She got on the bed, then scrambled back as far from the door as she could, until she was against the wall, breathing through her nose with frantic breaths. She still had her sketchpad under her arm, though she’d lost the charcoal. There was more in her nightstand.
Don’t do it, she thought. Just sit and calm yourself.
She felt a growing chill, a rising terror. She had to know. She scrambled to pull out the charcoal, then blinked and began to sketch her room.
Ceiling first. Four straight lines. Down the walls. Lines at the corners. Her fingers kept moving, drawing, depicting the pad itself, held before her, safehand shrouded and bracing the pad from behind. And then on. To the beings standing around her—twisted symbols unconnected to their uneven shoulders. Those not-heads had unreal angles, surfaces that melded in weird, impossible ways.
The creature at the front was reaching too-smooth fingers toward Shallan. Just inches from the right side of the sketchpad.
Oh, Stormfather… Shallan thought, charcoal pencil falling still. The room was empty, yet depicted right in front of her was an image of it crowded full of sleek figures. They were close enough that she should be able to feel them breathing, if they breathed.
Was there a chill in the room? Hesitantly—terrified but unable to stop herself—Shallan dropped her pencil and raised her freehand to the right.
And felt something.
She screamed then, jumping to her feet on her bed, dropping the pad, backing against the wall. Before she could consciously think of what she was doing, she was struggling with her sleeve, trying to get the Soulcaster out. It was the only thing she had resembling a weapon. No, that was stupid. She didn’t know how to use it. She was helpless.
Except…
Storms! she thought, frantic. I can’t use that. I promised myself.
She began the process anyway. Ten heartbeats, to bring forth the fruit of her sin, the proceeds of her most horrific act. She was interrupted midway through by a voice, uncanny yet distinct:
What are you?
She clutched her hand to her chest, losing her balance on the soft bed, falling to her knees on the rumpled blanket. She put one hand to the side, steadying herself on the nightstand, fingers brushing the large glass goblet that sat there.
“What am I?” she whispered. “I’m terrified.”
This is true.
The bedroom transformed around her.
The bed, the nightstand, her sketchpad, the walls, the ceiling—everything seemed to pop, forming into tiny, dark glass spheres. She found herself in a place with a black sky and a strange, small white sun that hung on the horizon, too far away.
Shallan screamed as she found herself in midair, falling backward in a shower of beads. Flames hovered nearby, dozens of them, perhaps hundreds. Like the tips of candles floating in the air and moving in the wind.
She hit something. An endless dark sea, except it wasn’t wet. It was made of the small beads, an entire ocean of tiny glass spheres. They surged around her, moving in an undulating swell. She gasped, flailing, trying to stay afloat.
You want me to change? a warm voice said in her mind, distinct and different from the cold whisper she had heard earlier. It was deep and hollow and conveyed a sense of great age. It seemed to come from her hand, and she realized she was grasping something there. One of the beads.
The movement of the ocean of glass threatened to tow her down; she kicked frantically, somehow managing to stay afloat.
I’ve been as I am for a great long time, the warm voice said. I sleep so much. I will change. Give me what you have.
“I don’t know what you mean! Please, help me!”
I will change.
She felt suddenly cold, as if the warmth were being drawn from her. She screamed as the bead in her fingers flared to sudden warmth. She dropped it just as a shift in the ocean swell towed her under, beads rolling over one another with a soft clatter.
She fell back and hit her bed, back in her room. Beside her, the goblet on her nightstand melted, the glass becoming red liquid, dropping the three spheres inside to the nightstand’s flooded top. The red liquid poured over the sides of the nightstand, splashing to the floor. Shallan pulled back, horrified.
The goblet had been changed into blood.
Her shocked motion thumped the nightstand, shaking it. An empty glass water pitcher had been sitting beside the goblet. Her motion knocked it over, toppling it to the ground. It shattered on the stone floor, splashing the blood.
That was a Soulcasting! she thought. She’d changed the goblet into blood, which was one of the Ten Essences. She raised her hand to her head, staring at the red liquid expanding in a pool on her floor. There seemed to be quite a lot of it.
