The Rithmatist

by Brandon Sanderson

  Life wasn’t simple. It never had been simple. He just hadn’t known.

  But how does Nalizar play into all of this? Joel thought. I still don’t trust that man. Exton had expressed dislike of Nalizar on several occasions, but perhaps it was something to think about. Could he have framed Exton?

  Perhaps Joel just wanted to find that Nalizar was doing something nefarious.

  Father Stewart stopped talking. Joel blinked, realizing he hadn’t been paying attention. He looked up, and Father Stewart nodded, his thin white beard shaking. He gestured toward the chamber of inception behind the altar.

  Joel stood up. Fitch, his mother, and Melody sat alone on the pews—the regular inception ceremony for the eight-year-olds wouldn’t come for another hour yet. The broad, vast cathedral hall sparkled with the light of stained glass windows and delicate murals.

  Joel walked quietly around the altar toward the boxy chamber. The door was set with a six-point circle. Joel regarded it, then fished the coin out of his pocket and held it up.

  The main gear moving inside had six teeth. The center of each tooth corresponded to the location of one of the six points. The smaller gear to the right had only four teeth. The one to the left, nine teeth, spaced unevenly. The three clicked together in a pattern, one that had to be perfectly attuned to work with the irregular nine-tooth gear.

  Huh, Joel thought, tucking the coin in his pocket. Then he pushed open the door.

  Inside, he found a white marble room containing a cushion for kneeling and a small altar made from a marble block, topped by a cushion to rest his elbows on. There didn’t seem to be anything else in the room—though a springwork lantern shone quite brightly from above, mounted in a crystalline casing so that it cast sparkling light on the walls.

  Joel stood, waiting, heart thumping. Nothing happened. Hesitantly, he knelt down, but didn’t know what to say.

  That was another piece in this whole puzzle. Was there really a Master up in heaven? People like Mary Rowlandson—the colonist he’d read about the night before—believed in God.

  The wild chalklings hadn’t killed her. They’d kept her prisoner, always stopping her from fleeing. Nobody knew their motives for such an act.

  She’d eventually escaped, partially due to the efforts of her husband and some other colonial men. Had her survival been directed by the Master, or had it been simple luck? What did Joel believe?

  “I don’t know what to say,” Joel said. “I figure that if you are there, you’ll be angry if I claim to believe when I don’t. The truth is, I’m not sure I don’t believe, either. You might be there. I hope you are, I guess.

  “Either way, I do want to be a Rithmatist. Even with all of the problems it will cause. I … I need the power to fight them. I don’t want to run again.

  “I’ll be a good Rithmatist. I know the defenses better than almost anyone else on campus. I’ll defend the Isles at Nebrask. I will serve. Just let me be a Rithmatist.”

  Nothing happened. Joel stood. Most people went in and came out quickly, so he figured that there was no point in waiting around. Either he’d be able to draw the lines when he left, or he wouldn’t.

  He turned to leave.

  Something stood in the room behind him.

  He jumped, stumbling back, almost falling over the small altar. The thing behind him was a brilliant white. It stood as high as Joel did, and was in the shape of a man—but a very thin one, with spindly arms and only a curved line for a head. It held what appeared to be a crude bow in one hand.

  The thing looked as if it had been drawn, but it didn’t stick to the walls or floors like a chalkling. Its form was primitive, like the ancient drawings one might find on the side of a cliff.

  Suddenly, Joel remembered the story he’d read from before, the tale of the explorer who had found a canyon where the drawings danced.

  It didn’t move. Joel hesitantly leaned to the side and could see that the thing almost disappeared when looked at from that angle.

  Joel leaned back to look at it from the front. What would it do? He took a hesitant step forward, reaching out. He paused, then touched the thing.

  It shook violently, then fell to the ground, pasting itself to the floor like a chalk drawing. Joel stumbled back as the thing shot away underneath the altar.

  Joel dropped to his knees, noticing a slit at the base of the altar. There was darkness beyond.

  “No,” Joel whispered, reaching out. “Please. Come back!”

  He knelt there for the better part of an hour. A knock finally came at the far door.

  He opened it and found Father Stewart standing outside. “Come, child,” he said. “The others needing inception will arrive soon. Whatever has happened has happened, and we shall see the result.”

  He held out a piece of chalk.

  Joel left the chamber feeling shocked and confused. He took the chalk numbly, walking over to a stone placed on the ground for the purpose of drawing. He knelt down. Melody, Fitch, and his mother approached.

  Joel drew a Line of Forbiddance on the top of the block. Melody reached out with an anxious hand, but Joel knew what would happen.

  Her hand passed through the plane above the line. Her face fell.

  Father Stewart looked troubled. “Well, son, it appears that the Master has other plans for you. In his name, I pronounce you a full member of the Church of the Monarch.” He hesitated. “Do not see this as a failure. Go, and the Master will lead you to the path he has chosen.” It was the same thing that Stewart had told Joel eight years ago.

  “No,” Melody said. “This isn’t right! It was supposed to … supposed to be different this time…”

  “It’s all right,” Joel said, standing. He felt so tired. With a crushing sense of defeat on top of that, making it difficult for him to breathe.

