Words of Radiance

by Brandon Sanderson

  “Still sore about what happened to you, I assume.”

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “Yes, I suppose I would. I am sorry that you were treated in such a way, but it could have been worse. You could have been hanged.”

  “I wouldn’t have wanted to be the executioner who tried that.” He said it with a quiet intensity.

  “Me neither,” Shallan said. “I think hanging people is a poor choice of professions for an executioner. Better to be the guy with an axe.”

  He frowned at her.

  “You see,” she said, “with the axe, it’s easier to get ahead. . . .”

  He stared. Then, after a moment, he winced. “Oh, storms. That was awful.”

  “No, it was funny. You seem to get those two mixed up a lot. Don’t worry. I’m here to help.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not that you aren’t witty, Shallan. I just feel like you try too hard. The world is not a sunny place, and frantically trying to turn everything into a joke is not going to change that.”

  “Technically,” she said, “it is a sunny place. Half the time.”

  “To people like you, perhaps,” Kaladin said.

  “What does that mean?”

  He grimaced. “Look, I don’t want to fight again, all right? I just . . . Please. Let’s let the topic drop.”

  “What if I promise not to get angry?”

  “Are you capable of that?”

  “Of course. I spend most of my time not being angry. I’m terribly proficient at it. Most of those times aren’t around you, granted, but I think I’ll be all right.”

  “You’re doing it again,” he said.

  “Sorry.”

  They walked in silence for a moment, passing plants in bloom with a shockingly well-preserved skeleton underneath them, somehow barely disturbed by the flowing of water in the chasm.

  “All right,” Kaladin said. “Here it is. I can imagine how the world must appear to someone like you. Growing up pampered, with everything you want. To someone like you, life is wonderful and sunny and worth laughing over. That’s not your fault, and I shouldn’t blame you. You haven’t had to deal with pain or death like I have. Sorrow is not your companion.”

  Silence. Shallan didn’t reply. How could she reply to that?

  “What?” Kaladin finally asked.

  “I’m trying to decide how to react,” Shallan said. “You see, you just said something very, very funny.”

  “Then why aren’t you laughing?”

  “Well, it isn’t that kind of funny.” She handed him her satchel and stepped onto a small dry rise of rock running through the middle of a deep pond on the chasm floor. The ground was usually flat—all of that crem settling—but the water in this pool looked a good two or three feet deep.

  She crossed with hands out to the sides, balancing. “So, let me see,” she said as she stepped carefully. “You think I’ve lived a simple, happy life full of sunshine and joy. But you also imply that I’ve got dark, evil secrets, so you’re suspicious of and even hostile to me. You tell me I’m arrogant and assume that I consider darkeyes to be playthings, but when I tell you what I’m trying to do to protect them—and everyone else—you imply I’m meddling and should just leave well enough alone.”

  She reached the other side and turned about. “Would you say that’s an accurate summary of our conversations up to this point, Kaladin Stormblessed?”

  He grimaced. “Yes. I suppose.”

  “Wow,” she said, “you sure do seem to know me well. Particularly considering that you started this conversation by professing that you don’t know what to make of me. An odd statement from someone who seems, from my perspective, to have figured it all out. Next time I’m trying to decide what to do, I’ll just ask you, since you appear to understand me better than I understand myself.”

  He crossed the same ridge of rock in the path, and she watched anxiously, as he was carrying her satchel. She trusted him better with it over the water than she trusted herself, though. She reached for it when he arrived on the other side, but found herself taking his arm to draw his attention.

  “How about this?” she said, holding his eyes. “I promise, solemnly and by the tenth name of the Almighty, that I mean no harm to Adolin or his family. I mean to prevent a disaster. I might be wrong, and I might be misguided, but I vow to you that I’m sincere.”

  He stared into her eyes. So intense. She felt a shiver meeting that expression. This was a man of passion.

  “I believe you,” he said. “And I guess that will do.” He looked upward, then cursed.

