Three years, living with what he’d done. Three years, wasting away in Kholinar. He’d assumed it would get better.
It was only getting worse.
Sadeas had carefully spun news of the Rift’s destruction to the king’s advantage. He’d called it regrettable that the Rifters had forced Kholin action by killing Dalinar’s wife, and named it unfortunate that the city had caught fire during the fighting. Gavilar had publicly censured Dalinar and Sadeas for “losing the city to flames,” but his denunciation of the Rifters had been far more biting.
The implication was clear. Gavilar didn’t want to unleash the Blackthorn. Even he couldn’t predict what kind of destruction Dalinar would bring. Obviously, such measures were a last resort—and these days, everyone was careful to give him plenty of other options.
So efficient. All it had cost was one city. And possibly Dalinar’s sanity.
Gavilar suggested to the gathered lighteyes that they light a fire in the hearth, for warmth. Well, that was the signal that he could leave. Dalinar could not stand fire. The scent of smoke smelled like burning skin, and the crackling of flames reminded him only of her.
Dalinar slipped out the back door, stepping into a hallway on the third floor, heading toward his own rooms. He had moved himself and his sons into the royal palace. His own keep reminded him too much of her.
Storms. Standing in that room—looking at the fear in the eyes of Gavilar’s guests—had made the pain and memories particularly acute today. He was better on some days. Others … felt like today. He needed a stiff drink from his wine cabinet.
Unfortunately, as he rounded through the curved corridor, he smelled incense in the air. Coming from his rooms? Renarin was burning it again.
Dalinar pulled up, as if he’d run up against something solid, then turned on his heel and walked away. It was too late, unfortunately. That scent … that was her scent.
He strode down to the second floor, passing bloodred carpets, pillared hallways. Where to get something to drink? He couldn’t go out into the city, where people acted so terrified of him. The kitchens? No, he wouldn’t go begging to one of the palace chefs—who would in turn tiptoe to the king and whisper that the Blackthorn had been at the violets again. Gavilar complained at how much Dalinar drank, but what else did soldiers do when not at war? Didn’t he deserve a little relaxation, after all he’d done for this kingdom?
He turned toward the king’s throne room, which—as the king was using his den instead—would be empty today. He went in through the servants’ entrance and stepped into a small staging room, where food was prepared before being delivered to the king. Using a sapphire sphere for light, Dalinar knelt and rummaged in one of the cupboards. Usually they kept some rare vintages here for impressing visitors.
The cupboards were empty. Damnation. He found nothing but pans, trays, and cups. A few bags of Herdazian spices. He fumed, tapping the counter. Had Gavilar discovered that Dalinar was coming here, and moved the wine? The king thought him a drunkard, but Dalinar indulged only on occasion. On bad days. Drink quieted the sounds of people crying in the back of his mind.
Weeping. Children burning. Begging their fathers to save them from the flames. And Evi’s voice, accompanying them all …
When was he going to escape this? He was becoming a coward! Nightmares when he tried to sleep. Weeping in his mind whenever he saw fire. Storms take Evi for doing this to him! If she’d acted like an adult instead of a child—if she’d been able to face duty or just reality for once—she wouldn’t have gotten herself killed.
He stomped into the corridor and strode right into a group of young soldiers. They scrambled to the sides of the hallway and saluted. Dalinar tipped his head toward their salutes, trying to keep the thunder from his expression.
The consummate general. That was who he was.
“Father?”
Dalinar pulled up sharply. He’d completely missed that Adolin was among the soldiers. At fifteen, the youth was growing tall and handsome. He got the former from Dalinar. Today, Adolin wore a fashionable suit with far too much embroidery, and boots that were topped by silver.
“That’s not a standard-issue uniform, soldier,” Dalinar said to him.
“I know!” Adolin said. “I had it specially tailored!”
Storms … His son was becoming a fop.
“Father,” Adolin said, stepping up and making an eager fist. “Did you get my message? I’ve got a bout set up with Tenathar. Father, he’s ranked. It’s a step toward winning my Blade!” He beamed at Dalinar.
Emotions warred inside of Dalinar. Memories of good years spent with his son in Jah Keved, riding or teaching him the sword.
Memories of her. The woman from whom Adolin had inherited that blond hair and that smile. So genuine. Dalinar wouldn’t trade Adolin’s sincerity for a hundred soldiers in proper uniforms.
But he also couldn’t face it right now.
“Father?” Adolin said.
“You’re in uniform, soldier. Your tone is too familiar. Is this how I taught you to act?”
Adolin blushed, then put on a stronger face. He didn’t wilt beneath the stern words. When censured, Adolin only tried harder.
“Sir!” the young man said. “I’d be proud if you’d watch my bout this week. I think you’ll be pleased with my performance.”
Storming child. Who could deny him? “I’ll be there, soldier. And will watch with pride.”
Adolin grinned, saluted, then dashed back to join the others. Dalinar walked off as quickly as he could, to get away from that hair, that wonderful—haunting—smile.
