Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive 3)

Dalinar took a chug, then handed the bottle back to Ahu. “How are the voices?”

“Soft, today. They chant about ripping me apart. Eating my flesh. Drinking my blood.”

“Pleasant.”

“Hee hee.” Ahu snuggled back against the branches of the hedge-wall, as if they were soft silk. “Nice. Not bad at all, little child. What of your noises?”

In reply, Dalinar reached out his hand. Ahu gave him the bottle. Dalinar drank, welcoming the fuzzing of mind that would quiet the weeping.

“Aven begah,” Ahu said. “It’s a fine night for my torment, and no telling the skies to be still. Where is my soul, and who is this in my face?”

“You’re a strange little man, Ahu.”

Ahu cackled his response and waved for the wine. After a drink, he returned it to Dalinar, who wiped off the beggar’s spittle with his shirt. Storm Gavilar for pushing him to this.

“I like you,” Ahu said to Dalinar. “I like the pain in your eyes. Friendly pain. Companionable pain.”

“Thanks.”

“Which one got to you, little child?” Ahu asked. “The Black Fisher? The Spawning Mother, the Faceless? Moelach is close. I can hear his wheezing, his scratching, his scraping at time like a rat breaking through walls.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Madness,” Ahu said, then giggled. “I used to think it wasn’t my fault. But you know, we can’t escape what we did? We let them in. We attracted them, befriended them, took them out to dance and courted them. It is our fault. You open yourself to it, and you pay the price. They ripped my brain out and made it dance! I watched.”

Dalinar paused, the bottle halfway to his lips. Then he held it out to Ahu. “Drink this. You need it.”

Ahu obliged.

Sometime later, Dalinar stumbled back to his rooms, feeling downright serene—thoroughly smashed and without a crying child to be heard. At the door, he stopped and looked back down the corridor. Where … He couldn’t remember the trip back up from the Beggars’ Porch.

He looked down at his unbuttoned jacket, his white shirt stained with dirt and drink. Um …

A voice drifted through the closed door. Was that Adolin inside? Dalinar started, then focused. Storms, he’d come to the wrong door.

Another voice. Was that Gavilar? Dalinar leaned in.

“I’m worried about him, Uncle,” Adolin’s voice said.

“Your father never adjusted to being alone, Adolin,” the king replied. “He misses your mother.”

Idiots, Dalinar thought. He didn’t miss Evi. He wanted to be rid of her.

Though … he did ache now that she was gone. Was that why she wept for him so often?

“He’s down with the beggars again,” another voice said from inside. Elhokar? That little boy? Why did he sound like a man? He was only … how old? “He tried the serving room again first. Seems he forgot he drank that all last time. Honestly, if there’s a bottle hidden in this palace anywhere, that drunken fool will find it.”

“My father is not a fool!” Adolin said. “He’s a great man, and you owe him your—”

“Peace, Adolin,” Gavilar said. “Both of you, hold your tongues. Dalinar is a soldier. He’ll fight through this. Perhaps if we go on a trip we can distract him from his loss. Maybe Azir?”

Their voices … He had just rid himself of Evi’s weeping, but hearing this dragged her back. Dalinar gritted his teeth and stumbled to the proper door. Inside, he found the nearest couch and collapsed.

My research into the Unmade has convinced me that these things were not simply “spirits of the void” or “nine shadows who moved in the night.” They were each a specific kind of spren, endowed with vast powers.

—From Hessi’s Mythica, page 3

Adolin had never bothered imagining what Damnation might look like.

Theology was for women and scribes. Adolin figured he’d try to follow his Calling, becoming the best swordsman he could. The ardents told him that was enough, that he didn’t need to worry about things like Damnation.

Yet here he was, kneeling on a white marble platform with a black sky overhead, a cold sun—if it could even be called that—hanging at the end of a roadway of clouds. An ocean of shifting glass beads, clattering against one another. Tens of thousands of flames, like the tips of oil lamps, hovering above that ocean.

And the spren. Terrible, awful spren swarmed in the ocean of beads, bearing a multitude of nightmare forms. They twisted and writhed, howling with inhuman voices. He didn’t recognize any of the varieties.

“I’m dead,” Adolin whispered. “We’re dead, and this is Damnation.”

But what of the pretty, blue-white spren girl? The creature with the stiff robe and a mesmerizing, impossible symbol instead of a head? What of the woman with the scratched-out eyes? And those two enormous spren standing overhead, with spears and—

Light exploded to Adolin’s left. Kaladin Stormblessed, pulling in power, floated into the air. Beads rattled, and every monster in the writhing throng turned—as if one—to fixate upon Kaladin.

“Kaladin!” the spren girl shouted. “Kaladin, they feed on Stormlight! You’ll draw their attention. Everything’s attention.”

“Drehy and Skar…” Kaladin said. “Our soldiers. Where are they?”

“They’re still on the other side,” Shallan said, standing up beside Adolin. The creature with the twisted head took her arm, steadying her. “Storms, they might be safer than we are. We’re in Shadesmar.”

Some of the lights nearby vanished. Candles’ flames being snuffed out.

Many spren swam toward the platform, joining an increasingly large group that churned around it, causing a ruckus in the beads. The majority of them were long eel-like things, with ridges along their backs and purple antennae that squirmed like tongues and seemed to be made of thick liquid.

Beneath them, deep in the beads, something enormous shifted, causing beads to roll off one another in piles.

“Kaladin!” the blue girl shouted. “Please!”

He looked at her, and seemed to see her for the first time. The Light vanished from him, and he dropped—hard—to the platform.

Azure held her thin Shardblade, gaze fixed on the things swimming through the beads around their platform. The only one who didn’t seem frightened was the strange spren woman with the scratched-out eyes and the skin made of rough cloth. Her eyes … they weren’t empty sockets. Instead she was like a portrait where the eyes had been scraped off.

Adolin shivered. “So…” he said. “Any idea what is happening?”

“We’re not dead,” Azure growled. “They call this place Shadesmar. It’s the realm of thought.”

“I peek into this place when I Soulcast,” Shallan said. “Shadesmar overlaps the real world, but many things are inverted here.”

“I passed through it when I first came to your land about a year ago,” Azure added. “I had guides then, and I tried to avoid looking at too much crazy stuff.”

“Smart,” Adolin said. He put his hand to the side to summon his own Shardblade.