Words of Radiance

by Brandon Sanderson

  “I won’t fear him any longer, Eylita! I won’t!”

  Shallan poured wine.

  They clashed, Father leaping over the high table, swinging in a two-handed blow. Eylita screamed and scrambled back while Balat swung at his father.

  Shallan did not know much of swordplay. She had watched Balat and the others spar, but the only real fights she’d seen were duels at the fair.

  This was different. This was brutal. Father bashing his sword down again and again toward Balat, who blocked as best he could with his own sword. The clang of metal on metal, and above it all the storm. Each blow seemed to shake the room. Or was that the thunder?

  Balat stumbled before the onslaught, falling on one knee. Father batted the sword out of Balat’s fingers.

  Could it really be over that quickly? Only seconds had passed. Not like the duels at all.

  Father loomed over his son. “I’ve always despised you,” Father said. “The coward. Helaran was noble. He resisted me, but he had passion. You . . . you crawl about, whining and complaining.”

  Shallan moved up to him. “Father?” She handed the wine toward him. “He’s down. You’ve won.”

  “I always wanted sons,” Father said. “And I got four. All worthless! A coward, a drunkard, and a weakling.” He blinked. “Only Helaran . . . Only Helaran . . .”

  “Father?” Shallan said. “Here.”

  He took the wine, gulping it down.

  Balat grabbed his sword. Still on one knee, he struck with a lunge. Shallan screamed, and the sword made a strange clang as it barely missed Father, stabbing through his coat and out the back, connecting with something metallic.

  Father dropped the cup. It smashed, empty, to the ground. He grunted, feeling at his side. Balat pulled the sword back and stared upward at his father in horror.

  Father’s hand came back with a touch of blood on it, but not much. “That’s the best you have?” Father demanded. “Fifteen years of sword training, and that’s your best attack? Strike at me! Hit me!” He held his sword out to the side, raising his other hand.

  Balat started to blubber, sword slipping from his fingers.

  “Bah!” Father said. “Useless.” He tossed his sword onto the high table, then stepped over to the hearth. He grabbed an iron poker, then walked back. “Useless.”

  He slammed the poker down on Balat’s thigh.

  “Father!” Shallan screamed, trying to take his arm. He shoved her aside as he struck again, smashing his poker against Balat’s leg.

  Balat screamed.

  Shallan hit the ground hard, knocking her head against the floor. She could only hear what happened next. Shouts. The poker connecting with a sound like a dull thump. The storm raging above.

  “Why.” Smack. “Can’t.” Smack. “You.” Smack. “Do.” Smack. “Anything.” Smack. “Right?”

  Shallan’s vision cleared. Father drew deep breaths. Blood had splattered his face. Balat whimpered on the floor. Eylita held to him, face buried in his hair. Balat’s leg was a bloody mess.

  Wikim and Jushu still stood in the doorway to the hall, looking horrified.

  Father looked to Eylita, murder in his eyes. He raised his poker to strike. But then the weapon slipped from his fingers and clanged to the ground. He looked at his hand as if surprised, then stumbled. He grabbed the table for support, but fell to his knees, then slumped to the side.

  Rain pelted the roof. It sounded like a thousand scurrying creatures looking for a way into the building.

  Shallan forced herself to her feet. Coldness. Yes, she recognized that coldness inside of her now. She’d felt it before, on the day when she’d lost her mother.

  “Bind Balat’s wounds,” she said, approaching the weeping Eylita. “Use his shirt.”

  The woman nodded through her tears and began working with trembling fingers.

  Shallan knelt beside her father. He lay motionless, eyes open and dead, staring at the ceiling.

  “What . . . what happened?” Wikim asked. She hadn’t noticed him and Jushu timidly entering the room, rounding the table and joining her. Wikim peered over her shoulder. “Did Balat’s strike to the side . . .”

  Father was bleeding there; Shallan could feel it through the clothing. It wasn’t nearly bad enough to have caused this though. She shook her head.

  “You gave me something a few years ago,” she said. “A pouch. I kept it. You said it grows more potent over time.”