She was so bewildered. The voice, the creatures, the sea of glass beads and the dark, cold sky. It had all come upon her so quickly.
I Soulcast, she realized again. I did it!
Did it have something to do with the creatures? But she’d begun seeing them in her drawings before she’d ever stolen the Soulcaster. How…what…? She looked down at her safehand and the Soulcaster hidden in the pouch inside her sleeve.
I didn’t put it on, she thought. Yet I used it anyway.
“Shallan?”
It was Jasnah’s voice. Just outside Shallan’s room. The princess must have followed her. Shallan felt a spike of terror as she saw a line of blood leaking toward the doorway. It was almost there, and would pass underneath in a heartbeat.
Why did it have to be blood? Nauseated, she leaped to her feet, slippers soaking up the red liquid.
“Shallan?” Jasnah said, voice closer. “What was that sound?”
Shallan looked frantically at the blood, then at the sketchpad, filled with pictures of the strange creatures. What if they did have something to do with the Soulcasting? Jasnah would recognize them. There was a shadow under the door.
She panicked, tucking the sketchpad away in her trunk. But the blood, it would condemn her. There was enough that only a life-threatening wound could have created it. Jasnah would see. She’d know. Blood where there should be none? One of the Ten Essences?
Jasnah was going to know what Shallan had done!
A thought struck Shallan. It wasn’t a brilliant thought, but it was a way out, and it was the only thing that occurred to her. She went to her knees and grabbed a shard of the broken glass pitcher in her safehand, through the fabric of her sleeve. She took a breath and pulled up her right sleeve, then used the glass to cut a shallow gash in her skin. In the panic of the moment, it barely even hurt. Blood welled out.
As the doorknob turned and the door opened, Shallan dropped the glass shard and lay on her side. She closed her eyes, feigning unconsciousness. The door swung open.
Jasnah gasped, immediately calling for help. She rushed to Shallan’s side, grabbing her arm and putting pressure on the wound. Shallan mumbled, as if she were barely conscious, gripping her safepouch—and the Soulcaster inside—with her safehand. They wouldn’t open it, would they? She pulled her arm closer to her chest, cowering silently as more footsteps and calls sounded, servants and parshmen running into the room, Jasnah shouting for more help.
This, Shallan thought, will not end well.
“Though I was due for dinner in Veden City that night, I insisted upon visiting Kholinar to speak with Tivbet. The tariffs through Urithiru were growing quite unreasonable. By then, the so-called Radiants had already begun to show their true nature.”
—Following the firing of the original Palanaeum, only one page of Terxim’s autobiography remained, and this is the only line of any use to me.
Kaladin dreamed he was the storm.
He raged forward, the stormwall behind him his trailing cape, soaring above a heaving, black expanse. The ocean. His passing churned up a tempest, slamming waves into one another, lifting white caps to be caught in his wind.
He approached a dark continent and soared upward. Higher. Higher. He left the sea behind. The vastness of the continen
t spread out before him, seemingly endless, an ocean of rock. So large, he thought, awed. He hadn’t understood. How could he have?
He roared past the Shattered Plains. They looked as if something very large had hit them at the center, sending rippling breaks outward. They too were larger than he’d expected; no wonder nobody had been able to find their way through the chasms.
There was a large plateau at the center, but with the darkness and the distance, he could not see much. There were lights, though. Someone lived there.
He did see that the eastern side of the plains was very different from the western side, marked by tall, spindly pillars, plateaus that had nearly been worn away. Despite that, he could see a symmetry to the Shattered Plains. From high above, the plains resembled a work of art.
In a moment, he was past them, continuing north and west to soar across the Sea of Spears, a shallow inland sea where broken fingers of rock jutted above the water. He passed over Alethkar, catching a glimpse of the great city of Kholinar, built amid formations of rock like fins rising from the stone. Then he turned southward, away from anything he knew. He crested majestic mountains, densely populated at their tips, with villages clustered near vents that emitted steam or lava. The Horneater Peaks?
