Renarin pulled his hand free and murmured an apology. He mentioned again the Shardblade needing to be given away, then fled back into the tower.
Adolin stared after him. Gallant trotted up and nudged him for more sugar, so he reached absently into his satchel and fed the horse.
Only after Gallant trotted off did Adolin realize he’d used his right hand. He held it up, amazed, moving his fingers.
His wrist had been completely healed.
11. The Rift
THIRTY-THREE YEARS AGO
Dalinar danced from one foot to the other in the morning mist, feeling a new power, an energy in every step. Shardplate. His own Shardplate.
The world would never be the same place. They’d all expected he would someday have his own Plate or Blade, but he’d never been able to quiet the whisper of uncertainty from the back of his mind. What if it never happened?
But it had. Stormfather, it had. He’d won it himself, in combat. Yes, that combat had involved kicking a man off a cliff, but he’d defeated a Shardbearer regardless.
He couldn’t help but bask in how grand it felt.
“Calm, Dalinar,” Sadeas said from beside him in the mist. Sadeas wore his own golden Plate. “Patience.”
“It won’t do any good, Sadeas,” Gavilar—clad in bright blue Plate—said from Dalinar’s other side. All three of them wore their faceplates up for the moment. “The Kholin boys are chained axehounds, and we smell blood. We can’t go into battle breathing calming breaths, centered and serene, as the ardents teach.”
Dalinar shifted, feeling the cold morning fog on his face. He wanted to dance with the anticipationspren whipping in the air around him. Behind, the army waited in disciplined ranks, their footsteps, clinkings, coughs, and murmured banter rising through the fog.
He almost felt as if he didn’t need that army. He wore a massive hammer on his back, so heavy an unaided man—even the strongest of them—wouldn’t be able to lift it. He barely noticed the weight. Storms, this power. It felt remarkably like the Thrill.
“Have you given thought to my suggestion, Dalinar?” Sadeas asked.
“No.”
Sadeas sighed.
“If Gavilar commands me,” Dalinar said, “I’ll marry.”
“Don’t bring me into this,” Gavilar said. He summoned and dismissed his Shardblade repeatedly as they talked.
“Well,” Dalinar said, “until you say something, I’m staying single.” The only woman he’d ever wanted belonged to Gavilar. They’d married—storms, they had a child now. A little girl.
His brother must never know how Dalinar felt.
“But think of the benefit, Dalinar,” Sadeas said. “Your wedding could bring us alliances, Shards. Perhaps you could win us a princedom—one we wouldn’t have to storming drive to the brink of collapse before they join us!”
After two years of fighting, only four of the ten princedoms had accepted Gavilar’s rule—and two of those, Kholin and Sadeas, had been easy. The result was a united Alethkar: against House Kholin.
Gavilar was convinced that he could play them off one another, that their natural selfishness would lead them to stab one another in the back. Sadeas, in turn, pushed Gavilar toward greater brutality. He claimed that the fiercer their reputation, the more cities would turn to them willingly rather than risk being pillaged.
“Well?” Sadeas asked. “Will you at least consider a union of political necessity?”
“Storms, you still on that?” Dalinar said. “Let me fight. You and my brother can worry about politics.”
“You can’t escape this forever, Dalinar. You realize that, right? We’ll have to worry about feeding the darkeyes, about city infrastructure, about ties with other kingdoms. Politics.”
“You and Gavilar,” Dalinar said.
“All of us,” Sadeas said. “All three.”
“Weren’t you trying to get me to relax?” Dalinar snapped. Storms.
The rising sun finally started to disperse the fog, and that let him see their target: a wall about twelve feet high. Beyond that, nothing. A flat rocky expanse, or so it appeared. The chasm city was difficult to spot from this direction. Named Rathalas, it was also known as the Rift: an entire city that had been built inside a rip in the ground.
“Brightlord Tanalan is a Shardbearer, right?” Dalinar asked.
Sadeas sighed, lowering his faceplate. “We only went over this four times, Dalinar.”
“I was drunk. Tanalan. Shardbearer?”
“Blade only, Brother,” Gavilar said.
“He’s mine,” Dalinar whispered.
Gavilar laughed. “Only if you find him first! I’ve half a mind to give that Blade to Sadeas. At least he listens in our meetings.”
“All right,” Sadeas said. “Let’s do this carefully. Remember the plan. Gavilar, you—”
Gavilar gave Dalinar a grin, slammed his faceplate down, then took off running to leave Sadeas midsentence. Dalinar whooped and joined him, Plated boots grinding against stone.
Sadeas cursed loudly, then followed. The army remained behind for the moment.
Rocks started falling; catapults from behind the wall hurled solitary boulders or sprays of smaller rocks. Chunks slammed down around Dalinar, shaking the ground, causing rockbud vines to curl up. A boulder struck just ahead, then bounced, spraying chips of stone. Dalinar skidded past it, the Plate lending a spring to his motion. He raised his arm before his eye slit as a hail of arrows darkened the sky.
“Watch the ballistas!” Gavilar shouted.
Atop the wall, soldiers aimed massive crossbowlike devices mounted to the stone. One sleek bolt—the size of a spear—launched directly at Dalinar, and it proved far more accurate than the catapults. He threw himself to the side, Plate grinding on stone as he slid out of the way. The bolt hit the ground with such force that the wood shattered.
Other shafts trailed netting and ropes, hoping to trip a Shardbearer and render him prone for a second shot. Dalinar grinned, feeling the Thrill awaken within him, and recovered his feet. He leaped over a bolt trailing netting.
Tanalan’s men delivered a storm of wood and stone, but it wasn’t nearly enough. Dalinar took a stone in the shoulder and lurched, but quickly regained his momentum. Arrows were useless against him, the boulders too random, and the ballistas too slow to reload.
This was how it should be. Dalinar, Gavilar, Sadeas. Together. Other responsibilities didn’t matter. Life was about the fight. A good battle in the day—then at night, a warm hearth, tired muscles, and a good vintage of wine.
Dalinar reached the squat wall and leaped, propelling himself in a mighty jump. He gained just enough height to grab one of the crenels of the wall’s top. Men raised hammers to pound his fingers, but he hurled himself over the lip and onto the wall walk, crashing down amid panicked defenders. He jerked the release rope on his hammer—dropping it on an enemy behind—then swung out with his fist, sending men broken and screaming.
This was almost too easy! He seized his hammer, then brought it up and swung it in a wide arc, tossing men from the wall like leaves before a gust of wind. Just beyond him, Sadeas kicked over a ballista, destroying the device with a casual blow. Gavilar attacked with his Blade, dropping corpses by the handful, their eyes burning. Up here, the fortification worked against the defenders, leaving them cramped and clumped up—perfect for Shardbearers to destroy.
Dalinar surged through them, and in a few moments likely killed more men than he had in his entire life. At that, he felt a surprising yet profound dissatisfaction. This was not about his skill, his momentum, or even his reputation. You could have replaced him with a toothless gaffer and produced practically the same result.
He gritted his teeth against that sudden useless emotion. He dug deeply within, and found the Thrill waiting. It filled him, driving away dissatisfaction. Within moments he was roaring his pleasure. Nothing these men did could touch him. He was a destroyer, a conqueror, a glorious maelstrom of death. A god.
Sadeas was saying something. The silly man gestured in his golden Shardplate. Dalinar blinked, looking out over the wall. He could see the Rift proper from this vantage, a deep chasm in the ground that hid an entire city, built up the sides of either cliff.
“Catapults, Dalinar!” Sadeas said. “Bring down those catapults!”
Right. Gavilar’s armies had started to charge the walls. Those catapults—near the way down into the Rift proper—were still launching stones, and would drop hundreds of men.
Dalinar leaped for the edge of the wall and grabbed a rope ladder to swing down. The ropes, of course, immediately snapped, sending him toppling to the ground. He struck with a crash of Plate on stone. It didn’t hurt, but his pride took a serious blow. Above, Sadeas looked at him over the edge. Dalinar could practically hear his voice.
Always rushing into things. Take some time to think once in a while, won’t you?
That had been a flat-out greenvine mistake. Dalinar growled and climbed to his feet, searching for his hammer. Storms! He’d bent the handle in his fall. How had he done that? It wasn’t made of the same strange metal as Blades and Plate, but it was still good steel.
Soldiers guarding the catapults swarmed toward him while the shadows of boulders passed overhead. Dalinar set his jaw, the Thrill saturating him, and reached for a stout wooden door set into the wall nearby. He ripped it free, the hinges popping, and stumbled. It came off more easily than he’d expected.
There was more to this armor than he’d ever imagined. Maybe he wasn’t any better with the Plate than some old gaffer, but he would change that. At that moment, he determined that he’d never be surprised again. He’d wear this Plate morning and night—he’d sleep in the storming stuff—until he was more comfortable in it than out.
He raised the wooden door and swung it like a bludgeon, sweeping soldiers away and opening a path to the catapults. Then he dashed forward and grabbed the side of one catapult. He ripped its wheel off, splintering wood and sending the machine teetering. He stepped onto it, grabbing the catapult’s arm and breaking it free.
Only ten more to go. He stood atop the wrecked machine when he heard a distant voice call his name. “Dalinar!”
He looked toward the wall, where Sadeas reached back and heaved his Shardbearer’s hammer. It spun in the air before slamming into the catapult next to Dalinar, wedging itself into the broken wood.
