The Way of Kings (Stormlight Archive, The)

by Brandon Sanderson

  Dalinar sighed, eyeing Navani, who stood close enough to hear. She pretended—for propriety—that she wasn’t listening in. “You know, it is customary to eventually choose just one woman to court.” You’re going to need a good wife, son. Perhaps very soon.

  “When I’m old and boring, perhaps,” Adolin said, smiling at the young woman. She was pretty. But only in camp one day? Blood of my ancestors, Dalinar thought. He’d spent three years courting the woman who’d eventually become his wife. Even if he couldn’t remember her face, he did remember how persistently he’d pursued her.

  Surely he’d loved her. All emotion regarding her was gone, wiped from his mind by forces he should never have tempted. Unfortunately, he did remember how much he’d desired Navani, years before meeting the woman who would become his wife.

  Stop that, he told himself. Moments ago, he’d been on the brink of deciding to abdicate his seat as highprince. It was no time to let Navani distract him.

  “Brightness Danlan Morakotha,” he said to the young woman. “You are welcome among my clerks. I understand that I’ve received a communication?”

  “Indeed, Brightlord,” the woman said, curtsying. She nodded to the line of five spanreeds sitting on his bookshelf, set upright in pen holders. The spanreeds looked like ordinary writing reeds, except that each had a small infused ruby affixed. The one on the far right pulsed slowly.

  Litima was there, and though she had seniority, she nodded for Danlan to fetch the spanreed. The young woman hurried to the bookshelf and moved the still-blinking reed to the small writing desk beside the lectern. She carefully clipped a piece of paper onto the writing board and put the ink vial into its hole, twisting it snugly into place and then pulling the stopper. Lighteyed women were very proficient at working with just their freehand.

  She sat down, looking up at him, seeming slightly nervous. Dalinar didn’t trust her, of course—she could easily be a spy for one of the other highprinces. Unfortunately, there weren’t any women in camp he trusted completely, not with Jasnah gone.

  “I am ready, Brightlord,” Danlan said. She had a breathy, husky voice. Just the type that attracted Adolin. He hoped she wasn’t as vapid as those he usually picked.

  “Proceed,” Dalinar said, waving Navani toward one of the room’s plush easy chairs. The other clerks sat back down on their bench.

  Danlan turned the spanreed’s gemstone one notch, indicating that the request had been acknowledged. Then she checked the levels on the sides of the writing board—small vials of oil with bubbles at the center, which allowed her to make the board perfectly flat. Finally, she inked the reed and placed it on the dot at the top left of the page. Holding it upright, she twisted the gemstone setting one more time with her thumb. Then she removed her hand.

  The reed remained in place, tip against the paper, hovering as if held in a phantom hand. Then it began to write, mimicking the exact movements Jasnah made miles away, writing with a reed conjoined to this one.

  Dalinar stood beside the writing table, armored arms folded. He could see that his proximity made Danlan nervous, but he was too anxious to sit.

  Jasnah had elegant handwriting, of course—Jasnah rarely did anything without taking the time to perfect it. Dalinar leaned forward as the familiar—yet indecipherable—lines appeared on the page in stark violet. Faint wisps of reddish smoke floated up from the gemstone.

  The pen stopped writing, freezing in place.

  “‘Uncle,’” Danlan read, “‘I presume that you are well.’”

  “Indeed,” Dalinar replied. “I am well cared for by those around me.” The words were code indicating that he didn’t trust—or at least didn’t know—everyone listening. Jasnah would be careful not to send anything too sensitive.

  Danlan took the pen and twisted the gemstone, then wrote out the words, sending them across the ocean to Jasnah. Was she still in Tukar? After Danlan finished writing, she returned it to the dot at the top left—the spot where the pens were both to be placed so Jasnah could continue the conversation—then turned the gemstone back to the previous setting.

  “‘As I expected, I have found my way to Kharbranth,’” Danlan read. “‘The secrets I seek are too obscure to be contained even in the Palanaeum, but I find hints. Tantalizing fragments. Is Elhokar well?’”

  Hints? Fragments? Of what? She had a penchant for drama, Jasnah did, though she wasn’t as flamboyant about it as the king.

