Words of Radiance (Stormlight Archive, The)

by Sanderson, Brandon

  That included the five Soulcasters. Each stood with right hand to breast, displaying a sparkling fabrial across the back of the palm. One of the ardents glanced at Adolin. Stormfather—that gaze wasn’t completely human, not any longer. Prolonged use of the Soulcaster had transformed the eyes so that they sparkled like gemstones themselves. The woman’s skin had hardened to something like stone, smooth, with fine cracks. It was as if the person were a living statue.

  Kadash hustled over toward Adolin. “Brightlord,” he said. “I had not realized you were coming to supervise.”

  “I’m not here to supervise,” Adolin said, glancing with discomfort at the Soulcasters. “I’m just surprised. Don’t you usually do this at night?”

  “We can’t afford to any longer, bright one,” Kadash said. “There are too many demands upon the Soulcasters. Buildings, food, removal of waste . . . To fit it all in, we are going to need to start training multiple ardents on each fabrial, then working them in shifts. Your father approved this earlier in the week.”

  This drew glances from several of the red-robed ardents. What did they think about others training on their fabrials? Their almost-alien expressions were unreadable.

  “I see,” Adolin said. Storms, we rely on these things a lot. Everyone talked about Shardblades and Shardplate, and their advantages in war. But in truth, it was these strange fabrials—and the grain they created—that had allowed this war to proceed as it had.

  “May we proceed, bright one?” Kadash asked.

  Adolin nodded, and Kadash walked back to the five and gave a few brief commands. He spoke quickly, nervous. It was odd to see that in Kadash, who was normally so placid and unflappable. Soulcasters had that effect on everyone.

  The five started softly chanting, a harmony to the singing of the ardents outside. The five stepped forward and raised their hands in a line, and Adolin found his face breaking out in a sweat, blown cold by the wind that managed to sneak past the silken walls.

  At first there was nothing. And then stone.

  Adolin thought he caught a brief glimpse of mist coalescing—like the moment a Shardblade appeared—as a massive wall sprang into existence. Wind blew inward, as if sucked by that materializing rock, making the cloth flap violently, snapping and writhing in the air. Why should the wind pull inward? Shouldn’t it have been blown outward by rock displacing it?

  The large barrier abutted the cloth on either side, causing the silk screens to bulge outward, and rose high into the air.

  “We’ll need taller poles,” Kadash muttered to himself.

  The stone wall had the same utilitarian look as the barracks, but this was a new shape. Flat on the side facing the warcamps, it was sloped on the other side, like a wedge. Adolin recognized it as something his father had been deliberating building for months now.

  “A windbreak!” Adolin said. “That’s wonderful, Kadash.”

  “Yes, well, your father seemed to like the proposal. A few dozen of these out here, and the construction yards will be able to expand onto the entire plateau without fear of highstorms.”

  That wasn’t completely true. You always had to worry about highstorms, since they could hurl boulders and blow hard enough to rip buildings from their foundations. But a good solid windbreak would be a blessing of the Almighty out here in the stormlands.

  The Soulcasters retreated, not speaking with the other ardents. The parshmen scrambled to keep up, those on one side of the barrier running along behind it with their silk and opening the back of the room to let the new windbreak slip out of the enclosure. They passed by Adolin and Kadash, leaving them exposed on the plateau and standing in the shade of the large new stone structure.

  The silk wall went back up, blocking sight of the Soulcasters. Just before it did, Adolin noticed one of the Soulcasters’ hands. The fabrial’s glow was gone. Likely one or more of the gemstones in it had shattered.

  “I still find it incredible,” Kadash said, looking up at the stone barrier. “Even after all these years. If we needed proof of the Almighty’s hand in our lives, this is certainly it.” A few gloryspren appeared around him, spinning and golden.

  “The Radiants could Soulcast,” Adolin said, “couldn’t they?”

  “It is written that they could,” Kadash said carefully. The Recreance—the term for the Radiants’ betrayal of mankind—was often seen as a failure of Vorinism as a religion. The way the Church sought to seize power in the centuries that followed was even more embarrassing.

