“It wasn’t a bottle to the head.” Vathah said. “My tent is near one of the buildings. The stone ones that were here in the market, you know?”
“And?” she demanded.
Vathah pointed as they drew close. You couldn’t miss the tall structure beside the tent he and Glurv had been watching. At the top, a corpse dangled from an outcropping, hanged by the neck.
Hanged. Storm it. The thing didn’t imitate the attack with the bottle … it imitated the execution that followed!
Vathah pointed. “Killer dropped the person up there, leaving them to twitch. Then the killer jumped down. All that distance, Veil. How—”
“Where?” she demanded.
“Glurv is tailing,” Vathah said, pointing.
The two charged in that direction, shoving their way through the crowds. They eventually spotted Glurv up ahead, standing on the edge of the well, waving. He was a squat man with a face that always looked swollen, as if it were trying to burst through its skin.
“Man wearing all black,” he said. “Ran straight toward the eastern tunnels!” He pointed toward where troubled marketgoers were peering down a tunnel, as if someone had just passed them in a rush.
Veil dashed in that direction. Vathah stayed with her longer than Glurv—but with Stormlight, she maintained a sprint no ordinary person could match. She burst into the indicated hallway and demanded to know if anyone had seen a man pass this way. A pair of women pointed.
Veil followed, heart beating violently, Stormlight raging within her. If she failed the chase, she’d have to wait for two more people to be assaulted—if it even happened again. The creature might hide, now that it knew she was watching.
She sprinted down this hallway, leaving behind the more populated sections of the tower. A few last people pointed down a tunnel at her shouted question.
She was beginning to lose hope as she reached the end of the hallway at an intersection, and looked one way, then the other. She glowed brightly to light the corridors for a distance, but she saw nothing in either.
She let out a sigh, slumping against the wall.
“Mmmm…” Pattern said from her coat. “It’s there.”
“Where?” Shallan asked.
“To the right. The shadows are off. The wrong pattern.”
She stepped forward, and something split out of the shadows, a figure that was jet black—though like a liquid or a polished stone, it reflected her light. It scrambled away, its shape wrong. Not fully human.
Veil ran, heedless of the danger. This thing might be able to hurt her—but the mystery was the greater threat. She needed to know these secrets.
Shallan skidded around a corner, then barreled down the next tunnel. She managed to follow the broken piece of shadow, but she couldn’t quite catch it.
The chase led her deeper into the far reaches of the tower’s ground floor, to areas barely explored, where the tunnels grew increasingly confusing. The air smelled of old things. Of dust and stone left alone for ages. The strata danced on the walls, the speed of her run making them seem to twist around her like threads in a loom.
The thing dropped to all fours, light from Shallan’s glow reflecting off its coal skin. It ran, frantic, until it hit a turn in the tunnel ahead and squeezed into a hole in the wall, two feet wide, near the floor.
Radiant dropped to her knees, spotting the thing as it wriggled out the other side of the hole. Not that thick, she thought, standing. “Pattern!” she demanded, thrusting her hand to the side.
She attacked the wall with her Shardblade, slicing chunks free, dropping them to the floor with a clatter. The strata ran all the way through the stone, and the pieces she carved off had a forlorn, broken beauty to them.
Engorged with Light, she shoved up against the sliced wall, finally breaking through into a small room beyond.
Much of its floor was taken up by the mouth of a pit. Circled by stone steps with no railing, the hole bored down through the rock into darkness. Radiant lowered her Shardblade, letting it slice into the rock at her feet. A hole. Like her drawing of spiraling blackness, a pit that seemed to descend into the void itself.
She released her Shardblade, falling to her knees.
“Shallan?” Pattern asked, rising up from the ground near where the Blade had vanished.
“We’ll need to descend.”
“Now?”
She nodded. “But first … first, go and get Adolin. Tell him to bring soldiers.”
Pattern hummed. “You won’t go alone, will you?”
“No. I promise. Can you make your way back?”
