Words of Radiance (Stormlight Archive, The)

by Sanderson, Brandon

  “Why? It is wonderful.”

  To him, she was a subject of study. For a moment, she understood how Kaladin must have seen Shallan as she spoke of the chasmfiend. Admiring its beauty, the form of its creation, oblivious to the present reality of its danger.

  “It frightens me,” Shallan said, “because we all see the world by some kind of light personal to us, and that light changes our perception. I don’t see clearly. I want to, but I don’t know if I ever truly can.”

  Eventually, a pattern broke through the sound of rain, and Dalinar Kholin entered the tent. Straight-backed and greying, he looked more like a general than a king. She had no sketches of him. It seemed a gross omission on her part, so she took a Memory of him walking into the pavilion, an aide holding an umbrella for him.

  He strode up to Shallan. “Ah, here you are. The one who has taken command of this expedition.”

  Shallan belatedly scrambled to her feet and bowed. “Highprince?”

  “You have co-opted my scribes and cartographers,” Dalinar said, sounding amused. “They hum of it like the rainfall. Urithiru. Stormseat. How did you do it?”

  “I didn’t. Brightness Navani did.”

  “She says you convinced her.”

  “I . . .” Shallan blushed. “I was really just there, and she changed her mind . . .”

  Dalinar nodded curtly to the side, and his aide stepped over to the debating scholars. The aide spoke with them softly, and they rose—some quickly, others with reluctance—and departed into the rain, leaving their papers. The aide followed them, and Vathah looked to Shallan. She nodded, excusing him and the other guards.

  Soon Shallan and Dalinar were alone in the pavilion.

  “You told Navani that Jasnah had discovered the secrets of the Knights Radiant,” Dalinar said.

  “I did.”

  “You’re certain that Jasnah didn’t mislead you somehow,” Dalinar said, “or allow you to mislead yourself—that would be far more like her.”

  “Brightlord, I . . . I don’t think that is . . .” She took a breath. “No. She did not mislead me.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I saw it,” Shallan said. “I witnessed what she did, and we spoke of it. Jasnah Kholin did not use a Soulcaster. She was one.”

  Dalinar folded his arms, looking past Shallan into the night. “I think I’m supposed to refound the Knights Radiant. The first man I thought I could trust for the job turned out to be a murderer and a liar. Now you tell me that Jasnah might have had actual power. If that is true, then I am a fool.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “In naming Amaram,” Dalinar said. “I did what I thought was my task. I wonder now if I was mistaken all along, and that refounding them was never my duty. They might be refounding themselves, and I am an arrogant meddler. You have given me a great deal to think upon. Thank you.”

  He did not smile as he said it; in fact, he looked severely troubled. He turned to leave, clasping his hands behind his back.

  “Brightlord Dalinar?” Shallan said. “What if your task wasn’t to refound the Knights Radiant?”

  “That is what I just said,” Dalinar replied.

  “What if instead, your task was to gather them?”

  He looked back to her, waiting. Shallan felt a cold sweat. What was she doing?

  I have to tell someone sometime, she thought. I can’t do as Jasnah did, holding it all. This is too important. Was Dalinar Kholin the right person?

  Well, she certainly couldn’t think of anyone better.

  Shallan held out her palm, then breathed in, draining one of her spheres. Then she breathed back out, sending a cloud of shimmering Stormlight into the air between herself and Dalinar. She formed it into a small image of Jasnah, the one she’d just drawn, on top of her palm.

  “Almighty above,” Dalinar whispered. A single awespren, like a ring of blue smoke, burst out above him, spreading like the ripple from a stone dropped in a pond. Shallan had seen such a spren only a handful of times in her life.

  Dalinar stepped closer, reverent, leaning down to inspect Shallan’s image. “Can I?” he asked, reaching out a hand.

  “Yes.”

  He touched the image, causing it to fuzz back into shifting light. When he withdrew his finger, the image re-formed.

  “It’s just an illusion,” Shallan said. “I can’t create anything real.”

  “It’s amazing,” Dalinar said, his voice so soft she could barely hear it over the pattering rain. “It is wonderful.” He looked up at her, and there were—shockingly—tears in his eyes. “You’re one of them.”

