The Way of Kings sa-1

by Brandon Sanderson

  “What are you doing, surgeon?” Roshone bellowed. “What of my son?” Painspren swarmed around him.

  “Your son is dead,” Lirin said, yanking the tusk free from Roshone’s leg.

  The lighteyes bellowed in agony, though Kaladin couldn’t tell if that was because of the tusk or his son. Roshone clenched his jaw as Kaladin pressed the bandage down on his leg. Lirin dunked his hands in the water bucket, then quickly wiped them with knobweed sap to frighten off rotspren.

  “My son is not dead,” Roshone growled. “I can see him moving! Tend to him, surgeon.”

  “Kaladin, get the dazewater,” Lirin ordered gathering his sewing needle.

  Kaladin hurried to the back of the room, steps splashing blood, and threw open the far cupboard. He took out a small flask of clear liquid.

  “What are you doing?” Roshone bellowed, trying to sit up. “Look at my son! Almighty above, look at him!”

  Kaladin turned hesitantly, pausing as he poured dazewater on a bandage. Rillir was spasming more violently.

  “I work under three guidelines, Roshone,” Lirin said, forcibly pressing the lighteyes down against his table. “The guidelines every surgeon uses when choosing between two patients. If the wounds are equal, treat the youngest first.”

  “Then see to my son!”

  “If the wounds are not equally threatening,” Lirin continued, “treat the worst wound first.”

  “As I’ve been telling you!”

  “The third guideline supersedes them both, Roshone,” Lirin said, leaning down. “A surgeon must know when someone is beyond their ability to help. I’m sorry, Roshone. I would save him if I could, I promise you. But I cannot.”

  “No!” Roshone said, struggling again.

  “Kaladin! Quickly!” Lirin said.

  Kaladin dashed over. He pressed the bandage of dazewater to Roshone’s chin and mouth, just below the nose, forcing the lighteyed man to breathe the fumes. Kaladin held his own breath, as he’d been trained.

  Roshone bellowed and screamed, but the two of them held him down, and he was weak from blood loss. Soon, his bellows became softer. In seconds, he was speaking in gibberish and grinning to himself. Lirin turned back to the leg wound while Kaladin went to throw away the dazewater bandage.

  “No. Administer it to Rillir.” His father didn’t look away from his work. “It’s the only mercy we can give him.”

  Kaladin nodded and used the dazewater bandage on the wounded youth. Rillir’s breathing grew less frantic, though he didn’t seem conscious enough to notice the effects. Then Kaladin threw the bandage with the dazewater into the brazier; heat negated the effects. The white, puffy bandage wrinkled and browned in the fire, steam streaming off it as the edges burst into flame.

  Kaladin returned with the sponge and washed out Roshone’s wound as Lirin prodded at it. There were a few shards of tusk trapped inside, and Lirin muttered to himself, getting out his tongs and razor-sharp knife.

  “Damnation can take them all,” Lirin said, pulling out the first sliver of tusk. Behind him, Rillir fell still. “Isn’t sending half of us to war enough for them? Do they have to seek death even when they’re living in a quiet township? Roshone should never have gone looking for the storming whitespine.”

  “He was looking for it?”

  “They went hunting it,” Lirin spat. “Wistiow and I used to joke about lighteyes like them. If you can’t kill men, you kill beasts. Well, this is what you found, Roshone.”

  “Father,” Kaladin said softly. “He’s not going to be pleased with you when he awakes.” The brightlord was humming softly, lying back, eyes closed.

  Lirin didn’t respond. He yanked out another fragment of tusk, and Kaladin washed out the wound. His father pressed his fingers to the side of the large puncture, inspecting it.

  There was one more sliver of tusk, jutting from a muscle inside the wound. Right beside that muscle thumped the femoral artery, the largest in the leg. Lirin reached in with his knife, carefully cutting free the sliver of tusk. Then he paused for a moment, the edge of his blade just hairs from the artery.

  If that were cut… Kaladin thought. Roshone would be dead in minutes. He was only alive right now because the tusk had missed the artery.