Pattern buzzed affirmatively, then zipped off across the ground, dimpling the floor of the rock. Curiously, the wall near where she’d broken in showed the rust marks and remnants of ancient hinges. So there was a secret door to get into this place.
Shallan kept her word. She was drawn toward that blackness, but she wasn’t stupid. Well, mostly not stupid. She waited, transfixed by the pit, until she heard voices from the hallway behind her. He can’t see me in Veil’s clothing! she thought, and started to reawaken. How long had she been kneeling there?
She took off Veil’s hat and long white coat, then hid them behind the debris. Stormlight enfolded her, painting the image of a havah over her trousers, gloved hand, and tight buttoned shirt.
Shallan. She was Shallan again—innocent, lively Shallan. Quick with a quip, even when nobody wanted to hear it. Earnest, but sometimes overeager. She could be that person.
That’s you, a part of her cried as she adopted the persona. That’s the real you. Isn’t it? Why do you have to paint that face over another?
She turned as a short, wiry man in a blue uniform entered the room, grey dusting his temples. What was his name again? She’d spent some time around Bridge Four in the last few weeks, but still hadn’t learned them all.
Adolin strode in next, wearing Kholin blue Shardplate, faceplate up, Blade resting on his shoulder. Judging from the sounds out in the hallway—and the Herdazian faces that peeked into the room—he had brought not only soldiers, but the entirety of Bridge Four.
That included Renarin, who clomped in after his brother, clad in slate-colored Shardplate. Renarin looked far less frail when fully armored, though his face didn’t seem like a soldier’s, even if he had stopped wearing his spectacles.
Pattern approached and tried to slide up her illusory dress, but then stopped, backing away and humming in pleasure at the lie. “I found him!” he proclaimed. “I found Adolin!”
“I see that,” Shallan said.
“He came at me,” Adolin said, “in the training rooms, screaming that you’d found the killer. Said that if I didn’t come, you’d probably—and I quote—‘go do something stupid without letting me watch.’ ”
Pattern hummed. “Stupidity. Very interesting.”
“You should visit the Alethi court sometime,” Adolin said, stepping over to the pit. “So…”
“We tracked the thing that has been assaulting people,” Shallan said. “It killed someone in the market, then it came here.”
“The … thing?” one of the bridgemen asked. “Not a person?”
“It’s a spren,” Shallan whispered. “But not like one I’ve ever seen. It’s able to imitate a person for a time—but it eventually becomes something else. A broken face, a twisted shape…”
“Sounds like that girl you’ve been seeing, Skar,” one of the bridgemen noted.
“Ha ha,” Skar said dryly. “How about we toss you in that pit, Eth, and see how far down this thing goes?”
“So this spren,” Lopen said, approaching the pit, “it, sure, killed Highprince Sadeas?”
Shallan hesitated. No. It had killed Perel in copying the Sadeas murder, but someone else had murdered the highprince. She glanced at Adolin, who must have been thinking the same thing, for how solemn his expression was.
The spren was the greater threat—it had performed multiple murders. Still, it made her uncomfortable to acknowledge that her i
nvestigation hadn’t taken them a single step closer to finding who had killed the highprince.
“We must have passed by this point a dozen times,” a soldier said from behind. Shallan started; that voice was female. Indeed, she’d mistaken one of Dalinar’s scouts—the short woman with long hair—for another bridgeman, though her uniform was different. She was inspecting the cuts Shallan had made to get into this room. “Don’t you remember scouting right past that curved hallway outside, Teft?”
Teft nodded, rubbing his bearded chin. “Yeah, you’re right, Lyn. But why hide a room like this?”
“There’s something down there,” Renarin whispered, leaning out over the pit. “Something … ancient. You’ve felt it, haven’t you?” He looked up at Shallan, then the others in the room. “This place is weird; this whole tower is weird. You’ve noticed it too, right?”
“Kid,” Teft said, “you’re the expert on what’s weird. We’ll trust your word.”
Shallan looked with concern toward Renarin at the insult. He just grinned, as one of the other bridgemen slapped him on the back—Plate notwithstanding—while Lopen and Rock started arguing over who was truly the weirdest among them. In a moment of surprise, she realized that Bridge Four had actually assimilated Renarin. He might be the lighteyed son of a highprince, resplendent in Shardplate, but here he was just another bridgeman.
