Oathbringer

by Brandon Sanderson

She’s a spren. She doesn’t need air. She’ll be fine. Hopefully.

  “Go, then,” the captain said. “And be swift. I cannot promise that my crew, once captured, will be able to keep this secret for long.” Apparently it was difficult to kill spren, but hurting them was quite easy.

  Another sailor released Adolin’s sword spren from her cabin. She didn’t look as weathered as Syl—one place seemed as good as another to her.

  Kaladin led Syl over.

  “Ancient Daughter,” the captain said, bowing his head.

  “Won’t meet my eyes, Notum?” Syl said. “I suppose locking me away here isn’t too different from all those days you spent running about at Father’s whims back home.”

  He didn’t reply, but instead turned away.

  With Syl and the deadeye joining them, that only left one person. Azure lounged by the steps, wearing her breastplate and cloak, arms folded.

  “You sure you won’t change your mind?” Shallan asked.

  Azure shook her head.

  “Azure,” Kaladin said. “I was too harsh earlier. That doesn’t mean I—”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “I simply have a different thread to chase, and besides, I left my men to fight these monsters in Kholinar. Doesn’t feel right to do the same again.” She smiled. “Don’t fear for me, Stormblessed. You will have a much better chance if I stay here—as will these sailors. When you boys next meet the swordsman who taught you that morning kata, warn him that I’m looking for him.”

  “Zahel?” Adolin said. “You know Zahel?”

  “We’re old friends,” she said. “Notum, have your sailors been cutting those bales of cloth into the shapes I requested?”

  “Yes,” the captain said. “But I don’t understand—”

  “You soon will.” She gave Kaladin a lazy salute. He returned it, sharper. Then she nodded to them and walked up toward the main deck.

  The ship crashed through a large wave of beads, sending some through the open cargo deck doors. Sailors with brooms started brushing them back toward the opening.

  “Are you going?” the captain said to Shallan. “Every moment you delay increases the danger to us all.” He still wouldn’t look at Syl.

  Right, Shallan thought. Well, someone had to start the party. She took Adolin by one hand and Pattern by the other. Kaladin linked hands with Pattern and Syl, and Adolin grabbed his spren. They crowded into the opening into the cargo hold, looking at the glass beads below. Churning, catching the light of a distant sun, sparkling like a million stars …

  “All right,” she said. “Jump!”

  Shallan threw herself off the ship, joined by the others. She crashed into the beads, which swallowed her. They seemed to slip too easily into them—like before, when she’d fallen into this ocean, it felt like something was pulling her down.

  She sank into the beads, which rolled against her skin, overwhelming her senses with thoughts of trees and rocks. She fought the sensations, struggling to keep herself from thrashing too much. She clung to Adolin, but Pattern’s hand was pulled from her grip.

  I can’t do this! I can’t let them claim me. I can’t—

  They hit the bottom, which was shallow, here near the shore. Then Shallan finally let herself draw in Stormlight. One precious gemstone’s worth. It sustained her, calmed her. She fished in her pocket for the bead she’d picked from the bucket earlier.

  When she fed the bead Stormlight, the other beads around her trembled, then pulled back, forming the walls and ceiling of a small room. The Stormlight curling from her skin illuminated the space with a faint glow. Adolin let go of her hand and fell to his knees, coughing and gasping. His deadeye just stood there, as always.

  “Damnation,” Adolin said, wheezing. “Drowning with no water. It shouldn’t be so hard, should it? All we had to do was hold our breath.…”

  Shallan stepped to the side of the room, listening. Yes … it was almost like she could hear the beads whispering to her beneath their clattering. She plunged her hand through the wall and her fingers brushed cloth. She grabbed hold, and a moment later Kaladin seized her arm and pulled himself into the room made from beads, stumbling and falling to his knees.

  He wasn’t glowing.

  “You didn’t use a gemstone?” Shallan asked.

  “Almost had to,” he said. He took a few deep breaths, then stood up. “But we need to conserve those.” He turned around. “Syl?”

