Rhythm of War (9781429952040)

by Brandon Sanderson

  In a way, Kaladin could understand what his father said. “Your words make sense up here,” Kaladin said, tapping his head. “But not down here.” He slapped his breast.

  “That’s always been your problem, son. Letting your heart override your head.”

  “My head can’t be trusted sometimes,” Kaladin said. “Can you blame me? Besides, isn’t the entire reason we became surgeons because of the heart? Because we care?”

  “We need both heart and mind,” Lirin said. “The heart might provide the purpose, but the head provides the method, the path. Passion is nothing without a plan. Wanting something doesn’t make it happen.

  “I can acknowledge—have to acknowledge—that you accomplished great things serving Dalinar Kholin. But with the Radiants down and most of the king’s surgeons on the battlefield, we are what stands between the people of this tower and deathspren. You acknowledge that you don’t think right sometimes? Then trust me. Trust my thoughts.”

  Kaladin grimaced, but nodded. It was true that his thoughts had proven—time after time—that they couldn’t be trusted. Besides, what did he think he was going to do? Fight a war against the invaders all by himself? After Navani had surrendered?

  Before retiring, they checked on the unconscious people in the patient rooms. The Stoneward was completely out cold, less responsive than Teft, though Lirin was able to get her to take soup by spooning it to her lips. Kaladin studied her—checking her eyes, her heart rate, her temperature. Then he moved over to Teft. The bearded Windrunner shifted, his eyes closed, and when Kaladin put broth to his lips he took it far more eagerly. His hands twitched, and though Kaladin couldn’t make out anything he was saying, he kept muttering under his breath.

  He’s a Windrunner, of the same oath as me, Kaladin thought. I’m awake when the others fell. Teft is close to being awake. Was there a connection?

  Whatever fabrial the enemy was using to do this, perhaps it didn’t work as well on Windrunners. He needed to see the other Radiants and compare them. There had been around two dozen other Windrunners in the tower. His status as a surgeon should let him visit them and check their vitals.

  Storms. His father was correct. Kaladin could accomplish far more by backing down than he could by fighting.

  Syl came zipping into the room a short time later. Lirin noticed her too, so she’d made herself visible to him.

  “Syl,” Kaladin said, “will you check again to see if you can spot Teft’s spren? He seems like he’s coming closer to waking, so she might be becoming more visible.”

  “No time,” Syl said, turning into the shape of a young woman with a sword strapped to her waist, wearing a scout’s uniform. She halted in the air, standing as if on an invisible platform. “They’re coming.”

  “Another Regal coming to check in on us?” Kaladin said.

  “Worse,” Syl said. “A group of soldiers, led by a different Regal, is searching each residence, methodically heading this direction. They’re hunting for something.”

  “Or someone,” Kaladin said. “They’ve heard that Stormblessed is awake.”

  “Don’t jump to conclusions, son,” Lirin said. “If they were searching for you specifically, they’d have come straight here. I’ll go see what this is about. If they are looking for you, escape out the window and we’ll decide what to do later.”

  Kaladin withdrew into the family room, which had doors to their bedrooms—including the small closet where little Oroden was sleeping in his crib. Kaladin didn’t go to his bedroom though. He cracked the door into the hallway, and was able to hear voices when his father opened the door at the far front of the clinic. Unfortunately, he couldn’t hear what they were saying. He nodded to Syl, who risked zipping out to get closer and overhear.

  Before she could return, the voices drew nearer. Kaladin made out the Regal by the rhythm of his speech.

  “… don’t care if you’re a surgeon, darkeyes,” the soldier said. “I have the queen’s sealed writ here, and its instructions supersede what you might have been told by messengers. All Radiants are to be taken into custody.”

  “These are my patients,” Lirin said. “They were entrusted to my care. Please; they’re no danger to you like this.”

  “Your queen accepted these terms,” the Regal replied. “Complain to her.”

  Kaladin peeked out the door into the hallway. A Regal led five ordinary warform singers. Their larger figures appeared cramped in the stone corridor as they walked to the two patient rooms. So they weren’t after him, not specifically. They were searching for fallen Radiants.