  “Your brother tried very hard to get himself killed by a chasmfiend a few weeks back,” Dalinar replied. Adolin smiled at that, leaning with his shoulder against the bookcase. “But evidently the Heralds watch over him. He is well, though your presence here is sorely missed. I’m certain he could use your counsel. He is relying heavily on Brightness Lalai to act as clerk.”

  Perhaps that would make Jasnah return. There was little love lost between herself and Sadeas’s cousin, who was the king’s head scribe in the queen’s absence.

  Danlan scratched away, writing the words. To the side, Navani cleared her throat.

  “Oh,” Dalinar said, “add this: Your mother is here in the warcamps again.”

  A short time later, the pen wrote of its own volition. “‘Send my mother my respect. Keep her at arm’s length, Uncle. She bites.’”

  From the side, Navani sniffed, and Dalinar realized he hadn’t signaled that Navani was actually listening. He blushed as Danlan continued speaking. “‘I cannot speak of my work via spanreed, but I’m growing increasingly concerned. There is something here, hidden by the sheer number of accrued pages in the historical record.’”

  Jasnah was a Veristitalian. She’d explained it to him once; they were an order of scholars who tried to find the truth in the past. They wished to create unbiased, factual accounts of what had happened in order to extrapolate what to do in the future. He wasn’t clear on why they thought themselves different from regular historians.

  “Will you be returning?” Dalinar asked.

  “‘I cannot say,’” Danlan read after the reply came. “‘I do not dare stop my research. But a time may soon come when I dare not stay away either.’”

  What? Dalinar thought.

  “‘Regardless,’” Danlan continued, “‘I have some questions for you. I need you to describe for me again what happened when you met that first Parshendi patrol seven years ago.’”

  Dalinar frowned. Despite the Plate’s augmentation, his digging had left him feeling tired. But he didn’t dare sit on one of the room’s chairs while wearing his Plate. He took off one of his gauntlets, though, and ran his hand through his hair. He wasn’t fond of this topic, but part of him was glad of the distraction. A reason to hold off on making a decision that would change his life forever.

  Danlan looked at him, prepared to dictate his words. Why did Jasnah want this story again? Hadn’t she written an account of these very events in her biography of her father?

  Well, she would eventually tell him why, and—if her past revelations were any indication—her current project would be of great worth. He wished Elhokar had received a measure of his sister’s wisdom.

  “These are painful memories, Jasnah. I wish I’d never convinced your father to go on that expedition. If we’d never discovered the Parshendi, then they couldn’t have assassinated him. The first meeting happened when we were exploring a forest that wasn’t on the maps. This was south of the Shattered Plains, in a valley about two weeks’ march from the Drying Sea.”

  During Gavilar’s youth, only two things had thrilled him—conquest and hunting. When he hadn’t been seeking one, it had been the other. Suggesting the hunt had seemed rational at the time. Gavilar had been acting oddly, losing his thirst for battle. Men had started to say that he was weak. Dalinar had wanted to remind his brother of the good times in their youth. Hence the hunt for a legendary chasmfiend.

  “Your father wasn’t with me when I ran across them,” Dalinar continued, thinking back. Camping on humid, forested hills. Interrogating Natan natives via transl
ators. Looking for scat or broken trees. “I was leading scouts up a tributary of the Deathbend River while your father scouted downstream. We found the Parshendi camped on the other side. I didn’t believe it at first. Parshmen. Camped, free and organized. And they carried weapons. Not crude ones, either. Swords, spears with carved hafts…”

  He trailed off. Gavilar hadn’t believed either, when Dalinar told him. There was no such thing as a free parshman tribe. They were servants, and always had been servants.

  “‘Did they have Shardblades then?’” Danlan said. Dalinar hadn’t realized that Jasnah had made a response.

  “No.”

  A scratched reply eventually came. “‘But they have them now. When did you first see a Parshendi Shardbearer?’”

  “After Gavilar’s death,” Dalinar said.

  He made the connection. They’d always wondered why Gavilar had wanted a treaty with the Parshendi. They wouldn’t have needed one just to harvest the greatshells on the Shattered Plains; the Parshendi hadn’t lived on the Plains then.

