Words of Radiance (Stormlight Archive, The)

by Sanderson, Brandon

  Moash felt sick.

  Graves gripped him on the arm. “Head up, Moash. Bringing a Shardbearer back with me will mean that my mission wasn’t a complete loss. Besides, you can tell us about this new Radiant. I’ll introduce you to the Diagram. We have an important work.”

  “Which is?”

  “The salvation of the entire world, my friend.” Graves patted him, then walked toward the front of the cart, where the others rode.

  The salvation of the entire world.

  I’ve been played for one of the ten fools, Moash thought, chin to his chest. And I don’t even know how.

  The wagon started rolling again.

  1173090605 1173090801 1173090901 1173091001

  1173091004 1173100105 1173100205 1173100401

  1173100603 1173100804

  —From the Diagram, North Wall Coda, Windowsill region: paragraph 2 (This appears to be a sequence of dates, but their relevance is as yet unknown.)

  They soon began to move into the tower.

  There was nothing else they could do, though Adolin’s explorations were far from finished. Night was approaching, and the temperature was dropping outside. Beyond that, the highstorm that had hit the Shattered Plains would be raging across the land currently, and would eventually hit these mountains. It took over a day for one to cross the entire continent, and they were probably somewhere near the center, so it would be growing close.

  An unscheduled highstorm, Shallan thought, walking through the dark hallways with her guards. And something else coming from the other direction.

  She could tell that this tower—its contents, every hallway—was a majestic wonder. It spoke worlds about how tired she was that she didn’t want to draw any of it. She just wanted to sleep.

  Their spherelight revealed something odd on the wall ahead. Shallan frowned, shaking off her fatigue and stepping up to it. A small folded piece of paper, like a card. She glanced back at her guards, who looked equally confused.

  She pulled the card off the wall; it had been stuck in place with some weevilwax on the back. Inside was the triangle symbol of the Ghostbloods. Beneath it, Shallan’s name. Not Veil’s name.

  Shallan’s.

  Panic. Alertness. In a moment, she had sucked in the Light of their lantern, plunging the corridor into darkness. Light shone from a doorway nearby, however.

  She stared at it. Gaz moved to investigate, but Shallan stopped him with a gesture.

  Run or fight?

  Run where? she thought. Hesitant, she stepped up to the doorway, again motioning her guards back.

  Mraize stood inside, gazing out a large, glassless window that overlooked another section of the innards of this tower. He turned toward her, twisted and scarred, yet somehow refined in his gentleman’s clothing.

  So. She had been found out.

  I am no longer a child who hides in her room when the shouting comes, she thought firmly to herself, walking into the room. If I run from this man, he will see me as something to be hunted.

  She stepped right up to him, ready to summon Pattern. He wasn’t like other Shardblades; she acknowledged that now. He could come more quickly than the ten requisite heartbeats.

  He’d done that before. She hadn’t been willing to admit that he was capable of it. Admitting that would have meant too much.

  How many more of my lies, she thought, hold me back from things I could accomplish?

  But she needed those lies. Needed them.

  “You led me on a grand hunt, Veil,” Mraize said. “If your abilities had not been manifest during the course of saving the army, I perhaps never would have located your false identity.”

  “Veil is the false identity, Mraize,” Shallan said. “I am me.”

  He inspected her. “I think not.”

  She met that gaze, but shivered inside.

  “A curious position you are in,” Mraize said. “Will you hide the true nature of your powers? I was able to guess what they are, but others will not be so knowledgeable. They might see only the Blade, and not ask what else you can do.”

  “I don’t see how it’s a concern of yours.”

  “You are one of us,” Mraize said. “We look after our own.”

  Shallan frowned. “But you’ve seen through the lie.”

  “Are you saying you don’t want to be one of the Ghostbloods?” His tone was not threatening, but those eyes . . . storms, those eyes could have drilled through stone. “We do not offer the invitation to just anyone.”

  “You killed Jasnah,” Shallan hissed.

