The Way of Kings (The Stormlight Archive 1)

That was a Soulcasting! she thought. She’d changed the goblet into blood, which was one of the Ten Essences. She raised her hand to her head, staring at the red liquid expanding in a pool on her floor. There seemed to be quite a lot of it.

She was so bewildered. The voice, the creatures, the sea of glass beads and the dark, cold sky. It had all come upon her so quickly.

I Soulcast, she realized again. I did it!

Did it have something to do with the creatures? But she’d begun seeing them in her drawings before she’d ever stolen the Soulcaster. How…what…? She looked down at her safehand and the Soulcaster hidden in the pouch inside her sleeve.

I didn’t put it on, she thought. Yet I used it anyway.

“Shallan?”

It was Jasnah’s voice. Just outside Shallan’s room. The princess must have followed her. Shallan felt a spike of terror as she saw a line of blood leaking toward the doorway. It was almost there, and would pass underneath in a heartbeat.

Why did it have to be blood? Nauseated, she leaped to her feet, slippers soaking up the red liquid.

“Shallan?” Jasnah said, voice closer. “What was that sound?”

Shallan looked frantically at the blood, then at the sketchpad, filled with pictures of the strange creatures. What if they did have something to do with the Soulcasting? Jasnah would recognize them. There was a shadow under the door.

She panicked, tucking the sketchpad away in her trunk. But the blood, it would condemn her. There was enough that only a life-threatening wound could have created it. Jasnah would see. She’d know. Blood where there should be none? One of the Ten Essences?

Jasnah was going to know what Shallan had done!

A thought struck Shallan. It wasn’t a brilliant thought, but it was a way out, and it was the only thing that occurred to her. She went to her knees and grabbed a shard of the broken glass pitcher in her safehand, through the fabric of her sleeve. She took a breath and pulled up her right sleeve, then used the glass to cut a shallow gash in her skin. In the panic of the moment, it barely even hurt. Blood welled out.

As the doorknob turned and the door opened, Shallan dropped the glass shard and lay on her side. She closed her eyes, feigning unconsciousness. The door swung open.

Jasnah gasped, immediately calling for help. She rushed to Shallan’s side, grabbing her arm and putting pressure on the wound. Shallan mumbled, as if she were barely conscious, gripping her safepouch—and the Soulcaster inside—with her safehand. They wouldn’t open it, would they? She pulled her arm closer to her chest, cowering silently as more footsteps and calls sounded, servants and parshmen running into the room, Jasnah shouting for more help.

This, Shallan thought, will not end well.

“Though I was due for dinner in Veden City that night, I insisted upon visiting Kholinar to speak with Tivbet. The tariffs through Urithiru were growing quite unreasonable. By then, the so-called Radiants had already begun to show their true nature.”

—Following the firing of the original Palanaeum, only one page of Terxim’s autobiography remained, and this is the only line of any use to me.

Kaladin dreamed he was the storm.

He raged forward, the stormwall behind him his trailing cape, soaring above a heaving, black expanse. The ocean. His passing churned up a tempest, slamming waves into one another, lifting white caps to be caught in his wind.

He approached a dark continent and soared upward. Higher. Higher. He left the sea behind. The vastness of the continent spread out before him, seemingly endless, an ocean of rock. So large, he thought, awed. He hadn’t understood. How could he have?

He roared past the Shattered Plains. They looked as if something very large had hit them at the center, sending rippling breaks outward. They too were larger than he’d expected; no wonder nobody had been able to find their way through the chasms.

There was a large plateau at the center, but with the darkness and the distance, he could not see much. There were lights, though. Someone lived there.

He did see that the eastern side of the plains was very different from the western side, marked by tall, spindly pillars, plateaus that had nearly been worn away. Despite that, he could see a symmetry to the Shattered Plains. From high above, the plains resembled a work of art.

In a moment, he was past them, continuing north and west to soar across the Sea of Spears, a shallow inland sea where broken fingers of rock jutted above the water. He passed over Alethkar, catching a glimpse of the great city of Kholinar, built amid formations of rock like fins rising from the stone. Then he turned southward, away from anything he knew. He crested majestic mountains, densely populated at their tips, with villages clustered near vents that emitted steam or lava. The Horneater Peaks?

He left them with rain and winds, rumbling down into foreign lands. He passed cities and open plains, villages and twisting waterways. There were many armies. Kaladin passed tents pulled flat against the leeward sides of rock formations, stakes driven into the rock to hold them taut, men hidden inside. He passed hillsides where soldiers huddled in clefts. He passed large wooden wagons, built to house lighteyes while at war. How many wars was the world fighting? Was there nowhere that was at peace?

He took a path to the southwest, blowing toward a city built in long troughs in the ground that looked like giant claw marks ripped across the landscape. He was over it in a flash, passing a hinterland where the stone itself was ribbed and rippled, like frozen waves of water. The people in this kingdom were dark-skinned, like Sigzil.

The land went on and on. Hundreds of cities. Thousands of villages. People with faintly blue veins beneath their skin. A place where the pressure of the approaching highstorm blew water out of spouts in the ground. A city where people lived in gigantic, hollowed-out stalactites hanging beneath a titanic sheltered ridge.

Westward he blew. The land was so vast. So enormous. So many different people. It dazzled his mind. War seemed far less prevalent in the West than it was in the East, and that comforted him, but still he was troubled. Peace seemed a scarce commodity in the world.

Something drew his attention. Strange flashes of light. He blew toward them at the forefront of the storm. What were those lights? They came in bursts, forming the strangest patterns. Almost like physical things that he could reach out and touch, spherical bubbles of light that vibrated with spikes and troughs.

Kaladin crossed a strange city laid out in a triangular pattern, with tall peaks rising like sentries at the corners and center. The flashes of light were coming from a building on the central peak. Kaladin knew he would pass quickly, for as the storm, he could not retreat. Ever westward he blew.

He threw open the door with his wind, entering a long hallway with bright red tile walls, mosaic murals that he passed too quickly to make out. He rustled the skirts of tall, golden-haired serving women who carried trays of food or steaming towels. They called in a strange language, perhaps wondering who had left a window unbarred in a highstorm.

The flashes of light came from directly ahead. So transfixing. Brushing past a pretty gold-and red-haired woman who huddled frightened in a corner, Kaladin burst through a door. He had one brief glimpse of what lay beyond.

A man stood over two corpses. His pale head shaved, his clothing white, the murderer held a long, thin sword in one hand. He looked up from his victims and almost seemed to see Kaladin. He had large Shin eyes.