At the first main fortified plateau where Dalinar kept standing troops to watch the warcamps, Shallan and Adolin were able to deliver up the prisoners—with instructions for them to be brought to Narak for questioning. Adolin and Shallan requisitioned a carriage, and left the rest of the troops to make their way back more slowly.
Shallan passed the time looking out the carriage window, listening to the clopping of the horses and watching the fractured landscape of plateaus and chasms. Once this had all been so difficult to traverse. Now she did it in a plush carriage, and considered that inconvenient compared to being flown about by a Windrunner. How would it be once Navani got her flying devices working efficiently? Would flying by Windrunner be the inconvenience then?
Adolin scooted over beside her, and she felt his warmth. She closed her eyes and melted into him, breathing him in—as if she could feel his soul brushing against her own.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s not so bad. Really. Father knew this plan might come to fighting. If Ialai had been willing to quietly rule in the warcamps, we’d have left her alone. But we couldn’t ignore someone sitting in our backyard raising an army to depose us.”
Shallan nodded.
“That’s not what you’re worried about, is it?” Adolin asked.
“No. Not completely.” She turned and pressed her face into his chest. He’d removed his jacket, and the shirt beneath reminded her of when he came to their rooms after sparring. He always wanted to bathe immediately, and she … well, she rarely let him. Not until she was done with him, at least.
They rode in silence for some time, with Shallan snuggled against him. “You never push,” she eventually said. “Though you know I keep secrets from you.”
“You’ll tell me eventually.”
She gripped his shirt tight between her fingers. “It bothers you though, doesn’t it?”
He didn’t reply at first, which was different from his normal cheery assurances. “Yeah,” he finally said. “How could it not? I trust you, Shallan. But sometimes … I wonder if I can trust all three of you. Veil especially.”
“She’s trying to protect me in her own way,” Shallan said.
“And if she does something you or I wouldn’t want her to? Gets … physical with someone?”
“That’s not a worry,” Shallan said. “I promise, and she will too if you ask her. We have an understanding. I’m not worried about you and me, Adolin.”
“What are you worried about, then?”
She pulled closer, and couldn’t help imagining it. What he would do if he knew the real her. If he knew all the things she’d actually done.
It wasn’t just about him. What if Pattern knew? Dalinar? Her agents?
They would leave, and her life would become a wasteland. She’d be alone, as she deserved. Because of the truths she hid, her entire life was a lie. Shallan, the one they all knew best, was the fakest mask of them all.
No, Radiant said. You can face it. You can fight it. You imagine only the worst possible outcome.
But it’s possible, isn’t it? Shallan asked. It’s possible that they would leave me if they knew.
Radiant had no reply. And deep within Shallan, something else stirred. Formless. She had told herself that she would never create a new persona, and she wouldn’t. Formless wasn’t real.
But the possibility of it frightened Veil. And anything that frightened Veil terrified Shallan.
“I will explain someday,” Shallan said softly to Adolin. “I promise. When I’m ready.”
He squeezed her arm in reply. She didn’t deserve him—his goodness, his love. That was the trap she’d found herself in. The more he trusted her, the worse she felt. And she didn’t know how to get out. She couldn’t get out.
Please, she whispered. Save me.
Veil reluctantly emerged. She sat up, not pulling against Adolin any longer—and he seemed to understand, shifting his position in the seat. He had an uncanny ability to tell which of her was in control.
“We’re trying to help,” Veil said to him. “And we think that this year has been good for Shallan, overall. But right now, it’s probably better if we discuss another topic.”
“Sure,” Adolin said. “Can we talk about the fact that Ialai was more frightened of capture than death?”
“She … didn’t kill herself, Adolin,” Veil said. “We are reasonably certain she died from a pinprick of poison.”
He sat up straight. “So you’re saying someone in our team did it? One of my soldiers or one of your agents?” He paused. “Or … did you do it, Veil?”
“I didn’t,” Veil said. “But would it have been so bad if I had? We both know she needed to die.”