Sadeas raised a hand in salute, and Dalinar waved back in gratitude, then grabbed the hammer. The destruction went a lot faster after that. He pounded the machines, leaving behind shattered wood. Engineers—many of them women—scrambled away, screaming, “Blackthorn, Blackthorn!”
By the time he neared the last catapult, Gavilar had secured the gates and opened them to his soldiers. A flood of men entered, joining those who had scaled the walls. The last of the enemies near Dalinar fled down into the city, leaving him alone. He grunted and kicked the final broken catapult, sending it rolling backward across the stone toward the edge of the Rift.
It tipped, then fell over. Dalinar stepped forward, walking onto a kind of observation post, a section of rock with a railing to prevent people from slipping over the side. From this vantage, he got his first good look down at the city.
“The Rift” was a fitting name. To his right, the chasm narrowed, but here at the middle he’d have been hard-pressed to throw a stone across to the other side, even with Shardplate. And within it, there was life. Gardens bobbing with lifespren. Buildings built practically on top of one another down the V-shaped cliff sides. The place teemed with a network of stilts, bridges, and wooden walkways.
Dalinar turned and looked back at the wall that ran in a wide circle around the opening of the Rift on all sides except the west, where the canyon continued until it opened up below at the shores of the lake.
To survive in Alethkar, you had to find shelter from the storms. A wide cleft like this one was perfect for a city. But how did you protect it? Any attacking enemy would have the high ground. Many cities walked a risky line between security from storms and security from men.
Dalinar shouldered Sadeas’s hammer as groups of Tanalan’s soldiers flooded down from the walls, forming up to flank Gavilar’s army on both right and left. They’d try to press against the Kholin troops from both sides, but with three Shardbearers to face, they were in trouble. Where was Highlord Tanalan himself?
Behind, Thakka approached with a small squad of elites, joining Dalinar on the stone viewing platform. Thakka put his hands on the railing, whistling softly.
“Something’s going on with this city,” Dalinar said.
“What?”
“I don’t know.…” Dalinar might not pay attention to the grand plans Gavilar and Sadeas made, but he was a soldier. He knew battlefields like a woman knew her mother’s recipes: he might not be able to give you measurements, but he could taste when something was off.
The fighting continued behind him, Kholin soldiers clashing with Tanalan’s defenders. Tanalan’s armies didn’t fare well; demoralized by the advancing Kholin army, the enemy ranks quickly broke and scrambled into a retreat, clogging the ramps down into the city. Gavilar and Sadeas didn’t give chase; they had the high ground now. No need to rush into a potential ambush.
Gavilar clomped across the stone, Sadeas beside him. They’d want to survey the city and rain arrows upon those below—maybe even use stolen catapults, if Dalinar had left any functional. They’d siege this place until it broke.
Three Shardbearers, Dalinar thought. Tanalan has to be planning to deal with us somehow.…
This viewing platform was the best vantage for looking into the city. And they’d situated the catapults right next to it—machines that the Shardbearers were certain to attack and disable. Dalinar glanced to the sides, and saw cracks in the stone floor of the viewing platform.
“No!” Dalinar shouted to Gavilar. “Stay back! It’s a—”
The enemy must have been watching, for the moment he shouted, the ground fell out from beneath him. Dalinar caught a glimpse of Gavilar—held back by Sadeas—looking on in horror as Dalinar, Thakka, and a handful of other elites were toppled into the Rift.
Storms. The entire section of stone where they’d been standing—the lip hanging out over the Rift—had broken free! As the large section of rock tumbled down into the first buildings, Dalinar was flung into the air above the city. Everything spun around him.
A moment later, he crashed into a building with an awful crunch. Something hard hit his arm, an impact so powerful he heard his armor there shatter.
The building failed to stop him. He tore right through the wood and continued, helm grinding against stone as he somehow came in contact with the side of the Rift.
He hit another surface with a loud crunch, and blessedly here he finally stopped. He groaned, feeling a sharp pain from his left hand. He shook his head, and found himself staring upward some fifty feet through a shattered section of the near-vertical wooden city. The large section of falling rock had torn a swath through the city along the steep incline, smashing homes and walkways. Dalinar had been flung just to the north, and had eventually come to rest on the wooden roof of a building.
He didn’t see signs of his men. Thakka, the other elites. But without Shardplate … He growled, angerspren boiling around him like pools of blood. He shifted on the rooftop, but the pain in his hand made him wince. His armor all down his left arm had shattered, and in falling he appeared to have broken a few fingers.
His Shardplate leaked glowing white smoke from a hundred fractures, but the only pieces he’d lost completely were from his left arm and hand.
He gingerly pried himself from the rooftop, but as he shifted, he broke through and fell into the home. He grunted as he hit, members of a family screaming and pulling back against the wall. Tanalan apparently hadn’t told the people of his plan to crush a section of his own city in a desperate attempt to deal with the enemy Shardbearers.
Dalinar got to his feet, ignoring the cowering people, and shoved open the door—breaking it with the strength of his push—and stepped out onto a wooden walkway that ran before the homes on this tier of the city.
A hail of arrows immediately fell on him. He turned his right shoulder toward them, growling, shielding his eye slit as best he could while he inspected the source of the attack. Fifty archers were set up on a garden platform on the other storming side of the Rift from him. Wonderful.
He recognized the man leading the archers. Tall, with an imperious bearing and stark white plumes on his helm. Who put chicken feathers on their helms? Looked ridiculous. Well, Tanalan was a fine enough fellow. Dalinar had beat him once at pawns, and Tanalan had paid the bet with a hundred glowing bits of ruby, each dropped into a corked bottle of wine. Dalinar had always found that amusing.
Reveling in the Thrill, which rose in him and drove away pain, Dalinar charged along the walkway, ignoring arrows. Above, Sadeas was leading a force down one of the ramps outside the path of the rockfall, but it would be slow going. By the time they arrived, Dalinar intended to have a new Shardblade.
He charged onto one of the bridges that crossed the Rift. Unfortunately, he knew exactly what he would do if preparing this city for an assault. Sure enough, a pair of soldiers hurried down the other side of the Rift, then used axes to attack the support posts to Dalinar’s bridge. It had Soulcast metal ropes holding it up, but if they could get those posts down—dropping the lines—his weight would surely cause the entire thing to fall.
The bottom wash of the Rift was easily another hundred feet below. Growling, Dalinar made the only choice he could. He threw himself over the side of his walkway, dropping a short distance to one below. It looked sturdy enough. Even so, one foot smashed through the wooden planks, nearly followed by his entire body.
He heaved himself up and continued running across. Two more soldiers reached the posts holding up this bridge, and they began frantically hacking away.
The walkway shook beneath Dalinar’s feet. Stormfather. He didn’t have much time, but there were no more walkways within jumping distance. Dalinar pushed himself to a run, roaring, his footfalls cracking boards.
A single black arrow fell from above, swooping like a skyeel. It dropped one of the soldiers. Another arrow followed, hitting the second soldier even as he gawked at his fallen ally. The walkway stopped shaking, and Dalinar grinned, pulling to a stop. He turned, spotting a man standing near the sheared-off section of stone above. He lifted a black bow toward Dalinar.
“Teleb, you storming miracle,” Dalinar said.
He reached the other side and plucked an axe from the hands of a dead man. Then he charged up a ramp toward where he’d seen Highlord Tanalan.
He found the place easily, a wide wooden platform built on struts connected to parts of the wall below, and draped with vines and blooming rockbuds. Lifespren scattered as Dalinar reached it.
Centered in the garden, Tanalan waited with a force of some fifty soldiers. Puffing inside his helm, Dalinar stepped up to confront them. Tanalan was armored in simple steel, no Shardplate, though a brutal-looking Shardblade—wide, with a hooked tip—appeared in his grasp.
Tanalan barked for his soldiers to stand back and lower their bows. Then he strode toward Dalinar, holding the Shardblade with both hands.
Everyone always fixated upon Shardblades. Specific weapons had lore dedicated to them, and people traced which kings or brightlords had carried which sword. Well, Dalinar had used both Blade and Plate, and if given the choice of one, he’d pick Plate every time. All he needed to do was get in one solid hit on Tanalan, and the fight would be over. The highlord, however, had to contend with a foe who could resist his blows.
The Thrill thrummed inside Dalinar. Standing between two squat trees, he set his stance, keeping his exposed left arm pointed away from the highlord while gripping the axe in his gauntleted right hand. Though it was a war axe, it felt like a child’s plaything.
“You should not have come here, Dalinar,” Tanalan said. His voice bore a distinctively nasal accent common to this region. The Rifters always had considered themselves a people apart. “We had no quarrel with you or yours.”
“You refused to submit to the king,” Dalinar said, armor plates clinking as he rounded the highlord while trying to keep an eye on the soldiers. He wouldn’t put it past them to attack him once he was distracted by the duel. It was what he himself would have done.
“The king?” Tanalan demanded, angerspren boiling up around him. “There hasn’t been a throne in Alethkar for generations. Even if we were to have a king again, who is to say the Kholins deserve the mantle?”
“The way I see it,” Dalinar said, “the people of Alethkar deserve a king who is the strongest and most capable of leading them in battle. If only there were a way to prove that.” He grinned inside his helm.
Tanalan attacked, sweeping in with his Shardblade and trying to leverage his superior reach. Dalinar danced back, waiting for his moment. The Thrill was a heady rush, a lust to prove himself.
But he needed to be cautious. Ideally Dalinar would prolong this fight, relying on his Plate’s superior strength and the stamina it provided. Unfortunately, that Plate was still leaking, and he had all these guards to deal with. Still, he tried to play it as Tanalan would expect, dodging attacks, acting as if he were going to drag out the fight.