  “Oh, Stormfather,” Wikim said, raising his hand to his mouth. “The blackbane? You . . .”

  “In his wine,” Shallan said. “Malise is dead by the kitchen. He went too far.”

  “You’ve killed him,” Wikim said, staring at their father’s corpse. “You’ve killed him!”

  “Yes,” Shallan said, feeling exhausted. She stumbled over to Balat, then began helping Eylita with the bandages. Balat was conscious and grunting at the pain. Shallan nodded to Eylita, who fetched him some wine. Unpoisoned, of course.

  Father was dead. She’d killed him.

  “What is this?” Jushu asked.

  “Don’t do that!” Wikim said. “Storms! You’re going through his pockets already?”

  Shallan glanced over to see Jushu pulling something silvery from Father’s coat pocket. It was shrouded in a small black bag, mildly wet with blood, only pieces of it showing from where Balat’s sword had struck.

  “Oh, Stormfather,” Jushu said, pulling it out. The device consisted of several chains of silvery metal connecting three large gemstones, one of which was cracked, its glow lost. “Is this what I think it is?”

  “A Soulcaster,” Shallan said.

  “Prop me up,” Balat said as Eylita returned with the wine. “Please.”

  Reluctantly the girl helped him sit. His leg . . . his leg was not in good shape. They would need to get him a surgeon.

  Shallan stood, wiping bloodied hands on her dress, and took the Soulcaster from Jushu. The delicate metal was broken where the sword had struck it.

  “I don’t understand,” Jushu said. “Isn’t that blasphemy? Don’t those belong to the king, only to be used by ardents?”

  Shallan rubbed her thumb across the metal. She couldn’t think. Numbness . . . shock. That was it. Shock.

  I killed Father.

  Wikim yelped suddenly, jumping back. “His leg twitched.”

  Shallan spun on the body. Father’s fingers spasmed.

  “Voidbringers!” Jushu said. He looked up at the ceiling, and at the raging storm. “They’re here. They’re inside of him. It—”

  Shallan knelt next to the body. The eyes trembled, then focused on her. “It wasn’t enough,” she whispered. “The poison wasn’t strong enough.”

  “Oh, storms!” Wikim said, kneeling next to her. “He’s still breathing. It didn’t kill him, it just paralyzed him.” His eyes widened. “And he’s waking.”

  “We need to finish the job, then,” Shallan said. She looked to her brothers.

  Jushu and Wikim stumbled away, shaking their heads. Balat, dazed, was barely conscious.

  She turned back to her father. He was looking at her, his eyes moving easily now. His leg twitched.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, unhooking her necklace. “Thank you for what you did for me.” She wrapped the necklace around his neck.

  Then she began to twist.

  She used the handle of one of the forks that had fallen from the table as her father tried to steady himself. She looped one side of the closed necklace around it, and in twisting, pulled the chain very tight around Father’s throat.

  “Now go to sleep,” she whispered, “in chasms deep, with darkness all around you . . .”

  A lullaby. Shallan spoke the song through her tears—the song he’d sung for her as a child, when she was frightened. Red blood speckled his face and covered her hands.

  “Though rock and dread may be your bed, so sleep my baby dear.”

  She felt his eyes on her. Her skin squirmed as she held the necklace tight.

&
nbsp; “Now comes the storm,” she whispered, “but you’ll be warm, the wind will rock your basket . . .”

  Shallan had to watch as his eyes bulged out, his face turning colors. His body trembling, straining, trying to move. The eyes looked to her, demanding, betrayed.

  Almost, Shallan could imagine that the storm’s howls were part of a nightmare. That soon she would awaken in terror, and Father would sing to her. As he’d done when she was a child . . .

  “The crystals fine . . . will glow sublime . . .”

  Father stopped moving.

  “And with a song . . . you’ll sleep . . . my baby dear.”

  You, however, have never been a force for equilibrium. You tow chaos behind you like a corpse dragged by one leg through the snow. Please, hearken to my plea. Leave that place and join me in my oath of nonintervention.

  Kaladin caught Shallan’s hand.