“She was a defenseless woman!”
“And it’s that different from what you did to Sadeas?”
“He was a soldier,” Adolin said. “That’s what makes it different.” He glanced out the window. “Maybe. Father thinks I did something terrible. But … I was right, Veil. I’m not going to let someone hide behind social propriety while threatening my family. I won’t let them use my honor against me. And … Stonefalls. I say things like that, and…”
“And it doesn’t sound so different from killing Ialai,” Veil said. “Regardless, I didn’t kill her.”
Shallan, having had a short breather, started to reemerge. Veil retreated, letting Shallan lean up against Adolin. He, though tense at first, let her do so.
She rested her head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat. His life. Pulsing within him like the thunder of a captive storm. Pattern seemed to sense the way that pulse calmed her, for he began humming from where he hung on the roof.
She would tell Adolin everything, eventually. She’d told him some already. About her father, and her mother, and her life in Jah Keved. But not the deepest things, the things she didn’t even remember herself. How could she tell him things that were clouded in her own memory?
She also hadn’t told him about the Ghostbloods. She wasn’t certain she could share that secret, but could … could she try? Begin, at least? At Veil and Radiant’s prompting, she searched for a way. After all, Dalinar kept saying that the next step was the most important one.
“There’s something you need to know,” she said. “Before you came in, Ialai implied that if I took her captive, she would be killed. She knew the blow was coming—that’s why I was suspicious of her death. She also said she didn’t kill Thanadal. That it was another group called the Ghostbloods. She thought the Ghostbloods would send someone for her—which was why she was certain she’d die.”
“We’ve been hunting them. Ialai was leading them.”
“No, dear, she was leading the Sons of Honor. The Ghostbloods are a different group.”
He scratched his head. “Are they the ones your … brother Helaran belonged to? The one that attacked Amaram, right? And Kaladin killed Helaran without knowing who he was?”
“Those were the Skybreakers. They’re not so secret any longer. They joined with the enemy—”
“Right. Radiants on the other team.” Those likely made sense to him, as he’d taken battlefield reports on them. The shadowy groups moving at night, on the other hand, were something he couldn’t fight directly. Dealing with them was to be her job.
She dug in her pocket as the carriage rolled over a particularly robust series of bumps. This path hadn’t been graded or leveled, and though the carriage driver did his best to miss the larger rockbuds, there was only so much he could do.
“The Ghostbloods,” Shallan said, “are the people who tried to kill Jasnah—and me by extension—by sinking our ship.”
“So they’re on Odium’s side,” Adolin said.
“It’s more complicated than that. Honestly, I’m not sure what they want, besides secrets. They were trying to get to Urithiru before Jasnah, but we beat them to it.” Led them to it might have been more accurate. “I’m not at all sure what they want those secrets for.”
“Power,” Adolin said.
That
response—the same one she’d given to Ialai—now seemed so simplistic. Mraize, and his inscrutable master Iyatil, were deliberate, precise people. Perhaps they were merely seeking to glean leverage or wealth from the chaos of the end of the world. Shallan realized she would be disappointed to discover that their plans were so pedestrian. Any corpse robber on a battlefield could exploit the misfortune of others.
Mraize was a hunter. He didn’t wait for opportunities. He went out and made them.
“What’s that?” Adolin asked, nodding to the book in her hand.
“Before she died,” Shallan said. “Ialai gave me a hint that led me to search the room and find this.”
“That’s why you didn’t want the guards to do it,” he said. “Because one of them might be a spy or assassin. Storms.”
“You might want to reassign your soldiers to boring, out-of-the-way posts for a season.”
“These are some of my best men!” Adolin complained. “Highly decorated! They just pulled off an extremely dangerous covert operation.”
“So give them a rest at some quiet post,” Shallan said. “Until we figure this out. I’ll watch my agents. If I discover it’s one of them, you can bring the men back.”