  “What?” she asked, looking toward the distant light above. The sun was peeking out over the lip of the ridge there.

  The wrong ridge. They weren’t going west any longer. They’d strayed again, pointing southward.

  “Blast,” Shallan said. “Give me that satchel. I need to draw this out.”

  He bears the weight of God’s own divine hatred, separated from the virtues that gave it context. He is what we made him to be, old friend. And that is what he, unfortunately, wished to become.

  “I was young,” Teft said, “so I didn’t hear much. Kelek, I didn’t want to hear much. The things my family did, they weren’t the sort of things you want your parents doing, all right? I didn’t want to know. So it’s not surprising I can’t remember.”

  Sigzil nodded in that mild, yet infuriating way of his. The Azish man just knew things. And he made you tell him things too. Unfair, that was. Terribly. Why did Teft have to end up with him on watch duty?

  The two sat on rocks near the chasms just east of Dalinar’s warcamp. A cold wind blew in. Highstorm tonight.

  He’ll be back before then. Surely by then.

  A cremling scuttled past. Teft threw a rock at it, driving it toward a nearby crack. “I don’t know why you want to hear all of these things anyway. They aren’t any use.”

  Sigzil nodded. Storming foreigner.

  “All right, fine,” Teft said. “It was some kind of cult, you see, called the Envisagers. They . . . well, they thought if they could find a way to return the Voidbringers, then the Knights Radiant would return as well. Stupid, right? Only, they knew things. Things they shouldn’t, things like what Kaladin can do.”

  “I see this is hard for you,” Sigzil said. “Want to play another hand of michim to pass the time instead?”

  “You just want my storming spheres,” Teft snapped, wagging his finger at the Azish man. “And don’t call it by that name.”

  “Michim is the game’s actual name.”

  “That’s a holy word, and ain’t no game named a holy word.”

  “The word isn’t holy where it came from,” Sigzil said, obviously annoyed.

  “We ain’t there now, are we? Call it something else.”

  “I thought you’d like it,” Sigzil said, picking up the colored rocks that were used in the game. You bet them, in a pile, while trying to guess the ones your opponent had hidden. “It’s a game of skill, not chance, so it doesn’t offend Vorin sensibilities.”

  Teft watched him pick up the rocks. Maybe it would be better if he just lost all of his spheres in that storming game. It wasn’t good for him to have money again. He couldn’t be trusted with money.

  “They thought,” Teft said, “that people were more likely to manifest powers if their lives were in danger. So . . . they’d put lives in danger. Members of their own group—never an innocent outsider, bless the winds. But that was bad enough. I watched people let themselves be pushed off cliffs, watched them tied in place with a candle slowly burning a rope until it snapped and dropped a rock to crush them. It was bad, Sigzil. Awful. The sort of thing nobody should have to watch, especially a boy of six.”

  “So what did you do?” Sigzil asked softly, pulling tight the string on his little bag of rocks.

  “Ain’t none of your business,” Teft said. “Don’t know why I’m even talking to you.”

  “It’s all right,” Sigzil said. “I can see—”
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br />   “I turned them in,” Teft blurted out. “To the citylord. He held a trial for them, a big one. Had them all executed in the end. Never did understand that. They were only a danger to themselves. Their punishment for threatening suicide was to be killed. Nonsense, that is. Should have found a way to help them . . .”

  “Your parents?”

  “Mother died in that rock–string contraption,” Teft said. “She really believed, Sig. That she had it in her, you know? The powers? That if she were about to die, they’d come out in her, and she’d save herself . . .”

  “And you watched?”

  “Storms, no! You think they’d let her son watch that? Are you mad?”

  “But—”

  “Did watch my father die, though,” Teft said, looking out over the Plains. “Hanged.” He shook his head, digging in his pocket. Where had he put that flask? As he turned, however, he caught sight of that other lad sitting back there, fiddling with his little box as he often did. Renarin.