Tanalan growled and came in again. Dalinar blocked the blow with his arm, then made a perfunctory swing with his axe. Tanalan dodged back easily. Stormfather, that Blade was long. Almost as tall as Dalinar was.
Dalinar maneuvered, brushing against the foliage of the garden. He couldn’t even feel the pain of his broken fingers anymore. The Thrill called to him.
Wait. Act like you’re drawing this out as long as possible.…
Tanalan advanced again, and Dalinar dodged backward, faster because of his Plate. And then when Tanalan tried his next strike, Dalinar ducked toward him.
He deflected the Shardblade with his arm again, but this blow hit hard, shattering the arm plate. Still, Dalinar’s surprise rush let him lower his shoulder and slam it against Tanalan. The highlord’s armor clanged, bending before the force of the Shardplate, and the highlord tripped.
Unfortunately, Dalinar was off balance just enough from his rush to fall alongside the highlord. The platform shook as they hit the ground, the wood cracking and groaning. Damnation! Dalinar had not wanted to go to the ground while surrounded by foes. Still, he had to stay inside the reach of that Blade.
Dalinar dropped off his right gauntlet—without the arm piece connecting it to the rest of the armor, it was dead weight—as the two of them twisted in a heap. He’d lost the axe, unfortunately. The highlord battered against Dalinar with the pommel of his sword, to no effect. But with one hand broken and the other lacking the power of Plate, Dalinar couldn’t get a good hold on his foe.
Dalinar rolled, finally positioning himself above Tanalan, where the weight of the Shardplate would keep his foe pinned. At that moment though, the other soldiers attacked. Just as he’d expected. Honorable duels like this—on a battlefield at least—always lasted only until your lighteyes was losing.
Dalinar rolled free. The soldiers obviously weren’t ready for how quickly he responded. He got to his feet and scooped up his axe, then lashed out. His right arm still had the pauldron and down to the elbow brace, so when he swung, he had power—a strange mix of Shard-enhanced strength and frailty from his exposed arms. He had to be careful not to snap his own wrist.
He dropped three men with a flurry of axe slices. The others backed away, blocking him with polearms as their fellows helped Tanalan to his feet.
“You speak of the people,” Tanalan said hoarsely, gauntleted hand feeling at his chest where the cuirass had been bent significantly by Dalinar’s rush. He seemed to be having trouble breathing. “As if this were about them. As if it were for their good that you loot, you pillage, you murder. You’re an uncivilized brute.”
“You can’t civilize war,” Dalinar said. “There’s no painting it up and making it pretty.”
“You don’t have to pull sorrow behind you like a sledge on the stones, scraping and crushing those you pass. You’re a monster.”
“I’m a soldier,” Dalinar said, eyeing Tanalan’s men, many of whom were preparing their bows.
Tanalan coughed. “My city is lost. My plan has failed. But I can do Alethkar one last service. I can take you down, you bastard.”
The archers started to loose.
Dalinar roared and threw himself to the ground, hitting the platform with the weight of Shardplate. The wood cracked around him, weakened by the fighting earlier, and he broke through it, shattering struts underneath.
The entire platform came crashing down around him, and together they fell toward the tier below. Dalinar heard screams, and he hit the next walkway hard enough to daze him, even with Shardplate.
Dalinar shook his head, groaning, and found his helm cracked right down the front, the uncommon vision granted by the armor spoiled. He pulled the helm free with one hand and gasped for breath. Storms, his good arm hurt too. He glanced at it and found splinters piercing his skin, including one chunk as long as a dagger.
He grimaced. Below, the few remaining soldiers who had been positioned to cut down bridges came charging up toward him.
Steady, Dalinar. Be ready!
He got to his feet, dazed, exhausted, but the two soldiers didn’t come for him. They huddled around Tanalan’s body where it had fallen from the platform above. The soldiers grabbed him, then fled.
Dalinar roared and awkwardly gave pursuit. His Plate moved slowly, and he stumbled through the wreckage of the fallen platform, trying to keep up with the soldiers.
The pain from his arms made him mad with rage. But the Thrill, the Thrill drove him forward. He would not be beaten. He would not stop! Tanalan’s Shardblade had not appeared beside his body. That meant his foe still lived. Dalinar had not yet won.
Fortunately, most of the soldiers had been positioned to fight on the other side of the city. This side was practically empty, save for huddled townspeople—he caught glimpses of them hiding in their homes.
Dalinar limped up ramps along the side of the Rift, following the men dragging their brightlord. Near the top, the two soldiers set their burden down beside an exposed portion of the chasm’s rock wall. They did something that caused a portion of that wall to open inward, revealing a hidden door. They towed their fallen brightlord into it, and two other soldiers—responding to their frantic calls—rushed out to meet Dalinar, who arrived moments later.
Helmless, Dalinar saw red as he engaged them. They bore weapons; he did not. They were fresh, and he had wounds nearly incapacitating both arms.
The fight still ended with the two soldiers on the ground, broken and bleeding. Dalinar kicked open the hidden door, Plated legs functioning enough to smash it down.
He lurched into a small tunnel with diamond spheres glowing on the walls. That door was covered in hardened crem on the outside, making it seem like a part of the wall. If he hadn’t seen them enter, it would have taken days, maybe weeks to locate this place.
At the end of a short walk, he found the two soldiers he’d followed. Judging by the blood trail, they’d deposited their brightlord in the closed room behind them.
They rushed Dalinar with the fatalistic determination of men who knew they were probably dead. The pain in Dalinar’s arms and head seemed nothing before the Thrill. He had rarely felt it so strong as he did now, a beautiful clarity, such a wonderful emotion.
He ducked forward, supernaturally quick, and used his shoulder to crush one soldier against the wall. The other fell to a well-placed kick, then Dalinar burst through the door beyond them.
Tanalan lay on the ground here, blood surrounding him. A beautiful woman was draped across him, weeping. Only one other person was in the small chamber: a young boy. Six, perhaps seven. Tears streaked the child’s face, and he struggled to lift his father’s Shardblade in two hands.
Dalinar loomed in the doorway.
“You can’t have my daddy,” the boy said, words distorted by his sorrow. Painspren crawled around the floor. “You can’t. You … you…” His voice fell to a whisper. “Daddy said … we fight monsters. And with faith, we will win.…”
* * *
A few hours later, Dalinar sat on the edge of the Rift, his legs swinging over the broken city below. His new Shardblade rested across his lap, his Plate—deformed and broken—in a heap beside him. His arms were bandaged, but he’d chased away the surgeons.
He stared out at what seemed an empty plain, then flicked his eyes toward the signs of human life below. Dead bodies in heaps. Broken buildings. Splinters of civilization.
Gavilar eventually walked up, trailed by two bodyguards from Dalinar’s elites, Kadash and Febin today. Gavilar waved them back, then groaned as he settled down beside Dalinar, removing his helm. Exhaustionspren spun overhead, though—despite his fatigue—Gavilar looked thoughtful. With those keen, pale green eyes, he’d always seemed to know so much. Growing up, Dalinar had simply assumed that his brother would always be right in whatever he said or did. Aging hadn’t much changed his opinion of the man.
“Congratulations,” Gavilar said, nodding toward the Blade. “Sadeas is irate it wasn’t his.”
“He’ll find one of his own eventually,” Dalinar said. “He’s too ambitious for me to believe otherwise.”
Gavilar grunted. “This attack nearly cost us too much. Sadeas is saying we need to be more careful, not risk ourselves and our Shards in solitary assaults.”
“Sadeas is smart,” Dalinar said. He reached gingerly with his right hand, the less mangled one, and raised a mug of wine to his lips. It was the only drug he cared about for the pain—and maybe it would help with the shame too. Both feelings seemed stark, now that the Thrill had receded and left him deflated.
“What do we do with them, Dalinar?” Gavilar asked, waving down toward the crowds of civilians the soldiers were rounding up. “Tens of thousands of people. They won’t be cowed easily; they won’t like that you killed their highlord and his heir. Those people will resist us for years. I can feel it.”
Dalinar took a drink. “Make soldiers of them,” he said. “Tell them we’ll spare their families if they fight for us. You want to stop doing a Shardbearer rush at the start of battles? Sounds like we’ll need some expendable troops.”
Gavilar nodded, considering. “Sadeas is right about other things too, you know. About us. And what we’re going to have to become.”
“Don’t talk to me about that.”
“Dalinar…”
“I lost half my elites today, my captain included. I’ve got enough problems.”
“Why are we here, fighting? Is it for honor? Is it for Alethkar?”
Dalinar shrugged.
“We can’t just keep acting like a bunch of thugs,” Gavilar said. “We can’t rob every city we pass, feast every night. We need discipline; we need to hold the land we have. We need bureaucracy, order, laws, politics.”
Dalinar closed his eyes, distracted by the shame he felt. What if Gavilar found out?
“We’re going to have to grow up,” Gavilar said softly.
“And become soft? Like these highlords we kill? That’s why we started, isn’t it? Because they were all lazy, fat, corrupt?”
“I don’t know anymore. I’m a father now, Dalinar. That makes me wonder about what we do once we have it all. How do we make a kingdom of this place?”
Storms. A kingdom. For the first time in his life, Dalinar found that idea horrifying.
Gavilar eventually stood up, responding to some messengers who were calling for him. “Could you,” he said to Dalinar, “at least try to be a little less foolhardy in future battles?”
