Syl tried to snatch it, but it dodged and was soon out over the ocean.
* * *
Kaladin rode the storm.
He’d done this before, in dreams. He’d even spoken to the Stormfather.
This felt different. He rode in a shimmering, rippling surge of colors. Around him, the clouds streamed past at incredible speed, coming alight with those colors. Pulsing with them, as if to a beat.
He couldn’t feel the Stormfather. He couldn’t see a landscape beneath him. Just shimmering colors, and clouds that faded into … light.
Then a figure. Dalinar Kholin, kneeling someplace dark, surrounded by nine shadows. A flash of glowing red eyes.
The enemy’s champion was coming. Kaladin knew in that moment—an overpowering sensation thrumming through him—that Dalinar was in terrible, terrible danger. Without help, the Blackthorn was doomed.
“Where!” Kaladin screamed to the light as it began to fade. “When! How do I reach him!”
The colors diminished.
“Please!”
He saw a flash of a vaguely familiar city. Tall, built along the stones, it had a distinctive pattern of buildings at the center. A wall and an ocean beyond.
Kaladin dropped to his knees in the fortuneteller’s room. The little Shin man batted Kaladin’s hand from the glowing sphere. “—rtune seers like myself. You’ll ruin it, or…” He trailed off, then took Kaladin’s head, turning it toward him. “You saw something!”
Kaladin nodded weakly.
“How? Impossible. Unless … you’re Invested. What Heightening are you?” He squinted at Kaladin. “No. Something else. Merciful Domi … A Surgebinder? It has begun again?”
Kaladin stumbled to his feet. He glanced at the large globe of light, which the lighthouse keeper covered up again with the black cloth, then put his hand to his forehead, which had begun thumping with pain. What had that been? His heart still raced with anxiety.
“I … I need to go get my friends,” he said.
* * *
Kaladin sat in the main room of the lighthouse, in the chair Riino—the Shin lighthouse keeper—had occupied earlier. Shallan and Adolin negotiated with him on the other side of the room, Pattern looming over Shallan’s shoulder and making the fortuneteller nervous. Riino had food and supplies for trade, though it would cost them infused spheres. Apparently, Stormlight was the only commodity that mattered on this side.
“Charlatans like him aren’t uncommon, where I come from,” Azure said, resting with her back against the wall near Kaladin. “People who claim to be able to see the future, living off people’s hopes. Your society was right to forbid them. The spren do likewise, so his kind have to live off in places like this, hoping people will be desperate enough to come to them. Probably gets some business with each ship that comes through.”
“I saw something, Azure,” Kaladin said, still trembling. “It was real.” His limbs felt drained, like the aftereffect of lifting weights for a long period.
“Maybe,” Azure said. “Those types use dusts and powders that grant euphoria, making you think you’ve seen something. Even the gods of my land catch only glimpses of the Spiritual Realm—and in all my life, I’ve only met one human I believe truly understood it. And he might actually be a god. I’m not sure.”
“Wit,” Kaladin said. “The man that brought you the metal that protected your Soulcaster.”
She nodded.
Well, Kaladin had seen something. Dalinar …
Adolin walked over and handed Kaladin a squat metal cylinder. He used a device—provided by the Shin man—to break open the top. There were some fish rations inside. Kaladin poked at the chunks with his finger, then inspected the container.
“Canned food,” Azure noted. “It’s extremely convenient.”
Kaladin’s stomach rumbled, so he dug into the fish with the spoon Adolin provided. The meat tasted salty, but was good—far better than something Soulcast. Shallan joined them, trailed by Pattern, while the lighthouse keeper bustled off to fetch some supplies they’d traded for. The man glanced at the doorway, where the spren of Adolin’s Blade stood, silent like a statue.
Out through the room’s window, Kaladin could see Syl standing on the coast, watching out over the sea of beads. Her hair doesn’t ripple here, he thought. In the Physical Realm it often waved as if being brushed by an unseen breeze. Here, it acted like the hair of a human.
She hadn’t wanted to enter the lighthouse for some reason. What was that about?
“The lighthouse keeper says a ship will be arriving any time now,” Adolin said. “We should be able to buy passage.”
“Mmm,” Pattern said. “The ship is going to Celebrant. Mmm. A city on the island.”
“Island?”
“It’s a lake on our side,” Adolin said. “Called the Sea of Spears, in the southeast of Alethkar. By the ruins … of Rathalas.” He drew his lips to a line and glanced away.
“What?” Kaladin asked.
“Rathalas was where my mother was killed,” Adolin said. “Assassinated by rebels. Her death drove my father into a fury. We almost lost him to the despair.” He shook his head, and Shallan rested her hand on his arm. “It’s … not a pleasant event to think about. Sadeas burned the city to the ground in retribution. My father gets a strange, distant expression whenever someone mentions Rathalas. I think he blames himself for not stopping Sadeas, even though he was mad with grief at the time, wounded and incoherent from an attempt on his own life.”
“Well, there’s still a spren city on this side,” Azure said. “But it’s in the wrong direction. We need to be heading west—toward the Horneater Peaks—not south.”
“Mmm,” Pattern said. “Celebrant is a prominent city. In it, we could find passage wherever we wish to go. And the lighthouse keeper doesn’t know when a ship going the right way might pass here.”
Kaladin put his fish down, then gestured at Shallan. “Can I have some paper?”
She let him have a sheet from her sketchpad. With an unpracticed hand, he drew out the buildings he’d seen in his momentary … whatever it had been. I’ve seen this pattern before. From above.
“That’s Thaylen City,” Shallan said. “Isn’t it?”
That’s right, Kaladin thought. He’d only visited once, opening the city’s Oathgate. “I saw this, in the vision I explained to you.” He glanced at Azure, who seemed skeptical.
Kaladin could still feel his emotion from the vision, that thrumming sense of anxiety. The sure knowledge that Dalinar was in grave danger. Nine shadows. A champion who would lead the enemy forces …
“The Oathgate in Thaylen City is open and working,” Kaladin said. “Shallan and I saw to that. And since the Oathgate in Kholinar brought us to Shadesmar, theoretically another—one that isn’t corrupted by the Unmade—could get us back.”
“Assuming I can figure out how to work it on this side,” Shallan said. “That’s a pretty daunting assumption.”
“We should try to reach the perpendicularity in the Peaks,” Azure said. “It’s the only sure way back.”
“The lighthouse keeper says he thinks something strange is happening there,” Shallan said. “Ships from that direction have never ended up arriving.”