Oathbringer

by Brandon Sanderson

  “You’re still the Blackthorn, Dalinar.”

  “I’m not worried about whether I can win battles.” Dalinar stood, throwing back his chair in his haste. He found himself pacing. “I’m like an animal, Gavilar. Did you hear about the bar fight? Storms. I can’t be trusted around people.”

  “You are what the Almighty made you.”

  “I’m telling you, I’m dangerous. Sure, I can crush this little rebellion, bathe Oathbringer in some blood. Great. Wonderful. Then what? I come back here and lock myself in a cage again?”

  “I … might have something that will help.”

  “Bah. I’ve tried living a quiet life. I can’t live through endless politics, like you can. I need more than just words!”

  “You’ve merely been trying to restrain yourself—you’ve tried casting out the bloodthirst, but you haven’t replaced it with anything else. Go do what I command, then return and we can discuss further.”

  Dalinar stopped near his brother, then took a single purposeful step into his shadow. Remember this. Remember you serve him. He would never return to that place that had almost led him to attack this man.

  “When do I ride for the Rift?” Dalinar asked.

  “You don’t.”

  “But you just said—”

  “I’m sending you to battle, but not against the Rift. Our kingdom suffers threats from abroad. There is a new dynasty threatening us from Herdaz; a Reshi house has gained power there. And the Vedens have been raiding Alethkar in the southwest. They’re claiming it’s bandits, but the forces are too organized. It’s a test to see how we react.”

  Dalinar nodded slowly. “You want me to go fight on our borders. Remind everyone we’re still capable of employing the sword.”

  “Exactly. This is a dangerous time for us, Brother. The highprinces question. Is a united Alethkar worth the trouble? Why bow before a king? Tanalan is the manifestation of their questions, but he has been careful not to stray into outright rebellion. If you attack him, the other highprinces could unite behind the rebels. We could shatter the kingdom and have to start all over.

  “I will not allow that. I will have a unified Alethkar. Even if I have to hit the highprinces so hard, they are forced to melt together from the heat of it. They need to remember that. Go to Herdaz first, then Jah Keved. Remind everyone why they fear you.”

  Gavilar met Dalinar’s eyes. No … he was not soft. He thought like a king now. He sought the long term, but Gavilar Kholin was as determined as ever.

  “It will be done,” Dalinar said. Storms, this day had been a tempest of emotion. Dalinar stalked toward the door. He wanted to see the child again.

  “Brother?” Gavilar said.

  Dalinar turned back and regarded Gavilar, who was bathed by the bleeding light of a fire reaching its end.

  “Words are important,” Gavilar said. “Much more than you give them credit for being.”

  “Perhaps,” Dalinar said. “But if they were all-powerful, you wouldn’t need my sword, would you?”

  “Perhaps. I can’t help feeling words would be enough, if only I knew the right ones to say.”

  We also instruct that you should not return to Obrodai. We have claimed that world, and a new avatar of our being is beginning to manifest there.

  She is young yet, and—as a precaution—she has been instilled with an intense and overpowering dislike of you.

  To Dalinar, flying felt much like being on a ship in the ocean.

  There was something profoundly disconcerting about being out on the ocean, subject to the winds and currents. Men didn’t control the waves, they merely set out and prayed that the ocean didn’t decide to consume them.

  Flying alongside Captain Kaladin provoked some of the same emotions in Dalinar. On one hand, the view over the Shattered Plains was magnificent. He felt he could almost see the pattern to it that Shallan mentioned.

  On the other hand, this kind of travel was deeply unnatural. Winds buffeted them, and if you moved your hands or arched your back in the wrong way, you were sent in a different direction from everyone else. Kaladin had to constantly zip back and forth, righting one of them that got blown off-course. And if you looked down, and paused to consider exactly how high up you were …

  Well, Dalinar was not a timid man, but he was still glad of Navani’s hand in his.