  Lirin’s normally steady hand quivered. Then he glanced up at Kaladin. He withdrew the knife without touching the artery, then reached in with his tongs to pull the sliver free. He tossed it aside, then calmly reached for his thread and needle.

  Behind them, Rillir had stopped breathing.

  That evening, Kaladin sat on the steps to his house, hands in his lap.

  Roshone had been returned to his estate to be cared for by his personal servants. His son’s corpse was cooling in the crypt below, and a messenger had been sent to request a Soulcaster for the body.

  On the horizon, the sun was red as blood. Everywhere Kaladin looked, the world was red.

  The door to the surgery closed, and his father-looking as exhausted as Kaladin felt-tottered out. He eased himself down, sighing as he sat beside Kaladin, looking at the sun. Did it look like blood to him too?

  They didn’t speak as the sun slowly sank before them. Why was it most colorful when it was about to vanish for the night? Was it angry at being forced belong the horizon? Or was it a showman, giving a performance before retiring?

  Why was the most colorful part of people’s bodies-the brightness of their blood-hidden beneath the skin, never to be seen unless something went wrong?

  No, Kaladin thought. The blood isn’t the most colorful part of a body. The eyes can be colorful too. The blood and the eyes. Both representations of one’s heritage. And one’s nobility.

  “I saw inside a man today,” Kaladin finally said.

  “Not for the first time,” Lirin said, “and certainly not for the last. I’m proud of you. I expected to find you here crying, as you usually do when we lose a patient. You’re learning.”

  “When I said I saw inside a man,” Kaladin said, “I wasn’t talking about the wounds.”

  Lirin didn’t respond for a moment. “I see.”

  “You would have let him die if I hadn’t been there, wouldn’t you?”

  Silence.

  “Why didn’t you?” Kaladin said. “It would have solved so much!”

  “It wouldn’t have been letting him die. It would have been murdering him.”

  “You could have just let him bleed, then claimed you couldn’t save him. Nobody would have questioned you. You could have done it.”

  “No,” Lirin said, staring at the sunset. “No, I couldn’t have.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I’m not a killer, son.”

  Kaladin frowned.

  Lirin had a distant look in his eyes. “Somebody has to start. Somebody has to step forward and do what is right, because it is right. If nobody starts, then others cannot follow. The lighteyes do their best to kill themselves, and to kill us. The others still haven’t brought back Alds and Milp. Roshone just left them there.”

  Alds and Milp, two townsmen, had been on the hunt but hadn’t returned with the party bearing the two wounded lighteyes. Roshone had been so worried about Rillir that he’d left them behind so he could travel quickly.

  “The lighteyes don’t care about life,” Lirin said. “So I must. That’s another reason why I wouldn’t have let Roshone die, even if you hadn’t been there. Though looking at you did strengthen me.”

  “I wish it hadn’t,” Kaladin said.

  “You mustn’t say such things.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, son. We have to be better than they are.” He sighed, standing. “You should sleep. I may need you when the others return with Alds and Milp.”

  That wasn’t likely; the two townsmen were probably dead by now. Their wounds were said to be pretty bad. Plus, the whitespines were still out there.

  Lirin went inside, but didn’t compel Kaladin to follow.

  Would I have let him die? Kaladin wondered. Maybe eve
n flicked that knife to hasten him on his way? Roshone had been nothing but a blight since his arrival, but did that justify killing him?

  No. Cutting that artery wouldn’t have been justified. But what obligation had Kaladin to help? Withholding his aid wasn’t the same thing as killing. It just wasn’t.

  Kaladin thought it through a dozen different ways, pondering his father’s words. What he found shocked him. He honestly would have let Roshone die on that table. It would have been better for Kaladin’s family; it would have been better for the entire town.

  Kaladin’s father had once laughed at his son’s desire to go to war. Indeed, now that Kaladin had decided he would become a surgeon on his own terms, his thoughts and actions of earlier years felt childish to him. But Lirin thought Kaladin incapable of killing. You can hardly step on a cremling without feeling guilty, son, he’d said. Ramming your spear into a man would be nowhere near as easy as you seem to think.

