Oathbringer

  He was out the door a moment later. Shallan stood with her hand stretched toward him, objections dying on her lips. She curled her fingers up and brought her hand to her breast, her heart thundering within.

  “Mmmm,” Pattern said. “This is good. This needs to be done.”

  Shallan scrambled through the room to the small mirror she’d hung from the wall. She stared at herself, eyes wide, hair an utter mess. She’d started breathing in sharp, quick gasps. “I can’t—” she said. “I can’t be this person, Pattern. I can’t just wield the sword. Some brilliant knight on a tower, pretending she should be followed.”

  Pattern hummed softly a tone she’d come to recognize as confusion. The bewilderment of one species trying to comprehend the mind of another.

  Sweat trickled down Shallan’s face, running beside her eye as she stared at herself. What did she expect to see? The thought of breaking down in front of Adolin heightened her tension. Her every muscle grew taut, and the corners of her vision started to darken. She could see only before herself, and she wanted to run, go somewhere. Be away.

  No. No, just be someone else.

  Hands shaking, she scrambled over and dug out her drawing pad. She ripped pages, flinging them out of the way to reach an empty one, then seized her charcoal pencil.

  Pattern moved over to her, a floating ball of shifting lines, buzzing in concern. “Shallan? Please. What is wrong?”

  I can hide, Shallan thought, drawing at a frenzied pace. Shallan can flee and leave someone in her place.

  “It’s because you hate me,” Pattern said softly. “I can die, Shallan. I can go. They will send you another to bond.”

  A high-pitched whine started to rise in the room, one Shallan didn’t immediately recognize as coming from the back of her own throat. Pattern’s words were like knives to her side. No, please. Just draw.

  Veil. Veil would be fine holding a sword. She didn’t have Shallan’s broken soul, and hadn’t killed her parents. She’d be able to do this.

  No. No, what would Adolin do if he returned and found a completely different woman in the room? He couldn’t know of Veil. The lines she sketched, ragged and unrefined from the shaking pencil, quickly took the shape of her own face. But hair in a bun. A poised woman, not as flighty as Shallan, not as unintentionally silly.

  A woman who hadn’t been sheltered. A woman hard enough, strong enough, to wield this sword. A woman like … like Jasnah.

  Yes, Jasnah’s subtle smile, composure, and self-confidence. Shallan outlined her own face with these ideals, creating a harder version of it. Could … could she be this woman?

  I have to be, Shallan thought, drawing in Stormlight from her satchel, then breathing it out in a puff around her. She stood up as the change took hold. Her heartbeat slowed, and she wiped the sweat from her brow, then calmly undid her safehand sleeve, tossed aside the foolish extra pouch she’d tied around her hand inside, then rolled the sleeve back to expose her still-gloved hand.

  Good enough. Adolin couldn’t possibly expect her to put on sparring clothing. She pulled her hair back into a bun and fixed it in place with hairspikes from her satchel.

  When Adolin returned to the room a moment later, he found a poised, calm woman who wasn’t quite Shallan Davar. Brightness Radiant is her name, she thought. She will go only by title.

  Adolin carried two long, thin pieces of metal that somehow could meld to the front of Shardblades and make them less dangerous for use in sparring. Radiant inspected them with a critical eye, then held her hand to the side, summoning Pattern. The Blade formed—a long, thin weapon nearly as tall as she was.

  “Pattern,” she said, “can modulate his shape, and will dull his edge to safe levels. I shan’t need such a clunky device.” Indeed, Pattern’s edge rippled, dulling.

  “Storms, that’s handy. I’ll still need one though.” Adolin summoned his own Blade, a process that took him ten heartbeats—during which he turned his head, looking at her.

  Shallan glanced down, realizing that she’d enhanced her bust in this guise. Not for him, of course. She’d just been making herself look more like Jasnah.

  Adolin’s sword finally appeared, with a thicker blade than her own, sinuous along the sharp edge, with delicate crystalline ridges along the back. He put one of the guards on the sword’s edge.

