The lighteyed man stood up immediately. He was perhaps a little older than Adolin, and he had jet-black Alethi hair, styled crisply. He wore an open jacket and an expensive-looking black shirt underneath, embroidered with white vines running between the buttons, and a stock at his throat.
“So this is the famous Kaladin!” the man exclaimed, stepping forward and reaching out to clasp Kaladin’s hand. “Storms, but it is a pleasure to meet you. Embarrassing Sadeas while saving the Blackthorn himself? Good show, man. Good show.”
“And you are?” Kaladin asked.
“A patriot,” the man said. “Call me Graves.”
“And are you the Shardbearer?”
“Straight to the point, are you?” Graves said, gesturing for Kaladin to sit at the table.
Moash took a seat immediately, nodding to the other man at the table—he was darkeyed, with short hair and sunken eyes. Mercenary, Kaladin guessed, noting the heavy leathers he was wearing and the axe beside his seat. Graves continued to gesture, but Kaladin delayed, inspecting the young woman at the table. She sat primly and sipped her cup of wine held in two hands, one covered in her buttoned sleeve. Pretty, with pursed red lips, she wore her hair up and stuck through with sundry metal decorations.
“I recognize you,” Kaladin said. “One of Dalinar’s clerks.”
She watched him, careful, though she tried to appear relaxed.
“Danlan is a member of the highprince’s retinue,” Graves said. “Please, Kaladin. Sit. Have some wine.”
Kaladin sat down, but did not pour a drink. “You are trying to kill the king.”
“He is direct, isn’t he?” Graves asked Moash.
“Effective, too,” Moash said. “It’s why we like him.”
Graves turned to Kaladin. “We are patriots, as I said before. Patriots of Alethkar. The Alethkar that could be.”
“Patriots who wish to murder the kingdom’s ruler?”
Graves leaned forward, clasping his hands on the table. A bit of the humor left him, which was fine. He’d been trying too hard anyway. “Very well, we shall be on with it. Elhokar is a supremely bad king. Surely you’ve noticed this.”
“It’s not my place to pass judgment on a king.”
“Oh please,” Graves said. “You’re telling me you haven’t seen the way he acts? Spoiled, petulant, paranoid. He squabbles instead of consulting, he makes childish demands instead of leading. He is blowing this kingdom to the ground.”
“Have you any idea the kinds of policies he put into place before Dalinar got him under control?” Danlan asked. “I spent the last three years in Kholinar helping the clerks there sort through the mess he made of the royal codes. There was a time when he’d sign practically anything into law if he was cajoled the right way.”
“He is incompetent,” said the darkeyed mercenary, whose name Kaladin didn’t know. “He gets good men killed. Lets that bastard Sadeas get away with high treason.”
“So you try to assassinate him?” Kaladin demanded.
Graves met Kaladin’s eyes. “Yes.”
“If a king is destroying his country,” the mercenary said, “is it not the right—the duty—of the people to see him removed?”
“If he were removed,” Moash said, “what would happen? Ask yourself that, Kaladin.”
“Dalinar would probably take the throne,” Kaladin said. Elhokar had a son back in Kholinar, a child, barely a few years old. Even if Dalinar only proclaimed himself regent in the name of the rightful heir, he would rule.
“The kingdom would be far better off with him at the head,” Graves said.
“He practically rules the place anyway,” Kaladin said.
“No,” Danlan said. “Dalinar holds himself back. He knows he should take the throne, but hesitates out of love for his dead brother. The other highprinces interpret this as weakness.”
“We need the Blackthorn,” Graves said, pounding the table. “This kingdom is going to fall otherwise. The death of Elhokar would spur Dalinar to action. We would get back the man we had twenty years ago, the man who unified the highprinces in the first place.”
“Even if that man didn’t fully return,” the mercenary added, “we certainly couldn’t be worse off than we are now.”
“So yes,” Graves said to Kaladin. “We’re assassins. Murderers, or would-be ones. We don’t want a coup, and we don’t want to kill innocent guards. We just want the king removed. Quietly. Preferably in an accident.”