He left them with rain and winds, rumbling down into foreign lands. He passed cities and open plains, villages and twisting waterways. There were many armies. Kaladin passed tents pulled flat against the leeward sides of rock formations, stakes driven into the rock to hold them taut, men hidden inside. He passed hillsides where soldiers huddled in clefts. He passed large wooden wagons, built to house lighteyes while at war. How many wars was the world fighting? Was there nowhere that was at peace?
He took a path to the southwest, blowing toward a city built in long troughs in the ground that looked like giant claw marks ripped across the landscape. He was over it in a flash, passing a hinterland where the stone itself was ribbed and rippled, like frozen waves of water. The people in this kingdom were dark-skinned, like Sigzil.
The land went on and on. Hundreds of cities. Thousands of villages. People with faintly blue veins beneath their skin. A place where the pressure of the approaching highstorm blew water out of spouts in the ground. A city where people lived in gigantic, hollowed-out stalactites hanging beneath a titanic sheltered ridge.
Westward he blew. The land was so vast. So enormous. So many different people. It dazzled his mind. War seemed far less prevalent in the West than it was in the East, and that comforted him, but still he was troubled. Peace seemed a scarce commodity in the world.
Something drew his attention. Strange flashes of light. He blew toward them at the forefront of the storm. What were those lights? They came in bursts, forming the strangest patterns. Almost like physical things that he could reach out and touch, spherical bubbles of light that vibrated with spikes and troughs.
Kaladin crossed a strange city laid out in a triangular pattern, with tall peaks rising like sentries at the corners and center. The flashes of light were coming from a building on the central peak. Kaladin knew he would pass quickly, for as the storm, he could not retreat. Ever westward he blew.
He threw open the door with his wind, entering a long hallway with bright red tile walls, mosaic murals that he passed too quickly to make out. He rustled the skirts of tall, golden-haired serving women who carried trays of food or steaming towels. They called in a strange language, perhaps wondering who had left a window unbarred in a highstorm.
The flashes of light came from directly ahead. So transfixing. Brushing past a pretty gold-and red-haired woman who huddled frightened in a corner, Kaladin burst through a door. He had one brief glimpse of what lay beyond.
A man stood over two corpses. His pale head shaved, his clothing white, the murderer held a long, thin sword in one hand. He looked up from his victims and almost seemed to see Kaladin. He had large Shin eyes.
It was too late to see anything more. Kaladin blew out the window, throwing shutters wide and streaking into the night.
More cities, mountains, and forests passed in a blur. At his advent, plants curled up their leaves, rockbuds closed their shells, and shrubs withdrew their branches. Before long, he neared the western ocean.
CHILD OF TANAVAST. CHILD OF HONOR. CHILD OF ONE LONG SINCE DEPARTED. The sudden voice shook Kaladin; he floundered in the air.
THE OOATHPACT WAS SHATTERED.
The booming sound made the stormwall itself vibrate. Kaladin hit the ground, separating from the storm. He skidded to a stop, feet throwing up sprays of water. Stormwinds crashed into him, but he was enough a part of them that they neither tossed nor shook him.
MEN RIDE THE STORMS NO LONGER. The voice was thunder, crashing in the air. THE OOATHPACT IS BROKEN, CHILD OF HONOR.
“I don’t understand!” Kaladin screamed into the tempest.
A face formed before him, the face he had seen before, the aged face as wide as the sky, its eyes full of stars.
ODIUM COMES. MOST DANGEROUS OF ALL THE SIXTEEN. YOU WILL NOW GO.
Something blew against him. “Wait!” Kaladin said. “Why is there so much war? Must we always fight?” He wasn’t sure why he asked. The questions simply came out.
The storm rumbled, like a thoughtful aged father. The face vanished, shattering into droplets of water.
More softly, the voice answered, ODIUM REIGNS.
Kaladin gasped as he awoke. He was surrounded by dark figures, holding him down against the hard stone floor. He yelled, old reflexes taking over. Instinctively, he snapped his hands outward to the sides, each grabbing an ankle and jerking to pull two assailants off balance.