  Dalinar felt a chill. Could his brother have known that these Parshendi had access to Shardblades? Had he made the treaty hoping to get out of them where they’d found the weapons?

  Is it his death? Dalinar wondered. Is that the secret Jasnah’s looking for? She’d never shown Elhokar’s dedication to vengeance, but she thought differently from her brother. Revenge wouldn’t drive her. But questions. Yes, questions would.

  “‘One more thing, Uncle,’” Danlan read. “‘Then I can go back to digging through this labyrinth of a library. At times, I feel like a cairn robber, sifting through the bones of those long dead. Regardless. The Parshendi, you once mentioned how quickly they seemed to learn our language.’”

  “Yes,” Dalinar said. “In a matter of days, we were speaking and communicating quite well. Remarkable.” Who would have thought that parshmen, of all people, had the wit for such a marvel? Most he’d known didn’t do much speaking at all.

  “‘What were the first things they spoke to you about?’” Danlan said. “‘The very first questions they asked? Can you remember?’”

  Dalinar closed his eyes, remembering days with the Parshendi camped just across the river from them. Gavilar had become fascinated by them. “They wanted to see our maps.”

  “Did they mention the Voidbringers?”

  Voidbringers? “Not that I recall. Why?”

  “‘I’d rather not say right now. However, I want to show you something. Have your scribe get out a new sheet of paper.’”

  Danlan affixed a new page to the writing board. She put the pen to the corner and let go. It rose and began to scratch back and forth in quick, bold strokes. It was a drawing. Dalinar stood up and stepped closer, and Adolin crowded near. Reed and ink wasn’t the best medium, and drawing across spans wasn’t precise. The pen leaked tiny globs of ink in places it wouldn’t have on the other side, and though the inkwell was in the exact same place—allowing Jasnah to re-ink both her reed and Dalinar’s at the same time—his reed sometimes ran out before the one on the other side.

  Still, the picture was marvelous. This isn’t Jasnah, Dalinar realized. Whoever was doing the drawing was far, far more talented than his niece.

  The picture resolved into a depiction of a tall shadow looming over some buildings. Hints of carapace and claws showed in the thin ink lines, and shadows were made by drawing finer lines close together.

  Danlan set it aside, getting out a third sheet of paper. Dalinar held the drawing up, Adolin at his side. The nightmarish beast in the lines and shadows was faintly familiar. Like…

  “It’s a chasmfiend,” Adolin said, pointing. “It’s distorted—far more menacing in the face and larger at the shoulders, and I don’t see its second set of foreclaws—but someone was obviously trying to draw one of them.”

  “Yes,” Dalinar said, rubbing his chin.

  “‘This is a depiction from one of the books here,’” Danlan read. “‘My new ward is quite skilled at drawing, and so I had her reproduce it for you. Tell me. Does it remind you of anything?’”

  A new ward? Dalinar thought. It had been years since Jasnah had taken one. She always said she didn’t have the time. “This picture’s of a chasmfiend,” Dalinar said.

  Danlan wrote the words. A moment later, the reply came. “‘The book describes this as a picture of a Voidbringer.’” Danlan frowned, cocking her head. “‘The book is a copy of a text originally written in the years before the Recreance. However, the illustrations are copied from another text, even older. In fact, some think that picture was drawn only two or three generations after the Heralds departed.’”

  Adolin whistled softly. That would make it very old indeed. So far as Dalinar understood, they had few pieces of art or writing dating from the shadowdays, The Way of Kings being one of the oldest, and the only complete text. And even it had survived only in translation; they had no copies in the original tongue.

  “‘Before you jump to conclusions,’” Danlan read, “‘I’m not implying that the Voidbringers were the same thing as chasmfiends. I believe that the ancient artist didn’t know what a Voidbringer looked like, and so she drew the most horrific thing she knew of.’”

  But how did the original artist know what a chasmfiend looked like? Dalinar thought. We only just discovered the Shattered Plains—

  But of course. Though the Unclaimed Hills were now empty, they had once been an inhabited kingdom. Someone in the past had known about chasmfiends, known them well enough to draw one and label it a Voidbringer.

