Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive 3)

When she forced her eyes open, she found the room clean of the darkness. The corpses of the midnight creatures had dissolved. Renarin quickly knelt next to a bridgeman who had been hurt, removing his gauntlet and infusing the man with healing Stormlight.

Adolin helped Shallan sit up, and she tucked her exposed safehand under her other arm. Storms … she’d somehow kept up the illusion of the havah.

Even after all of that, she didn’t want Adolin to know of Veil. She couldn’t.

“Where?” she asked him, exhausted. “Where did it go?”

Adolin pointed toward the other side of the room, where a tunnel extended farther down into the depths of the mountain. “It fled in that direction, like moving smoke.”

“So … should we chase it down?” Eth asked, making his way carefully toward the tunnel. His lantern revealed steps cut into the stone. “This goes down a long ways.”

Shallan could feel a change in the air. The tower was … different. “Don’t give chase,” she said, remembering the terror of that conflict. She was more than happy to let the thing run. “We can post guards in this chamber, but I don’t think she’ll return.”

“Yeah,” Teft said, leaning on his spear and wiping sweat from his face. “Guards seem like a very, very good idea.”

Shallan frowned at the tone of his voice, then followed his gaze, to look at the thing Re-Shephir had been hiding. The pillar in the exact center of the room.

It was set with thousands upon thousands of cut gemstones, most larger than Shallan’s fist. Together, they were a treasure worth more than most kingdoms.

If they cannot make you less foolish, at least let them give you hope.

—From Oathbringer, preface

Throughout his youth, Kaladin had dreamed of joining the military and leaving quiet little Hearthstone. Everyone knew that soldiers traveled extensively and saw the world.

And he had. He’d seen dozens upon dozens of empty hills, weed-covered plains, and identical warcamps. Actual sights, though … well, that was another story.

The city of Revolar was, as his hike with the parshmen had proven, only a few weeks away from Hearthstone by foot. He’d never visited. Storms, he’d never actually lived in a city before, unless you counted the warcamps.

He suspected most cities weren’t surrounded by an army of parshmen as this one was.

Revolar was built in a nice hollow on the leeward side of a series of hills, the perfect spot for a little town. Except this was not a “little town.” The city had sprawled out, filling in the areas between the hills, going up the leeward slopes—only leaving the tips completely bare.

He’d expected a city to look more organized. He’d imagined neat rows of houses, like an efficient warcamp. This looked more like a snarl of plants clumped in a chasm at the Shattered Plains. Streets running this way and that. Markets that poked out haphazardly.

Kaladin joined his team of parshmen as they wound along a wide roadway kept level with smoothed crem. They passed through thousands upon thousands of parshmen camped here, and more gathered by the hour, it seemed.

His, however, was the only group that carried stone-headed spears on their shoulders, packs of dried grain biscuits, and hogshide leather sandals. They tied their smocks with belts, and carried stone knives, hatchets, and tinder in waxed sleeves made from candles he’d traded for. He’d even begun teaching them to use a sling.

He probably shouldn’t have shown them any of these things; that didn’t stop him from feeling proud as he walked with them, entering the city.

Crowds thronged the streets. Where had all these parshmen come from? This was a force of at least forty or fifty thousand. He knew most people ignored parshmen … and, well, he’d done the same. But he’d always had tucked into the back of his mind this idea that there weren’t that many out there. Each high-ranking lighteyes owned a handful. And a lot of the caravaneers. And, well, even the less wealthy families from cities or towns had them. And there were the dockworkers, the miners, the water haulers, the packmen they used when building large projects.…

“It’s amazing,” Sah said from where he walked beside Kaladin, carrying his daughter on his shoulder to give her a better view. She clutched some of his wooden cards, holding them close like another child might carry a favorite stuffed doll.

“Amazing?” Kaladin asked Sah.

“Our own city, Kal,” he whispered. “During my time as a slave, barely able to think, I still dreamed. I tried to imagine what it would be like to have my own home, my own life. Here it is.”

The parshmen had obviously moved into homes along the streets here. Were they running markets too? It raised a difficult, unsettling question. Where were all the humans? Khen’s group walked deeper into the city, still led by the unseen spren. Kaladin spotted signs of trouble. Broken windows. Doors that no longer latched. Some of that would be from the Everstorm, but he passed a couple of doors that had obviously been hacked open with axes.

Looting. And ahead stood an inner wall. It was a nice fortification, right in the middle of the city sprawl. It probably marked the original city boundary, as decided upon by some optimistic architect.

Here, at long last, Kaladin found signs of the fight he’d expected during his initial trip to Alethkar. The gates to the inner city lay broken. The guardhouse had been burned, and arrowheads still stuck from some of the wood beams they passed. This was a conquered city.

But where had the humans been moved? Should he be looking for a prison camp, or a heaping pyre of burned bones? Considering the idea made him sick.

“Is this what it’s about?” Kaladin said as they walked down a roadway in the inner city. “Is this what you want, Sah? To conquer the kingdom? Destroy humankind?”

“Storms, I don’t know,” he said. “But I can’t be a slave again, Kal. I won’t let them take Vai and imprison her. Would you defend them, after what they did to you?”

“They’re my people.”

“That’s no excuse. If one of ‘your people’ murders another, don’t you put them in prison? What is a just punishment for enslaving my entire race?”

Syl soared past, her face peeking from a shimmering haze of mist. She caught his eye, then zipped over to a windowsill and settled down, taking the shape of a small rock.

“I…” Kaladin said. “I don’t know, Sah. But a war to exterminate one side or the other can’t be the answer.”

“You can fight alongside us, Kal. It doesn’t have to be about humans against parshmen. It can be nobler than that. Oppressed against the oppressors.”

As they passed the place where Syl was, Kaladin swept his hand along the wall. Syl, as they’d practiced, zipped up the sleeve of his coat. He could feel her, like a gust of wind, move up his sleeve then out his collar, into his hair. The long curls hid her, they’d determined, well enough.

“There are a lot of those yellow-white spren here, Kaladin,” she whispered. “Zipping through the air, dancing through buildings.”

“Any signs of humans?” Kaladin whispered.

“To the east,” she said. “Crammed into some army barracks and old parshman quarters. Others are in big pens, watched under guard. Kaladin … there’s another highstorm coming today.”