Danlan grimaced, then took a drink of wine. “Unfortunately, we have not been particularly effective so far.”
“And that’s why I wanted to meet with you,” Graves said.
“You expect me to help you?” Kaladin asked.
Graves raised his hands. “Think about what we’ve said. That is all I ask. Think about the king’s actions, watch him. Ask yourself, ‘How much longer will the kingdom last with this man at its head?’”
“The Blackthorn must take the throne,” Danlan said softly. “It will happen eventually. We want to help him along, for his own good. Spare him the difficult decision.”
“I could turn you in,” Kaladin said, meeting Graves’s eyes. To the side, the cloaked man—who had been leaning against the wall and listening—shuffled, standing up straighter. “Inviting me here was a risk.”
“Moash says you were trained as a surgeon,” Graves said, not looking at all concerned.
“Yes.”
“And what do you do if the hand is festering, threatening the entire body? Do you wait and hope it gets better, or do you act?”
Kaladin didn’t reply.
“You control the King’s Guard now, Kaladin,” Graves said. “We will need an opening, a time when no guards will be hurt, to strike. We didn’t want the actual blood of the king on our hands, wanted to make this seem an accident, but I have realized this is cowardly. I will do the deed myself. All I want is an opening, and Alethkar’s suffering will be over.”
“It will be better for the king this way,” Danlan said. “He is dying a slow death on that throne, like a drowning man far from land. Best to be done with it quickly.”
Kaladin stood up. Moash rose hesitantly.
Graves looked at Kaladin.
“I will consider,” Kaladin said.
“Good, good,” Graves said. “You can get back to us through Moash. Be the surgeon this kingdom needs.”
“Come on,” Kaladin said to Moash. “The others will be wondering where we got to.”
He walked out, Moash following after making a few hasty farewells. Kaladin, honestly, expected one of them to try to stop him. Didn’t they worry that he’d turn them in, as he’d threatened?
They let him go. Back out into the clattering, chattering common room.
Storms, he thought. I wish their arguments hadn’t been so good. “How did you meet them?” Kaladin asked as Moash jogged up to join him.
“Rill, that’s the fellow who was sitting at the table, he was a mercenary on some of the caravans I worked before ending up in the bridge crews. He came to me once we were free of slavery.” Moash took Kaladin by the arm, halting him before they got back to their table. “They’re right. You know they are, Kal. I can see it in you.”
“They’re traitors,” Kaladin said. “I want nothing to do with them.”
“You said you’d consider!”
“I said that,” Kaladin said softly, “so that they’d let me leave. We have a duty, Moash.”
“Is it greater than the duty to the country itself?”
“You don’t care about the country,” Kaladin snapped. “You just want to pursue your grudge.”
“All right, fine. But Kaladin, did you notice? Graves treats all men the same, regardless of eye color. He doesn’t care that we’re darkeyed. He married a darkeyed woman.”
“Really?” Kaladin had heard of wealthy darkeyes marrying lowborn lighteyes, but never anyone as high-dahn as a Shardbearer.
“Yeah,” Moash said. “One of his sons is even a one-eye. Graves
doesn’t give a storm about what other people think of him. He does what is right. And in this case, it’s—” Moash glanced around. They were now surrounded by people. “It’s what he said. Someone has to do it.”
“Don’t speak of this to me again,” Kaladin said, pulling his arm free and walking back toward the table. “And don’t meet with them anymore.”
He sat back down, Moash slinking into his place, annoyed. Kaladin tried to get himself to rejoin the conversation with Rock and Lopen, but he just couldn’t.
All around him, people laughed or shouted.
Be the surgeon this kingdom needs. . . .
Storms, what a mess.
Yet, were the orders not disheartened by so great a defeat, for the Lightweavers provided spiritual sustenance; they were enticed by those glorious creations to venture on a second assault.
—From Words of Radiance, chapter 21, page 10
“It doesn’t make sense,” Shallan said. “Pattern, these maps are baffling.”
