Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive 3)

“Is that spren watching me right now?” Kaladin asked.

“No.”

“Then let’s cut this rope.”

He turned and hid what he was doing, then quickly summoned Syl as a knife to cut himself free. That would change his eye color, but in the darkness, he hoped the parshmen wouldn’t notice.

Syl puffed back into a spren. “Sword now?” she said. “The spheres they took from you have all run out, but they’ll scatter at seeing a Blade.”

“No.” Kaladin instead picked up a large stone. The parshmen hushed, noticing his escape. Kaladin carried his rock a few steps, then dropped it, crushing a rockbud. He was surrounded a few moments later by angry parshmen carrying cudgels.

Kaladin ignored them, picking through the wreckage of the rockbud. He held up a large section of shell.

“The inside of this,” he said, turning it over for them, “will still be dry, despite the rainfall. The rockbud needs a barrier between itself and the water outside for some reason, though it always seems eager to drink after a storm. Who has my knife?”

Nobody moved to return it.

“If you scrape off this inner layer,” Kaladin said, tapping at the rockbud shell, “you can get to the dry portion. Now that the rain has stopped, I should be able to get us a fire going, assuming nobody has lost my tinder bag. We need to boil that grain, then dry it into cakes. They won’t be tasty, but they’ll keep. If you don’t do something soon, your supplies will rot.”

He stood up and pointed. “Since we’re already here, we should be near enough the river that we can gather more water. It won’t flow much longer with the end of the rains.

“Rockbud shells don’t burn particularly well, so we’ll want to harvest some real wood and dry it at the fire during the day. We can keep that one small, then do the cooking tomorrow night. In the dark, the smoke is less likely to reveal us, and we can shield the light in the trees. I just have to figure out how we’re going to cook without any pots to boil the water.”

The parshmen stared at him. Then Khen finally pushed him away from the rockbud and took up the shard he’d been holding. Kaladin spotted his original captor standing near the rock where Kaladin had been sitting. The parshman held the rope Kaladin had cut, rubbing its sliced-through end with his thumb.

After a short conference, the parshmen dragged him to the trees he’d indicated, returned his knife—standing by with every cudgel they had—and demanded that he prove he could build a fire with wet wood.

He did just that.

You cannot have a spice described to you, but must taste it for yourself.

—From Oathbringer, preface

Shallan became Veil.

Stormlight made her face less youthful, more angular. Nose pointed, with a small scar on the chin. Her hair rippled from red to Alethi black. Making an illusion like this took a larger gem of Stormlight, but once it was going, she could maintain it for hours on just a smidgen.

Veil tossed aside the havah, instead pulling on trousers and a tight shirt, then boots and a long white coat. She finished with only a simple glove on the left hand. Veil, of course, wasn’t in the least embarrassed at that.

There was a simple relief for Shallan’s pain. There was an easy way to hide. Veil hadn’t suffered as Shallan had—and she was tough enough to handle that sort of thing anyway. Becoming her was like setting down a terrible burden.

Veil threw a scarf around her neck, then slung a rugged satchel—acquired for Veil specifically—over her shoulder. Hopefully the conspicuous knife handle sticking out from the top would look natural, even intimidating.

The part at the back of her mind that was still Shallan worried about this. Would she look fake? She’d almost certainly missed some subtle clues encoded in her behavior, dress, or speech. These would indicate to the right people that Veil didn’t have the hard-bitten experience she feigned.

Well, she would have to do her best and hope to recover from her inevitable mistakes. She tied another knife onto her belt, long, but not quite a sword, since Veil wasn’t lighteyed. Fortunately. No lighteyed woman would be able to prance around so obviously armed. Some mores grew lax the farther you descended the social ladder.

“Well?” Veil asked, turning to the wall, where Pattern hung.

“Mmm…” he said. “Good lie.”

“Thank you.”

“Not like the other.”

“Radiant?”

“You slip in and out of her,” Pattern said, “like the sun behind clouds.”

“I just need more practice,” Veil said. Yes, that voice sounded excellent. Shallan was getting far better with sounds.

She picked Pattern up—which involved pressing her hand against the wall, letting him pass over to her skin and then her coat. With him humming happily, she crossed her room and stepped out onto the balcony. The first moon had risen, violet and proud Salas. She was the least bright of the moons, which meant it was mostly dark out.

Most rooms on the outside had these small balconies, but hers on the second level was particularly advantageous. It had steps down to the field below. Covered in furrows for water and ridges for planting rockbuds, the field also had boxes at the edges for growing tubers or ornamental plants. Each tier of the city had a similar one, with eighteen levels inside separating them.

She stepped down to the field in the darkness. How had anything ever grown up here? Her breath puffed out in front of her, and coldspren grew around her feet.

The field had a small access doorway back into Urithiru. Perhaps the subterfuge of not exiting through her room wasn’t necessary, but Veil preferred to be careful. She wouldn’t want guards or servants remarking on how Brightness Shallan went about during odd hours of the night.

Besides, who knew where Mraize and his Ghostbloods had operatives? They hadn’t contacted her since that first day in Urithiru, but she knew they’d be watching. She still didn’t know what to do about them. They had admitted to assassinating Jasnah, which should be grounds enough to hate them. They also seemed to know things, important things, about the world.

Veil strolled through the corridor, carrying a small hand lamp for light, as a sphere would make her stand out. She passed evening crowds that kept the corridors of Sebarial’s quarter as busy as his warcamp had been. Things never seemed to slow down here as much as they did in Dalinar’s quarter.

The strangely mesmerizing strata of the corridors guided her out of Sebarial’s quarter. The number of people in the hallways slackened. Just Veil and those lonely, endless tunnels. She felt as if she could sense the weight of the other levels of the tower, empty and unexplored, bearing down on her. A mountain of unknown stone.

She hurried on her way, Pattern humming to himself from her coat.

“I like him,” Pattern said.

“Who?” Veil said.

“The swordsman,” Pattern said. “Mmm. The one you can’t mate with yet.”

“Can we please stop talking about him that way?”

“Very well,” Pattern said. “But I like him.”

“You hate his sword.”

“I have come to understand,” Pattern said, growing excited. “Humans … humans don’t care about the dead. You build chairs and doors out of corpses! You eat corpses! You make clothing from the skins of corpses. Corpses are things to you.”