  “Maybe, kind of?” Shallan said, feeling awkward. This man, so commanding, so much larger than life, should not be crying in front of her.

  “I’m not mad,” he said, more to himself, it seemed. “I had decided that I wasn’t, but that’s not the same as knowing. It’s all true. They’re returning.” He tapped at the image again. “Jasnah taught you this?”

  “I more stumbled into it on my own,” Shallan said. “I think I was led to her so she could teach me. We didn’t have much time for that, unfortunately.” She grimaced, withdrawing the Stormlight, heart beating quickly because of what she’d done.

  “I need to give you the golden cape,” Dalinar said, standing up straight, wiping his eyes and growing firm of voice again. “Put you in charge of them. So we—”

  “Me?” Shallan yelped, thinking of what that would mean to her alternate identity. “No, I can’t! I mean, Brightlord, sir, what I can do is mostly useful if nobody knows it’s possible. I mean, if everyone is looking for my illusions, I’ll never fool them.”

  “Fool them?” Dalinar said.

  Perhaps the not best choice of words for Dalinar.

  “Brightlord Dalinar!”

  Shallan spun, alert, suddenly worried that someone had seen what she did. A lithe messenger approached the tent, dripping wet, locks of hair undone from her braids and sticking to her face. “Brightlord Dalinar! Parshendi spotted, sir!”

  “Where?”

  “Eastern side of this plateau,” the messenger said, panting. “Scouting party, we think.”

  Dalinar looked from the messenger to Shallan, then cursed and started out into the rain.

  Shallan tossed her sketchpad onto her chair and followed.

  “This could be dangerous,” Dalinar said.

  “I appreciate the concern, Brightlord,” she said softly. “But I think I could actually take a spear through the stomach, and my abilities would heal me up without a scar. I’m probably the most difficult person to kill in this entire camp.”

  Dalinar strode in silence for a moment. “The fall into the chasm?” he asked softly.

  “Yes. I think I must have rescued Captain Kaladin too, though I don’t know how I managed that.”

  He grunted. They moved quickly through the rain, the water wetting Shallan’s hair and clothing. She practically had to jog to keep pace with Dalinar. Storming Alethi and their long legs. Guards ran up, members of Bridge Four, and fell in around them.

  She heard shouting in the distance. Dalinar sent the guards into a wider perimeter to give himself and Shallan a measure of privacy.

  “Can you Soulcast?” Dalinar asked softly. “Like Jasnah did?”

  “Yes,” Shallan said. “But I haven’t practiced it much.”

  “It could prove very useful.”

  “It’s also very dangerous. Jasnah didn’t want me practicing without her, though now that she’s gone . . . Well, I will do more with it, eventually. Sir, please don’t tell anyone about this. For now, at least.”

  “This was why Jasnah took you on as a ward,” Dalinar said. “It’s why she wanted you marrying Adolin, isn’t it? To bind you to us?”

  “Yes,” Shallan said, blushing in the darkness.

  “A great many things make more sense now. I will tell Navani about you, but nobody else, and I will swear her to secrecy. She can keep a secret, if she has to.”

  She ope
ned her mouth to say yes, but stopped herself. Was that what Jasnah would have said?

  “We’ll send you back to the warcamps,” Dalinar continued, eyes forward, speaking softly. “Immediately, with an escort. I don’t care how hard you are to kill. You’re too valuable to risk on this expedition.”

  “Brightlord,” Shallan said, splashing through a pool of water, glad she was wearing boots and leggings under the skirt, “you are not my king, nor are you my highprince. You have no authority over me. My duty is to find Urithiru, so you will not be sending me back. And, by your honor, I will have your promise not to tell a soul what I can do unless I give leave. That includes Brightness Navani.”

  He stopped in place, and stared at her in surprise. Then he grunted, his face barely visible. “I see Jasnah in you.”

  Rarely had Shallan been given such a compliment.

  Lights bobbed and approached in the rain, soldiers bearing sphere lanterns. Vathah and his men jogged up, having been left behind, and Bridge Four held them back for the moment.