  A disturbance at the other side of the chamber announced someone approaching. Whoever it was wasn’t able to get in until Shallan walked over and broke the surface of the bead wall with her hand. Pattern entered and looked around the room, humming happily. “Mmm. A nice pattern, Shallan.”

  “Syl,” Kaladin repeated. “We jumped hand-in-hand, but she let go. Where—”

  “She’ll be fine,” Shallan said.

  “Mmm,” Pattern agreed. “Spren need no air.”

  Kaladin took a deep breath, then nodded. He started pacing anyway, so Shallan settled down on the ground to wait, pack in her lap. They each carried a change of clothing, three water jugs, and some of the food Adolin had purchased. Hopefully it would be enough to reach Thaylen City.

  Then she’d have to make the Oathgate work.

  They waited as long as they dared, hoping the Fused had passed them by, chasing the ship. Finally, Shallan stood up and pointed. “That way.”

  “You sure?” Kaladin asked.

  “Yes. Even the slope agrees.” She kicked at the obsidian ground, which ran at a gentle incline.

  “Right,” Adolin said. “Lock hands.”

  They did so and—heart fluttering—Shallan recovered the Stormlight from her shell of a room. Beads came crashing down, enveloping her.

  They started up the slope, against the tide of beads. It was more difficult than she’d imagined; the current of the shifting beads seemed determined to hold them back. Still, she had Stormlight to sustain her. They soon reached a place where the ground was too steep to walk on easily. Shallan let go of the men’s hands and scrambled up the incline.

  A moment after her head broke the surface, Syl appeared on the bank, reaching down and helping Shallan up the last few feet. Beads rolled off her clothing, clattering against the ground, as the others pulled themselves onto the shore.

  “I saw the enemy fly past,” Syl said. “I was hiding by the trees here.”

  At her urging, they entered the forest of glass plants before settling down to recover from their escape. Shallan immediately felt herself itching for her sketchpad. These trees! The trunks were translucent; the leaves looked like they were blown from glass in a multitude of colors. Moss drooped from one branch, like melted green glass, strands hanging down in silky lines. When she touched them, they broke off.

  Overhead, the clouds rippled with the mother-of-pearl iridescence that marked another highstorm in the real world. Shallan could barely see it through the canopy, but the effect on Pattern and Syl was immediate. They stood up straighter, and Syl’s wan color brightened to a healthy blue-white. Pattern’s head shifted more quickly, spinning through a dozen different cycles in a matter of minutes.

  Stormlight still trailed from Shallan’s skin. She’d taken in a rather large amount of it, but hadn’t lost too much. She returned it to the gemstone, a process she didn’t quite understand, but which felt natural at the same time.

  Nearby, Syl looked to the southwest with a kind of wistful, far-off expression. “Syl?” Shallan asked.

  “There’s a storm that way too…” she whispered, then shook herself and seemed embarrassed.

  Kaladin dug out two gemstones. “All right,” he said, “we fly.”

  They’d decided to use two gemstones’ worth of Stormlight to fly inward, a gamble to get a head start on their hike—and to get away from the coast. Hopefully the Fused wouldn’t treat the honorspren too harshly. Shallan worried for them, but equally for what would happen if the Fused doubled back to search for her group.

  A short flight now should
deposit them far enough inland that they’d be tough to locate. Once they landed, they would hike across several days’ worth of Shadesmar landscape before reaching the island of Thaylenah, which would manifest as a lake here. Thaylen City, and its Oathgate, were on the very rim of that lake.

  Kaladin Lashed them one at a time—and fortunately, his arts worked on the spren as they did humans. They took to the air and started the last leg of their journey.

  It will not take a careful reader to ascertain I have listed only eight of the Unmade here. Lore is confident there were nine, an unholy number, asymmetrical and often associated with the enemy.

  —From Hessi’s Mythica, page 266

  Dalinar stepped out of the Oathgate control building into Thaylen City and was met by the man he most wanted to punch in all Roshar.

  Meridas Amaram stood straight in his House Sadeas uniform, clean-shaven, narrow-faced, square-jawed. Tall, orderly, with shining buttons and a sharp posture, he was the very image of a perfect Alethi officer.