  Indeed, the Regal gestured his attendants toward the first exam room. Two moved out soon after, carrying the fallen Stoneward between them. They shoved Lirin aside as they carted her off down the hallway.

  Syl came zipping back to Kaladin, agitated as she moved into the room with him. “They don’t seem to know about you. Only that the surgeon has a couple of fallen Radiants.”

  Kaladin nodded, though he’d grown tense.

  “I can care for these far better than you can,” Lirin said. “Removing them like this could be dangerous to their health, even deadly.”

  “Why would we care?” the Regal said, both tone and rhythm sounding amused. Two of his soldiers took the Stoneward’s squires, one each, and hauled them out of the second exam room. “I think we should throw them all off the tower and rid ourselves of a huge problem. The Fused want us to collect them though. Guess they want to have the fun of killing these themselves.”

  He’s posturing, Kaladin thought. The Fused wouldn’t go to the effort of taking the Radiants captive only to kill them. Would they?

  Did it matter?

  They were going to take Teft.

  The Regal moved into the first exam room, and Kaladin’s father followed, making more objections. Kaladin stood with one hand on the wall, one hand on the door, breathing deeply. Wind surged through the window behind, brushing past him, bearing with it two twisting windspren that moved as lines of light.

  A hundred objections held him. His father’s arguments. His soul in fragments. The knowledge that he was probably too tired to be making decisions. The fact that the queen had decided it was best to end hostilities.

  So many reasons to stay where he was. But one reason to move.

  They were going to take Teft.

  Kaladin pulled open the door and stepped into the hallway, feeling the inevitable shift of a boulder perched on the top of a slope. Just. Beginning. To tip.

  “Kaladin…” Syl said, landing on his shoulder.

  “It was a nice dream, wasn’t it, Syl?” he asked. “That we could escape? Find peace at long last?”

  “Such a wonderful dream,” she whispered.

  “You ready for this?” he asked.

  She nodded, and he stepped into the doorway of the exam room. Two enemy soldiers remained in the room: one warform and the stormform Regal. The Regal had helped get Teft up onto the regular soldier’s shoulders.

  Lirin looked straight at Kaladin, then shook his head urgently, his eyes going wide.

  “You will put him down,” Kaladin said to the singers. “And leave quietly. Send one of the Fused to get him, if they’re so insistent.”

  The two froze, and the Regal sized him up. “Go back to bed, boy,” he eventually said. “You don’t want to try my patience today.”

  Lirin dashed forward, trying to push Kaladin out of the room. With a quick pivot to the side, Kaladin sent his father tumbling into the hall—and hopefully out of danger. He stepped back into the doorway.

  “Why not go for reinforcements?” Kaladin said to the two singers. Almost more a plea than a request. “Don’t press this issue right now.”

  The Regal gestured for his companion to set Teft back onto the exam table, and for a moment Kaladin thought they might actually do what he said. Then the Regal unhooked the axe from its sheath at his side.

  “No!” Lirin said from behind. “Don’t do this!”

  In response, Kaladin drew
in a breath of Stormlight. His body came alight with the inner storm, and wisps of luminescent smoke began to curl from his skin.

  That gave the two singers pause, until the warform pointed. “That’s him, Brightlord! The one the Pursuer is searching for! He matches the description exactly!”

  The Regal grinned. “You’re going to make me very rich, human.” Dark red lightning crackled across his skin. The warform shied away, hitting the counter and causing surgery implements to clink against one another.

  Lirin grabbed Kaladin from behind.

  Kaladin stood quietly on that precipice. Balanced.

  The Regal leaped forward, swinging his axe.

  And Kaladin stepped off the edge.

  He shook free of his father’s grip and shoved him backward with one hand, then caught the Regal’s arm with his other before the axe could fall. Kaladin braced himself for the jolt of energy that shot through him at touching a stormform—he’d fought these before. It stunned him for a moment nonetheless, so he wasn’t ready to guard as the Regal cuffed him across the face, ripping his cheek with the barbed carapace on the back of his hand.

  Stormlight would heal that. Kaladin got his other hand up, preventing another punch while continuing to hold back the axe. The two struggled for a moment, then Kaladin managed to get the advantage, tipping their center of balance forward so he could twist and ram his shoulder into the Regal.