  “Yes. After she, in turn, had assassinated a number of our members. You didn’t think her hands were clean of blood, did you, Veil?”

  She looked away, breaking his gaze.

  “I should have guessed that you would turn out to be Shallan Davar,” Mraize continued. “I feel a fool for not seeing it earlier. Your family has a long history of involvement in these events.”

  “I will not help you,” Shallan said.

  “Curious. You should know that I have your brothers.”

  She looked to him sharply.

  “Your house is no more,” Mraize said. “Your family’s grounds seized by a passing army. I rescued your brothers from the chaos of the succession war, and am bringing them here. Your family, however, does owe me a debt. One Soulcaster. Broken.”

  He met her eyes. “How convenient that you, by my estimations, are one, little knife.”

  She summoned Pattern. “I will kill you before I let you use them as blackmail—”

  “No blackmail,” Mraize said. “They will arrive safe. A gift to you. You may wait upon my words and see. I mention your debt only so that it has a chance to find . . . purchase in your mind.”

  She frowned, holding her Shardblade, wavering. “Why?” she finally asked.

  “Because, you are ignorant.” Mraize stepped closer to her, towering over her. “You don’t know who we are. You don’t know what we’re trying to accomplish. You don’t know much of anything at all, Veil. Why did your father join us? Why did your brother seek out the Skybreakers? I have done some research, you see. I have answers for you.” Surprisingly, he turned from her and walked toward the doorway. “I will give you time to consider. You seem to think that your newfound place among the Radiants makes you unfit for our numbers, but I see it differently, as does my babsk. Let Shallan Davar be a Radiant, conformist and noble. Let Veil come to us.” He stopped by the doorway. “And let her find truth.”

  He disappeared into the hallway. Shallan found herself feeling even more drained than before. She dismissed Pattern and leaned back against the wall. Of course Mraize would have found his way here—he’d likely been among the armies, somewhere. Getting to Urithiru had been one of the Ghostbloods’ primary goals. Despite her determination not to help them, she’d transported them—along with the army—right where they wanted to go.

  Her brothers? Would they actually be safe? What of her family servants, her brother’s betrothed?

  She sighed, walking to the doorway and collecting her guards. Let her find truth. What if she didn’t want to find the truth? Pattern hummed softly.

  After walking through the tower’s ground floor—using her own glow for light—she found Adolin in the hallway beside a room, where he’d said he’d be. He had his wrist wrapped, and the bruises on his face were starting to purple. They made him look slightly less intoxicatingly handsome, though there was a rugged “I punched a lot of people today” quality to that, which was fetching in its own right.

  “You look exhausted,” he said, giving her a peck of a kiss.

  “And you look like you let someone play sticks with your face,” she said, but smiled at him. “You should get some sleep too.”

  “I will,” he said. “Soon.” He touched her face. “You’re amazing, you realize. You saved everything. Everyone.”

  “No need to treat me like I’m glass, Adolin.”

  “You’re a Radiant,” he said. “I mean . . .” He ran his hand through his pers
istently messy hair. “Shallan. You’re something greater than even a lighteyes.”

  “Was that a wisecrack about my girth?”

  “What? No. I mean . . .” He blushed.

  “I will not let this be awkward, Adolin.”

  “But—”

  She grabbed him in an embrace and forced him into a kiss, a deep and passionate one. He tried to mumble something, but she kept on kissing, pressing her lips against his, letting him feel her desire. He melted into the kiss, then grabbed her by the torso and pulled her close.

  After a moment, he pulled back. “Storms, that smarts!”

  “Oh!” Shallan raised a hand to her mouth, remembering the bruises on his face. “Sorry.”

  He grinned, then winced again, as apparently that hurt too. “Worth it. Anyway, I’ll promise to avoid being awkward if you avoid being too irresistible. At least until I’m healed up. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  He looked to her guards. “Nobody disturbs the Lady Radiant, understand?”

  They nodded.

  “Sleep well,” he said, pushing open a door into the room. Many of the rooms still had wooden doors, despite their long abandonment. “Hopefully, the room is suitable. Your spren chose it.”