“This coming from you?”
“A thoughtful me,” Gavilar said. “An … exhausted me. Enjoy Oathbringer. You earned it.”
“Oathbringer?”
“Your sword,” Gavilar said. “Storms, didn’t you listen to anything last night? That’s Sunmaker’s old sword.”
Sadees, the Sunmaker. He had been the last man to unite Alethkar, centuries ago. Dalinar shifted the Blade in his lap, letting the light play off the pristine metal.
“It’s yours now,” Gavilar said. “By the time we’re done, I’ll have it so that nobody even thinks of Sunmaker anymore. Just House Kholin and Alethkar.”
He walked away. Dalinar rammed the Shardblade into the stone and leaned back, closing his eyes again and remembering the sound of a brave boy crying.
12. Negotiations
I ask not that you forgive me. Nor that you even understand.
Dalinar stood beside the glass windows in an upper-floor room of Urithiru, hands clasped behind his back. He could see his reflection hinted in the window, and beyond it vast openness. The sky cloud-free, the sun burning white.
Windows as tall as he was—he’d never seen anything like them. Who would dare build something of glass, so brittle, and face it toward the storms? But of course, this city was above the storms. These windows seemed a mark of defiance, a symbol of what the Radiants had meant. They had stood above the pettiness of world politics. And because of that height, they could see so far.…
You idealize them, said a distant voice in his head, like rumbling thunder. They were men like you. No better. No worse.
“I find that encouraging,” Dalinar whispered back. “If they were like us, then it means we can be like them.”
They eventually betrayed us. Do not forget that.
“Why?” Dalinar asked. “What happened? What changed them?”
The Stormfather fell silent.
“Please,” Dalinar said. “Tell me.”
Some things are better left forgotten, the voice said to him. You of all men should understand this, considering the hole in your mind and the person who once filled it.
Dalinar drew in a sharp breath, stung by the words.
“Brightlord,” Brightness Kalami said from behind. “The emperor is ready for you.”
Dalinar turned. Urithiru’s upper levels held several unique rooms, including this amphitheater. Shaped like a half-moon, the room had windows at the top—the straight side—then rows of seats leading down to a speaking floor below. Curiously, each seat had a small pedestal beside it. For the Radiant’s spren, the Stormfather told him.
Dalinar started down the steps toward his team: Aladar and his daughter, May. Navani, wearing a bright green havah, sitting in the front row with feet stretched out before her, shoes off and ankles crossed. Elderly Kalami to write, and Teshav Khal—one of Alethkar’s finest political minds—to advise. Her two senior wards sat beside her, ready to provide research or translation if needed.
A small group, prepared to change the world.
“Send my greetings to the emperor,” Dalinar instructed.
Kalami nodded, writing. Then she cleared her throat, reading the response that the spanreed—writing as if on its own—relayed. “You are greeted by His Imperial Majesty Ch.V.D. Yanagawn the First, Emperor of Makabak, King of Azir, Lord of the Bronze Palace, Prime Aqasix, grand minister and emissary of Yaezir.”
“An imposing title,” Navani noted, “for a fifteen-year-old boy.”
“He supposedly raised a child from the dead,” Teshav said, “a miracle that gained him the support of the viziers. Local word is that they had trouble finding a new Prime after the last two were murdered by our old friend the Assassin in White. So the viziers picked a boy with questionable lineage and made up a story about him saving someone’s life in order to demonstrate a divine mandate.”
Dalinar grunted. “Making things up doesn’t sound very Azish.”
“They’re fine with it,” Navani said, “as long as you can find witnesses willing to fill out affidavits. Kalami, thank His Imperial Majesty for meeting with us, and his translators for their efforts.”
Kalami wrote, and then she looked up at Dalinar, who began to pace the center of the room. Navani stood to join him, eschewing her shoes, walking in socks.
“Your Imperial Majesty,” Dalinar said, “I speak to you from the top of Urithiru, city of legend. The sights are breathtaking. I invite you to visit me here and tour the city. You are welcome to bring any guards or retinue you see fit.”
He looked to Navani, and she nodded. They’d discussed long how to approach the monarchs, and had settled on a soft invitation. Azir was first, the most powerful country in the west and home to what would be the most central and important of the Oathgates to secure.
The response took time. The Azish government was a kind of beautiful mess, though Gavilar had often admired it. Layers of clerics filled all levels—where both men and women wrote. Scions were kind of like ardents, though they weren’t slaves, which Dalinar found odd. In Azir, being a priest-minister in the government was the highest honor to which one could aspire.
Traditionally, the Azish Prime claimed to be emperor of all Makabak—a region that included over a half-dozen kingdoms and princedoms. In reality, he was king over only Azir, but Azir did cast a long, long shadow.
As they waited, Dalinar stepped up beside Navani, resting his fingers on one of her shoulders, then drew them across her back, the nape of her neck, and let them linger on the other shoulder.
Who would have thought a man his age could feel so giddy?
“ ‘Your Highness,’ ” the reply finally came, Kalami reading the words. “ ‘We thank you for your warning about the storm that blew from the wrong direction. Your timely words have been noted and recorded in the official annals of the empire, recognizing you as a friend to Azir.’ ”
Kalami waited for more, but the spanreed stopped moving. Then the ruby flashed, indicating that they were done.
“That wasn’t much of a response,” Aladar said. “Why didn’t he reply to your invitation, Dalinar?”
“Being noted in their official records is a great honor to the Azish,” Teshav said, “so they’ve paid you a compliment.”
“Yes,” Navani said, “but they are trying to dodge the offer we made. Press them, Dalinar.”
“Kalami, please send the following,” Dalinar said. “I am honored, though I wish my inclusion in your annals could have been due to happier circumstances. Let us discuss the future of Roshar together, here. I am eager to make your personal acquaintance.”
They waited as patiently as they could for a response. It finally came, in Alethi. “ ‘We of the Azish crown are saddened to share mourning for the fallen with you. As your noble brother was killed by the Shin destroyer, so were beloved members of our court. This creates a bond between us.’ ”
That was all.
Navani clicked her tongue. “They’re not going to be pushed into an answer.”
“They could at least explain themselves!” Dalinar snapped. “It feels like we’re having two different conversations!”
“The Azish,” Teshav said, “do not like to give offense. They’re almost as bad as the Emuli in that regard, particularly with foreigners.”
It wasn’t only an Azish attribute, in Dalinar’s estimation. It was the way of politicians worldwide. Already this conversation was starting to feel like his efforts to bring the highprinces to his side, back in the warcamps. Half answer after half answer, mild promises with no bite to them, laughing eyes that mocked him even while they pretended to be perfectly sincere.
Storms. Here he was again. Trying to unite people who didn’t want to listen to him. He couldn’t afford to be bad at this, not any longer.
There was a time, he thought, when I united in a different way. He smelled smoke, heard men screaming in pain. Remembered bringing blood and ash to those who defied his brother.
Those memories had become particularly vivid lately.
“Another tactic maybe?” Navani suggested. “Instead of an invitation, try an offer of aid.”
“Your Imperial Majesty,” Dalinar said. “War is coming; surely you have seen the changes in the parshmen. The Voidbringers have returned. I would have you know that the Alethi are your allies in this conflict. We would share information regarding our successes and failures in resisting this enemy, with hope that you will report the same to us. Mankind must be unified in the face of the mounting threat.”
The reply eventually came: “ ‘We agree that aiding one another in this new age will be of the utmost importance. We are glad to exchange information. What do you know of these transformed parshmen?’ ”
“We engaged them on the Shattered Plains,” Dalinar said, relieved to make some kind of headway. “Creatures with red eyes, and similar in many ways to the parshmen we found on the Shattered Plains—only more dangerous. I will have my scribes prepare reports for you detailing all we have learned in fighting the Parshendi over the years.”
“ ‘Excellent,’ ” the reply finally came. “ ‘This information will be extremely welcome in our current conflict.’ ”
“What is the status of your cities?” Dalinar asked. “What have the parshmen been doing there? Do they seem to have a goal beyond wanton destruction?”
Tensely, they waited for word. So far they’d been able to discover blessed little about the parshmen the world over. Captain Kaladin sent reports using scribes from towns he visited, but knew next to nothing. Cities were in chaos, and reliable information scarce.
“ ‘Fortunately,’ ” came the reply, “ ‘our city stands, and the enemy is not actively attacking any longer. We are negotiating with the hostiles.’ ”
“Negotiating?” Dalinar said, shocked. He turned to Teshav, who shook her head in wonder.
“Please clarify, Your Majesty,” Navani said. “The Voidbringers are willing to negotiate with you?”
“ ‘Yes,’ ” came the reply. “ ‘We are exchanging contracts. They have very detailed demands, with outrageous stipulations. We hope that we can forestall armed conflict in order to gather ourselves and fortify the city.’ ”
“They can write?” Navani pressed. “The Voidbringers themselves are sending you contracts?”
“ ‘The average parshman cannot write, so far as we can tell,’ ” the reply came. “ ‘But some are different—stronger, with strange powers. They do not speak like the others.’ ”
“Your Majesty,” Dalinar said, stepping up to the spanreed writing table, speaking more urgently—as if the emperor and his ministers could hear his passion through the written word. “I need to talk to you directly. I can come myself, through the portal we wrote of earlier. We must get it working again.”
Silence. It stretched so long that Dalinar found himself grinding his teeth, itching to summon a Shardblade and dismiss it, over and over, as had been his habit as a youth. He’d picked it up from his brother.