Well, he needed a drink now more than ever. But he would not go begging to the cooks. He had another option, one that he was certain even his brother—sly though Gavilar was—wouldn’t have considered. He went down another set of steps and reached the eastern gallery of the palace, now passing ardents with shaved heads. It was a sign of his desperation that he came all the way out here, facing their condemning eyes.
He slipped down the stairwell into the depths of the building, entering halls that led toward the kitchens in one direction, the catacombs in the other. A few twists and turns led him out onto the Beggars’ Porch: a small patio between the compost heaps and the gardens. Here, a group of miserable people waited for the offerings Gavilar gave after dinner.
Some begged of Dalinar, but a glare made the rag-clothed wretches pull back and cower. At the back of the porch, he found Ahu huddled in the shadows between two large religious statues, their backs facing the beggars, their hands spread toward the gardens.
Ahu was an odd one, even for a crazy beggar. With black, matted hair and a scraggly beard, his skin was dark for an Alethi. His clothing was mere scraps, and he smelled worse than the compost.
Somehow he always had a bottle with him.
Ahu giggled at Dalinar. “Have you seen me?”
“Unfortunately.” Dalinar settled on the ground. “I have smelled you too. What are you drinking today? It had better not be water this time, Ahu.”
Ahu wagged a stout, dark bottle. “Dunno what it is, little child. Tastes good.”
Dalinar tried a sip and hissed. A burning wine, no sweetness to it at all. A white, though he didn’t recognize the vintage. Storms … it smelled intoxicating.
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.
The woman with the scratched eyes stretched her head toward him in an unnatural way, then screeched with a loud, piercing howl.
Adolin stumbled away, nearly colliding with Shallan and her … her spren? Was that Pattern?
“That is your sword,” Pattern said in a perky voice. He had no mouth that Adolin could see. “Hmmm. She is quite dead. I don’t think you can summon her here.” He cocked his bizarre head, looking at Azure’s Blade. “Yours is different. Very curious.”
The thing deep beneath their platform shifted again.
“That is probably bad,” Pattern noted. “Hmmm … yes. Those spren above us are the souls of the Oathgate, and that one deep beneath us is likely one of the Unmade. It must be very large on this side.”
“So what do we do?” Shallan asked.
Pattern looked in one direction, then the other. “No boat. Hmmm. Yes, that is a problem, isn’t it?”
Adolin spun around. Some of the eel-like spren climbed onto the platform, using stumpy legs that Adolin had missed earlier. Those long purple antennae stretched toward him, wiggling.…
Fearspren, he realized. Fearspren were little globs of purple goo that looked exactly like the tips of those antennae.
“We need to get off this platform,” Shallan said. “Everything else is secondary. Kaladin…” She trailed off as she glanced toward him.
The bridgeman knelt on the stone, head bowed, shoulders slumped. Storms … Adolin had been forced to carry him away from the battle, numb and broken. Looked like that emotion had caught up to him again.
Kaladin’s spren—Adolin could only guess that was
the identity of the pretty girl in blue—stood beside him, one hand resting protectively on his back. “Kaladin’s not well,” she said.
“I have to be well,” Kaladin said, his voice hoarse as he climbed back to his feet. His long hair fell across his face, obscuring his eyes. Storms. Even surrounded by monsters, the bridgeman could look intimidating. “How do we get to safety? I can’t fly us without attracting attention.”
“This place is the inverse of your world,” Azure said. She stepped back from a long antenna exploring in her direction. “Where there are larger bodies of water on Roshar, we will have land here, correct?”
“Mmm,” Pattern said, nodding.
“The river?” Adolin asked. He tried to orient himself, looking past the thousands of floating lights. “There.” He pointed at a lump he could barely spot in the distance. Like a long island.
Kaladin stared at it, frowning. “Can we swim in these beads?”
“No,” Adolin said, remembering what it had felt like to fall into this ocean. “I…”
The beads rattled and clacked against one another as the large thing surged beneath. In the near distance, a single spire of rock broke the surface, tall and black. It emerged like a mountain peak slowly lifting from the sea, beads rattling in waves around it. As it grew to the height of a building, a joint appeared. Storms. It wasn’t a spire or a mountain … it was a claw.
More emerged in other directions. An enormous hand was reaching slowly upward through the glass beads. Deep beneath them a heartbeat began sounding, rattling the beads.
Adolin stumbled back, horrified, and nearly slipped into the bead ocean. He kept his balance, barely, and found himself face-to-face with the woman with scratches for eyes. She stared at him, completely emotionless, as if waiting for him to try to summon his Shardblade so she could scream again.
Damnation. No matter what Azure said, he was certainly in Damnation.
* * *
“What do I do?” Shallan whispered. She knelt on the white stone of the platform, searching among the beads. Each gave her an impression of an object in the Physical Realm. A dropped shield. A vase from the palace. A scarf.