  Mostly, he just wanted to be alone. He turned and walked slowly from the cathedral and back toward campus.

  CHAPTER

  Joel slept through most of the day, but didn’t try to go to bed that night. He sat up at his father’s table, a springwork lantern whirring on the wall behind him.

  He’d cleaned the books off the table, making way for his father’s old notes and annotations, which he’d placed alongside a few pieces of the man’s best chalk. The notes and diagrams seemed unimportant. The mystery had been solved. The problems were over.

  Joel wasn’t a Rithmatist. He’d failed his father.

  Stop that, he told himself. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.

  He wanted to throw the table over and scream. He wanted to break the pieces of chalk, then grind them to dust. Why had he dared hope? He’d known that very few people got chosen.

  So much about life was disappointment. He often wondered how humankind endured so long, and if the few moments when things went right really made up for all the rest.

  This was how it ended. Joel, back where he had begun, the same as before. He’d done too poorly in his classes to earn himself further education once he was done with Armedius. Now he didn’t even have the slight, buried hope that he might find a way to be a Rithmatist.

  The three students who had been taken were dead. Gone, left in unmarked graves by Exton. The killer had been stopped, but what did that mean to the families who had lost children? Their pain would continue.

  He leaned forward. “Why?” he asked of the papers and notes. “Why does everything turn out like this?”

  His father’s work would be forgotten in the light of Exton’s horrible deeds. The clerk would be remembered as a murderer, but also as the man who had finally solved the mystery of a new Rithmatic line.

  How? Joel thought. How did he solve that mystery? How did Exton, a man who failed his classes, discover things that no Rithmatic scholar has been able to?

  Joel stood up, pacing back and forth. His father’s notes continued to confront him, seeming to shine in the light of the lantern.

  Joel walked over, digging through them, trying to find the very oldest of the notes. He came up
with a yellowed piece of paper, browning on one edge.

  I traveled again to the fronts of Nebrask. And discovered very little. Men speak of strange happenings all the time, but they never seem to occur when I am there.

  I remain convinced that there are other lines. I need to know what they do before I can determine anything else.

  The page had a drawn symbol at the bottom, the Line of Silencing, with its four loops. “Where?” Joel asked. “Where did you get this, Father? How did you discover it? At Nebrask?”

  If that had been the case, then others would know about it. Surely the Rithmatists on the battlefront, if they saw lines like these, would intuit their meaning. And who would draw them? Wild chalklings didn’t draw lines. Did they?

  Joel put the sheet aside, looking through his father’s log, trying to date when he’d written that particular passage.

  The last date on the log was the day before his father had died. It listed Nebrask as the location of that trip.

  Joel sat down, thinking about that. He flipped back to the very first dates of travel. A visit to the island of Zona Arida.

  Zona Arida, near Bonneville and Texas. They were all southwestern islands. Joel’s father had gone there several times, according to the logs.

  Joel frowned, then glanced at the books on the floor. One was the one that Nalizar had checked out, about further Rithmatic lines. Joel picked it up and opened it to the back, looking at the stamped card that listed the book’s history. The volume had only been checked out a few times over the years.

  Joel’s father was one of the first on the list. His father’s first visit to Zona Arida had come only a few weeks after he had checked out the book.

  Joel flipped open the volume, scanning the chapter lists. One was called “Historical New-Line Theories.” He flipped to that one, skimming the contents by the light of a single lantern. It took several hours to find what he wanted.

  Some early explorers reported strange designs upon the cliffs of these islands in the southwest. We cannot know who created them, since much of America was uninhabited at the time of European arrival.

  Some have claimed that lines drawn after these patterns have Rithmatic properties. Most scholars dismiss this. Many odd shapes can be drawn and gain chalkling life from a Line of Making. That does not make them a new line.

  Joel turned the next page. There, facing him, was a sketch of the very creature he’d seen in the chamber of inception earlier that day.

  What is going on here? Joel thought, reading the caption to the picture. It read: One of the many sketches made by Captain Estevez during his explorations of Zona Arida Island.

  Joel blinked, then looked back at his table.

  Something tapped at his window.

  He yelped, jumping up out of his chair. He reached for the bucket of acid he’d taken from Inspector Harding, but then saw what was on the other side of the window.

  Red hair, wide eyes. Melody grinned at him, waving. Joel checked the clock. It was two in the morning.

  He groaned, walking out and then climbing the steps to open the dormitory door, which was locked. Melody stood outside. Her skirt was scuffed, and there were twigs in her hair.

  “Melody,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Standing in the cold,” she said. “Aren’t you going to invite a lady in?”

  “I don’t know if it would be proper.…”

  She pushed her way in anyway, walking down to the workroom. Joel sighed, closing the door and following her. Inside, she turned to him, hands on hips. “This,” she said, “is appalling.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “It really doesn’t work as well as the word ‘tragic,’ does it?” She flopped down into a chair. “I need a different word.”

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “I’m annoyed,” she said, ignoring his question. “They’ve had us locked up all day. You’re an insomniac. I figured I could come bug you.”

  “You snuck past the guards?”