A response finally came. “ ‘We regret to inform you that the device you mention,’ ” Kalami read, “ ‘is not functional in our city. We have investigated it, and have found that it was destroyed long ago. We cannot come to you, nor you to us. Many apologies.’ ”
“He’s telling us this now?” Dalinar said. “Storms! That’s information we could have used as soon as he learned it!”
“It’s a lie,” Navani said. “The Oathgate on the Shattered Plains functioned after centuries of storms and crem buildup. The one in Azimir is a monument in the Grand Market, a large dome in the center of the city.”
Or so she’d determined from maps. The one in Kholinar had been incorporated into the palace structure, while the one in Thaylen City was some kind of religious monument. A beautiful relic like this wouldn’t simply be destroyed.
“I agree with Brightness Navani’s assessment,” Teshav said. “They are worried about the idea of you or your armies visiting. This is an excuse.” She frowned, as if the emperor and his ministers were little more than spoiled children disobeying their tutors.
The spanreed started writing again.
“What does it say?” Dalinar said, anxious.
“It’s an affidavit,” Navani said, amused. “That the Oathgate is not functional, signed by imperial architects and stormwardens.” She read further. “Oh, this is delightful. Only the Azish would assume you’d want certification that something is broken.”
“Notably,” Kalami added, “it only certifies that the device ‘does not function as a portal.’ But of course it would not, not unless a Radiant were to visit and work it. This affidavit basically says that when turned off, the device doesn’t work.”
“Write this, Kalami,” Dalinar said. “Your Majesty. You ignored me once. Destruction caused by the Everstorm was the result. Please, this time listen. You cannot negotiate with the Voidbringers. We must unify, share information, and protect Roshar. Together.”
She wrote it and Dalinar waited, hands pressed against the table.
“ ‘We misspoke when we mentioned negotiations,’ ” Kalami read. “ ‘It was a mistake of translation. We agree to share information, but time is short right now. We will contact you again to further discuss. Farewell, Highprince Kholin.’ ”
“Bah!” Dalinar said, pushing himself back from the table. “Fools, idiots! Storming lighteyes and Damnation’s own politics!” He stalked across the room, wishing he had something to kick, before forcing his temper under control.
“That’s more of a stonewall than I expected,” Navani said, folding her arms. “Brightness Khal?”
“In my experiences with the Azish,” Teshav said, “they are extremely proficient at saying very little in as many words as possible. This is not an unusual example of communication with their upper ministers. Don’t be put off; it will take time to accomplish anything with them.”
“Time during which Roshar burns,” Dalinar said. “Why did they pull back regarding their claim to have had negotiations with the Voidbringers? Are they thinking of allying themselves to the enemy?”
“I hesitate to guess,” Teshav said. “But I would say that they simply decided they’d given away more information than intended.”
“We need Azir,” Dalinar said. “Nobody in Makabak will listen to us unless we have Azir’s blessing, not to mention that Oathgate.…” He trailed off as a different spanreed on the table started blinking.
“It’s the Thaylens,” Kalami said. “They’re early.”
“You want to reschedule?” Navani asked.
Dalinar shook his head. “No, we can’t afford to wait another few days before the queen can spare time again.” He took a deep breath. Storms, talking to politicians was more exhausting than a hundred-mile march in full armor. “Proceed, Kalami. I’ll contain my frustration.”
Navani settled down on one of the seats, though Dalinar remained standing. Light poured in through the windows, pure and bright. It flowed down, bathing him. He breathed in, almost feeling as if he could taste the sunlight. He’d spent too many days inside the twisting stone corridors of Urithiru, lit by the frail light of candles and lamps.
“ ‘Her Royal Highness,’ ” Kalami read, “ ‘Brightness Fen Rnamdi, queen of Thaylenah, writes to you.’ ” Kalami paused. “Brightlord … pardon the interruption, but that indicates that the queen holds the spanreed herself rather than using a scribe.”
To another woman, that would have been intimidating. To Kalami, it was merely one of many footnotes—which she added copiously to the bottom of the page before preparing the reed to relay Dalinar’s words.
“Your Majesty,” Dalinar said, clasping his hands behind his back and pacing the stage at the center of the seats. Do better. Unite them. “I send you greetings from Urithiru, holy city of the Knights Radiant, and extend to you our humblest invitation. This tower is truly a sight to behold, matched only by the glory of a sitting monarch. I would be honored to present it for you to experience.”
The spanreed quickly scribbled a reply. Queen Fen was writing directly in Alethi. “ ‘Kholin,’ ” Kalami read, “ ‘you old brute. Quit spreading chull scat. What do you really want?’ ”
“I always did like her,” Navani noted.
“I’m being sincere, Your Majesty,” Dalinar said. “My only desire is for us to meet in person, and to talk to you and show you what we’ve discovered. The world is changing around us.”
“ ‘Oh,’ ” came the reply, “ ‘the world is changing, is it? What led you to this incredible conclusion? Was it the fact that our slaves suddenly became Voidbringers, or was it perhaps the storm that blew the wrong way,’—She wrote that twice as large as the line around it, Brightlord—‘ripping our cities apart?’ ”
Aladar cleared his throat. “Her Majesty seems to be having a bad day.”
“She’s insulting us,” Navani said. “For Fen, that actually implies a good day.”
“She’s always been perfectly civil the few times I’ve met her,” Dalinar said with a frown.
“She was being queenly then,” Navani said. “You’ve got her talking to you directly. Trust me, it’s a good sign.”
“Your Majesty,” Dalinar said, “please tell me of your parshmen. The transformation came upon them?”
“ ‘Yes,’ ” she replied. “ ‘Storming monsters stole our best ships—almost everything in the harbor from single-masted sloops on up—and escaped the city.’ ”
“They … sailed?” Dalinar said, again shocked. “Confirm. They didn’t attack?”
“ ‘There were some scuffles,’ ” Fen wrote, “ ‘but most everyone was too busy dealing with the effects of the storm. By the time we got things somewhat sorted out, they were sailing away in a grand fleet of royal warships and private trading vessels alike.’ ”
Dalinar drew a breath. We don’t know half as much about the Voidbringers as we assumed. “Your Majesty,” he continued. “You might remember that we warned you about the imminent arrival of that storm.”
“ ‘I believed you,’ ” Fen said. “ ‘If only because we got word from New Natanan confirming it. We tried to prepare, but a nation cannot upend four millennia worth of tradition at a snap of the fingers. Thaylen City is a shambles, Kholin. The storm broke our aqueducts and sewer systems, and ripped apart our docks—flattened the entire outer market! We have to fix all our cisterns, reinforce our buildings to withstand storms, and rebuild society—all without any parshman laborers and in the middle of the storming Weeping. I don’t have time for sightseeing.’ ”
“It’s hardly sightseeing, Your Majesty,” Dalinar said. “I am aware of your problems, and dire though they are, we cannot ignore the Voidbringers. I intend to convene a grand conference of kings to fight this threat.”
“ ‘Led by you,’ ” Fen wrote in reply. “ ‘Of course.’ ”
“Urithiru is the natural location for a meeting,” Dalinar said. “Your Majesty, the Knights Radiant have returned—we speak again their ancient oaths, and bind the Surges of nature to us. If we can restore your Oathgate to functionality, you can be here in an afternoon, then return the same evening to direct the needs of your city.”
Navani nodded at this tactic, though Aladar folded his arms, looking thoughtful.
“What?” Dalinar asked him as Kalami wrote.
“We need a Radiant to travel to the city to activate their Oathgate, right?” Aladar asked.
“Yes,” Navani said. “A Radiant needs to unlock the gate on this side—which we can do at any moment—then one has to travel to the destination city and undo the lock there as well. That done, a Radiant can initiate a transfer from either location.”
“Then the only one we have that can theoretically get to Thaylen City is the Windrunner,” Aladar said. “But what if it takes him months to get back here? Or what if he’s captured by the enemy? Can we even make good on our promises, Dalinar?”
A troubling problem, but one that Dalinar thought he might have an answer to. There was a weapon that he’d decided to keep hidden for now. It might work as well as a Radiant’s Shardblade in opening the Oathgates—and might let someone reach Thaylen City by flight.
That was moot for the time being. First he needed a willing ear on the other side of the spanreed.
Fen’s reply came. “ ‘I will admit that my merchants are intrigued by these Oathgates. We have lore surrounding them here, that the one most Passionate could cause the portal of worlds to open again. I think every girl in Thaylenah dreams of being the one to invoke it.’ ”
“The Passions,” Navani said with a downward turn of her lips. The Thaylens had a pagan pseudo-religion, and that had always been a curious aspect in dealing with them. They would praise the Heralds one moment, then speak of the Passions the next.
Well, Dalinar wasn’t one to fault another for unconventional beliefs.
“ ‘If you want to send me what you know about these Oathgates, well, that sounds great,’ ” Fen continued. “ ‘But I’m not interested in some grand conference of kings. You let me know what you boys come up with, because I’m going to be here frantically trying to rebuild my city.’ ”
“Well,” Aladar said, “at least we finally got an honest response.”
“I’m not convinced this is honest,” Dalinar said. He rubbed his chin, thinking. He’d only met this woman a few times, but something seemed off about her responses.
“I agree, Brightlord,” Teshav said. “I think any Thaylen would jump at the chance to come pull strings at a meeting of monarchs, if only to see if she can find a way to get trade deals out of them. She is most certainly hiding something.”