  Teft wasn’t one for all that nonsense like Moash had talked about, wanting to overturn lighteyes. The Almighty had put them in their place, and who had business questioning him? Not spearmen, that’s for certain. But in a way, Prince Renarin was as bad as Moash. Neither one knew their place. A lighteyes wanting to join Bridge Four was as bad as a darkeyes talking stupid and lofty to the king. It didn’t fit, even if the other bridgemen seemed to like the lad.

  And, of course, Moash was one of them now. Storms. Had he left his flask back at the barrack?

  “Heads up, Teft,” Sigzil said, rising.

  Teft turned around and saw men in uniform approaching. He scrambled to his feet, grabbing his spear. It was Dalinar Kholin, accompanied by several of his lighteyed advisors, along with Drehy and Skar from Bridge Four, the day’s guards. With Moash promoted away and Kaladin . . . well, not there . . . Teft had taken over daily assignments. Nobody else would storming do it. They said he was in command now. Idiots.

  “Brightlord,” Teft said, slapping his chest in salute.

  “Adolin told me you men were coming here,” the highprince said. He spared a glance for Prince Renarin, who had also stood and saluted, as if this weren’t his own father. “A rotation, I understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” Teft said, looking toward Sigzil. It was a rotation.

  Teft was just on nearly every shift.

  “You really think he’s alive out there, soldier?” Dalinar asked.

  “He is, sir,” Teft said. “It’s not about what I or anyone thinks.”

  “He fell hundreds of feet,” Dalinar said.

  Teft continued to stand at attention. The highprince hadn’t asked a question, so Teft didn’t give a reply.

  He did have to banish a few terrible images in his head. Kaladin having knocked his head while falling. Kaladin having been crushed by the falling bridge. Kaladin lying with a broken leg, unable to find spheres to heal himself. The fool boy thought he was immortal, sometimes.

  Kelek. They all thought he was.

  “He is going to come back, sir,” Sigzil said to Dalinar. “He’s going to come climbing right up out of that chasm right there. It will be well if we’re here to meet him. Uniforms on, spears polished.”

  “We wait on our own time, sir,” Teft said. “Neither of us three are supposed to be anywhere else.” He blushed as soon as he said it. And here he’d been thinking about how Moash talked back to his betters.

  “I didn’t come to order you away from your chosen task, soldier,” Dalinar said. “I came to make certain you were caring for yourselves. No men are to skip meals to wait here, and I don’t want you getting any ideas about waiting during a highstorm.”

  “Er, yes, sir,” Teft said. He had used his morning meal break to put in duty here. How had Dalinar known?

  “Good luck, soldier,” Dalinar said, then continued on his way, flanked by attendants, apparently off to inspect the battalion that was nearest to the eastern edge of camp. Soldiers there scurried like cremlings after a storm, carrying supply bags and piling them inside their barracks. The time for Dalinar’s full expedition onto the Plains was quickly approaching.

  “Sir,” Teft called after the highprince.

  Dalinar turned back toward him, his attendants pausing mid-sentence.

  “You don’t believe us,” Teft said. “That he’ll come back, I mean.”

  “He’s dead, soldier. But I understand that you need to be here anyway.” The highprince touched his hand to his shoulder, a salute to the dead, then continued on his way.

  Well, Teft supposed that was all right, Dalinar not believing. He’d just be that much more surprised when Kaladin did return.

  Highstorm tonight, Teft thought, settling back down on his rock. Come on, lad. What are you doing out there?

  * * *

  Kaladin felt like one of the ten fools.

  Actually, he felt like all of them. Ten times an idiot. But most specifically Eshu, who spoke of things he did not understand in front of those who did.

  Navigation this deep in the chasms was hard, but he could usually read directions by the way that the debris was deposited. Water blew in from the east to the west, but then it drained out the other way—so cracks on walls where debris was smashed in tight usually marked a western direction, but places where debris had been deposited more naturally—as water drained—marked where water had flowed east.