  But his father was wrong. It was a stunning, frightening revelation. This wasn’t idle fancy or daydreaming about the glory of battle. This was real.

  At that moment, Kaladin knew he could kill, if he needed to. Some people-like a festering finger or a leg shattered beyond repair-just needed to be removed.

  42

  Beggars and Barmaids

  “Like a highstorm, regular in their coming, yet always unexpected.”

  — The word Desolation is used twice in reference to their appearances. See pages 57, 59, and 64 of Tales by Hearthlight.

  “I’ve made my decision,” Shallan declared.

  Jasnah looked up from her research. In an unusual moment of deference, she put aside her books and sat with her back to the Veil, regarding Shallan. “Very well.”

  “What you did was both legal and right, in the strict sense of the words,” Shallan said. “But it was not moral, and it certainly wasn’t ethical.”

  “So morality and legality are distinct?”

  “Nearly all of the philosophies agree they are.”

  “But what do you think?”

  Shallan hesitated. “Yes. You can be moral without following the law, and you can be immoral while following the law.”

  “But you also said what I did was ‘right’ but not ‘moral.’ The distinction between those two seems less easy to define.”

  “An action can be right,” Shallan said. “It is simply something done, viewed without considering intent. Killing four men in self-defense is right.”

  “But not moral?”

  “Morality applies to your intent and the greater context of the situation. Seeking out men to kill is an immoral act, Jasnah, regardless of the eventual outcome.”

  Jasnah tapped her desktop with a fingernail. She was wearing her glove, the gemstones of the broken Soulcaster bulging beneath. It had been two weeks. Surely she’d discovered that it didn’t work. How could she be so calm?

  Was she trying to fix it in secret? Perhaps she feared that if she revealed it was broken, she would lose political power. Or had she realized that hers had been swapped for a different Soulcaster? Could it be, despite all odds, that Jasnah just hadn’t tried to use the Soulcaster? Shallan needed to leave before too long. But if she left before Jasnah discovered the swap, she risked having the woman try her Soulcaster just after Shallan vanished, bringing suspicion directly on her. The anxious waiting was driving Shallan near to madness.

  Finally, Jasnah nodded, then returned to her research.

  “You have nothing to say?” Shallan said. “I just accused you of murder.”

  “No,” Jasnah said, “murder is a legal definition. You said I killed unethically.”

  “You think I’m wrong, I assume?”

  “You are,” Jasnah said. “But I accept that you believe what you are saying and have put rational thought behind it. I have looked over your notes, and I believe you understand the various philosophies. In some cases, I think that you were quite insightful in your interpretation of them. The lesson was instructive.” She opened her book.

  “Then that’s it?”

  “Of course not,” Jasnah said. “We will study philosophy further in the future; for now, I’m satisfied that you have established a solid foundation in the topic.”

  “But I still decided you were wrong. I still think there’s an absolute Truth out there.”

  “Yes,” Jasnah said, “and it took you two weeks of struggling to come to that conclusion.” Jasnah looked up, meeting Shallan’s eyes. “It wasn’t easy, was it?”

  “No.”

  “And you still wonder, don’t you?”

  “Yes.

  “That is enough.” Jasnah narrowed her eyes slightly, a consoling smile appearing on her lips. “If it helps you wrestle with your feelings, child, understand that I was trying to do good. I sometimes wonder if I should accomplish more with my Soulcaster.” She turned back to her reading. “You are free for the rest of the day.”

  Shallan blinked. “What?”

  “Free,” Jasnah said. “You may go. Do as you please. You’ll spend it drawing beggars and barmaids, I suspect, but you may choose. Be off with you.”

  “Yes, Brightness! Thank you.”

  Jasnah waved in dismissal and Shallan grabbed her portfolio and hastened from the alcove. She hadn’t had any free time since the day she’d gone sketching on her own in the gardens. She’d been gently chided for that; Jasnah had left her in her rooms to rest, not go out sketching.