  “What else could the Radiants do?” Adolin asked. “They had strange powers, right?”

  “I have not read on it extensively, bright one,” Kadash said. “Perhaps I should have spent more time learning about them, if only to remember the evils of pride. I will be certain to do this, bright one, in order to remain faithful and remember the proper place of all ardents.”

  “Kadash,” Adolin said, watching the shimmering silken procession retreat, “I need information right now, not humility. The Assassin in White has returned.”

  Kadash gasped. “The disturbance at the palace last night? The rumors are true?”

  “Yes.”

  There was no use hiding it. His father and the king had told the highprinces, and were planning on how to release the information to everyone else.

  Adolin met the ardent’s eyes. “That assassin walked on the walls, as if the pull of the earth were nothing to him. He fell a hundred feet without injury. He was like a Voidbringer, death given form. So I ask you again. What could the Radiants do? Were abilities like these ascribed to them?”

  “Those and more, bright one,” Kadash whispered, face drained of color. “I spoke with some of the soldiers who survived that first terrible night when the old king was killed. I thought the things they claimed to have seen the result of trauma—”

  “I need to know,” Adolin said. “Look into it. Read. Tell me what this creature might be capable of doing. We have to know how to fight him. He will return.”

  “Yes,” Kadash said, visibly shaken. “But . . . Adolin? If what you say is true . . . Storms! It could mean the Radiants are not dead.”

  “I know.”

  “Almighty preserve us,” Kadash whispered.

  * * *

  Navani Kholin loved warcamps. In ordinary cities, everything was so messy. Shops where they hardly belonged, streets that refused to run in straight lines.

  Military men and women, however, valued order and rationality—at least, the better ones did. Their camps reflected that. Barracks in neat rows, shops confined to marketplaces, as opposed to popping up on every corner. From her vantage atop her observation tower, she could see much of Dalinar’s camp. So neat, so intentional.

  This was the mark of humankind: to take the wild, unorganized world and make something logical of it. You could get so much more done when everything was in its place, when you could easily find what or whom you needed. Creativity required such things.

  Careful planning was, indeed, the water that nourished innovation.

  She took in a deep breath and turned back toward the engineering grounds, which dominated the eastern section of Dalinar’s warcamp. “All right, everyone!” she called. “Let’s give it a try!” This test had been planned long before the assassin’s attack, and she’d decided to proceed. What else was she going to do? Sit around and worry?

  The grounds below became a buzz of activity. Her elevated observation platform was perhaps twenty-five feet high, and gave her a good view of the engineering grounds. She was flanked by a dozen different ardents and scholars—and even Matain and a few other stormwardens. She still wasn’t sure what she thought of those fellows—they spent too much time talking about numerology and reading the winds. They called it a science in an attempt to dodge Vorin prohibitions of predicting the future.

  They had offered some useful wisdom from time to time. She’d invited them for that reason—and because she wanted to keep an eye on them.

  The object of her attention, and the subject
of today’s test, was a large circular platform at the center of the engineering yards. The wooden structure looked like the top of a siege tower that had been cut off and laid on the ground. Crenellations ringed it, and they’d set up dummies at those, the kinds that the soldiers used for archery practice. Next to that grounded platform was a tall wooden tower with a latticework of scaffolding up the sides. Workers scuttled over it, checking that everything was operational.

  “You really should read this, Navani,” Rushu said, looking over a report. The young woman was an ardent, and had no right whatsoever to have such lush eyelashes or delicate features. Rushu had joined the ardentia to escape the advances of men. A silly choice, judging by the way male ardents always wanted to work with her. Fortunately, she was also brilliant. And Navani could always find a use for someone brilliant.

  “I’ll read it later,” Navani said in a gently chiding voice. “We have work to do now, Rushu.”

  “. . . changed even when he was in the other room,” Rushu mumbled, flipping to another page. “Repeatable and measurable. Only flamespren so far, but so many potential other applications . . .”