  Her spren? Shallan frowned, then stepped into the room. Adolin closed the door.

  Shallan studied the windowless stone chamber. Why had Pattern chosen this particular place for her? The room didn’t seem distinctive. Adolin had left a Stormlight lantern for her that was extravagant, considering how few lit gemstones they had—and it showed a small square chamber with a stone bench in the corner. There were a few blankets on it. Where had Adolin found blankets?

  She frowned at the wall. The rock here was faded in a square, as if someone had once hung a picture there. Actually, that looked oddly familiar. Not that she’d been here before, but the place that square hung on the wall . . .

  It was exactly in the same place where the picture had hung on her father’s wall back in Jah Keved.

  Her mind started to fuzz.

  “Mmm . . .” Pattern said from the floor beside her. “It is time.”

  “No.”

  “It is time,” he repeated. “The Ghostbloods circle you. The people need a Radiant.”

  “They have one. The bridgeboy.”

  “Not enough. They need you.”

  Shallan blinked out tears. Against her will, the room started to change. White carpet appeared. A picture on the wall. Furniture. Walls painted light blue.

  Two corpses.

  Shallan stepped over one, though it was just an illusion, and walked to the wall. A painting had appeared, part of the illusion, and it was outlined with a white glow. Something was hidden behind it. She pulled aside the picture, or tried to. Her fingers only made the illusion blur.

  This was nothing. Just a re-creation of a memory she wished she didn’t have.

  “Mmm . . . A better lie, Shallan.”

  She blinked away tears. Her fingers lifted, and she pressed them against the wall again. This time, she could feel the painting’s frame. It wasn’t real. For the moment, she pretended that it was, and let the image capture her.

  “Can’t I just keep pretending?”

  “No.”

  She was there, in her father’s room. Trembling, she pulled aside the picture, revealing the strongbox in the wall beyond. She raised the key, and hesitated. “Mother’s soul is inside.”

  “Mmm . . . No. Not her soul. That which took her soul.”

  Shallan unlocked the safe, then tugged it open, revealing the contents. A small Shardblade. Thrust into the strongbox hastily, tip piercing through the back, hilt toward her.

  “This was you,” she whispered.

  “Mmm . . . Yes.”

  “Father took you from me,” Shallan said, “and tried to hide you in here. Of course, that was useless. You vanished as soon as he closed the strongbox. Faded to mist. He wasn’t thinking clearly. Neither of us were.”

  She turned.

  Red carpet. Once white. Her mother’s friend lay on the floor, bleeding from the arm, though that wound hadn’t killed him. Shallan walked to the other corpse, the one facedown in the beautiful dress of blue and gold. Red hair spilled out in a pattern around the head.

  Shallan knelt and rolled over her mother’s corpse, confronting a skull with burned-out eyes.

  “Why did she try to kill me, Pattern?” Shallan whispered.

  “Mmm . . .”

  “It started when she found out what I could do.”

  She remembered it now. Her mother’s arrival, with a friend Shallan didn’t recognize, to confront her father. Her mother’s shouts, arguing with her father.

  Mother calling Shallan one of them.

  Her father barging in. Mother’s friend with a knife, the two struggling, the friend getting cut in the arm. Blood spilled on the carpet. The friend had won that fight, eventually holding Father down, pinned on the ground. Mother took the knife and came for Shallan.

  And then . . .

  And then a sword in Shallan’s hands.

  “He let everyone believe that he’d killed her,” Shallan whispered. “That he’d murdered his wife and her lover in a rage, when I was the one who had actually killed them. He lied to protect me.”

  “I know.”

  “That secret destroyed him. It destroyed our entire family.”

  “I know.”

  “I hate you,” she whispered, staring into her mother’s dead eyes.

  “I know.” Pattern buzzed softly. “Eventually, you will kill me, and you will have your revenge.”

  “I don’t want revenge. I want my family.”

  Shallan wrapped her arms around herself and buried her head in them, weeping as the illusion bled white smoke, then vanished, leaving her in an empty room.