  Shallan waited impatiently as the parshman porters lowered her lift to the Veil’s groundfloor, then hurried out into the cavernous central hall. A long walk later, she approached the guest quarters, nodding to the master-servants who served there. Half guards, half concierges, they monitored who entered and left.

  She used her thick brass key to unlock the door to Jasnah’s rooms, then slipped inside and locked the door behind her. The small sitting chamber-furnished with a rug and two chairs beside the hearth-was lit by topazes. The table still contained a half-full cup of orange wine from Jasnah’s late research the night before, along with a few crumbs of bread on a plate.

  Shallan hurried to her own chamber, then shut the door and took the Soulcaster out of her safepouch. The warm glow of the gemstones bathed her face in white and red light. They were large enough-and therefore bright enough-that it was hard to look at them directly. Each would be worth ten or twenty broams.

  She’d been forced to hide them outside in the recent highstorm to infuse them, and that had been its own source of anxiety. She took a deep breath, then knelt and slid a small wooden stick from under the bed. A week and a half of practice, and she still hadn’t managed to make the Soulcaster do…well, anything at all. She’d tried tapping the gems, twisting them, shaking her hand, and flexing her hand in exact mimicry of Jasnah. She’d studied picture after picture she’d drawn of the process. She tried speaking, concentrating, and even begging.

  However, she’d found a book the day before that had offered what seemed like a useful tip. It claimed that humming, of all things, could make a Soulcasting more effective. It was just a passing reference, but it was more than she’d found anywhere else. She sat down on her bed and forced herself to concentrate. She closed her eyes, holding the stick, imagining it transforming into quartz. Then she began humming.

  Nothing happened. She kept on humming though, trying different notes, concentrating as hard as she could. She kept her attention on the task for a good half hour, but eventually her mind began to wander. A new worry began to nibble at her. Jasnah was one of the most brilliant, insightful scholars in the world. She’d put the Soulcaster out where it could be taken. Had she intentionally duped Shallan with a fake?

  It seemed an awful lot of trouble to go through. Why not just spring the trap and reveal Shallan as a thief? The fact that she couldn’t get the Soulcaster to work left her straining plausibility for explanations.

  She stopped humming and opened her eyes. The stick had not changed. So much for that tip, she thought, setting the stick aside with
a sigh. She’d been so hopeful.

  She lay back on the bed, resting, staring up at the brown stone ceiling, cut-like the rest of the Conclave-directly out of the mountain. Here, the stone had been left intentionally rough, evoking the roof of a cave. It was quite beautiful in a subtle way she’d never noticed before, the colors and contours of the rock rippling like a disturbed pond.

  She took a sheet from her portfolio and began to sketch the rock patterns. One sketch to calm her, and then she would get back to the Soulcaster. Perhaps she should try it on her other hand again.

  She couldn’t capture the colors of the strata, not in charcoal, but she could record the fascinating way the strata wove together. Like a work of art. Had some stoneworker cut this ceiling intentionally, crafting this subtle creation, or was it an accident of nature? She smiled, imagining some overworked stonecutter noticing the beautiful grain of the rock and deciding to form a wave pattern for his own personal wonder and sense of beauty.

  “What are you?”

  Shallan yelped, sitting up, sketchpad bouncing free of her lap. Someone had whispered those words. She’d heard them distinctly!

  “Who is there?” she asked.

  Silence.

  “Who’s there!” she said more loudly, her heart beating quickly.

  Something sounded outside her door, from the sitting room. Shallan jumped, hiding the hand wearing the Soulcaster under a pillow as the door creaked open, revealing a wizened palace maid, darkeyed and dressed in a white and black uniform.

  “Oh dear!” the woman exclaimed. “I had no idea you were here, Brightness.” She bowed low.

  A palace maid. Here to clean the room, an everyday occurrence. Focused on her meditation, Shallan hadn’t heard her enter. “Why did you speak to me?”

  “Speak to you, Brightness?”

  “You…” No, the voice had been a whisper, and it had quite distinctly come from inside Shallan’s room. It couldn’t have been the maid.

  She shivered and glanced about. But that was foolish. The tiny room was easily inspected. There were no Voidbringers hiding in the corners or under her bed.