  “Report,” Dalinar said, hopefully keeping the dislike out of his voice.

  Amaram—Sadeas—fell into step with Dalinar, and they walked to the edge of the Oathgate platform, overlooking the city. Dalinar’s guards gave them space to converse.

  “Our crews have done wonders for this city, Brightlord,” Amaram said. “We focused our initial attentions on the debris outside the walls. I worried that would give an invading force too much cover—not to mention rubble to construct a ramp up to the wall.”

  Indeed, the plain before the city walls—which had once housed the markets and warehouses of the docks—was completely clear. A killing field, interrupted by the occasional outline of a broken foundation. The Almighty only knew how the Thaylen military had allowed a collection of buildings outside the walls in the first place. That would have been a nightmare to defend.

  “We shored up positions where the wall was weakened,” Amaram continued, gesturing. “It’s not high by Kholinar standards, but is an impressive fortification nonetheless. We cleared out the buildings right inside to provide staging and resource dumps, and my army is camped there. We then helped with general reconstruction.”

  “The city looks far better,” Dalinar said. “Your men did well.”

  “Then maybe our penance can be over,” Amaram said. He said it straight, though angerspren—a pool of boiling blood—spread from beneath his right foot.

  “Your work here was important, soldier. You didn’t only rebuild a city; you built the trust of the Thaylen people.”

  “Of course.” Amaram added, more softly, “And I do see the tactical importance of knowing the enemy fortifications.”

  You fool. “The Thaylens are not our enemies.”

  “I misspoke,” Amaram said. “Yet I cannot ignore that the Kholin troops have been deployed to the border between our kingdom and Jah Keved. Your men get to liberate our homeland, while mine spend their days digging in rocks. You do realize the effect this has on their morale, particularly since many of them still assume you assassinated their highprince.”

  “I hope that their current leader has worked to disabuse them of such false notions.”

  Amaram finally turned to look Dalinar in the eyes. Those angerspren were still there, though his tone was crisp and militaristic. “Brightlord. I know you for a realist. I’ve modeled my career after yours. Frankly, even if you did kill him—which I know you must deny—I would respect you for it. Torol was a liability to this nation.

  “Let me prove to you that I am not the same. Storms, Dalinar! I’m your best frontline general, and you know it. Torol spent years wasting me because my reputation intimidated him. Don’t make the same mistake. Use me. Let me fight for Alethkar, not kiss the feet of Thaylen merchants! I—”

  “Enough,” Dalinar snapped. “Follow your orders. That is how you’ll prove yourself to me.”

  Amaram stepped back, then—after a deliberate pause—saluted. He spun on his heel and marched down into the city.

  That man … Dalinar thought. Dalinar had intended to tell him that this island would host the front lines in the war, but the conversation had slipped from him. Well, Amaram might quickly get the fighting he wanted—a fact he would discover soon enough, at the planning meeting.

  Boots on stone sounded behind him as a group of men in blue uniforms joined him at the rim of the plateau. “Permission to stab him a little, sir,” said Teft, the bridgeman leader.

  “How do you stab someone ‘a little,’ soldier?”

  “I could do it,” Lyn said. “I’ve only started training with a spear. We could claim it was an accident.”

  “No, no,” Lopen said. “You want to stab him a little? Let my cousin Huio do it, sir. He’s the expert on little things.”

  “Short joke?” Huio said in his broken Alethi. “Be glad not short temper.”

  “I’m just trying to involve you, Huio. I know that most people overlook you. It’s very easy to do, you see.…”

  “Attention!” Dalinar snapped, though he found himself smiling. They scrambled into ranks. Kaladin had trained them well.

  “You’ve got”—Dalinar checked the clock on his arm—“thirty-seven minutes until the meeting, men. And, er, women. Don’t be late.”

  They rushed off, chatting among themselves. Navani, Jasnah, and Renarin joined him soon after, and his wife gave him a sly smile as she noticed him checking his arm clock again. Storming woman had gotten him to start arriving early for appointments just by strapping a device to his arm.