“So,” one of the men said, a handsome, muscled fellow with arms that seemed too long for his body, “I assume we’re heading down into this awful crypt of terror?”
“Yes,” Shallan said. She thought his name was Drehy.
“Storming lovely,” Drehy said. “Marching orders, Teft?”
“That’s up to Brightlord Adolin.”
“I brought the best men I could find,” Adolin said to Shallan. “But I feel like I should bring an entire army instead. You sure you want to do this now?”
“Yes,” Shallan said. “We have to, Adolin. And … I don’t know that an army would make a difference.”
“Very well. Teft, give us a hefty rearguard. I don’t fancy having something sneak up on us. Lyn, I want accurate maps—stop us if we get too far ahead of your drawing. I want to know my exact line of retreat. We go slowly, men. Be ready to perform a controlled, careful retreat if I command it.”
Some shuffling of personnel followed. Then the group finally started down the staircase, single file, Shallan and Adolin near the center of the pack. The steps jutted right from the wall, but were wide enough that people would be able to pass on their way up, so there was no danger of falling off. She tried to keep from brushing anyone, as it might disturb the illusion that she was wearing her dress.
The sound of their footsteps vanished into the void. Soon they were alone with the timeless, patient darkness. The light of the sphere lanterns the bridgemen carried didn’t seem to stretch far in that pit. It reminded Shallan of the mausoleum carved into the hill near her manor, where ancient Davar family members had been Soulcast to statues.
Her father’s body hadn’t been placed there. They had lacked the funds to pay for a Soulcaster—and besides, they’d wanted to pretend he was alive. She and her brothers had burned the body, as the darkeyes did.
Pain …
“I have to remind you, Brightness,” Teft said from in front of her, “you can’t expect anything … extraordinary from my men. For a bit, some of us sucked up light and strutted about like we were Stormblessed. That stopped when Kaladin left.”
“It’ll come back, gancho!” Lopen said from behind her. “When Kaladin returns, we’ll glow again good.”
“Hush, Lopen,” Teft said. “Keep your voice down. Anyway, Brightness, the lads will do their best, but you need to know what—and what not—to expect.”
Shallan hadn’t been expecting Radiant powers from them; she’d known about their limitation already. All she needed were soldiers. Eventually, Lopen tossed a diamond chip into the hole, earning him a glare from Adolin.
“It might be down there waiting for us,” the prince hissed. “Don’t give it warning.”
The bridgeman wilted, but nodded. The sphere bounced as a visible pinprick below, and Shallan was glad to know that at least there was an end to this descent. She’d begun to imagine an infinite spiral, like with old Dilid, one of the ten fools. He ran up a hillside toward the Tranquiline Halls with sand sliding beneath his feet—running for eternity, but never making progress.
Several bridgemen let out audible sighs of relief as they finally reached the bottom of the shaft. Here, piles of splinters scattered at the edges of the round chamber, covered in decayspren. There had once been a banister for the steps, but it had fallen to the effects of time.
The bottom of the shaft had only one exit, a large archway more elaborate than others in the tower. Up above, almost everything was the same uniform stone—as if this whole tower had been carved in one go. Here, the archway was of separately placed stones, and the walls of the tunnel beyond were lined with bright mosaic tiles.
Once they entered the hall, Shallan gasped, holding up a diamond broam. Gorgeous, intricate pictures of the Heralds—made of thousands of tiles—adorned the ceiling, each in a circular panel.
The art on the walls was more enigmatic. A solitary figure hovering above the ground before a large blue disc, arms stretched to the side as if to embrace it. Depictions of the Almighty in his traditional form as a cloud bursting with energy and light. A woman in the shape of a tree, hands spreading toward the sky and becoming branches. Who would have thought to find pagan symbols in the home of the Knights Radiant?
Other murals depicted shapes that reminded her of Pattern, windspren … ten kinds of spren. One for each order?