  “Very well, Brightness,” Dalinar said to Shallan. “Your secret will remain one, for now. We will consult further, once this expedition is done. You have read of the things I have been seeing?”

  She nodded.

  “The world is about to change,” Dalinar said. He took a deep breath. “You give me hope, true hope, that we can change it in the right way.”

  The approaching scouts saluted, and Bridge Four parted to allow their leader access to Dalinar. He was a portly man with a brown hat that reminded her of the one Veil wore, except it was wide-brimmed. The scout wore soldier’s trousers, but a leather jacket over them, and certainly didn’t seem in fighting shape.

  “Bashin,” Dalinar said.

  “Parshendi on that plateau next to us, sir,” Bashin said, pointing. “The Parshendi stumbled over one of my scouting teams. The lads raised the alarm quickly, but we lost all three men.”

  Dalinar cursed softly, then turned toward Highlord Teleb, who had approached from the other direction, wearing his Shardplate, which he’d painted silver. “Wake the army, Teleb. Everyone on alert.”

  “Yes, Brightlord,” Teleb said.

  “Brightlord Dalinar,” Bashin said, “the lads took down one of those shellheads before being killed themselves. Sir . . . you need to see this. Something has changed.”

  Shallan shivered, feeling sodden and cold. She’d brought clothing that would last well in the rain, of course, but that didn’t mean standing out here was comfortable. Though they wore coats, nobody else seemed to pay much heed. Likely, they took it for granted that during the Weeping, you were going to get soaked. That was something else for which her sheltered childhood had not prepared her.

  Dalinar did not object as Shallan joined him in walking toward a nearby bridge—one of the more mobile ones run by Kaladin’s bridge teams, who wore raincoats and front-brimmed caps. A group of soldiers on the other side of the bridge dragged something across, pushing a little wave of water before it. A Parshendi corpse.

  Shallan had only seen the one that she’d found with Kaladin in the chasm. She’d done a sketch of that earlier, and this one looked very different. It had hair—well, a kind of hair. Leaning down, she found that it was thicker than human hair, and felt too . . . slick. Was that the right word? The face was marbled, like that of a parshman, this one with prominent red streaks through the black. The body was lean and strong, and something seemed to grow under the skin of the exposed arms, peeking out. Shallan prodded at it, and found it hard and ridged, like a crab shell. In fact, the face was crusted with a kind of thin, bumpy carapace just above the cheeks and running back around the sides of the head.

  “This isn’t a type we’ve seen before, sir,” Bashin said to Dalinar. “Look at those ridges. Sir . . . some of the lads that were killed, they had burn marks on them. In the rain. Shakiest thing I’ve ever seen . . .”

  Shallan looked up at them. “What do you mean by a ‘type,’ Bashin?”

  “Some Parshendi have hair,” the man said—he was a darkeyes, but clearly well respected, though he didn’t bear an obvious military rank. “Others have carapace. The ones we met with King Gavilar long ago, they were . . . shaped different from the ones we fight.”

  “They have specialized subspecies?” Shallan said. Some cremlings were like that, working in a hive, with different specializations and varied forms.

  “We might be depleting their numbers,” Dalinar said to Bashin. “Forcing them to send out their equivalent of lighteyes to fight.”

  “And the burns, Dalinar?” Bashin said, scratching his head under his hat.

  Shallan reached out to check the Parshendi’s eye color. Did they have lighteyes and dark, like humans? She lifted the eyelid.

  The eye beneath was completely red.

  She screamed, jumping back, pulling her hand up to her chest. The soldiers cursed, looking around, and Dalinar’s Shardblade appeared in his hand a few seconds later.

  “Red eyes,” Shallan whispered. “It’s happening.”

  “The red eyes are just a legend.”

  “Jasnah had an entire notebook of references to this, Brightlord,” Shallan said, shivering. “The Voidbringers are here. Time is short.”

  “Throw the body into the chasm,” Dalinar said to his men. “I doubt we’d be able to easily burn it. Keep everyone alert. Be prepared for an attack tonight. They—”

  “Brightlord!”

  Shallan spun as a hulking armored figure came up, rainwater trailing down his silvery Plate. “We’ve found another one, sir,” Teleb said.