  As they gathered, Fen’s son climbed up onto the Oathgate platform and greeted Dalinar warmly. “We have rooms for you, above the temple where we’ll be meeting. I … well, we know you don’t need them, since you can simply Oathgate home in an instant…”

  “We’ll take them gladly, son,” Dalinar said. “I could use a little refreshment and time to think.”

  The young man grinned. Dalinar never would get used to those spiked eyebrows.

  They climbed down from the platform, and a Thaylen guard gave the all clear. A scribe sent word via spanreed that the next transfer could take place. Dalinar paused to watch. A minute later a flash occurred, surrounding the Oathgate with light. The Oathgates were under almost perpetual use these days—Malata was running the device today, as was becoming her duty more often.

  “Uncle?” Jasnah said as he lingered.

  “Merely curious about who’s coming in next.”

  “I could pull the records for you…” Jasnah said.

  The new arrivals turned out to be a group of Thaylen merchants in pompous clothing. They made their way down the larger ramp, surrounded by guards and accompanied by several men carrying large chests.

  “More bankers,” Fen’s son said. “The quiet economic collapse of Roshar continues.”

  “Collapse?” Dalinar said, surprised.

  “Bankers all across the continent have been pulling out of cities,” Jasnah said, pointing. “See that fortress of a building at the front of the Ancient Ward down below? That’s the Thaylen Gemstone Reserve.”

  “Local governments are going to have difficulty financing troops after this,” Fen’s son said with a grimace. “They’ll have to write here with authorized spanreeds and get spheres shipped to them. It’s going to be a nightmare of logistics for anyone not close to an Oathgate.”

  Dalinar frowned. “Couldn’t you encourage the merchants to stay and support the cities they were in?”

  “Sir!” he replied. “Sir, force the merchants to obey military authority?”

  “Forget I asked,” Dalinar said, sharing a look with Navani and Jasnah. Navani smiled fondly at what was probably a huge social misstep, but he suspected Jasnah agreed with him. She’d probably have seized the banks and used them to fund the war.

  Renarin lingered, watching the merchants. “How big are the gemstones they’ve brought?” he asked.

  “Brightlord?” Fen’s son asked, glancing toward Dalinar for help. “They’ll be spheres. Normal spheres.
”

  “Any larger gemstones?” Renarin asked. He turned toward them. “Anywhere in the city?”

  “Sure, lots of them,” Fen’s son said. “Some really nice pieces, like in every city. Um … why, Brightlord?”

  “Because,” Renarin said. He didn’t say anything more.

  * * *

  Dalinar splashed water onto his face from a basin in his rooms, which were in a villa above the temple of Talenelat, on the top tier of the city—the Royal Ward. He wiped his face with the towel and reached out to the Stormfather. “Feeling any better?”

  I do not feel like men. I do not sicken like men. I am. The Stormfather rumbled. I could have been destroyed, though. Splintered into a thousand pieces. I live only because the enemy fears exposing himself to a strike from Cultivation.

  “So she lives still, then? The third god?”

  Yes. You’ve met her.

  “I … I have?”

  You do not remember. But normally, she hides. Cowardice.

  “Perhaps wisdom,” Dalinar said. “The Nightwatcher—”

  Is not her.

  “Yes, you’ve said. The Nightwatcher is like you. Are there others, though? Spren like you, or the Nightwatcher? Spren that are shadows of gods?”

  There is … a third sibling. They are not with us.

  “In hiding?”

  No. Slumbering.

  “Tell me more.”

  No.

  “But—”

  No! Leave them alone. You hurt them enough.

  “Fine,” Dalinar said, setting aside the towel and leaning against the window. The air smelled of salt, reminding him of something not yet clear in his mind. One last hole in his memory. A trip by sea.

  And his visit to the Valley.

  He glanced at the dresser beside the washbasin, which held a book written in unfamiliar Thaylen glyphs. A little note beside it, in Alethi glyphs, read, “Pathway. King.” Fen had left him a gift, a copy of The Way of Kings in Thaylen.

  “I’ve done it,” Dalinar said. “I’ve united them, Stormfather. I’ve kept my oath, and have brought men together, instead of dividing them. Perhaps this can be penance in some small way, for the pain I’ve caused.”