Adolin sent a vanguard a short distance ahead, and soon they returned. “Metal doors ahead, Brightlord,” Lyn said. “One on each side of the hall.”
Shallan pried her eyes away from the murals, joining the main body of the force as they moved. They reached the large steel doors and stopped, though the corridor itself continued onward. At Shallan’s prompting, the bridgemen tried them, but couldn’t get them open.
“Locked,” Drehy said, wiping his brow.
Adolin stepped forward, sword in hand. “I’ve got a key.”
“Adolin…” Shallan said. “These are artifacts from another time. Valuable and precious.”
“I won’t break them too much,” he promised.
“But—”
“Aren’t we chasing a murderer?” he said. “Someone who is likely to, say, hide in a locked room?”
She sighed, then nodded as he waved everyone back. She tucked her safehand, which had brushed him, back under her arm. It was so strange to feel like she was wearing a glove, but to see her hand as sleeved. Would it really have been so bad to let Adolin know about Veil?
A part of her panicked at the idea, so she let go of it quickly.
Adolin rammed his Blade through the door just above where the lock or bar would be, then swept it down. Teft tried the door, and was able to shove it open, hinges grinding loudly.
The bridgemen ducked in first, spears in hand. For all Teft’s insistence that she wasn’t to expect anything exceptional of them, they took point without orders, even though there were two Shardbearers at the ready.
Adolin rushed in after the bridgemen to secure the room, though Renarin wasn’t paying much attention. He’d walked a few steps farther down the main corridor, and now stood still, staring deeper into the depths, sphere held absently in one gauntleted hand, Shardblade in the other.
Shallan stepped up hesitantly beside him. A cool breeze blew from behind them, as if being sucked into that darkness. The mystery lurked in that direction, the captivating depths. She could sense it more distinctly now. Not an evil really, but a wrongness. Like the sight of a wrist hanging from an arm after the bone is broken.
“What is it?” Renarin whispered. “Glys is frightened, and won’t speak.”
“Pattern doesn’t know,” Shallan said. “He calls it ancient. Say
s it’s of the enemy.”
Renarin nodded.
“Your father doesn’t seem to be able to feel it,” Shallan said. “Why can we?”
“I … I don’t know. Maybe—”
“Shallan?” Adolin said, looking out of the room, his faceplate up. “You should see this.”
The wreckage inside the room was more decayed than most they’d found in the tower. Rusted clasps and screws clung to bits of wood. Decomposed heaps ran in rows, containing bits of fragile covers and spines.
A library. They’d finally found the books Jasnah had dreamed of discovering.
They were ruined.
With a sinking feeling, Shallan moved through the room, nudging at piles of dust and splinters with her toes, frightening off decayspren. She found some shapes of books, but they disintegrated at her touch. She knelt between two rows of fallen books, feeling lost. All that knowledge … dead and gone.
“Sorry,” Adolin said, standing awkwardly nearby.
“Don’t let the men disturb this. Maybe … maybe there’s something Navani’s scholars can do to recover it.”
“Want us to search the other room?” Adolin asked.
She nodded, and he clanked off. A short time later, she heard hinges creak as Adolin forced open the door.
Shallan suddenly felt exhausted. If these books here were gone, then it was unlikely they’d find others better preserved.
Forward. She rose, brushing off her knees, which only reminded her that her dress wasn’t real. You aren’t here for this secret anyway.
She stepped out into the main hallway, the one with the murals. Adolin and the bridgemen were exploring the room on the other side, but a quick glance showed Shallan that it was a mirror of the one they’d left, furnished only with piles of debris.
“Um … guys?” Lyn, the scout, called. “Prince Adolin? Brightness Radiant?”
Shallan turned from the room. Renarin had walked farther down the corridor. The scout had followed him, but had frozen in the hallway. Renarin’s sphere illuminated something in the distance. A large mass that reflected the light, like glistening tar.
“We shouldn’t have come here,” Renarin said. “We can’t fight this. Stormfather.” He stumbled backward. “Stormfather…”
Oathbringer Page 36