  “Rushu,” Navani said, a little more firmly this time. “The test?”

  “Oh! Sorry, Brightness.” The woman tucked the folded pages into a pocket of her robes. Then she ran her hand across her shaved head, frowning. “Navani, have you ever wondered why the Almighty gave beards to men, but not women? For that matter, why do we consider it feminine for a woman to have long hair? Should not more hair be a masculine trait? Many of them have quite a lot of it, you see.”

  “Focus, child,” Navani said. “I want you watching when the test happens.” She turned to the others. “That goes for all of you. If this thing crashes to the ground again, I don’t want to lose another week attempting to figure out what went wrong!”

  The others nodded, and Navani found herself growing excited, some of the tension from the night’s attack finally bleeding away. She went over the protocols for the test in her head. People moved out of danger . . . Ardents on various platforms nearby, watching intently with quills and paper to record . . . Stones infused . . .

  Everything had been done and checked three times over. She stepped up to the front of her platform—holding the railing tightly with freehand and gloved safehand—and blessed the Almighty for the distracting power of a good fabrial project. She’d used this one at first to divert herself from worrying about Jasnah, though she’d eventually realized that Jasnah would be fine. True, reports now said the ship had been lost with all hands, but this wasn’t the first time that supposed disaster had struck Navani’s daughter. Jasnah played with danger as a child played with a captive cremling, and she always came through.

  The assassin’s return, though . . . Oh, Stormfather. If he took Dalinar as he had Gavilar . . .

  “Give the signal,” she said to the ardents. “We’ve checked everything more times than is useful.”

  The ardents nodded and wrote, via spanreed, to the workers below. Navani noticed with annoyance that a figure in blue Shardplate had wandered onto the engineering grounds, helm under arm, exposing a messy mop of blond hair speckled black. The guards were supposed to have kept people out, but such prohibitions would not apply to the highprince’s heir. Well, Adolin would know to keep his distance. She hoped.

  She turned back to the wooden tower. Ardents at the top had activated the fabrials there, and now climbed down the ladders at the sides, unhooking latches as they went. Once they were down, workers carefully pulled the sides away on their rollers. Those were the only things that had been holding the top of the tower in place. Without them, it should fall.

  The top of the platform, however, remained in place—hanging impossibly in the air. Navani’s breath caught. The only thing connecting it to the ground was a set of two pulleys and ropes, but those offered no support. That square, thick section of wood now hung in the air completely unsupported.

  The ardents around her murmured in excitement. Now for the real test. Navani waved, and the men below worked the cranks on the pulleys, pulling down the floating section of wood. The archer parapet nearby shook, wobbled, then began to rise into the air in a motion exactly opposite to the square’s.

  “It’s working!” Rushu exclaimed.

  “I don’t like that wobble,” said Falilar. The ancient engineer scratched at his ardent’s beard. “That ascent should be smoother.”

  “It’s not falling,” Navani said. “I’ll settle for that.”

  “Winds willing, I’d have been up there,” Rushu said, raising a spyglass. “I can’t see even a sparkle from the gemstones. What if they’re cracking?”

  “Then we’ll find out eventually,” Navani said, though in truth she wouldn’t have minded being on top of the rising parapet herself. Dalinar would have had a heart attack if he’d learned of her doing such a thing. The man was a dear, but he was a touch overprotective. In the way a highstorm was a touch windy.

  The parapet wobbled its way upward. It acted as if it were being hoisted, though it had no support at all. Finally, it peaked. The square of wood that had been hanging in the air before was now down against the ground and tied in place. The round parapet hung in the air instead, slightly off-kilter.

  It did not fall.

  Adolin clomped up the steps to her viewing platform, rattling and shaking the entire thing with that Shardplate of his. By the time he reached her, the other scholars were chattering among themselves and furiously making notes. Logicspren, in the shape of tiny stormclouds, rose around them.

  It had worked. Finally.

  “Hey,” Adolin said. “Is that platform flying?”

