Words of Radiance (The Stormlight Archive 2)

She turned and looked to him. “The crushing guilt,” she said, “of being powerless. Of wishing they’d hurt you instead of those around you. Of screaming and scrambling and hating as those you love are ruined, popped like a boil. And you have to watch their joy seeping away while you can’t do anything. They break the ones you love, and not you. And you plead. Can’t you just beat me instead?”

“Yes,” he whispered.

Shallan nodded, holding his eyes. “Yes. It would be nice if nobody in the world knew of those things, Kaladin Stormblessed. I agree. With everything I have.”

He saw it in her eyes. The anguish, the frustration. The terrible nothing that clawed inside and sought to smother her. She knew. It was there, inside. She had been broken.

Then she smiled. Oh, storms. She smiled anyway.

It was the single most beautiful thing he’d seen in his entire life.

“How?” he asked.

She shrugged lightly. “Helps if you’re crazy. Come on. I do believe we’re under a slight time constraint…”

She started down the chasm. He stood behind, feeling drained. And oddly brightened.

He should feel like a fool. He’d done it again—he’d been telling her how easy her life was, while she’d had that hiding inside of her all along. This time, though, he didn’t feel like an idiot. He felt like he understood. Something. He didn’t know what. The chasm just seemed a little brighter.

Tien always did that to me… he thought. Even on the darkest day.

He stood still long enough that frillblooms opened around him, their wide, fanlike fronds displaying veined patterns of orange, red, and violet. He eventually jogged after Shallan, shocking the plants closed.

“I think,” she said, “we need to focus on the positive side of being down here in this terrible chasm.”

She eyed him. He didn’t say anything.

“Come on,” she said.

“I… have the sense that it would be better not to encourage you.”

“What’s the fun in that?”

“Well, we are about to get hit by a highstorm’s flood.”

“So our clothing will get washed,” she said with a grin. “See! Positive.”

He snorted.

“Ah, that bridgeman grunt dialect again,” she noted.

“That grunt meant,” he said, “that at least if the waters come, it will wash away some of your stench.”

“Ha! Mildly amusing, but no points to you. I already established that you’re the malodorous one. Reuse of jokes is strictly forbidden on pain of getting dunked in a highstorm.”

“All right then,” he said. “It’s a good thing we’re down here because I had guard duty tonight. Now I’m going to miss it. That is practically like getting the day off.”

“To go swimming, no less!”

He smiled.

“I,” she proclaimed, “am glad we are down here because the sun is far too bright up above, and it tends to give me a sunburn unless I wear a hat. It is much better to be down in the dank, dark, smelly, moldy, potentially life-threatening depths. No sunburns. Just monsters.”

“I’m glad to be down here,” he said, “because at least it was me, and not one of my men, who fell.”

She hopped over a puddle, then eyed him. “You’re not very good at this.”

“Sorry. I meant that I’m glad to be down here because when we get out, everyone will cheer me for being a hero for rescuing you.”

“Better,” Shallan said. “Except for the fact that I do believe that I am the one rescuing you.”

He glanced at her map. “Point.”

“I,” she said, “am glad to be down here because I’ve always wondered what it’s like to be a chunk of meat traveling through a digestive system, and these chasms remind me of the intestines.”

“I hope you’re not serious.”

“What?” She looked shocked. “Of course I’m not. Ew.”

“You really do try too hard.”

“It’s what keeps me insane.”

He scrambled up a large pile of debris, then offered a hand to help her. “I,” he said, “am happy to be here because it reminds me of how lucky I am to be free of Sadeas’s army.”

“Ah,” she said, stepping up to the top with him.

“His lighteyes sent us down here to gather,” Kaladin said, sliding down the other side. “And didn’t pay us much at all for the effort.”

“Tragic.”

“You could say,” he told her as she stepped down off the pile, “that we were given only a pittance.”

He grinned at her.

She cocked her head.

“Pit-tance,” he said, gesturing toward the depth of the hole they were in. “You know. We’re in a pit…”

“Oh, storms,” she said. “You don’t actually expect that to count. That was terrible!”

“I know. I’m sorry. My mother would be disappointed.”

“She didn’t like wordplay?”

“No, she loved it. She’d just be mad I tried to do it when she wasn’t around to laugh at me.”

Shallan smiled, and they continued on, keeping a brisk pace. “I am glad we’re down here,” she said, “because by now, Adolin will be worried sick about me—so when we get back, he’ll be ecstatic. He might even let me kiss him in public.”

Adolin. Right. That dampened his mood.

“We probably need to stop so I can draw out our map,” Shallan said, frowning at the sky. “And so that you can yell some more for our potential salvation.”

“I suppose,” he said as she settled down to get out her map. He cupped his hands. “Hey, up there? Anyone? We’re down here, and we’re making bad puns. Please save us from ourselves!”

Shallan chuckled.

Kaladin smiled, then started as he actually heard something echoing back. Was that a voice? Or… Wait…

A trumping sound—like a horn’s call, but overlapping itself. It grew louder, washing over them.

Then an enormous, skittering mass of carapace and claws crashed around the corner.

Chasmfiend.

Kaladin’s mind panicked, but his body simply moved. He snatched Shallan by the arm, hauling her to her feet and pulling her into a run. She shouted, dropping her satchel.

Kaladin pulled her after him and did not look back. He could feel the thing, too close, the walls of the chasm shaking from its pursuit. Bones, twigs, shell, and plants cracked and snapped.

The monster trumped again, a deafening sound.

It was almost upon them. Storms, but it could move. He’d never have imagined something so large being so quick. There was no distracting it this time. It was almost upon them; he could feel it right behind…

There.

He whipped Shallan in front of him and thrust her into a fissure in the wall. As a shadow loomed over him, he threw himself into the fissure, shoving Shallan backward. She grunted as he pressed her against some of the refuse of twigs and leaves that had been packed into this crack by floodwaters.

The chasm fell silent. Kaladin could hear only Shallan’s panting and his own heartbeat. They’d left most of their spheres on the ground, where Shallan had been preparing to draw. He still had his spear, his improvised lantern.