“Yes,” Dalinar said, feeling a sudden surge of excitement. “That would explain why Gavilar didn’t immediately send our armies against you. We were in collusion all along.”
“What better proof, than the fact that we just had this strange battlefield conversation?” Tanalan looked over his shoulder at the body of his men on the wall. “My men must be thinking it very odd. It will make sense when they hear the truth—that I was telling you about the envoy that had been here, delivering weapons and supplies to us from one of your secret enemies.”
“Your reward, of course,” Dalinar said, “would be legitimacy as a highlord in the kingdom. Perhaps that highprince’s place.”
“And no fighting today,” Tanalan said. “No deaths.”
“No deaths. Except perhaps for the actual traitors.”
Tanalan looked to his advisors. The man with the birthmark nodded slowly.
“They headed east, toward the Unclaimed Hills,” Tanalan said, pointing. “A hundred soldiers and caravaneers. I think they were planning to stay for the night in the waystop at a town called Vedelliar.”
“Who was it?” Dalinar asked. “Which highprince?”
“It might be best if you find out for yourself, as—”
“Who?” Dalinar demanded.
“Brightlord Torol Sadeas.”
Sadeas? “Impossible!”
“As I said,” Tanalan noted. “Best if you see for yourself. But I will testify before the king, assuming you keep your side of our … accord.”
“Open your gates to my men,” Dalinar said, pointing. “Stand down your soldiers. You have my word of honor for your safety.”
With that, he turned and trotted back toward his forces, passing into a corridor of men. As he did, Teleb ran up to meet him. “Brightlord!” he said. “My scouts have returned from surveying that caravan. Sir, it—”
“Was from a highprince?”
“Undoubtedly,” Teleb said. “They couldn’t determine which one, but they claim to have seen someone in Shardplate among them.”
Shardplate? That made no sense.
Unless that is how he’s planning to see that we lose, Dalinar thought. That might not have been a simple supply caravan—it could be a flanking force in disguise.
A single Shardbearer hitting the back of his army while it was distracted could do incredible damage. Dalinar didn’t believe Tanalan, not completely. But … storms, if Sadeas secretly had sent one of his Shardbearers to the battlefield, Dalinar couldn’t just send a simple team of soldiers to deal with him.
“You have command,” he said to Teleb. “Tanalan is going to stand down; have the vanguard join the locals on the fortifications, but do not displace them. Camp the rest of the army back in the field, and keep our officers out of Rathalas. This isn’t a surrender. We’re going to pretend that he was on our side all along, so he can save face and preserve his title. Horinar, I want a company of a hundred elites, our fastest, ready to march with me immediately.”
They obeyed, asking no questions. Runners dashed with messages, and the entire area became a hive of motion, men and women hastening in all directions.
One person stood still in the midst of it, hands clasped hopefully at her breast. “What happened?” Evi asked as he trotted his horse toward her.
“Go back to our camp and compose a message to my brother saying that we may have brought the Rift to our side without bloodshed.” He paused, then added, “Tell him not to trust anyone. One of our closest allies may have betrayed us. I’m going to go find out.”
The Edgedancers are too busy relocating the tower’s servants and farmers to send a representative to record their thoughts in these gemstones.
I’ll do it for them, then. They are the ones who will be most displaced by this decision. The Radiants will be taken in by nations, but what of all these people now without homes?
—From drawer 4-17, second topaz
This city had a heartbeat, and Veil felt she could hear it when she closed her eyes.
She crouched in a dim room, hands touching the smooth stone floor, which had been eroded by thousands upon thousands of footfalls. If stone met a man, stone might win—but if stone met humanity, then no force could preserve it.
The city’s heartbeat was deep within these stones, old and slow. It had yet to realize something dark had moved in. A spren as ancient as it was. An urban disease. People didn’t speak of it; they avoided the palace, mentioned the queen only to complain about the ardent who had been killed. It was like standing in a highstorm and griping that your shoes were too tight.
A soft whistling drew Veil’s attention. She looked up and scanned the small loading dock around her, occupied only by herself, Vathah, and their wagon. “Let’s go.”
Veil eased the door open and entered the mansion proper. She and Vathah wore new faces. Hers was a version of Veil with too large a nose and dimpled cheeks.
His was the face of a brutish man Shallan had seen in the market. Red’s whistle meant the coast was clear, so they strode down the hallway without hesitation.
This extravagant stone mansion had been built around a square, skylit atrium, where manicured shalebark and rockbuds flourished, bobbing with lifespren. The atrium went up four stories, with walkways around each level. Red was on the second, whistling as he leaned on the balustrade.
The real showpiece of the mansion, however, wasn’t the garden, but waterfalls. Because not a single one of them was actually water.
They had been, once. But sometime long ago, someone had mixed far too much wealth with far too much imagination. They had hired Soulcasters to transform large fountains of water that had been poured from the top level, four stories up. They’d been Soulcast into other materials right as the water splashed to the floor.
Veil’s path took her along rooms to her left, with an overhang of the first floor’s atrium balcony overhead. A former waterfall spilled down to her right, now made of crystal. The shape of flowing water crashed forever onto the stone floor, where it blossomed outward in a wave, brilliant and glistening. The mansion had changed hands dozens of times, and people called it Rockfall—despite the newest owner’s attempt over the last decade to rename it the incredibly boring Hadinal Keep.
Veil and Vathah hurried along, accompanied by Red’s reassuring whistling. The next waterfall was similar in shape, but made instead from polished dark stumpweight wood. It looked strangely natural, almost like a tree could have grown in that shape, poured from above and running down in an undulating column, splashing outward at the base.
They soon passed a room to their left, where Ishnah was talking with the current mistress of Rockfall. Each time the Everstorm struck, it left destruction—but in an oddly distinct way from a highstorm. Everstorm lightning had proven its greatest danger. The strange red lightning didn’t merely set fires or scorch the ground; it could break through rock, causing blasts of fragmenting stone.
One such strike had broken a gaping hole in the side of this ancient, celebrated mansion. It had been patched with an unsightly wooden wall that would be covered with crem, then finally bricked over. Brightness Nananav—a middle-aged Alethi woman with a bun of hair practically as tall as she was—gestured at the boarded-up hole, and then at the floor.