He sulked at the suggestion; he hated the idea of punishing a group of good men because one of them might be a spy. Adolin might claim he was different from his father, but in fact they were two shades of the same paint. Often, two similar colors clashed worse than wildly different ones would.
Shallan kicked the bag of notes and letters that Gaz had gathered, resting at their feet. “We’ll give that to your father’s scribes, but I’ll look through this book personally.”
“What’s in it?” Adolin asked, leaning to the side so he could see—but there were no pictures.
“I haven’t read the entire thing,” Shallan said. “It seems to be Ialai’s attempts to piece together what the Ghostbloods are planning. Like this page—a list of terms or names her spies had heard. She was trying to define what they were.” Shallan moved her finger down the page. “Nalathis. Scadarial. Tal Dain. Do you recognize any of those?”
“They sound like nonsense to me. Nalathis might have something to do with Nalan, the Skybreaker Herald.”
Ialai had noticed the same connection, but indicated these names might be places—ones she could not find in any atlas. Perhaps they were like Feverstone Keep, the place Dalinar had seen in his visions. Somewhere that had disappeared so long ago, no one remembered the name anymore.
Circled several times on one page at the end of the list was the word “Thaidakar” with the note, He leads them. But who is he? The name seems a title, much like Mraize. But neither are in a language I know.
Shallan was pretty sure she’d heard Mraize use the name Thaidakar before.
“So, this is our new mission?” Adolin asked. “We find out what these Ghostblood people are up to, and we stop them.” He took the palm-size notebook from her and flipped through the pages. “Maybe we should give this to Jasnah.”
“We will,” she said. “Eventually.”
“All right.” He gave it back, then put his arm around her and pulled her close. “But promise me that you—and I mean all of you—will avoid doing anything crazy until you talk to me.”
“Dear,” she said, “considering who you’re talking to, anything I am prone to try will be—by definition—crazy.”
He smiled at that, but gave her another comforting hug. She settled into the nook between his arm and chest, though he was too muscly to make a good pillow. She continued reading, but it wasn’t until an hour or so later that she realized—despite dancing around the topic with him—she hadn’t revealed she was a member of the Ghostbloods.
They were likely to put Shallan in the middle of whatever they were up to. So far—despite telling herself she was spying on them—she’d basically achieved every goal they’d asked of her. That meant a crisis was coming. The inflection point, past which she could not continue down this duplicitous path. Keeping secrets from Adolin was eating at her from the inside. Fueling Formless, pushing it toward a reality.
She needed a way out. To leave the Ghostbloods, break ties. Otherwise they’d get inside her head. And it was way too crowded in there already.
I didn’t kill Ialai though, Shallan thought. I was close to it, but I didn’t. So I’m not theirs entirely.
Mraize would want to speak to her about the mission, and about some other things she’d been doing for him, so she could bet on him visiting her soon. Maybe when he did, she would finally find the strength to break with the Ghostbloods.
A tin cage will cause the fabrial to diminish nearby attributes. A painrial, for example, can numb pain. Note that advanced designs of cages can use both steel and iron as well, changing the fabrial’s polarity depending on which metals are pushed to touch the gemstone.
—Lecture on fabrial mechanics presented by Navani Kholin to the coalition of monarchs, Urithiru, Jesevan, 1175
Kaladin was feeling quite a bit better as they neared the Shattered Plains. A few hours’ flying through open sky and sunlight always left him feeling refreshed. Right now, the man who had crumpled before Moash in that burning building seemed an entirely different person.
Syl flew up beside him as a ribbon of light. Kaladin’s Windrunners were Lashing Dalinar and the others; all Kaladin had to do was fly at the head of them all and look confident.
I’ve spoken to Yunfah again, Syl said in his mind. He’s here on the Plains. I think he wants to talk to you.
“Tell him to come up and see me, then,” Kaladin said. His voice was lost to the rushing wind, but Syl would catch it anyway.