  “Out the window. Second story. There’s a tree close by. Harder to climb down than it looks.”

  “You’re lucky the policemen didn’t catch you.”

  “Nah,” she said. “They aren’t there.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, there are a couple at the main door,” she said. “But only those two. The ones that patrolled below the windows left a short time ago. Guess they changed shift or something. Anyway, that’s not important. Joel, the important thing is this tragedy I’m trying to tell you about.”

  “You being locked up?”

  “That,” she said. “And Exton being locked up. He didn’t do it, Joel. I know he didn’t. The guy gave me half of his sandwich once.”

  “That’s a reason for him not being a murderer?”

  “It’s more than that,” Melody said. “He’s a nice man. He grumbles a lot, but I like him. He has a kind heart. He’s also smart.”

  “The person doing this was smart.”

  “Exactly. Why would Exton attack the son of a knight-senator? That’s a stupid move for him, if he wanted to remain inconspicuous. That’s the part of this that doesn’t make sense. We should be asking why—why attack Charles? If we knew that, I’ll bet the real motive for all of this would come together.”

  Joel sat thoughtfully.

  “Harding has evidence against Exton,” Joel said.

  “So?”

  “So,” Joel said. “That’s usually what proves that a person is guilty.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Melody said. “Look, if Exton got kicked out of here all those years ago, then how in the world was he a good enough Rithmatist to create a line nobody else knew of?”

  “Yeah. I know.” He stood. “Come on,” he said, walking out the door.

  Melody followed. “Where are we going?”

  “Professor Fitch’s office,” Joel said, crossing the dark campus. They walked in silence for a time before Joel noticed it. “Where are the police patrols?”

  “I don’t know,” Melody said. “See, I told you.”

  Joel hastened his step. They reached Warding Hall, then rushed up the stairs. Joel pounded on the door for a while, and eventually a very groggy Professor Fitch answered the door. “Hum?”

  “Professor,” Joel said. “I think something’s going on.”

  Fitch yawned. “What time is it?”

  “Early,” Joel said. “Look, Professor, you saw the lines that were intended to trap me? The cage of Lines of Forbiddance that Exton supposedly drew?”

  “Yes?” Fitch asked.

  “How well were the lines drawn?”

  “They were good. Expertly straight.”

  “Professor,” Joel said, “I saw lines that Exton drew at the door. They weren’t shaped right. He did a terrible job.”

  “So he was trying to fool you, Joel.”

  “No,” Joel said. “He was afraid for his life. I saw it in his eyes. He wouldn’t have drawn poor lines in that case! Professor, what if Nalizar—”

  “Joel!” Fitch snapped. “I’m tired of your fixation on Professor Nalizar! I … well … I hate raising my voice, but I’m just fed up! You wake me up at awful hours, talking about Nalizar? He didn’t do it, no matter how badly you want him to have.”

  Joel fell silent.

  Fitch rubbed his eyes. “I don’t mean to be testy. It’s just … well, talk to me in the morning.”

  With that, and a yawn, Fitch closed the door.

  “Great,” Melody said.

  “He’s not good with lack of sleep,” Joel said. “Never has been.”

  “So what now?” Melody asked.

  “Let’s go talk to the policemen at the front of your dormitory,” Joel said, rushing down the stairs. “See why the others aren’t on their patrol.”

  They crossed the campus again in the dark, and Joel began to wish he’d brought that bucket of acid with him. But surely Harding’s men would—

  He pulled up short. The Rithmatic student d
ormitory was straight ahead, and the door was open. Two forms lay on the grass in front of it.

  “Dusts!” Joel said, pelting forward, Melody at his side. The forms proved to be the policemen. Joel checked the pulse of the first one with nervous fingers.

  “Alive,” Joel said. “But unconscious.” He moved over to the other one, finding that he was still alive as well.

  “Uh, Joel,” Melody said. “You remember what I said this morning, about being angry at you for not inviting me to be attacked with you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I completely take that back.”

  Joel looked up at the open doorway. Light reflected distantly inside.

  “Go for help,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “The front gates,” he said. “The office. I don’t know! Just find it. I’m going to see who’s inside.”

  “Joel, you’re not a Rithmatist. What can you do?”

  “People could be dying in there, Melody.”

  “I’m the Rithmatist.”

  “If the Scribbler really is in there,” Joel said, “it won’t matter which of us goes in. Your lines will be little defense against him. Go!”

  Melody stood for a moment, then bolted away at a dash.

  Joel looked at the open doorway. What am I doing?

  He gritted his teeth, slipping inside. At the corner, he found some buckets of acid, and he felt more confident carrying one as he snuck up the stairs. Boys were on the first floor, with girls on the second, some families of professors on the third. There were hall mothers stationed on the second floor to keep watch. If Joel could find one of them, perhaps she could help.

  He rounded the top of the stairs on the second floor, slipping into the hallway. It appeared empty.

  He heard something on the stairs behind him.

  He looked with a panic to see something coming down from the third floor, moving in the darkness there. Barely thinking, Joel hefted his bucket of acid and tossed it.

  The something turned out to be a person. The wave of acid completely drenched the surprised Nalizar.