  Storms it hurt. That carapace was no joke. Still, the maneuver put his opponent momentarily off balance, so Kaladin was able to control the fight, spinning his enemy around and slamming the creature’s hand into the corner of an exam table. A resounding snap split the air, and the carapace on the hand cracked.

  The Regal hissed in pain and dropped the axe. But then he pivoted hard and rammed his side into Kaladin’s chest, shoving him against the counter. Kaladin’s father was shouting, but the warform—instead of helping—remained by the opposite wall. He didn’t seem eager to attack a Radiant.

  Without Stormlight, Kaladin wouldn’t have been able to withstand the constant jolts of energy from the stormform’s touch. As it was, he was able to hold on—not letting the enemy force him back too much—until the Regal tried another punch. At the windup, Kaladin hooked his leg around the foot of his opponent, then sent them both to the ground.

  He landed with a grunt and tried to roll into position to choke his opponent unconscious. If the fight ended without bloodshed, perhaps his father would forgive him.

  Unfortunately, Kaladin hadn’t done a lot of wrestling. He knew enough to keep himself from being pinned easily, but the Regal was stronger than he was, and that carapace kept jabbing in surprising places and interfering with his holds. The Regal leveraged his superior weight and strength, twisting Kaladin around with a grunt. Then—with Kaladin pinned beneath him—the creature began pummeling him in the face with his good fist, the one that hadn’t cracked.

  Kaladin breathed in a gasp of Stormlight, draining the spheres on the counter. He brought his fist up and slammed it into the back of the hand that had cracked earlier. His enemy flinched, and Kaladin was able to kick free, throwing the Regal off—though both slammed into the counters in the tight confines as he did so.

  Kaladin scrambled to find his feet so he could attack his enemy from above—but the Regal began to glow red. The hairs on Kaladin’s arms stood up, and he had a fraction of a second to duck to the side as a flash of light—and an earsplitting crack—filled the room.

  He hit the ground, blinded and deafened, the sharp scent of a lightning strike filling his nostrils. Strange and distinctive, it was a scent he associated with rainfall. Kaladin didn’t think he’d been struck directly—stormforms had trouble aiming their lightning—but it took a moment for Kaladin’s Stormlight to heal his ears and restore his vision.

  A shadow moved over him, swinging its axe down. Kaladin twisted to the side just in time. The axe clanged against the ground.

  I’m sorry, Father, Kaladin thought, reaching for the scalpel in his boot. As the axe fell again, Kaladin let it bite him in the left shoulder, praying his Stormlight would hold. He rammed the scalpel into the side of the Regal’s knee, directly between bits of carapace.

  The Regal screamed and stumbled. Kaladin’s shoulder hurt like Damnation, but he pushed through the pain and leaped to his feet. His Stormlight ran out as he rushed his enemy, toppling them again—but this time Kaladin fell with more care and dropped on top of the Regal. With the momentum of the fall, he rammed his scalpel into the creature’s neck, right above its carapace gorget.

  The knife wasn’t intended for battle, but it was sharpened to exactness. Kaladin twisted it and swiftly cut the carotid artery, then threw himself up.

  He stumbled back against the counter, covered in sweat, panting, his hearing not fully healed from the blast. The Regal thrashed on the floor, and orange blood … Well, Kaladin turned away. Some sights were sickening even for a surgeon.

  Even for a soldier, he corrected. You’re no surgeon.

  He looked across the room at the singer who huddled beside the far wall. He’d watched, stunned, and hadn’t intervened.

  “Haven’t been in many fights, have you?” Kaladin asked, hoarse.

  The singer jumped, his eyes wide. He was in warform, so he appeared fearsome, but his expression told another story. That of a person who wanted to be anywhere else, a person horrified by the brutality of the fight.

  Storms … He hadn’t considered that singers might feel battle shock too.

  “Go,” Kaladin said, then winced as the dying Regal’s leg thumped against the wall with a frantic, panicked sound. Bleeding out always seemed to happen too quickly to your friends, and not quickly enough to those you killed.

  The singer stared at him, haunted, and Kaladin realized the malen might also have been deafened by the lightning. Kaladin pointed, mouthing the word. “Go!”