The spren hovered nearby in his three-dimensional form full of twisting lines and angles. Sketching him had proven difficult, as whenever she looked closely at a section of his form, she found that it had so much detail as to defy proper depiction.
“Mmm?” Pattern asked in his humming voice.
Shallan climbed off her bed and tossed the book onto her white-painted writing desk. She knelt beside Jasnah’s trunk, digging through it before coming out with a map of Roshar. It was ancient, and not terribly accurate; Alethkar was depicted as far too large and the world as a whole was misshapen, with trade routes emphasized. It clearly predated modern methods of survey and cartography. Still, it was important, for it showed the Silver Kingdoms as they had supposedly existed during the time of the Knights Radiant.
“Urithiru,” Shallan said, pointing toward a shining city depicted on the map as the center of everything. It wasn’t in Alethkar, or Alethela as it had been known at the time. The map put it in the middle of the mountains near what might have been modern Jah Keved. However, Jasnah’s annotations said other maps from the time placed it elsewhere. “How could they not know where their capital was, the center of the orders of knights? Why does every map argue with its fellows?”
“Mmmmmm . . .” Pattern said, thoughtful. “Perhaps many had heard of it, but never visited.”
“Cartographers as well?” Shallan asked. “And the kings who commissioned these maps? Surely some of them had been to the place. Why on Roshar would it be so difficult to pinpoint?”
“They wished to keep its location secret, perhaps?”
Shallan stuck the map to the wall using some weevilwax from Jasnah’s supplies. She backed away, folding her arms. She hadn’t dressed for the day yet, and wore her dressing gown, hands uncovered.
“If that’s the case,” Shallan said, “they did too good a job of it.” She dug out a few other maps from the time, created by other kingdoms. In each, Shallan noted, the country of origin was presented far larger than it should have been. She stuck these to the wall too.
“Each shows Urithiru in a different location,” Shallan said. “Notably close to their own lands, yet not in their lands.”
“Different languages on each,” Pattern said. “Mmm . . . There are patterns here.” He started to try sounding them out.
Shallan smiled. Jasnah had told her that several of them were thought to have been written in the Dawnchant, a dead language. Scholars had been trying for years to—
“Behardan King . . . something I do not understand . . . order, perhaps . . .” Pattern said. “Map? Yes, that would likely be map. So the next is perhaps to draw . . . draw . . . something I do not understand . . .”
“You’re reading it?”
“It is a pattern.”
“You’re reading the Dawnchant.”
“Not well.”
“You’re reading the Dawnchant!” Shallan exclaimed. She scrambled up to the map beside which Pattern hovered, then rested her fingers on the script at the bottom. “Behardan, you said? Maybe Bajerden . . . Nohadon himself.”
“Bajerden? Nohadon? Must people have so many names?”
“One is honorific,” Shallan said. “His original name wasn’t considered symmetrical enough. Well, I guess it wasn’t really symmetrical at all, so the ardents gave him a new one centuries ago.”
“But . . . the new one isn’t symmetrical either.”
“The h sound can be for any letter,” Shallan said absently. “We write it as the symmetrical letter, to make the word balance, but add a diacritical mark to indicate it sounds like an h so the word is easier to say.”
“That— One can’t just pretend that a word is symmetrical when it isn’t!”
Shallan ignored his sputtering, instead staring at the alien script of what was supposedly the Dawnchant. If we do find Jasnah’s city, Shallan thought, and if it does have records, they might be in this language. “We need to see how much of the Dawnchant you can translate.”
“I did not read it,” Pattern said, annoyed. “I postulated a few words. The name I could translate because of the sounds of the cities above.”
“But those aren’t written in the Dawnchant!”
“The scripts are derived from one another,” Pattern said. “Obviously.”
“So obvious that no human scholar has ever figured it out.”
“You are not as good with patterns,” he said, sounding smug. “You are abstract. You think in lies and tell them to yourselves. That is fascinating, but it is not good for patterns.”
You are abstract . . . Shallan rounded the bed and slipped a book from the pile there, one written by the scholar Ali-daughter-Hasweth of Shinovar. The Shin scholars were among the most interesting to read, as their perspectives on the rest of Roshar could be so frank, so different.