  Boulders crashed above, smashing against the plateaus, breaking off chunks and tossing them down around him. Wind raged. Water swelled below, rising toward him. He clung to Shallan, but their wet hands started to slip.

  And then, in a sudden surge, her grip tightened. With a strength that seemed to belie her smaller form, she heaved. Kaladin shoved with his good leg as water washed over it, and forced himself up the remaining distance to join her in the rocky alcove.

  The hollow was barely three or four feet deep, shallower than the crack they’d hid in. Fortunately, it faced westward. Though icy wind twisted about and sprayed water on them, the brunt of the storm was broken by the plateau.

  Puffing, Kaladin pulled against the wall of the alcove, his injured leg smarting like nothing else, Shallan clinging to him. She was a warmth in his arms, and he held to her as much as she did him, both of them sitting hunched against the rock, his head brushing the top of the hollowed hole.

  The plateau shuddered, quivering like a frightened man. He couldn’t see much; the blackness was absolute except when lightning came. And the sound. Thunder crashing, seemingly disconnected from the sprays of lightning. Water roared like an angry beast, and the flashes illuminated a frothing, churning, raging river in the chasm.

  Damnation . . . it was almost up to their alcove. It had risen fifty or more feet in moments. The dirty water was filled with branches, broken plants, vines ripped from their mountings.

  “The sphere?” Kaladin asked in the blackness. “You had a sphere with you for light.”

  “Gone,” she shouted over the roar. “I must have dropped it when I grabbed you!”

  “I didn’t—”

  A crash of thunder, accompanied by a blinding flash of light, sent him stuttering. Shallan pulled more tightly against him, fingers digging into his arm. The light left an afterimage in his eyes.

  Storms. He could swear that afterimage was a face, horribly twisted, the mouth pulled open. The next lightning bolt lit the flood just outside with a sequence of crackling light, and it showed water bobbing with corpses. Dozens of them pulled past in the current, dead eyes toward the sky, many just empty sockets. Men and Parshendi.

  The water surged upward, and a few inches of it flooded the chamber. The water of dead men. The storm went dark again, as black as a cavern beneath the ground. Just Kaladin, Shallan, and the bodies.

  “That was,” Shallan said, her head near his, “the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Storms are strange.”

  “You speak from experience?”

  “Sadeas hung me out in one,” he said. “I was supposed to die.”

  That tempest had tried to rip the skin, then muscles, from his skeleton. Rain like knives. Lightning like a cauterizing iron.

  And a small figure, all white, standing before him with hands forward, as if to part the tempest for him. Tiny and frail, yet as strong as the winds themselves.

  Syl . . . what have I done to you?

  “I need to hear the story,” Shallan said.

  “I’ll tell it to you sometime.”

  Water washed up over them again. For a moment, they became lighter, floating in the sudden burst of water. The current pulled with unexpected strength, as if eager to tow them out into the river. Shallan screamed and Kaladin gripped the rock on either side, holding on in a panic. The river retreated, though he could still hear it rushing. They settled back into the alcove.

  Light came from above, too steady to be lightning. Something was glowing on the plateau. Something that moved. It was hard to see, since water streamed off the side of the plateau above, falling in a sheet before their refuge. He swore he saw an enormous figure walking up there, a glowing inhuman form, followed by another, alien and sleek. Striding the storm. Leg after leg, until the glow passed.

  “Please,” Shallan said. “I need to hear something other than that. Tell me.”

  He shivered, but nodded. Voices. Voices would help. “It started when Amaram betrayed me,” he said, tone hushed, just loud enough for her—pressed close—to hear. “He made me a slave for knowing the truth, that he’d killed my men in his lust to get a Shardblade. That it mattered more to him than his own soldiers, more to him than honor . . .”

  He continued on, talking of his days as a slave, of his attempts to escape. Of the men he’d gotten killed for trusting him. It gushed from him, a story he’d never told. Who would he have told it to? Bridge Four had lived most of it with him.

  He told her of the wagon and of Tvlakv—that name earned a gasp. She apparently knew him. He spoke of the numbness, the . . . nothing. The thinking he should kill himself, but the trouble believing that it was worth the effort.

