Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive 3)

Smoke bubbles rattled the dinghy, which nearly upended. She should have warned them. Sailors muttered, but in the next dinghy over, the captain praised her.

She removed two more spear tips beneath the waves before finally reaching the wall. Here, the spearheadlike formations had been grown so close together, there was barely a handspan gap between them. It took three tries to get the dinghy close enough—as soon as they got into position, some turning of the waves would pull them away again.

Finally, the sailors managed to keep the dinghy steady. Kaza reached out with the Soulcaster—two of the three gems were almost out of Stormlight, and glowed only faintly. She should have enough.

She pressed her hand against the spike, then convinced it to become smoke. It was … easy this time. She felt the explosion of wind from the transformation, her soul crying in delight at the smoke, thick and sweet. She breathed it in through the hole in her cheek while sailors coughed. She looked up at the smoke, drifting away. How wonderful it would be to join it.…

No.

The island proper loomed beyond that hole. Dark, like its stones had been stained by smoke themselves, it had tall rock formations along its center. They looked almost like the walls of a city.

The captain’s dinghy pulled up to hers, and the captain transferred to her boat. His began to row backward.

“What?” she asked. “Why is your boat heading back?”

“They claim to not be feeling well,” the captain said. Was he abnormally pale? “Cowards. They won’t have any of the prize, then.”

“Gemstones lay around just for the plucking here,” Droz added. “Generations of greatshells have died here, leaving their hearts. We’re going to be rich, rich men.”

As long as the secret was here.

She settled into her place at the prow of the boat as the sailors guided the three dinghies through the gap. The Aimians had known about Soulcasters. This was where you’d come to get the devices, in the old days. You’d come to the ancient island of Akinah.

If there was a secret of how to avoid death by the device she loved, she would find it here.

Her stomach began acting up again as they rowed. Kaza endured it, though she felt as if she were slipping into the other world. That wasn’t an ocean beneath her, but deep black glass. And two suns in the sky, one that drew her soul toward it. Her shadow, to stretch out in the wrong direction …

Splash.

She started. One of the sailors had slipped from his boat into the water. She gaped as another slumped to the side, oar falling from his fingers.

“Captain?” She turned to find him with drooping eyes. He went limp, then fell backward, unconscious, knocking his head against the back seat of the boat.

The rest of the sailors weren’t doing any better. The other two dinghies had begun to drift aimlessly. Not a single sailor seemed to be conscious.

My destiny, Kaza thought. My choice.

Not a thing to be carted from place to place, and ordered to Soulcast. Not a tool. A person.

She shoved aside an unconscious sailor and took the oars herself. It was difficult work. She was unaccustomed to physical labor, and her fingers had trouble gripping. They’d started to dissolve further. Perhaps a year or two for her survival was optimistic.

Still, she rowed. She fought the waters until she at long last got close enough to hop out into the water and feel rock beneath her feet. Her robes billowing up around her, she finally thought to check if Vazrmeb was alive.

None of the sailors in her dinghy were breathing, so she let the boat slip backward on the waves. Alone, Kaza fought through the surf and—finally—on hands and knees, crawled up onto the stones of the island.

There, she collapsed, drowsy. Why was she so sleepy?

She awoke to a small cremling scuttling across the rocks near her. It had a strange shape, with large wings and a head that made it look like an axehound. Its carapace shimmered with dozens of colors.

Kaza could remember a time when she’d collected cremlings, pinning them to boards and proclaiming she’d become a natural historian. What had happened to that girl?

She was transformed by necessity. Given the Soulcaster, which was always to be kept in the royal family. Given a charge.

And a death sentence.

She stirred, and the cremling scrambled away. She coughed, then began to crawl toward those rock formations. That city? Dark city of stone? She could barely think, though she did notice a gemstone as she passed it—a large uncut gemheart among the bleached white carapace leftovers of a dead greatshell. Vazrmeb had been right.

She collapsed again near the perimeter of the rock formations. They looked like large, ornate buildings, crusted with crem.

“Ah…” a voice said from behind her. “I should have guessed the drug would not affect you as quickly. You are barely human anymore.”

Kaza rolled over and found someone approaching on quiet, bare feet. The cook? Yes, that was her, with the tattooed face.

“You…” Kaza croaked, “you poisoned us.”

“After many warnings not to come to this place,” the cook said. “It is rare I must guard it so … aggressively. Men must not again discover this place.”

“The gemstones?” Kaza asked, growing more drowsy. “Or … is it something else … something … more…”

“I cannot speak,” the cook said, “even to sate a dying demand. There are those who could pull secrets from your soul, and the cost would be the ends of worlds. Sleep now, Soulcaster. This is the most merciful end I could give.”

The cook began to hum. Pieces of her broke off. She crumbled to a pile of chittering little cremlings that moved out of her clothing, leaving it in a heap.

A hallucination? Kaza wondered as she drifted.

She was dying. Well, that was nothing new.

The cremlings began to pick at her hand, taking off her Soulcaster. No … she had one last thing to do.

With a defiant shout, she pressed her hand to the rocky ground beneath her and demanded it change. When it became smoke, she went with it.

Her choice.

Her destiny.

Taravangian paced in his rooms in Urithiru as two servants from the Diagram arranged his table, and fidgety Dukar—head of the King’s Testers, who each wore a ridiculous stormwarden robe with glyphs all along the seams—set out the tests, though they needn’t have bothered.

Today, Taravangian was a storming genius.

The way he thought, breathed, even moved, implicitly conveyed that today was a day of intelligence—perhaps not as brilliant as that single transcendent one when he’d created the Diagram, but he finally felt like himself after so many days trapped in the mausoleum of his own flesh, his mind like a master painter allowed only to whitewash walls.

Once the table was finished, Taravangian pushed a nameless servant aside and sat down, grabbing a pen and launching into the problems—starting at the second page, as the first was too simple—and flicking ink at Dukar when the idiot started to complain.

“Next page,” he snapped. “Quickly, quickly. Let’s not waste this, Dukar.”

“You still must—”

“Yes, yes. Prove myself not an idiot. The one day I’m not drooling and lying in my own waste, you tax my time with this idiocy.”

“You set—”