“Offer troops,” Navani said, “to help her rebuild.”
“Your Majesty,” Dalinar said, “I am deeply grieved to hear of your losses. I have many soldiers here who are currently unoccupied. I would gladly send you a battalion to help repair your city.”
The reply was slow in coming. “ ‘I’m not sure what I think of having Alethi troops on my stone, well intentioned or not.’ ”
Aladar grunted. “She’s worried about invasion? Everyone knows Alethi and ships don’t mix.”
“She’s not worried about us arriving on ships,” Dalinar said. “She’s worried about an army of troops suddenly materializing in the center of her city.”
A very rational worry. If Dalinar had the inclination, he could send a Windrunner to secretly open a city’s Oathgate, and invade in an unprecedented assault that appeared right behind enemy lines.
He needed allies, not subjects, so he wouldn’t do it—at least not to a potentially friendly city. Kholinar, however, was another story. They still didn’t have reliable word of what was happening in the Alethi capital. But if the rioting was still going on, he’d been thinking that there might be a way to get armies in and restore order.
For now, he needed to focus on Queen Fen. “Your Majesty,” he said, nodding for Kalami to write, “consider my offer of troops, please. And as you do, might I suggest that you begin searching among your people for budding Knights Radiant? They are the key to working Oathgates.
“We have had a number of Radiants manifest near the Shattered Plains. They are formed through an interaction with certain spren, who seem to be searching for worthy candidates. I can only assume this is happening worldwide. It is entirely likely that among the people of your city, someone has already spoken the oaths.”
“You’re giving up quite an advantage, Dalinar,” Aladar noted.
“I’m planting a seed, Aladar,” Dalinar said. “And I’ll plant it on any hill I can find, regardless of who owns it. We must fight as a unified people.”
“I don’t dispute that,” Aladar said, standing up and stretching. “But your knowledge of the Radiants is a bargaining point, one that can perhaps draw people to you—force them to work with you. Give up too much, and you might find a ‘headquarters’ for the Knights Radiant in every major city across Roshar. Rather than working together, you’ll have them competing to recruit.”
He was right, unfortunately. Dalinar hated turning knowledge into bargaining chips, but what if this was why he’d always failed in his negotiations with the highprinces? He wanted to be honest, straightforward, and let the pieces fall where they may. But it seemed that someone better at the game—and more willing to break the rules—always snatched the pieces from the air as he dropped them, then set them down the way they wanted.
“And,” he said quickly for Kalami to add, “we would be happy to send our Radiants to train those you discover, then introduce them to the system and fraternity of Urithiru, to which each of them has a right by nature of their oaths.”
Kalami added this, then twisted the spanreed to indicate they were done and waiting for a reply.
“ ‘We will consider this,’ ” Kalami read as the spanreed scribbled across the page. “ ‘The crown of Thaylenah thanks you for your interest in our people, and we will consider negotiations regarding your offer of troops. We have sent some of our few remaining cutters to track down the fleeing parshmen, and will inform you of what we discover. Until we speak again, Highprince.’ ”
“Storms,” Navani said. “She reverted to queenspeak. We lost her somewhere in there.”
Dalinar sat down in the seat next to her and let out a long sigh.
“Dalinar…” she said.
“I’m fine, Navani,” he said. “I can’t expect glowing commitments to cooperation on my first attempt. We’ll just have to keep trying.”
The words were more optimistic than he felt. He wished he could talk to these people in person, instead of over spanreed.
They talked to the princess of Yezier next, followed by the prince of Tashikk. They didn’t have Oathgates, and were less essential to his plan, but he wanted to at least open lines of communication with them.
Neither gave him more than vague answers. Without the Azish emperor’s blessing, he wouldn’t be able to get any of the smaller Makabaki kingdoms to commit. Perhaps the Emuli or the Tukari would listen, but he’d only ever get one of those two, considering their long-standing feud.
At the end of the last conference, Aladar and his daughter excusing themselves, Dalinar stretched, feeling worn down. And this wasn’t the end of it. He would have discussions with the monarchs of Iri—it had three, strangely. The Oathgate at Rall Elorim was in their lands, making them important—and they held sway over nearby Rira, which had another Oathgate.
Beyond that, of course, there were the Shin to deal with. They hated using spanreeds, so Navani had poked at them through a Thaylen merchant who had been willing to relay information.
Dalinar’s shoulder protested as he stretched. He had found middle age to be like an assassin—quiet, creeping along behind him. Much of the time he would go about his life as he always had, until an unexpected ache or pain gave warning. He was not the youth he had once been.
And bless the Almighty for that, he thought idly, bidding farewell to Navani—who wanted to sift through information reports from various spanreed stations around the world. Aladar’s daughter and scribes were gathering them in bulk for her.
Dalinar collected several of his guards, leaving others for Navani should she need some extra hands, and climbed up along the rows of seats to the room’s exit at the top. Hovering just outside the doorway—like an axehound banished from the warmth of the fire—stood Elhokar.
“Your Majesty?” Dalinar said, starting. “I’m glad you could make the meeting. Are you feeling better?”
“Why do they refuse you, Uncle?” Elhokar asked, ignoring the question. “Do they think perhaps you will try to usurp their thrones?”
Dalinar drew in his breath sharply, and his guards looked embarrassed to be standing nearby. They backed up to give him and the king privacy.
“Elhokar…” Dalinar said.
“You likely think I say this in spite,” the king said, poking his head into the room, noting his mother, then looking back at Dalinar. “I don’t. You are better than I am. A better soldier, a better person, and certainly a better king.”
“You do yourself a disservice, Elhokar. You must—”
“Oh, save your platitudes, Dalinar. For once in your life, just be honest with me.”
“You think I haven’t been?”
Elhokar raised his hand and lightly touched his own chest. “Perhaps you have been, at times. Perhaps the liar here is me—lying to tell myself I could do this, that I could be a fraction of the man my father was. No, don’t interrupt me, Dalinar. Let me have my say. Voidbringers? Ancient cities full of wonder? The Desolations?” Elhokar shook his head. “Perhaps … perhaps I’m a fine king. Not extraordinary, but not an abject failure. But in the face of these events, the world needs better than fine.”
There seemed a fatalism to his words, and that sent a worried shiver through Dalinar. “Elhokar, what are you saying?”
Elhokar strode into the chamber and called down to those at the bottom of the rows of seats. “Mother, Brightness Teshav, would you witness something for me?”
Storms, no, Dalinar thought, hurrying after Elhokar. “Don’t do this, son.”
“We all must accept the consequences of our actions, Uncle,” Elhokar said. “I’ve been learning this very slowly, as I can be as dense as a stone.”
“But—”
“Uncle, am I your king?” Elhokar demanded.
“Yes.”
“Well, I shouldn’t be.” He knelt, shocking Navani and causing her to pull to a stop three-quarters of the way up the steps. “Dalinar Kholin,” Elhokar said in a loud voice, “I swear to you now. There are princes and highprinces. Why not kings and highkings? I give an oath, immutable and witnessed, that I accept you as my monarch. As Alethkar is to me, I am to you.”
Dalinar breathed out, looking to Navani’s aghast face, then down to his nephew, kneeling as a vassal on the floor.
“You did ask for this, Uncle,” Elhokar said. “Not specifically in words, but it is the only place we could have gone. You have slowly been taking command ever since you decided to trust those visions.”
“I’ve tried to include you,” Dalinar said. Silly, impotent words. He should be better than that. “You are right, Elhokar. I’m sorry.”
“Are you?” Elhokar asked. “Are you really?”
“I’m sorry,” Dalinar said, “for your pain. I’m sorry that I didn’t handle this better. I’m sorry that this … this must be. Before you make this oath, tell me what you expect that it entails?”
“I’ve already said the words,” Elhokar said, growing red faced. “Before witnesses. It is done. I’ve—”
“Oh, stand up,” Dalinar said, grabbing him by the arm and hauling him to his feet. “Don’t be dramatic. If you really want to swear this oath, I’ll let you. But let’s not pretend you can sweep into a room, shout a few words, and assume it’s a legal contract.”
Elhokar pulled his arm free and rubbed it. “Won’t even let me abdicate with dignity.”
“You’re not abdicating,” Navani said, joining them. She shot a glare at the guards, who stood watching with slack jaws, and they grew white at the glare. She pointed at them as if to say, Not a word of this to anyone else. “Elhokar, you intend to shove your uncle into a position above you. He’s right to ask. What will this mean for Alethkar?”
“I…” Elhokar swallowed. “He should give up his lands to his heir. Dalinar is a king of somewhere else, after all. Dalinar, Highking of Urithiru, maybe the Shattered Plains.” He stood straighter, speaking more certainly. “Dalinar must stay out of the direct management of my lands. He can give me commands, but I decide how to see them accomplished.”
“It sounds reasonable,” Navani said, glancing at Dalinar.
Reasonable, but gut-wrenching. The kingdom he’d fought for—the kingdom he’d forged in pain, exhaustion, and blood—now rejected him.
This is my land now, Dalinar thought. This tower covered in coldspren. “I can accept these terms, though at times I might need to give commands to your highprinces.”
“As long as they’re in your domain,” Elhokar said, a hint of stubbornness to his voice, “I consider them under your authority. While they visit Urithiru or the Shattered Plains, command as you wish. When they return to my kingdom, you must go through me.” He looked to Dalinar, and then glanced down, as if embarrassed to be making demands.