  “‘I must go now,’” Jasnah said via Danlan. “‘Care for my brother in my absence, Uncle.’”

  “Jasnah,” Dalinar sent, choosing his words very carefully. “Things are difficult here. The storm begins to blow unchecked, and the building shakes and moans. You may soon hear news that shocks you. It would be very nice if you could return and lend your aid.”

  He waited quietly for the reply, the spanreed scratching. “‘I should like to promise a date when I will come.’” Dalinar could almost hear Jasnah’s calm, cool voice. “‘But I cannot estimate when my research will be completed.’”

  “This is very important, Jasnah,” Dalinar said. “Please reconsider.”

  “‘Be assured, Uncle, that I am coming. Eventually. I just can’t say when.’”

  Dalinar sighed.

  “‘Note,’” Jasnah wrote, “‘that I am most eager to see a chasmfiend for myself.’”

  “A dead one,” Dalinar said. “I have no intention of letting you repeat your brother’s experience of a few weeks ago.”

  “‘Ah,’” Jasnah sent back, “‘dear, overprotective Dalinar. One of these years, you will have to admit that your favored niece and nephew have grown up.’”

  “I’ll treat you as adults so long as you act the part,” Dalinar said. “Come speedily, and we’ll get you a dead chasmfiend. Take care.”

  They waited to see if a further response came, but the gem stopped blinking, Jasnah’s transmission complete. Danlan put away the spanreed and the board, and Dalinar thanked the clerks for their aid. They withdrew; Adolin looked as if he wanted to linger, but Dalinar gestured for him to leave.

  Dalinar looked down at the picture of the chasmfiend again, unsatisfied. What had he gained from the conversation? More vague hints? What could be so important about Jasnah’s research that she would ignore threats to the kingdom?

  He would have to compose a more forthright letter to her once he’d made his announcement, explaining why he had decided to step down. Perhaps that would bring her back.

  And, in a moment of shock, Dalinar realized that he had made his decision. Sometime between leaving the trench and now, he’d stopped treating his abdication as an if and started thinking of it as a when. It was the right decision. He felt sick about it, but certain. A man sometimes needed to do things that were unpleasant.

  It was the discussion with Jasnah, he realized. The talk of her father. He was acting like Gavilar at the end. Th
at had nearly undermined the kingdom. Well, he needed to stop himself before he got that far. Perhaps whatever was happening to him was some kind of disease of the mind, inherited from their parents. It—

  “You are quite fond of Jasnah,” Navani said.

  Dalinar started, turning away from the picture of the chasmfiend. He’d assumed she’d followed Adolin out. But she still stood there, looking at him.

  “Why is it,” Navani said, “that you encourage her so strongly to return?”

  He turned to face Navani, and realized that she’d sent her two youthful attendants out with the clerks. They were now alone.

  “Navani,” he said. “This is inappropriate.”

  “Bah. We’re family, and I have questions.”

  Dalinar hesitated, then walked to the center of the room. Navani stood near the door. Blessedly, her attendants had left open the door at the end of the antechamber, and beyond it were two guards in the hall outside. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but so long as Dalinar could see the guards and they him, his conversation with Navani was just barely, proper.

  “Dalinar?” Navani asked. “Are you going to answer me? Why is it you trust my daughter so much when others almost universally revile her?”

  “I consider their disdain for her to be a recommendation,” he said.

  “She is a heretic.”

  “She refused to join any of the devotaries because she did not believe in their teachings. Rather than compromise for the sake of appearances, she has been honest and has refused to make professions she does not believe. I find that a sign of honor.”

  Navani snorted. “You two are a pair of nails in the same doorframe. Stern, hard, and storming annoying to pull free.”

  “You should go now,” Dalinar said, nodding toward the hallway. He suddenly felt very exhausted. “People will talk.”

  “Let them. We need to plan, Dalinar. You are the most important highprince in—”

  “Navani,” he cut in. “I’m going to abdicate in favor of Adolin.”

  She blinked in surprise.

  “I’m stepping down as soon as I can make the necessary arrangements. It will be a few days at most.” Speaking the words felt odd, as if saying them made his decision real.