Words of Radiance (The Stormlight Archive 2)

Kaladin twisted about. Shallan? What was that fool woman doing, standing in the chasm, waving her hands like a maniac? How had she even gotten past him?

She yelled again, getting the chasmfiend’s attention. Her voice echoed oddly.

The chasmfiend turned from Kaladin to Shallan, then began to smash at her.

“No!” Kaladin yelled. But what was the use in shouting? He needed his weapon. Gritting his teeth, he twisted about and scrambled—as best he could—to the Shardblade. Storms. Shallan…

He ripped the sword from the rock, but then he collapsed again. The leg just wouldn’t hold him. He twisted back, holding out the Blade, searching the chasm. The monster continued to swipe about, trumping, the terrible sound echoing and reverberating in the narrow confines. Kaladin couldn’t see a corpse. Had Shallan escaped?

Stabbing the blasted thing through the chest only seemed to have made it angrier. The head. His only chance was the head.

Kaladin struggled to his feet. The monster stopped smashing against the ground and with a trump surged toward him. Kaladin gripped the sword in two hands, then wavered. His leg buckled beneath him. He tried to go down on one knee, but the leg gave out completely, and he slumped to the side and narrowly avoided slicing himself with the Shardblade.

He splashed into a pool of water. In front of him, one of the spheres he’d tossed shone with a bright white light.

He reached into the water, snatching it, clutching the chilled glass. He needed that Light. Storms, his life depended on it.

Please.

The chasmfiend loomed above.

Kaladin sucked in a breath, straining, like a man gasping for air. He heard… as if distantly…

Weeping.

No power entered him.

The chasmfiend swung and Kaladin twisted, and strangely found himself. The other version of him stood above him, sword raised, larger than life. It was bigger than him by half.

What in the Almighty’s own eyes… ? Kaladin thought, dumbfounded, as the chasmfiend smashed an arm down onto the figure beside Kaladin. That not-him shattered into a puff of Stormlight.

What had he done? How had he done it?

No matter. He lived. With a cry of desperation, he threw himself back to his feet and lurched toward the chasmfiend. He needed to get close, as he had before, too close for the claws to swing in these confines.

So close that…

The chasmfiend reared, then snapped down for a bite, mandibles extending, terrible eyes bearing down.

Kaladin thrust upward.

* * *

The chasmfiend crashed down, chitin snapping, legs spasming. Shallan cried out, freehand to mouth, from where she hid behind a boulder, her skin and clothing turned deep black.

The chasmfiend had fallen on Kaladin.

Shallan dropped her paper—it bore a drawing of her and another of Kaladin—and scrambled across the rocks, dismissing the blackness around her. She’d needed to be close to the fighting for the illusions to work. Better if she’d been able to send them on Pattern, but that was problematic because—

She stopped in front of the still-twitching beast, a heap of flesh and carapace like a fallen avalanche of stone. She shifted from one foot to another, uncertain what to do. “Kaladin?” she called out. Her voice was frail in the darkness.

Stop it, she told herself. No timidity. You’re past that. Taking a deep breath, she moved forward, picking her way over the huge armored legs. She tried to shove aside a claw, but it was far too heavy for her, so she climbed over it and skidded down the other side.

She froze as she heard something. The chasmfiend’s head lay nearby, massive eyes cloudy. Spren started to rise from it, like trails of smoke. The same ones as before, only… leaving? She held her light closer.

The bottom half of Kaladin’s body protruded from the chasmfiend’s mouth. Almighty above! Shallan gasped, then scrambled forward. She tried, with difficulty, to pull Kaladin from the closed maw before summoning her Shardblade and cutting away at several mandibles.

“Kaladin?” she asked, nervously peering into the thing’s mouth from the side, where she’d removed a mandible.

“Ow,” a weak voice trailed back to her.

Alive! “Hang on!” she said, hacking at the thing’s head, careful not to cut too close to Kaladin. Violet ichor spurted out, coating her arms, smelling like wet mold.

“This is kind of uncomfortable…” Kaladin said.

“You’re alive,” Shallan said. “Stop complaining.”

He was alive. Oh, Stormfather. Alive. She would have a whole heap of prayers to burn when they got back.

“Smells awful in here,” Kaladin said weakly. “Almost as bad as you do.”

“Be glad,” Shallan said as she worked. “Here, I have a reasonably perfect specimen of a chasmfiend—with only a minor case of being dead—and I’m chopping it apart for you instead of studying it.”

“I’m eternally grateful.”

“How did you get in its mouth, anyway?” Shallan asked, prying off a piece of carapace with a sickening sound. She tossed it aside.

“Stabbed it through the roof of its mouth,” Kaladin said, “into the brain. Only way I could figure to kill the blasted thing.”

She leaned down, reaching her hand through the large hole she’d opened. With some work—and with a little cutting at the front mandibles—she managed to help Kaladin wiggle out the side of the mouth. Covered in ichor and blood, face pale from apparent blood loss, he looked like death itself.

“Storms,” she whispered, as he lay back on the rocks.

“Bind my leg,” Kaladin said weakly. “The rest of me should be fine. Heal right up…”

She looked at the mess of his leg, and shivered. It looked like… Like… Balat…

Kaladin wouldn’t be walking on that leg anytime soon. Oh, Stormfather, she thought, cutting off the skirt of her dress at the knees. She wrapped his leg tightly, as he instructed. He seemed to think he didn’t need a tourniquet. She listened to him; he’d probably bound far more wounds than she had.

She cut the sleeve off her right arm and used that to bind a second wound on his side, where the chasmfiend had started to rip him in half as it bit. Then she settled down next to him, feeling drained and cold, legs and arm now exposed to the chill air of the chasm bottom.

Kaladin took a deep breath, resting on the rock ground, eyes closed. “Two hours until the highstorm,” he whispered.

Shallan checked the sky. It was almost dark. “If that long,” she whispered. “We beat it, but we’re dead anyway, aren’t we?”

“Seems unfair,” he said. Then he groaned, sitting up.

“Shouldn’t you—”

“Bah. I’ve had far worse wounds than this.”

She raised an eyebrow at him as he opened his eyes. He looked dizzy.

“I have,” he insisted. “That’s not just soldier bravado.”

“This bad?” she asked. “How often?”

“Twice,” he admitted. He looked over the hulking form of the chasmfiend. “We actually killed the thing.”

“Sad, I know,” she said, feeling depressed. “It was beautiful.”

“It would be more beautiful if it hadn’t tried to eat me.”

“From my perspective,” Shallan noted, “it didn’t try, it succeeded.”