  His instincts told him which way to go. They’d been wrong. He shouldn’t have been so confident. This far from the warcamps, the waterflows must be different.

  Annoyed at himself, he left Shallan drawing and walked out a ways. “Syl?” he asked.

  No response.

  “Sylphrena!” he said, louder.

  He sighed and walked back to Shallan, who knelt on the mossy ground—she’d obviously given up on protecting the once-fine dress from stains and rips—drawing on her sketchpad. She was another reason he felt like a fool. He shouldn’t let her provoke him so. He could hold in the retorts against other, far more annoying lighteyes. Why did he lose control when talking with her?

  Should have learned my lesson, he thought as she sketched, her expression growing intense. She’s won every argument so far, hands down.

  He leaned against a section of the chasm wall, spear in the crook of his arm, light shining from the spheres tied tightly at its head. He had made invalid assumptions about her, as she had so poignantly noted. Again and again. It was like a part of him frantically wanted to dislike her.

  If only he could find Syl. Everything would be better if he could see her again, if he could know that she was all right. That scream . . .

  To distract himself, he moved over to Shallan, then leaned down to see her sketch. Her map was more of a picture, one that looked eerily like the view Kaladin had had, nights ago, when flying above the Shattered Plains.

  “Is all that necessary?” he asked as she shaded in the sides of a plateau.

  “Yes.”

  “But—”

  “Yes.”

  It took longer than he’d have preferred. The sun passed through the crack overhead, vanishing from sight. Already past noon. They had seven hours until the highstorm, assuming the timing prediction was right—even the best stormwardens got the calculations wrong sometimes.

  Seven hours. The hike out here, he thought, took about that long. But surely they’d made some progress toward the warcamps. They’d been walking all morning.

  Well, no use rushing Shallan. He left her to it, walking back along the chasm, looking up at the shape of the rift up above and comparing it to her drawing. From what he could see, her map was dead on. She was drawing, from memory, their entire path as if seen from above—and she did it perfectly, every little knob and ledge accounted for.

  “Stormfather,” he whispered, jogging back. He’d known she had skill in drawing, but this was something entirely different.

  Who was this woman?

  She was still drawing when he arrived. “Your picture is amazingly accurate,�
� he said.

  “I may have . . . underplayed my skill a little last night,” Shallan said. “I can remember things pretty well, though to be honest, I didn’t realize how far off our path was until I drew it. A lot of these plateau shapes are unfamiliar to me; we might be into the areas that haven’t been mapped yet.”

  He looked to her. “You remember the shapes of all of the plateaus on the maps?”

  “Uh . . . yes?”

  “That’s incredible.”

  She sat back on her knees, holding up her sketch. She brushed aside an unruly lock of red hair. “Maybe not. Something’s very odd here.”

  “What?”

  “I think my sketch must be off.” She stood up, looking troubled. “I need more information. I’m going to walk around one of the plateaus here.”

  “All right . . .”

  She started walking, still focused on her sketch, barely paying attention to where she was going as she stumbled over rocks and sticks. He kept up with ease, but didn’t bother her as she turned her eyes toward the rift ahead. She walked them all the way around the base of the plateau to their right.

  It took a painfully long time, even walking quickly. They were losing minutes. Did she know where they were or not?

  “Now that plateau,” she said, pointing to the next wall. She began walking around the base of that plateau.

  “Shallan,” Kaladin said. “We don’t have—”

  “This is important.”

  “So is not getting crushed in a highstorm.”

  “If we don’t find out where we are, we won’t ever escape,” she said, handing him the sheet of paper. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.” She jogged off, skirt swishing.

  Kaladin stared at the paper, inspecting the path she’d drawn. Though they’d started the morning going the right way, it was as he’d feared—Kaladin had eventually wound them around until they were going directly south again. He’d even somehow turned them back going east for a while!

  That put them even farther from Dalinar’s camp than when they’d begun the night before.

  Please let her be wrong, he thought, going around the plateau the other direction to meet her halfway.