They cursed, crashing to the ground. Kaladin used the moment to twist while bringing an arm up in a sweep. He knocked free the hands pushing him down, rocked and threw himself forward, lurching into the man directly in front of him.
Kaladin rolled over him, tucking and coming up on his feet, free of his captives. He spun, flinging sweat from his brow. Where was his spear? He clutched for the knife at his belt.
No knife. No spear.
“Storm you, Kaladin!” That was Teft.
Kaladin raised a hand to his breast, breathing deliberately, dispelling the strange dream. Bridge Four. He was with Bridge Four. The king’s stormwardens had predicted a highstorm in the early morning hours.
“It’s all right,” he said to the cursing, twisting clump of bridgemen who had been holding him down. “What were you doing?”
“You tried to go out in the storm,” Moash said accusingly, extricating himself. The only light was a single diamond sphere one of the men had set in the corner.
“Ha!” Rock added, standing up and brushing himself off. “Had the door open to the rain, staring out, as if you’d been hit on the head with stone. We had to pull you back. Is not good for you to spend another two weeks sick in bed, eh?”
Kaladin calmed himself. The riddens—the quiet rainfall at the trailing end of a highstorm—continued outside, drops sprinkling the roof.
“You wouldn’t wake up,” Sigzil said. Kaladin glanced at the Azish man, sitting with his back to the stone wall. He hadn’t tried to hold Kaladin down. “You were having some kind of fever dream.”
“I feel just fine,” Kaladin said. That wasn’t quite true; his head ached and he was exhausted. He took a deep breath and threw back his shoulders, trying to force the fatigue away.
The sphere in the corner flickered. Then its light faded away, leaving them in darkness.
“Storm it!” Moash muttered. “That eel Gaz. He’s been giving us dun spheres again.”
Kaladin crossed the pitch-black barrack, stepping carefully. His headache faded away as he felt for the door. He pushed it open, letting in the faint light of an overcast morning.
The winds were weak, but the rain still fell. He stepped out, and was shortly soaked through. The other bridgemen followed him out, and Rock tossed Kaladin a small chunk of soap. Like most of the others, Kaladin wore only his loincloth, and he lathered himself
up in the cold downpour. The soap smelled of oil and was gritty with the sand suspended in it. No sweet, soft soaps for bridgemen.
Kaladin tossed the bit of soap to Bisig, a thin bridgeman with an angular face. He took it gratefully—Bisig didn’t say much—and began to lather up as Kaladin let the rain wash the soap from his body and hair. To the side, Rock was using a bowl of water to shave and trim his Horneater beard, long on the sides and covering the cheeks, but clean below the lips and chin. It made an odd counterpoint to his head, which he shaved up the center, from directly above the eyebrows back. He trimmed the rest of his hair short.
Rock’s hand was smooth and careful, and he didn’t so much as nick himself. Once finished, he stood up and waved to the men waiting behind him. One by one, he shaved any who wanted it. He occasionally paused to sharpen the razor using his whetstone and leather strop.
Kaladin raised his fingers to his own beard. He hadn’t been clean-shaven since he’d been in Amaram’s army, so long ago. He walked forward to join those waiting in line. When Kaladin’s time came, the large Horneater laughed. “Sit, my friend, sit! Is good you have come. Your face is more like scragglebark branches than a proper beard.”
“Shave it clean,” Kaladin said, sitting down on the stump. “And I’d rather not have a strange pattern like yours.”
“Ha!” Rock said, sharpening his razor. “You are a lowlander, my good friend. Is not right for you to wear a humaka’aban. I would have to thump you soundly if you tried this thing.”
“I thought you said fighting was beneath you.”
“Is allowed several important exceptions,” Rock said. “Now stop with your talking, unless you wish to be losing a lip.”
Rock began by trimming the beard down, then lathered and shaved, starting at the left cheek. Kaladin had never let another shave him before; when he’d first gone to war, he’d been young enough that he’d barely needed to shave at all. He’d grown into doing it himself as he got older.
The Way of Kings Page 80