“Very well,” Dalinar said. “Though we need to work this out with scribes before we make the change officially. And before we go too far, we should make certain there is still an Alethkar for you to rule.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing. Uncle, I want to lead our forces to Alethkar and recapture our homeland. Something is wrong in Kholinar. More than these riots or my wife’s supposed behavior, more than the spanreeds going still. The enemy is doing something in the city. I’ll take an army to stop it, and save the kingdom.”
Elhokar? Leading troops? Dalinar had been imagining himself leading a force, cutting through the Voidbringer ranks, sweeping them from Alethkar and marching into Kholinar to restore order.
Truth was, though, it didn’t make sense for either of them to lead such an assault. “Elhokar,” Dalinar said, leaning in. “I’ve been considering something. The Oathgate is attached to the palace itself. We don’t need to march an army all the way to Alethkar. All we need to do is restore that device! Once it works, we can transport our forces into the city to secure the palace, restore order, and fend off the Voidbringers.”
“Get into the city,” Elhokar said. “Uncle, to do that we might need an army in the first place!”
“No,” Dalinar said. “A small team could reach Kholinar far faster than an army. As long as there was a Radiant with them, they could sneak in, restore the Oathgate, and open the way for the rest of us.”
Elhokar perked up. “Yes! I’ll do it, Uncle. I’ll take a team and reclaim our home. Aesudan is there; if the rioting is still happening, she’s fighting against it.”
That wasn’t what the reports—before they’d cut off—had suggested to Dalinar. If anything, the queen was the cause of the riots. And he certainly hadn’t been intending Elhokar to go on this mission himself.
Consequences. The lad was earnest, as he’d always been. Besides, Elhokar seemed to have learned something from his near death at the hands of assassins. He was certainly humbler now than he’d been in years past.
“It is fitting,” Dalinar said, “that their king should be the one who saves them. I will see that you have whatever resources you need, Elhokar.”
Glowing gloryspren orbs burst around Elhokar. He grinned at them. “I only seem to see those when I’m around you, Uncle. Funny. For all that I should resent you, I don’t. It’s hard to resent a man who is doing his best. I’ll do it. I’ll save Alethkar. I need one of your Radiants. The hero, preferably.”
“The hero?”
“The bridgeman,” Elhokar said. “The soldier. He needs to go with me, so if I screw up and fail, someone will be there to save the city anyway.”
Dalinar blinked. “That’s very … um…”
“I’ve had ample chances to reflect lately, Uncle,” Elhokar said. “The Almighty has preserved me, despite my stupidity. I’ll bring the bridgeman with me, and I’ll observe him. Figure out why he’s so special. See if he’ll teach me to be like him. And if I fail…” He shrugged. “Well, Alethkar is in safe hands regardless, right?”
Dalinar nodded, bemused.
“I need to make plans,” Elhokar said. “I’ve only just recovered from my wounds. But I can’t leave until the hero returns anyway. Could he fly me and my chosen team to the city? That would certainly be the fastest way. I will want every report we’ve had from Kholinar, and I need to study the Oathgate device in person. Yes, and have drawings done comparing it to the one in the city. And…” He beamed. “Thank you, Uncle. Thank you for believing in me, if only this small amount.”
Dalinar nodded to him, and Elhokar retreated, a spring in his step. Dalinar sighed, feeling overwhelmed by the exchange. Navani hovered by his side as he settled down in one of the seats for the Radiants, beside a pedestal for a little spren.
On one side, he had a king swearing to him an oath he didn’t want. On the other, he had an entire group of monarchs who wouldn’t listen to his most rational of suggestions. Storms.
“Dalinar?” Kalami said. “Dalinar!”
He leaped to his feet, and Navani spun. Kalami was watching one of the spanreeds, which had started writing. What was it now? What terrible news awaited him?
“ ‘Your Majesty,’ ” Kalami read from the page, “ ‘I consider your offer generous, and your advice wise. We have located the device you call an Oathgate. One of my people has come forward, and—remarkably—claims to be Radiant. Her spren directed her to speak with me; we plan to use her Shardblade to test the device.
“ ‘If it works, I will come to you in all haste. It is well that someone is attempting to organize a resistance to the evils that befall us. The nations of Roshar must put aside their squabbles, and the reemergence of the holy city of Urithiru is proof to me that the Almighty guides your hand. I look forward to counseling with you and adding my forces to yours in a joint operation to protect these lands.’ ” She looked up at him, amazed. “It was sent by Taravangian, king of Jah Keved and Kharbranth.”
Taravangian? Dalinar hadn’t expected him to reply so quickly. He was said to be a kindly, if somewhat simple man. Perfect for ruling a small city-state with the help of a governing council. His elevation to king of Jah Keved was widely seen as an act of spite from the former king, who hadn’t wanted to give the throne to any of his rivals’ houses.
The words still warmed Dalinar. Someone had listened. Someone was willing to join him. Bless that man, bless him.
If Dalinar failed everywhere else, at least he would have King Taravangian at his side.
13. Chaperone
I ask only that you read or listen to these words.
Shallan breathed out Stormlight and stepped through it, feeling it envelop her, transform her.
She’d been moved, upon request, to Sebarial’s section of Urithiru, in part because he’d promised her a room with a balcony. Fresh air and a view of the mountain peaks. If she couldn’t be completely free of this building’s shadowed depths, then at least she could have a home on the borders.
She pulled at her hair, pleased to see it had turned black. She had become Veil, a disguise she’d been working on for some time.
Shallan held up hands that were callused and worked—even the safehand. Not that Veil was unfeminine. She kept her nails filed, and liked to dress nicely, keep her hair brushed. She simply didn’t have time for frivolities. A good sturdy coat and trousers suited Veil better than a flowing havah. And she had no time for an extended sleeve covering her safehand. She’d wear a glove, thank you very much.
At the moment she was dressed in her nightgown; she’d change later, once she was ready to sneak out into Urithiru’s halls. She needed some practice first. Though she felt bad about the use of Stormlight when everyone else was scrimping, Dalinar had told her to train with her powers.
She strode through her chamber, adopting Veil’s gait—confident and sturdy, never prim. You couldn’t balance a book on Veil’s head as she walked, but she’d happily balance one on your face after she knocked you unconscious.
She circled the room several times, crossing the patch of evening light from the window. Her room was ornamented by bright circular patterns of strata on the walls. The stone was smooth to the touch, and a knife couldn’t scratch it.
There wasn’t much furniture, though Shallan was hopeful that the latest scavenging expeditions to the warcamps would return with something she could appropriate from Sebarial. For now she did what she could with some blankets, a single stool, and—blessedly—a hand mirror. She’d hung it on the wall, tied to a stone knob that she assumed was for hanging pictures.
She checked her face in the mirror. She wanted to get to the point where she could become Veil at a moment’s notice, without needing to review sketches. She prodded at her features, but of course as the more angular nose and pronounced forehead were a result of Lightweaving, she couldn’t feel them.
When she frowned, Veil’s face mimicked the motion perfectly. “Something to drink, please,” she said. No, rougher. “Drink. Now.” Too strong?
“Mmm,” Pattern said. “The voice becomes a good lie.”
“Thank you. I’ve been working on sounds.” Veil’s voice was deeper than Shallan’s, rougher. She’d started to wonder, how far could she go in changing how things sounded?
For now, she wasn’t sure she’d gotten the lips right in the illusion. She sauntered over to her art supplies and flipped open her sketchbook, looking for renditions of Veil she’d drawn instead of going to dinner with Sebarial and Palona.
The first page of the sketchbook was of the corridor with the twisting strata she’d passed through the other day: lines of madness curling toward darkness. She flipped to the next, a picture of one of the tower’s budding markets. Thousands of merchants, washwomen, prostitutes, innkeepers, and craftsmen of all varieties were setting up in Urithiru. Shallan knew well how many—she’d been the one to bring them all through the Oathgate.
In her sketch, the black upper reaches of the large market cavern loomed over tiny figures scurrying between tents, holding fragile lights. The next was another tunnel into darkness. And the next. Then a room where the strata coiled about one another in a mesmerizing manner. She hadn’t realized she’d done so many. She flipped twenty pages before she found her sketches of Veil.
Yes, the lips were right. The build was wrong, however. Veil had a lean strength, and that wasn’t coming through in the nightgown. It looked too much like Shallan’s figure beneath.
Someone knocked on the wooden plate hung outside her rooms. She had just a cloth draping the doorway right now. Many of the tower’s doors had warped over the years; hers had been ripped out, and she was still waiting on a replacement.
The one knocking would be Palona, who had once again noticed that Shallan had skipped dinner. Shallan sucked in a breath, destroying the image of Veil, recovering some of the Stormlight from her Lightweaving. “Come,” she said. Honestly, it didn’t seem to matter to Palona that Shallan was a storming Knight Radiant now, she’d still mother her all the—
Adolin stepped in, carrying a large plate of food in one hand, some books under the other arm. He saw her and stumbled, nearly dropping it all.
Shallan froze, then yelped and tucked her bare safehand behind her back. Adolin didn’t even have the decency to blush at finding her practically naked. He balanced the food in his hand, recovering from his stumble, and then grinned.
“Out!” Shallan said, waving her freehand at him. “Out, out, out!”
He backed away awkwardly, through the draped cloth over the doorway. Stormfather! Shallan’s blush was probably so bright they could have used her as a signal to send the army to war. She pulled on a glove, then wrapped that in a safepouch, then threw on the blue dress she had draped over the back of her chair and did up the sleeve. She didn’t have the presence of mind to pull on her bodice vest first, not that she really needed one anyway. She kicked it under a blanket instead.
