Adolin bellowed a laugh, and Shallan couldn’t help joining in at the ridiculousness of it. She stepped back from him, but kept hold on his hand. “Neither of us is going to mess this up,” she said to him, squeezing his hand. “Despite what might at times seem like our best efforts otherwise.”
“Promise?” he asked.
“I promise. Let’s look at this notebook of yours and see what it says about our murderer.”
In this record, I hold nothing back. I will try not to shy away from difficult topics, or paint myself in a dishonestly heroic light.
—From Oathbringer, preface
Kaladin crept through the rains, sidling in a wet uniform across the rocks until he was able to peek through the trees at the Voidbringers. Monstrous terrors from the mythological past, enemies of all that was right and good. Destroyers who had laid waste to civilization countless times.
They were playing cards.
What in Damnation’s depths? Kaladin thought. The Voidbringers had posted a single guard, but the creature had simply been sitting on a tree stump, easy to avoid. A decoy, Kaladin had assumed, figuring he would find the true guard watching from the heights of the trees.
If there was a hidden guard though, Kaladin had missed spotting them—and they’d missed Kaladin in equal measure. The dim light served him well, as he was able to settle between some bushes right at the edge of the Voidbringer camp. Between trees they had stretched tarps, which leaked horribly. In one place they’d made a proper tent, fully enclosed with walls—and he couldn’t see what was inside.
There wasn’t enough shelter, so many sat out in the rain. Kaladin spent a torturous few minutes expecting to be spotted. All they had to do was notice that these bushes had drawn in their leaves at his touch.
Nobody looked, fortunately. The leaves timidly peeked back out, obscuring him. Syl landed on his arm, hands on her hips as she surveyed the Voidbringers. One of them had a set of wooden Herdazian cards, and he sat at the edge of the camp—directly before Kaladin—using a flat surface of stone as a table. A female sat opposite him.
They looked different from what he expected. For one thing, their skin was a different shade—many parshmen here in Alethkar had marbled white and red skin, rather than the deep red on black like Rlain from Bridge Four. They didn’t wear warform, though neither did they wear some terrible, powerful form. Though they were squat and bulky, their only carapace ran along the sides of their forearms and jutted out at their temples, leaving them with full heads of hair.
They still wore their simple slave smocks, tied at the waists with strings. No red eyes. Did that change, perhaps, like his own eyes?
The male—distinguished by a dark red beard, the hairs each unnaturally thick—finally placed a card on the rock next to several others.
“Can you do that?” the female asked.
“I think so.”
“You said squires can’t capture.”
“Unless another card of mine is touching yours,” the male said. He scratched at his beard. “I think?”
Kaladin felt cold, like the rainwater was seeping in through his skin, penetrating all the way to his blood and washing through him. They spoke like Alethi. Not a hint of an accent. With his eyes closed, he wouldn’t have been able to tell these voices from those of common darkeyed villagers from Hearthstone, save for the fact that the female had a deeper voice than most human women.
“So…” the female said. “You’re saying you don’t know how to play the game after all.”
The male began gathering up the cards. “I should know, Khen. How many times did I watch them play? Standing there with my tray of drinks. I should be an expert at this, shouldn’t I?”
“Apparently not.”
The female stood and walked over to another group, who were trying to build a fire under a tarp without much success. It took a special kind of luck to be able to get flames going outside during the Weeping. Kaladin, like most in the military, had learned to live with the constant dampness.
They had the stolen sacks of grain—Kaladin could see them piled underneath one of the tarps. The grain had swollen, splitting several of the sacks. Several were eating soggy handfuls, since they had no bowls.
Kaladin wished he didn’t immediately taste the mushy, awful stuff in his own mouth. He’d been given unspiced, boiled tallew on many occasions. Often he’d considered it a blessing.
The male who’d been speaking continued to sit on his rock, holding up a wooden card. They were a lacquered set, durable. Kaladin had occasionally seen their like in the military. Men would save for months to get a set like this, that wouldn’t warp in the rain.
The parshman looked so forlorn, staring down at his card, shoulders slumped.
“This is wrong,” Kaladin whispered to Syl. “We’ve been so wrong.…” Where were the destroyers? What had happened to the beasts with the red eyes that had tried to crush Dalinar’s army? The terrible, haunting figures that Bridge Four had described to him?
We thought we understood what was going to happen, Kaladin thought. I was so sure.…
“Alarm!” a sudden, shrill voice called. “Alarm! You fools!”
Something zipped through the air, a glowing yellow ribbon, a streak of light in the dim afternoon shade.
“He’s there,” the shrill voice said. “You’re being watched! Beneath those shrubs!”
Kaladin burst up through the underbrush, ready to suck in Stormlight and be away. Though fewer towns had any now, as it was running out again, he had a little left.
The parshmen seized cudgels made from branches or the handles of brooms. They bunched together and held the sticks like frightened villagers, no stance, no control.
Kaladin hesitated. I could take them all in a fight even without Stormlight. He’d seen men hold weapons like that many times before. Most recently, he’d seen it inside the chasms, when training the bridgemen.
These were no warriors.
Syl flitted up to him, prepared to become a Blade. “No,” Kaladin whispered to her. Then he held his hands to the sides, speaking more loudly. “I surrender.”
I will express only direct, even brutal, truth. You must know what I have done, and what those actions cost me.
—From Oathbringer, preface
“Brightlord Perel’s body was found in the same area as Sadeas’s,” Shallan said, pacing back and forth in her room as she flipped through pages of the report. “That can’t be a coincidence. This tower is far too big. So we know where the murderer is prowling.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” Adolin said. He lounged with his back against the wall, coat unbuttoned while tossing a small leather ball filled with dried grain into the air and catching it again. “I just think the murders could have been done by two different people.”
“Same exact method of murder,” Shallan said. “Body positioned the same way.”
“Nothing else connecting them,” Adolin said. “Sadeas was slime, widely hated, and usually accompanied by guards. Perel was quiet, well-liked, and known for his administrative prowess. He was less a soldier than a manager.”
The sun had fully set by now, and they’d set out spheres on the floor for light. The remnants of their meal had been carted away by a servant, and Pattern hummed happily on the wall near Adolin’s head. Adolin glanced at him occasionally, looking uncomfortable, which she fully understood. She’d grown used to Pattern, but his lines were strange.