  “And you only just now noticed this, dear?” Navani asked.

  He scratched his head. “I’ve been distracted, Aunt. Huh. That . . . That’s really odd.” He seemed troubled.

  “What?” Navani asked him.

  “It’s, it’s like . . .”

  Him. The assassin, who had—according to both Adolin and Dalinar—somehow manipulated gravityspren.

  Navani looked to the scholars. “Why don’t you all go down and have them lower the platform? You can inspect the gemstones and see if any broke.”

  The others heard it as a dismissal and went down the steps in an excited bunch, though Rushu—dear Rushu—remained. “Oh!” the woman said. “It would be better to watch from up here, in case—”

  “I will speak with my nephew. Alone, please.” Sometimes, working with scholars, you had to be a touch blunt.

  Rushu finally blushed, then bobbed a bow and hastened away. Adolin stepped up to the railing. It was difficult to not feel dwarfed by a man wearing Plate, and when he reached out to hold the railing, she thought she could hear the wood groan from the strength of that grip. He could have snapped that rail without a second thought.

  I will figure out how to make more of that, she thought. While she was no warrior, there might be things she could do to protect her family. The more she understood the secrets of technology and the power of spren locked within gemstones, the closer she grew to finding what she sought.

  Adolin was staring at her hand. Oh, so he’d finally noticed that, had he?

  “Aunt?” he said, voice strained. “A glove?”

  “Far more practical,” she said, holding up her safehand and wiggling the fingers. “Oh, don’t look like that. Darkeyed women do it all the time.”

  “You’re not darkeyed.”

  “I’m the dowager queen,” Navani said. “Nobody cares what in Damnation I do. I could prance around completely nude, and they’d all just shake their heads and talk about how eccentric I am.”

  Adolin sighed, but let the matter drop, instead nodding toward the platform. “How did you do it?”

  “Conjoined fabrials,” Navani said. “The trick was finding a way to overcome the structural weaknesses of the gemstones, which succumb easily to the multiplied strain of simultaneous infusion drain and physical stress. We . . .”

  She trailed off
as she caught Adolin’s eyes glazing over. He was a bright young man when it came to most social interactions, but he didn’t have a single scholarly breath in him. Navani smiled, switching to layman’s terms.

  “If you split a fabrial gemstone in a certain way,” Navani said, “you can link the two pieces together so they mimic each other’s motions. Like a spanreed?”

  “Ah, right,” Adolin said.

  “Well,” Navani said, “we can also make two halves that move opposite one another. We filled the floor of that parapet with such gemstones and put their other halves in the wooden square. Once we engage them all—so they are mimicking one another in reverse—we can pull one platform down and make the other go up.”

  “Huh,” Adolin said. “Can you make this work on a battlefield?”

  That was, of course, the exact thing Dalinar had asked when she’d shown him the concepts. “Proximity is a problem right now,” she said. “The farther the pairs grow from one another, the weaker their interaction, and that causes them to crack more easily. You don’t see it with something light like a spanreed, but when working with heavy weights . . . Well, we can probably get them working on the Shattered Plains. That’s our goal right now. You could roll one of these out there, then engage it and write back to us via reed. We pull the platform here down, and your archers get raised up fifty feet to gain a perfect archery position.”

  This, finally, seemed to get Adolin excited. “The enemy wouldn’t be able to topple it or climb it! Stormfather. The tactical advantage!”

  “Exactly.”

  “You don’t sound enthusiastic.”

  “I am, dear,” Navani said. “But this isn’t the most ambitious idea we’ve had for this technique. Not by a faint breeze or a stormwind.”

  He frowned at her.

  “It’s all very technical and theoretical right now,” Navani said, smiling. “But just wait. When you see the things the ardents are imagining—”

  “Not you?” Adolin asked.

  “I’m their patron, dear,” Navani said, patting him on the arm. “I don’t have time to make all of the diagrams and figures, even were I up to the task.” She looked down at the gathered ardents and women scientists who were inspecting the floor of the parapet platform. “They suffer me.”