  On his other side flew Elhokar, and beyond him were Kadash and a pretty young ardent who served as one of Navani’s scholars. The five of them were escorted by Kaladin and ten of his squires. The Windrunners had been training steadily for three weeks now, and Kaladin had finally—after practicing by flying groups of soldiers back and forth to the warcamps—agreed to treat Dalinar and the king to a similar trip.

  It is like being on a ship, Dalinar thought. What would it feel like to be up here during a highstorm? That was how Kaladin planned to get Elhokar’s team to Kholinar—fly them at the leading edge of a storm, so his Stormlight was continually renewed.

  You’re thinking of me, the Stormfather sent. I can feel it.

  “I’m thinking of how you treat ships,” Dalinar whispered, his physical voice lost to the winds—yet his meaning carried, unhampered, to the Stormfather.

  Men should not be upon the waters during a storm, he replied. Men are not of the waves.

  “And the sky? Are men of the sky?”

  Some are. He said this grudgingly.

  Dalinar could only imagine how terrible it must be to be a sailor out at sea during a storm. He had taken only short coastwise trips by ship.

  No, wait, he thought. There was one, of course. A trip to the Valley …

  He barely remembered that voyage, though he could not blame that solely upon the Nightwatcher.

  Captain Kaladin swooped over. He was the only one who seemed truly in control of his flying. Even his men flew more like dropped rocks than skyeels. They lacked his finesse, his control. Though the others could help if something went wrong, Kaladin had been the only one Lashing Dalinar and the others. He said he wanted practice, for the eventual flight to Kholinar.

  Kaladin touched Elhokar, and the king started to slow. Kaladin then moved down the line, slowing each in turn. He then swept them up so they were close enough to speak. His soldiers stopped and floated nearby.

  “What’s wrong?” Dalinar asked, trying to ignore that he was hanging hundreds of feet in the sky.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Kaladin said, then pointed.

  With the wind in his eyes, Dalinar had failed to spot the warcamps: ten craterlike circles arrayed along the northwestern edge of the Shattered Plains. From up here, it was obvious they had once been domes. The way their walls curved, like cupping fingers from underneath.

  Two of the camps were still fully occupied, and Sebarial had set up forces to lay claim to the nearby forest. Dalinar’s own warcamp was less populated, but had a few platoons of soldiers and some workers.

  “We arrived so quickly!” Navani said. Her hair was a wind-tousled mess, much of it having escaped her careful braid. Elhokar hadn’t fared much better—his hair sprayed out from his face like waxed Thaylen eyebrows. The two ardents, of course, were bald and didn’t have such worries.

  “Quick indeed,” Elhokar said, redoing a few buttons of his uniform. “This is most promising for our mission.”

  “Yeah,” Kaladin said. “I still want to test it more in front of a storm.” He took the king by the shoulder, and Elhokar started to drift downward.

  Kaladin sent them each down in turn, and when his feet finally touched stone again, Dalinar heaved a sigh of relief. They were only one plateau over from the warcamp, where a soldier at a watchpost waved to them with eager, exaggerated movements. Within minutes, a troop of Kholin soldiers had surrounded them.

  “Let’s get you inside the walls, Brightlord,” their captainlord said, hand on the pommel of his sword. “The shellheads are still active out here.”

  “Have they attacked this close to the camps?” Elhokar asked, surprised.

  �
��No, but that doesn’t mean they won’t, Your Majesty.”

  Dalinar wasn’t so worried, but said nothing as the soldiers ushered him and the others into the warcamp where Brightness Jasalai—the tall, stately woman Dalinar had put in charge of the camp—met and accompanied them.

  After spending so much time in the alien hallways of Urithiru, walking through this place—which had been Dalinar’s home for five years—was relaxing. Part of that was finding the warcamp mostly intact; it had weathered the Everstorm quite well. Most of the buildings were stone bunkers, and that western rim of the former dome had provided a solid windbreak.

  “My only worry,” he told Jasalai after a short tour, “is about logistics. This is a long march from Narak and the Oathgate. I fear that by dividing our forces among Narak, here, and Urithiru, we’re increasing our vulnerability to an attack.”

  “That is true, Brightlord,” the woman said. “I endeavor only to provide you with options.”