  * * *

  I can only conclude, Amaram wrote hurriedly, the glyphs a mess of sloppy ink, that we have been successful, Restares. The reports from Dalinar’s army indicate that Voidbringers were not only spotted, but fought. Red eyes, ancient powers. They have apparently unleashed a new storm upon this world.

  He looked up from his pad and peeked out the window. His carriage rattled down the roadway in Dalinar’s warcamp. All of his soldiers were away, and his remaining guards had gone to oversee the exodus. Even with Amaram’s reputation, he’d been able to pass into the camp with ease.

  He turned back to his paper. I do not exult in this success, he wrote. Lives will be lost. It has ever been our burden as the Sons of Honor. To return the Heralds, to return the dominance of the Church, we had to put the world into a crisis.

  That crisis we now have, a terrible one. The Heralds will return. How can they not, with the problems we now face? But many will die. So very many. Nalan send that it is worth the loss. Regardless, I will have more information soon. When I next write you, I hope to do so from Urithiru.

  The coach pulled to a stop and Amaram pushed open the door. He handed the letter to the carriage driver, Pama. She took it and began digging in her satchel for the spanreed to send the communication to Restares. He would have done it himself, but you could not use a spanreed while moving.

  She would destroy the papers when done. Amaram spared a glance for the trunks on the back of the coach; they contained a precious cargo, including all of his maps, notes, and theories. Should he have left those with his soldiers? Bringing the force of fifty into Dalinar’s warcamp would have drawn attention for certain, even with the chaos here, so he’d ordered them to meet him on the Plains.

  He needed to keep moving. He strode away from the coach, pulling up the hood on his cloak. The grounds of Dalinar’s temple complex were even more frenzied than most of the warcamps, as many people had come to the ardents in this time of stress. He passed a mother begging for one of them to burn a prayer for her husband, who fought with Dalinar’s army. The ardent kept repeating that she should gather her things and join the caravans heading out across the Plains.

  It was happeni
ng. It was really happening. The Sons of Honor had, at long last, achieved their goal. Gavilar would be proud. Amaram hastened his pace, turning as another ardent bustled up to him, to ask if he needed anything. Before she could look in his hood and recognize him, however, her attention was drawn by a pair of frightened youths who complained that their father was too old to make the trip, and begged for the ardents to help them carry him somehow.

  He made it to the corner of the monastery building where they kept the insane and rounded to the back wall, out of sight, near the rim of the warcamp itself. He looked about, then summoned his Blade. A few swift slices would—

  What was that?

  He spun, certain he’d seen someone approach. But it was nothing. Shadows playing tricks on him. He made his slices in the wall and then carefully pushed open the hole he’d made. The Great One—Talenelat’Elin, Herald of War himself—sat in the dark room, in much the same posture he’d borne before. Perched on the end of his bed, slumped forward, head bowed.

  “Why must they keep you in such darkness?” Amaram said, dismissing his Blade. “This is not fit for the lowliest of men, let alone one such as yourself. I will have words with Dalinar about the way the insane are—”

  No, he would not. Dalinar thought him a murderer. Amaram drew in a long, deep breath. Prices would need to be paid to see the Heralds return, but by Jezerezeh himself, the loss of Dalinar’s friendship would be a stiff one indeed. Would that mercy had not stayed his hand, all those months ago, when he could have executed that spearman.

  He hastened to the Herald’s side. “Great Prince,” Amaram whispered. “We must go.”

  Talenelat did not move. He was whispering again, though. The same things as before. Amaram could not help being reminded of the last time he had visited this place, in the company of someone who had been playing him for one of the ten fools all along. Who knew that Dalinar had grown so crafty in his old age? Time had changed both of them.

  “Please, Great Prince,” Amaram said, getting the Herald to his feet with some difficulty. The man was enormous, as tall as Amaram but built like a wall. The dark brown skin had surprised him the first time he’d seen the man—Amaram had, somewhat foolishly, expected that all of the Heralds would look Alethi.