  And then, Bridge Four. He didn’t talk about Syl. Too much pain there right now. Instead, he talked of bridge runs, of terror, of death, and of decision.

  Rain washed over them, blown in swirls, and he swore he could hear chanting out there somewhere. Some kind of strange spren zipped past their enclosure, red and violet and reminiscent of lightning. Was that what Syl had seen?

  Shallan listened. He would have expected questions from her, but she didn’t ask a single one. No pestering for details, no chattering. She apparently did know how to be quiet.

  He got through it all, amazingly. The last bridge run. Rescuing Dalinar. He wanted to spill it all out. He talked about facing the Parshendi Shardbearer, about how he’d offended Adolin, about holding the bridgehead on his own . . .

  When he finished, they both let the silence settle on them, and shared warmth. Together, they stared out at the rushing water just out of reach and lit by flashing.

  “I killed my father,” Shallan whispered.

  Kaladin looked toward her. In a flash of light, he saw her eyes as she looked up from where her head had been resting against his chest, beads of water on her eyelashes. With his hands around her waist, hers around him, it was as close as he’d held a woman since Tarah.

  “My father was a violent, angry man,” Shallan said. “A murderer. I loved him. And I strangled him as he lay on the floor, watching me, unable to move. I killed my own father . . .”

  He didn’t prod her, though he wanted to know. Needed to know.

  She went on, fortunately, speaking of her youth and the terrors she had known. Kaladin had thought his life terrible, but there was one thing he’d had, and perhaps not cherished enough: parents who loved him. Roshone had brought Damnation itself to Hearthstone, but at least Kaladin’s mother and father had always been there to rely upon.

  What would he have done, if his father had been like the abusive, hateful man Shallan described? If his mother had died before his own eyes? What would he have done if, instead of living off Tien’s light, he had been required to bring light to the family?

  He listened with wonder. Storms. Why wasn’t this woman broken, truly broken? She described herself that way, but she was no more broken than a spear with a chipped blade—and a spear like that could still be as sharp a weapon as any. He preferred one with a score or two on the blade, a worn handle. A spearhead that had known fighting was just . . . better than a new one
. You could know it had been used by a man fighting for his life, and that it had remained sure and not broken. Marks like those were signs of strength.

  He did feel a chill as she mentioned her brother Helaran’s death, anger in her voice.

  Helaran had been killed in Alethkar. At Amaram’s hands.

  Storms . . . I killed him, didn’t I? Kaladin thought. The brother she loved. Had he told her about that?

  No. No, he hadn’t mentioned that he’d killed the Shardbearer, only that Amaram had killed Kaladin’s men to cover up his lust for the weapon. He’d gotten used to, over the years, referencing the event without mentioning that he’d killed a Shardbearer. His first few months as a slave had beaten into him the dangers of talking about an event like that. He hadn’t even realized he’d fallen into that habit of speaking here.

  Did she realize? Had she inferred that Kaladin, not Amaram, had been the one to actually kill the Shardbearer? She didn’t seem to have made that connection. She continued talking, speaking of the night—also during a storm—when she’d poisoned, then murdered her father.

  Almighty above. This woman was stronger than he’d ever been.

  “And so,” she continued, pressing her head back against his chest, “we decided that I would find Jasnah. She . . . had a Soulcaster, you see.”

  “You wanted to see if she could fix yours?”

  “That would have been too rational.” He couldn’t see her scowl at herself, but he heard it, somehow. “My plan—being stupid and naive—was to swap mine for hers and bring back a working one to make money for the family.”

  “You had never left your family’s lands before.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you went to rob one of the smartest women in the world?”

  “Er . . . yes. Remember that bit about ‘stupid and naive’? Anyway, Jasnah found out. Fortunately, I intrigued her and she agreed to take me on as a ward. The marriage to Adolin was her idea, a way to protect my family while I trained.”

  “Huh,” he said. Lightning flashed outside. The winds seemed to be building even further, if that was possible, and he had to raise his voice even though Shallan was right there. “Generous, for a woman you intended to rob.”