  “Dead?” Dalinar said.

  “No, sir,” the Shardbearer said, pointing. “He walked right up to us, sir. He’s sitting on a rock over there.”

  Dalinar looked to Shallan, who shrugged. Dalinar started off in the direction Teleb had pointed.

  “Sir?” Teleb said, voice resonating inside his helm. “Should you . . .”

  Dalinar ignored the warning, and Shallan hastened after him, collecting Vathah and his two guards.

  “Should you head back?” Vathah said under his breath to her. Storms, but that face of his looked dangerous in the dim light, even if his voice was respectful. She couldn’t help but still see him as the man who had almost killed her, back in the Unclaimed Hills.

  “I will be safe,” Shallan replied softly.

  “You might have a Blade, Brightness, but you could still die to an arrow in the back.”

  “Unlikely, in this rain,” she said.

  He fell in behind her, offering no further objection. He was trying to do the job she had assigned him. Unfortunately, she was discovering that she didn’t much like being guarded.

  They found the Parshendi after a hike through the rain. The rock he sat on was about as high as a man was tall. He seemed to have no weapons, and about a hundred Alethi soldiers stood around the base of his seat, spears pointed upward. Shallan couldn’t make out much more, as he sat across the chasm from them, a portable bridge in place to his plateau.

  “Has he said anything?” Dalinar asked softly as Teleb stepped up.

  “Not that I know of,” the Shardbearer said. “He just sits there.”

  Shallan peered across the chasm toward the solitary Parshendi man. He stood up, and shaded his eyes against the rain. The soldiers below shuffled, spears rising into more threatening positions.

  “Skar?” the Parshendi’s voice called. “Skar, is that you? And Leyten?”

  Nearby, one of Dalinar’s bridgeman guards cursed. He ran across the bridge, and several other bridgemen followed.

  They returned a moment later. Shallan crowded in closely to hear what their leader whispered to Dalinar.

  “It’s him, sir,” Skar said. “He’s changed, but storm me for a fool if I’m wrong—it’s him. Shen. He ran bridges with us for months, then vanished. Now he’s here. He says he wants to surrender to you.”

  Q: For what essential must we strive? A: The essential of preservation, to shelter a seed of huma
nity through the coming storm. Q: What cost must we bear? A: The cost is irrelevant. Mankind must survive. Our burden is that of the species, and all other considerations are but dust by comparison.

  —From the Diagram, Catechism of the Back of the Flowered Painting: paragraph 1

  Dalinar stood with hands behind his back, waiting in his command tent and listening to the patter of rain on the cloth. The floor of the tent was wet. You couldn’t avoid that, in the Weeping. He knew that from miserable experience—he’d been out on more than one military excursion during this time of year.

  It was the day after they’d discovered the Parshendi on the Plains—both the dead one and the one the bridgemen called Shen, or Rlain, as he had said his name was. Dalinar himself had allowed the man to be armed.

  Shallan claimed that all parshmen were Voidbringers in embryo. He had ample reason to believe her word, considering what she’d shown him. But what was he to do? The Radiants had returned, the Parshendi had manifested red eyes. Dalinar felt as if he were trying to stop a dam from breaking, all the while not knowing where the leaks were actually coming from.

  The tent flaps parted and Adolin ducked in, escorting Navani. She hung her stormcoat on the rack beside the flap, and Adolin grabbed a towel and began drying his hair and face.

  Adolin was betrothed to a member of the Knights Radiant. She says she’s not one yet, Dalinar reminded himself. That made sense. One could be a trained spearman without being a soldier. One implied skill, the other a position.

  “They are bringing the Parshendi man?” Dalinar asked.

  “Yes,” Navani said, sitting down in one of the room’s chairs. Adolin didn’t take his seat, but found a pitcher of filtered rainwater and poured himself a cup. He tapped the side of the tin cup as he drank.

  They were restless, all of them, following the discovery of red-eyed Parshendi. After no attack had come that night, Dalinar had pushed the three armies into another day of marching.

  Slowly, they approached the middle of the Plains, at least as Shallan’s projections indicated. They were already well beyond the regions that scouts had explored. Now, they had to rely on the young woman’s maps.