Words of Radiance (The Stormlight Archive 2)

Kaladin met his eyes. Behind him, Adolin glanced over, narrowing his eyes. He looked down at Kaladin’s arm and frowned.

That one saw something, Kaladin thought. As if he didn’t have enough trouble with Adolin as it was.

“I saw a light moving in the air outside,” Kaladin said. “I moved by instinct.”

Nearby, Syl zipped into the room and looked pointedly at him, frowning. But it wasn’t a lie. He had seen a light in the night. Hers.

“All those years ago,” Dalinar said, “I dismissed the stories the witnesses told of my brother’s assassination. Men walking on walls, others falling up instead of down… Almighty above. What is he?”

“Death,” Kaladin whispered.

Dalinar nodded.

“Why has he come back now?” Navani asked, moving up to Dalinar’s side. “After all these years?”

“He wants to claim me,” Elhokar said. His back was to them, and Kaladin could make out a cup in his hand. He downed the contents, then immediately refilled it from a jug. Deep violet wine. Elhokar’s hand was trembling as he poured.

Kaladin met Dalinar’s eyes. The highprince had heard. This Szeth had not come for the king, but Dalinar.

Dalinar didn’t say anything to correct the king, so Kaladin didn’t either.

“What do we do if he comes back?” Adolin asked.

“I don’t know,” Dalinar said, sitting back down on the couch beside his son. “I don’t know…”

Tend his wounds. It was the voice of Kaladin’s father, whispering inside him. The surgeon. Stitch that cheek. Reset the nose.

He had a more important duty. Kaladin forced himself to his feet, though he felt like he was carrying lead weights, and took a spear from one of the men at the door. “Why are the hallways silent?” he asked Moash. “Do you know where the servants are?”

“The highprince,” Moash said, nodding to Dalinar. “Brightlord Dalinar sent a couple of the men to the servants’ quarters to move everyone out. He thought that if the assassin came back, he might start killing indiscriminately. Figured the more people who left the palace, the fewer casualties there would be.”

Kaladin nodded, taking a sphere lamp and moving out into the hallway. “Hold here. I need to do something.”

* * *

Adolin slumped in his seat as the bridgeboy left. Kaladin gave no explanation, of course, and didn’t ask the king for permission to withdraw. Storming man seemed to consider himself above lighteyes. No, the storming man seemed to consider himself above the king.

He did fight alongside you, part of him said. How many men, lighteyed or dark, would stand so firm against a Shardbearer?

Troubled, Adolin stared up at the ceiling. He couldn’t have seen what he thought he had. He’d been dazed from his fall from the ceiling. Surely the assassin hadn’t actually cut Kaladin through the arm with his Shardblade. The arm seemed perfectly fine now, after all.

But why was the sleeve missing?

He fell with the assassin, Adolin thought. He fought, and looked like he was wounded, but it turns out he wasn’t. Could this all be part of some ruse?

Stop it, Adolin thought at himself. You’ll get as paranoid as Elhokar. He glanced at the king, who was staring—face pale—at his empty wine cup. Had he really gone through everything in the pitcher? Elhokar walked toward his bedroom, where there would be more waiting for him, and pulled open the door.

Navani gasped, causing the king to freeze in place. He turned toward the door. The back side of the wood had been scratched with a knife, jagged lines forming a series of glyphs.

Adolin stood up. Several of those were numbers, weren’t they?

“Thirty-eight days,” Renarin read. “The end of all nations.”

* * *

Kaladin moved tiredly through the palace hallways, retracing the route he’d led them along only a short time before. Down toward the kitchens, into the hallway with the hole cut out into the air. Past the place where Dalinar’s blood spotted the floor, to the intersection.

Where Beld’s corpse lay. Kaladin knelt down, rolling the body over. The eyes were burned out. Above those dead eyes remained the tattoos of freedom that Kaladin had designed.

Kaladin closed his own eyes. I’ve failed you, he thought. The balding, square-faced man had survived Bridge Four and the rescue of Dalinar’s armies. He’d survived Damnation itself, only to fall here, to an assassin with powers he should not have.

Kaladin groaned.

“He died protecting.” Syl’s voice.

“I should be able to keep them alive,” Kaladin said. “Why didn’t I just let them go free? Why did I bring them to this duty, and more death?”

“Someone has to fight. Someone has to protect.”

“They’ve done enough! They’ve bled their share. I should banish them all. Dalinar can find different bodyguards.”

“They made the choice,” Syl said. “You can’t take that from them.”

Kaladin knelt, struggling with his grief.

You have to learn when to care, son. His father’s voice. And when to let go. You’ll grow calluses.

He never had. Storm him, he never had. It was why he’d never made a good surgeon. He couldn’t lose patients.

And now, now he killed? Now he was a soldier? How did that make any sense? He hated how good he was at killing.

He took a deep breath, regaining control, with effort. “He can do things I can’t,” he finally said, opening his eyes and looking toward Syl, who stood in the air near him. “The assassin. Is it because I have more Words to speak?”

“There are more,” Syl said. “You’re not ready for them yet, I don’t think. Regardless, I think you could already do what he does. With practice.”

“But how is he Surgebinding? You said that the assassin had no spren.”

“No honorspren would give that creature the means to slaughter as he does.”

“Perspectives can be different among humans,” Kaladin said, trying to keep the emotion from his voice as he turned Beld facedown so he wouldn’t have to see those shriveled, burned-out eyes. “What if the honorspren thought this assassin was doing the right thing? You gave me the means to slaughter Parshendi.”

“To protect.”

“In their eyes, the Parshendi are protecting their kind,” Kaladin said. “To them, I’m the aggressor.”

Syl sat down, wrapping her arms around her knees. “I don’t know. Maybe. But no other honorspren are doing what I do. I am the only one who disobeyed. But his Shardblade…”

“What of it?” Kaladin asked.

“It was different. Very different.”

“It looked ordinary to me. Well, as ordinary as a Shardblade can.”

“It was different,” she repeated. “I feel I should know why. Something about the amount of Light he was consuming…”

Kaladin rose, then walked down the side corridor, holding up his lamp. It bore sapphires, turning the walls blue. The assassin had cut that hole with his Blade, entered the corridor, and killed Beld. But Kaladin had sent two men on ahead.

Yes, another body. Hobber, one of the first men Kaladin had saved in Bridge Four. Storms take that assassin! Kaladin remembered saving this man after he had been left by everyone else to die on the plateau.