She flitted off, followed by a few windspren. From this distance, Kaladin could almost make out the pattern to the Shattered Plains. So he gave a hand signal and reduced to a single Lashing.
A short time later, two blue-white ribbons of light came zipping up toward him. He could somehow tell Syl from the other one. There was a specific shade to her, as familiar to him as his own face.
The other light resolved into the shape of a tiny old man reclining on a small cloud as he flew beside Kaladin. The spren, Yunfah, had been bonded to Vratim, a Windrunner who had died a few months ago. At first, when they’d begun losing Radiants in battle, Kaladin had worried it would cause him to lose the spren as well. Syl, after all, had gone comatose many centuries ago when she’d lost her first Radiant.
Others, however, handled it differently. The majority, though grieved, seemed to want another bond soon—as it helped them move past the pain of loss. Kaladin didn’t pretend to understand spren psychology, but Yunfah had seemed to deal with the death of his Radiant well. Treating it as a battlefield loss of an ally, rather than the destruction of part of his own soul. Indeed, Yunfah appeared willing to bond another.
So far, he hadn’t—and for reasons Kaladin couldn’t understand. And as far as Kaladin knew, he was the sole free honorspren among them.
He says, Syl told Kaladin in his mind, that he’s still considering picking a new knight. He’s narrowed it down to five possibilities.
“Is Rlain one of them?”
Yunfah stood up on his cloud, his long beard whipping in the wind—though he had no real substance. Kaladin could read anger in his posture before Syl gave him the reply. She was acting as intermediary since the sound of the rushing wind was fairly loud, even at a single Lashing.
No, Syl said. He is angry at your repeated suggestion he bond one of the enemies.
“He won’t find a potential Windrunner more capable or earnest.”
He’s acting mad, Syl said. But I do think he’ll agree if you push him. He respects you, and honorspren like hierarchy. The ones who have joined us did so against the will of the general body of their peers; they’ll be looking for someone to be in charge.
All right then. “As your highmarshal and superior officer,” Kaladin said, “I forbid you to bond anyone else unless you try to work with Rlain first.”
The el
derly spren shook his fist at Kaladin.
“You have two choices, Yunfah,” Kaladin said, not waiting for Syl. “Obey me, or throw away all the work you’ve done to adapt to this realm. You need a bond or your mind will fade. I’m tired of waiting on your indecisiveness.”
The spren glared at him.
“Will you follow orders?”
The spren spoke.
He asks how long you’ll give him, Syl explained.
“Ten days,” Kaladin said. “And that is generous.”
Yunfah said something, then sped away, becoming a ribbon of light. Syl pulled up alongside Kaladin’s head.
He said “fine” before leaving, she said. I have little doubt he’ll at least consider Rlain now. Yunfah doesn’t want to go back to Shadesmar; he likes this realm too much.
Kaladin nodded, and felt uplifted by the result. If this worked out, Rlain would be thrilled.
Followed by the others, Kaladin swooped down toward Narak, their outpost at the center of the Shattered Plains. Navani’s engineers were turning the entire plateau from ruins into a fortified base. A wall to the east—easily six feet wide at its foot—was being built, low and squat, against the storms. A thinner wall wrapped the rest of the plateau, and lightning rods helped protect from the Everstorm.
Kaladin alighted on top of the wall and surveyed the fort. The engineers had scraped away most of the old Parshendi buildings, preserving only the most ancient of the ruins for study. Supply dumps, barracks, and storm cisterns rose around them now. With the wall going right up to the chasm, and with collapsible bridges outside, this isolated plateau was quickly becoming impregnable from ordinary ground assault.
“Imagine if the Parshendi had known modern fortification techniques,” Kaladin said to Syl as she blew past in the shape of tumbling leaves. “A few strategic forts set up like this across the Plains, and we’d never have broken them out.”
“As I recall,” she replied, “we didn’t so much break them out as purposely fall into their trap and hope it wouldn’t hurt too much.”
Rhythm of War (9781429952040) Page 16