  Unfortunately, they would probably need this place for farming operations, not to mention the lumber. Plateau runs for gemhearts couldn’t sustain the tower city’s population forever, particularly in the face of Shallan’s assessment that they had likely hunted chasmfiends near to extinction.

  Dalinar glanced at Navani. She thought they should found a new kingdom here, on and around the Shattered Plains. Import farmers, retire older soldiers, start production here on a much larger scale than they’d ever tried before.

  Others disagreed. There was a reason the Unclaimed Hills weren’t densely inhabited. It would be a harsh life here—rockbuds grew smaller, crops would be less productive. And founding a new kingdom during a Desolation? Better to protect what they had. Alethkar could probably feed Urithiru—but that depended on Kaladin and Elhokar recovering the capital.

  Their tour ended with a meal at Dalinar’s bunker, in his former sitting room, which looked bare now that most of the furniture and rugs had been removed to Urithiru.

  After the meal, he found himself standing by the window, feeling oddly out of place. He’d left this warcamp only ten weeks ago, but the place was at once deeply familiar and also no longer his.

  Behind him, Navani and her scribe ate fruit as they chatted quietly over some sketches that Navani had done.

  “Oh, but I think that the others need to experience that, Brightness!” the scribe said. “The flight was remarkable. How fast do you think we were going? I believe we might have attained a speed that no human has reached since the Recreance. Think about that, Navani! Surely we were faster than the fastest horse or ship.”

  “Focus, Rushu,” Navani said. “My sketch.”

  “I don’t think this math is right, Brightness. No, that sail will never stand.”

  “It’s not meant to be completely accurate,” Navani said. “Just a concept. My question is, can it work?”

  “We’ll need more reinforcement. Yes, more reinforcement for certain. And then the steering mechanism … definitely work to do there. This is clever though, Brightness. Falilar needs to see it; he will be able to say whether or not it can be built.”

  Dalinar glanced away from the window, catching Navani’s eye. She smiled. She always claimed that she wasn’t a scholar, but a patron of scholars. She said her place was to encourage and guide the real scientists. Anyone who saw the light in her eyes as she took out another sheet and sketched her idea further knew she was being too modest.

  She began another sketch, but then stopped and glanced to the side, where she’d set out a spanreed. The ruby was blinking.

  Fen! Dalinar thought. The queen of Thaylenah had asked that, in this morning’s highstorm, Dalinar send her into the vision of Aharietiam, which she knew about from the published accounts of Dalinar’s visions. He’d reluctantly sent her alone, without supervision.

  They’d been waiting for her to speak of the event, to say anything. In the morning, she hadn’t replied to their requests for a conversation.

  Navani prepared the spanreed, then set it writing. It scribbled for only a brief moment.

  “That was short,” Dalinar said, stepping toward her.

  “Only one word,” Navani said. She looked up at him. “Yes.”

  Dalinar heaved out a long breath. She was willing to visit Urithiru. Finally!

  “Tell her we’ll send her a Radiant.” He left the window, watching as she replied. In her sketchpad, he caught sight of some kind of shiplike contraption, but with the sail on the bottom. What in the world?

  Fen seemed content to leave the conversation there, and Navani returned to her discussion of engineering, so Dalinar slipped from the room. He passed through his bunker, which felt hollow. Like the rind of a fruit with the pulp scooped out. No servants scuttling back and forth, no soldiers. Kaladin and his men had gone off somewhere, and Kadash was probably at the camp monastery. He’d been keen to get there, and Dalinar had been gratified by his willingness to fly with Kaladin.

  They hadn’t spoken much since their confrontation in the sparring room. Well, perhaps seeing the Windrunners’ power firsthand would improve Kadash’s opinion of the Radiants.

  Dalinar was surprised—and secretly pleased—to find that no guards had been posted at the bunker’s back door. He slipped out alone and headed to the warcamp monastery. He wasn’t looking for Kadash; he had another purpose.