“In my defense,” Adolin said from outside, “you did invite me in.”
“I thought you were Palona!” Shallan said, doing up the buttons on the side of her dress—which proved difficult, with three layers covering her safehand.
“You know, you could check to see who is at your door.”
“Don’t make this my fault,” Shallan said. “You’re the one slipping into young ladies’ bedrooms practically unannounced.”
“I knocked!”
“The knock was feminine.”
“It was … Shallan!”
“Did you knock with one hand or two?”
“I’m carrying a storming platter of food—for you, by the way. Of course the knock was one-handed. And seriously, who knocks with two?”
“It was quite feminine, then. I’d have thought that imitating a woman to catch a glimpse of a young lady in her undergarments was beneath you, Adolin Kholin.”
“Oh, for Damnation’s sake, Shallan. Can I come in now? And just so we’re clear, I’m a man and your betrothed, my name is Adolin Kholin, I was born under the sign of the nine, I have a birthmark on the back of my left thigh, and I had crab curry for breakfast. Anything else you need to know?”
She poked her head out, pulling the cloth tight around her neck. “Back of your left thigh, eh? What’s a girl got to do to sneak a glimpse of that?”
“Knock like a man, apparently.”
She gave him a grin. “Just a sec. This dress is being a pain.” She ducked back into the room.
“Yes, yes. Take your time. I’m not standing out here holding a heavy platter of food, smelling it after having skipped dinner so I could dine with you.”
“It’s good for you,” Shallan said. “Builds strength, or something. Isn’t that the sort of thing you do? Strangle rocks, stand on your head, throw boulders around.”
“Yes, I have quite my share of murdered rocks stuffed under my bed.”
Shallan grabbed her dress with her teeth at the neck to pull it tight, helping with the buttons. Maybe.
“What is it with women and their undergarments anyway?” Adolin said, the platter clinking as some of the plates slid against one another. “I mean, that shift covers basically the same parts as a formal dress.”
“It’s the decency of it,” Shallan said around a mouthful of fabric. “Besides, certain things have a tendency to poke out through a shift.”
“Still seems arbitrary to me.”
“Oh, and men aren’t arbitrary about clothing? A uniform is basically the same as any other coat, right? Besides, aren’t you the one who spends his afternoons searching through fashion folios?”
He chuckled and started a reply, but Shallan, finally dressed, swept back the sheet on her doorway. Adolin stood up from leaning against the wall of the corridor and took her in—frazzled hair, dress that she had missed two buttons on, cheeks flushed. Then he grinned a dopey grin.
Ash’s eyes … he actually thought she was pretty. This wonderful, princely man actually liked being with her. She’d traveled to the ancient city of the Knights Radiant, but compared to Adolin’s affection, all the sights of Urithiru were dun spheres.
He liked her. And he brought her food.
Do not find a way to screw this up, Shallan thought to herself as she took the books from under his arm. She stepped aside, letting him enter and set the platter on the floor. “Palona said you hadn’t eaten,” he said, “and then she found out I’d skipped dinner. So, uh…”
“So she sent you with a lot,” Shallan said, inspecting the platter piled high with dishes, flatbreads, and shellfood.
“Yeah,” Adolin said, standing and scratching at his head. “I think it’s a Herdazian thing.”
Shallan hadn’t realized how hungry she was. She’d been intending to get something at one of the taverns later tonight while prowling about wearing Veil’s face. Those taverns had set up in the main market, despite Navani’s attempts to send them elsewhere, and Sebarial’s merchants had quite the stock to sell.
Now that this was all before her … well, she didn’t worry much about decorum as she settled down on the ground and started to spoon herself up a thin, watery curry with vegetables.
Adolin remained standing. He did look sharp in that blue uniform, though admittedly she’d never really seen him in anything else. Birthmark on the thigh, eh …
“You’ll have to sit on the ground,” Shallan said. “No chairs yet.”
“I just realized,” he said, “this is your bedroom.”
“And my drawing room, and my sitting room, and my dining room, and my ‘Adolin says obvious things’ room. It’s quite versatile, this room—singular—of mine. Why?”
“I’m just wondering if it’s proper,” he said, then actually blushed—which was adorable. “For us to be in here alone.”
“Now you’re worried about propriety?”
“Well, I did recently get lectured about it.”
“That wasn’t a lecture,” Shallan said, taking a bite of food. The succulent tastes overwhelmed her mouth, bringing on that delightful sharp pain and mixing of flavor that you only got from the first bite of something sweet. She closed her eyes and smiled, savoring it.
“So … not a lecture?” Adolin said. “Was there to be more to that quip?”
“Sorry,” she said, opening her eyes. “It wasn’t a lecture, it was a creative application of my tongue to keep you distracted.” Looking at his lips, she could think of some other creative applications for her tongue.…
Right. She took a deep breath.
“It would be inappropriate,” Shallan said, “if we were alone. Fortunately, we are not.”
“Your ego doesn’t count as a separate individual, Shallan.”
“Ha! Wait. You think I have an ego?”
“It just sounded good—I don’t mean … Not that … Why are you grinning?”
“Sorry,” Shallan said, making two fists before herself and shivering in glee. She’d spent so long feeling timid, it was so satisfying to hear a reference to her confidence. It was working! Jasnah’s teaching about practicing and acting like she was in control. It was working.
Well, except for that whole part about having to admit to herself that she’d killed her mother. As soon as she thought of it, she instinctively tried to shove the memory away, but it wouldn’t budge. She’d spoken it to Pattern as a truth—which were the odd Ideals of the Lightweavers.
It was stuck in her mind, and every time she thought about it, the gaping wound flared up with pain again. Shallan had killed her mother. Her father had covered it up, pretended he’d murdered his wife, and the event had destroyed his life—driving him to anger and destruction.
Until eventually Shallan had killed him too.
“Shallan?” Adolin asked. “Are you well?”
No.
“Sure. Fine. Anyway, we aren’t alone. Pattern, come here please.” She held out her hand, palm up.
He reluctantly moved down from the wall where he’d been watching. As always, he made a ripple in whatever he crossed, be it cloth or stone—like there was something under the surface. His complex, fluctuating pattern of lines was always changing, melding, vaguely circular but with surprising tangents.
He crossed up her dress and onto her hand, then split out from beneath her skin and rose into the air, expanding fully into three dimensions. He hovered there, a black, eye-bending network of shifting lines—some patterns shrinking while others expanded, rippling across his surface like a field of moving grass.
She would not hate him. She could hate the sword she’d used to kill her mother, but not him. She managed to push aside the pain for now—not forgetting it, but hopefully not letting it spoil her time with Adolin.
“Prince Adolin,” Shallan said, “I believe you’ve heard my spren’s voice before. Let me introduce you formally. This is Pattern.”
Adolin knelt, reverent, and stared at the mesmerizing geometries. Shallan didn’t blame him; she’d lost herself more than once in that network of lines and shapes that almost seemed to repeat, but never quite did.
“Your spren,” Adolin said. “A Shallanspren.”
Pattern sniffed in annoyance at that.
“He’s called a Cryptic,” she said. “Every order of Radiant bonds a different variety of spren, and that bond lets me do what I do.”
“Craft illusions,” Adolin said softly. “Like that one with the map the other day.”
Shallan smiled and—realizing she had just a smidge of Stormlight left from her illusion earlier—was unable to resist showing off. She raised her sleeved safehand and breathed out, sending a shimmering patch of Stormlight above the blue cloth. It formed into a small image of Adolin from her sketches of him in his Shardplate. This one remained frozen, Shardblade on his shoulder, faceplate up—like a little doll.
“This is an incredible talent, Shallan,” Adolin said, poking at the version of himself—which fuzzed, offering no resistance. He paused, then poked at Pattern, who shied back. “Why do you insist on hiding this, pretending that you’re a different order than you are?”
“Well,” she said, thinking fast and closing her hand, dismissing the image of Adolin. “I just think it might give us an edge. Sometimes secrets are important.”
Adolin nodded slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, they are.”
“Anyway,” Shallan said. “Pattern, you’re to be our chaperone tonight.”
“What,” Pattern said with a hum, “is a chaperone?”
“That is someone who watches two young people when they are together, to make certain they don’t do anything inappropriate.”
“Inappropriate?” Pattern said. “Such as … dividing by zero?”
“What?” Shallan asked, looking to Adolin, who shrugged. “Look, just keep an eye on us. It will be all right.”
Pattern hummed, melting down into his two-dimensional form and taking up residence on the side of a bowl. He seemed content there, like a cremling snuggled into its crack.
Unable to wait any longer, Shallan dug into her meal. Adolin settled down across from her and attacked his own food. For a time, Shallan ignored her pain and savored the moment—good food, good company, the setting sun casting ruby and topaz light across the mountains and into the room. She felt like drawing this scene, but knew it was the type of moment she couldn’t capture on a page. It wasn’t about content or composition, but the pleasure of living.
The trick to happiness wasn’t in freezing every momentary pleasure and clinging to each one, but in ensuring one’s life would produce many future moments to anticipate.
Adolin—after finishing an entire plate of stranna haspers steamed in the shell—picked out a few chunks of pork from a creamy red curry, then put them on a plate and handed them in her direction. “Wanna try a bite?”
Shallan made a gagging noise.
“Come on,” he said, wagging the plate. “It’s delicious.”
“It would burn my lips off, Adolin Kholin,” Shallan said. “Don’t think I didn’t not