She found the passage she wanted. Jasnah had highlighted it in her notes, so Shallan had sent out for the full book. Sebarial’s stipend to her—which he was paying—came in very handy. Vathah and Gaz, by her request, had spent the last few days visiting book merchants asking after Words of Radiance, the book Jasnah had given her just before dying. So far no luck, though one merchant had claimed he might be able to order it in from Kholinar.
“Urithiru was the connection to all nations,” she read from the Shin writer’s work. “And, at times, our only path to the outside world, with its stones unhallowed.” She looked up at Pattern. “What does that mean to you?”
“It means what it says,” Pattern replied, still hovering beside the maps. “That Urithiru was well connected. Roads, perhaps?”
“I’ve always read the phrase metaphorically. Connected in purpose, in thought, and scholarship.”
“Ah. Lies.”
“What if it’s not a metaphor? What if it’s like what you say?” She rose and crossed the room toward the maps, resting her fingers on Urithiru at the center. “Connected . . . but not by roads. Some of these maps don’t have any roads leading to Urithiru at all. They all place it in the mountains, or at least the hills. . . .”
“Mmm.”
“How do you reach a city if not by roads?” Shallan asked. “Nohadon could walk there, or so he claimed. But others do not speak of riding, or walking, to Urithiru.” True, there were few accounts of people visiting the city. It was a legend. Most modern scholars considered it a myth.
She needed more information. She scrambled over to Jasnah’s trunk, digging out one of her notebooks. “She said that Urithiru wasn’t on the Shattered Plains,” Shallan said, “but what if the pathway to it is here? Not an ordinary pathway, though. Urithiru was the city of Surgebinders. Of ancient wonders, like Shardblades.”
“Mm . . .” Pattern said softly. “Shardblades are no wonder . . .”
Shallan found the reference she was searching for. It wasn’t the quote she found curious, but Jasnah’s annotation of it. Another folktale, this one recorded in Among the Darkeyed, by Calinam. Page 102. Stories of instantaneous travel and the Oathgates pervade these tales.
<
br /> Instantaneous travel. Oathgates.
“That’s what she was coming here for,” Shallan whispered. “She thought she could find a passageway here, on the Plains. But they’re barren stormlands, just stone, crem, and greatshells.” She looked up at Pattern. “We really need to get out there, onto the Shattered Plains.”
Her announcement was accompanied by an ominous chime from the clock. Ominous in that it meant the hour was far later than she’d assumed. Storms! She needed to meet Adolin by noon. She had to leave in a half hour if she was going to meet him on time.
Shallan yelped and ran for the washroom. She turned the spigot for water to fill the tub. After a moment of it spitting out dirty cremwater, clean, warm water began to flow, and she put in the stopper. She put her hand underneath it, marveling yet again. Flowing warm water. Sebarial said that artifabrians had visited recently, arranging to set up a fabrial that would keep the water in the cistern above perpetually warm, like the ones in Kharbranth.
“I,” she said, shucking off her dressing gown, “am going to allow myself to grow very, very accustomed to this.”
She climbed into the tub as Pattern moved along the wall above her. She had decided not to be bashful around him. True, he had a male voice, but he wasn’t really a man. Besides, there were spren everywhere. The tub probably had one in it, as did the walls. She’d seen for herself that everything had a soul, or a spren, or whatever. Did she care if the walls watched her? No. So why should she care about Pattern?
She did have to repeat this line of reasoning every time he saw her undress. It would help if he weren’t so blasted curious about everything.
“The anatomical differences between genders are so slight,” Pattern said, humming to himself. “Yet so profound. And you augment them. Long hair. Blush on the cheeks. I went and watched Sebarial bathe last night and—”
“Please tell me you didn’t,” Shallan said, blushing as she grabbed some pasty soap from the jar beside the iron tub.
“But . . . I just told you that I did. . . . Anyway, I wasn’t seen. I would not need to do this if you’d be more accommodating.”
Words of Radiance (Stormlight Archive, The) Page 66