  He soon arrived at the monastery, which looked like most of the warcamp—a collection of buildings with the same smooth, rounded construction. Crafted from the air by Alethi Soulcasters. This place had a few small, hand-built buildings of cut stone, but they looked more like bunkers than places of worship. Dalinar had never wanted his people to forget that they were at war.

  He strolled through the campus and found that without a guide, he didn’t know his way among the nearly identical structures. He stopped in a courtyard between buildings. The air smelled of wet stone from the highstorm, and a nice group of shalebark sculptures rose to his right, shaped like stacks of square plates. The only sound was water dripping from the eaves of the buildings.

  Storms. He should know his way around his own monastery, shouldn’t he? How often did you actually visit here, during all the years in the warcamps? He’d meant to come more often, and talk to the ardents in his chosen devotary. There had always been something more pressing, and besides, the ardents stressed that he didn’t need to come. They had prayed and burned glyphwards on his behalf; that was why highlords owned ardents.

  Even during his darkest days of war, they’d assured him that in pursuing his Calling—by leading his armies—he served the Almighty.

  Dalinar stooped into a building that had been divided into many small rooms for prayers. He walked down a hallway until he stepped through a storm door into the atrium, which still smelled faintly of incense. It seemed insane that the ardents would be angry with him now, after training him his whole life to do as he wished. But he’d upset the balance. Rocked the boat.

  He moved among braziers filled with wet ash. Everyone liked the system they had. The lighteyes got to live without guilt or burden, always confident that they were active manifestations of God’s will. The darkeyes got free access to training in a multitude of skills. The ardents got to pursue scholarship. The best of them lived lives of service. The worst lived lives of indolence—but what else were important lighteyed families going to do with unmotivated children?

  A noise drew his attention, and he left the courtyard and looked into a dark corridor. Light poured from a room at the other end, and Dalinar was not surprised to find Kadash inside. The ardent was moving some ledgers and books from a wall safe into a pack on the floor. On a desk nearby, a spanreed scribbled.

  Dalinar stepped into the room. The scarred ardent jumped, then relaxed when he saw it was Dalinar.

  “Do we need to have this conversation again, Dalinar?” he asked, turning back to his packing.

  “No,” Dalinar said. “I didn’t actually come looking for you. I want to find a man who lived here. A madman who claimed to be
one of the Heralds.”

  Kadash cocked his head. “Ah, yes. The one who had a Shardblade?”

  “All of the other patients at the monastery are accounted for, safe at Urithiru, but he vanished somehow. I was hoping to see if his room offered any clues to what became of him.”

  Kadash looked at him, gauging his sincerity. Then the ardent sighed, rising. “That’s a different devotary from mine,” he said, “but I have occupancy records here. I should be able to tell you which room he was in.”

  “Thank you.”

  Kadash looked through a stack of ledgers. “Shash building,” he finally said, pointing absently out the window. “That one right there. Room thirty-seven. Insah ran the facility; her records will list details of the madman’s treatment. If her departure from the warcamp was anything like mine, she’ll have left most of her paperwork behind.” He gestured toward the safe and his packing.

  “Thank you,” Dalinar said. He moved to leave.

  “You … think the madman was actually a Herald, don’t you?”

  “I think it’s likely.”

  “He spoke with a rural Alethi accent, Dalinar.”

  “And he looked Makabaki,” Dalinar replied. “That alone is an oddity, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Immigrant families are not so uncommon.”

  “Ones with Shardblades?”

  Kadash shrugged.

  “Let’s say I could actually find one of the Heralds,” Dalinar said. “Let’s say we could confirm his identity, and you accepted that proof. Would you believe him if he told you the same things I have?”

  Kadash sighed.

  “Surely you’d want to know if the Almighty were dead, Kadash,” Dalinar said, stepping back into the room. “Tell me you wouldn’t.”

  “You know what it would mean? It would mean there is no spiritual basis for your rule.”

  “I know.”

  “And the things you did in conquering Alethkar?” Kadash said. “No divine mandate, Dalinar. Everyone accepts what you did because your victories were proof of the Almighty’s favor. Without him … then what are you?”