  The singer scrambled away, leaving wet orange footprints from the dying singer’s blood. Kaladin pulled himself over to the opposite counter, where a few spheres still glowed. He drew those in and healed the rest of his wounds. He should have kept another pouch on him. This had been coming.

  He searched out the doorway, and found his father on the floor where Kaladin had shoved him, lit by morning light coming in through the distant window.

  “You all right?” Kaladin asked him. “Did that blast hurt you?”

  Lirin stood up, staring past Kaladin. Into the room, square at the dying Regal. In the other room, Oroden had started crying. Then Lirin, overcoming his shock, scrambled into the room to try to help the dying singer.

  Father is fine, Kaladin thought. The thunder of stormform lightning blasts—at least those made by a single individual—wasn’t as bad as that of real lightning. As long as you were sheltered, as his father had been, you wouldn’t suffer permanent hearing loss.

  Kaladin tiredly glanced to Syl, who sat on the counter with her hands in her lap. Her eyes were closed, her head turned away from the dying Regal as Lirin tried to stanch the blood flow. Kaladin had killed dozens, perhaps hundreds of them during this war—though he’d tried to focus his attention on the Fused. He’d told himself that those fights were more meaningful, but the truth was that he hated killing common soldiers. They never seemed to have much of a chance against him.

  Yet each Fused he killed meant something even worse. A noncombatant would be sacrificed to give that Fused new life, so each one of them Kaladin killed meant taking the life of some housewife or craftsman.

  He moved over to Teft, Kaladin’s glowing body illuminating the man, unconscious on the table. Kaladin spared a momentary worry for the Stoneward who had been taken. Could he somehow rescue her too?

  Don’t be a fool, Kaladin. You barely saved Teft. In fact, you might not have saved him yet. Deal with the current problems before creating new ones.

  Nearby, Lirin gave up, lowering his head and slumping in place as he knelt before the body. It had stopped moving, finally.

  “We’ll ne
ed to hide,” Kaladin said to his father. “I’ll fetch Mother.” He surveyed his bloody clothing. “Perhaps you should do that, actually.”

  “How dare you!” Lirin whispered, his voice hoarse.

  Kaladin hesitated, shocked.

  “How dare you kill in this place!” Lirin shouted, turning on Kaladin, angerspren pooling at his feet. “My sanctuary. The place where we heal! What is wrong with you?”

  “They were going to take Teft,” Kaladin said. “Kill him.”

  “You don’t know that!” Lirin said. He stared at his bloodied hands. “You … You just…” He took a deep breath. “The Fused are probably gathering the Radiants to keep them in one location, and watch to see that none of them wake up!”

  “You don’t know that,” Kaladin said. “I wasn’t going to let them take him. He’s my friend.”

  “Is that it, or did you just want an excuse?” Lirin’s hands trembled as he tried to wipe the blood onto his trousers. When he looked back at Kaladin, something seemed to have broken in him, tears on his cheeks. Storms, he seemed exhausted.

  “Heralds above…” Lirin whispered. “They really did kill my boy, didn’t they? What have they done to you?”

  Kaladin’s smidgen of Stormlight ran out. Damnation, he was so tired. “I’ve tried to tell you. Your boy died years ago.”

  Lirin stared at the floor, wet with blood. “Go. They’ll come for you now.”

  “You need to go into hiding with me,” Kaladin said. “They’ll know you’re my—”

  “We’re not going anywhere with you,” Lirin snapped.

  “Don’t play the sixth fool, Father,” Kaladin said. “You can’t let them take you after this.”

  “I can and will!” Lirin shouted, standing up. “Because I will take responsibility for what I’ve done! I will work within whatever confines I must in order to protect people! I have taken oaths not to harm!” He grimaced, sickened. “Oh, Almighty. You murdered a man inside my home.”

  “It wasn’t murder,” Kaladin said.

  Lirin didn’t respond.

  “It wasn’t murder.”

  Lirin sank to the floor. “Just … go,” he said, his voice growing soft again. The grief in it, the disappointment, was far worse than the anger had been. “I will … find a way to get the rest of us out of this. That singer saw me trying to make you stop. They won’t harm a surgeon who didn’t fight. But you, they’ll kill.”