  Radiant put one foot forward, Blade lifted high in two hands beside her head.

  “Hey,” Adolin said. “That’s not bad.”

  “Shallan did spend quite a lot of time drawing you all.”

  Adolin nodded thoughtfully. He approached and reached toward her with a thumb and two fingers. She thought he was going to adjust her grip, but instead he pressed his fingers against her collarbone and shoved lightly.

  Radiant stumbled backward, almost tripping.

  “A stance,” Adolin said, “is about more than just looking great on the battlefield. It’s about footing, center of balance, and control of the fight.”

  “Noted. So how do I make it better?”

  “I’m trying to decide. Everyone I’ve worked with before had been using a sword since their youth. I’m wondering how Zahel would have changed my training if I’d never even picked up a weapon.”

  “From what I’ve heard of him,” Radiant said, “It will depend on whether there are any convenient rooftops nearby to jump off.”

  “That’s how he trained with Plate,” Adolin said. “This is Blade. Should I teach you dueling? Or should I teach you how to fight in an army?”

  “I shall settle,” Radiant said, “for knowing how to avoid cutting off any of my own appendages, Brightlord Kholin.”

  “Brightlord Kholin?”

  Too formal. Right. That was how Radiant would act, of course—but she could allow herself some familiarity. Jasnah had done that.

  “I was merely,” Radiant said, “attempting to show the respect due a master from his humble pupil.”

  Adolin chuckled. “Please. We don’t need that. But here, let’s see what we can do about that stance.…”

  Over the next hour, Adolin positioned her hands, her feet, and her arms a dozen times over. He picked a basic stance for her that she could eventually adapt into several of the formal stances—the ones like Windstance, which Adolin said wouldn’t rely on strength or reach as much as mobility and skill.

  She wasn’t certain why he’d bothered fetching the metal sparring sleeves, as the two of them didn’t exchange any blows. Other than correcting her stance ten thousand times, he spoke about the art of the duel. How to treat your Shardblade, how to think of an opponent, how to show respect to the institutions and traditions of the duel itself.

  Some of it was very practical. Shardblades were dangerous weapons, which explained the demonstrations on how to hold hers, how to walk with it, how to take care not to slice people or things while casually turning.

  Other parts of his monologue were more … mystical.

  “The Blade is part of you,” Adolin said. “The Blade is more than your tool; it is your life. Respect it. It will not fail you—if you are bested, it is because you failed the sword.”

  Radiant stood in what felt like a very stiff pose, Blade held before herself in two hands. She’d only scraped Pattern on the ceiling two or three times; fortunately, most of the rooms in Urithiru had high ceilings.

  Adolin gestured for her to perform a simple strike, as they’d been practicing. Radiant raised both arms, tilting the sword, then took a step forward while bringing it down. The entire angle of movement couldn’t have been more than ninety degrees—barely a strike at all.

  Adolin smiled. “You’re catching it. A few thousand more of those, and it will start to feel natural. We’ll have to work on your breathing though.”

  “My breathing?”

  He nodded absently.

  “Adolin,” Radiant said, “I assure you, I have been breathing—without fail—my entire life.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s why you’re going to have to unlearn it.”
r />   “How I stand, how I think, how I breathe. I have trouble distinguishing what is actually relevant, and what is part of the subculture and superstition of swordsmen.”

  “It’s all relevant,” Adolin said.

  “Eating chicken before a match?”

  Adolin grinned. “Well, maybe some things are personal quirks. But the swords are part of us.”

  “I know mine is part of me,” Radiant said, resting the Blade at her side and setting her gloved safehand on it. “I’ve bonded it. I suspect this is the origin of the tradition among Shardbearers.”

  “So academic,” Adolin said, shaking his head. “You need to feel this, Shallan. Live it.”

  That would not have been a difficult task for Shallan. Radiant, however, preferred not to feel things she hadn’t considered in depth beforehand.

  “Have you considered,” she said, “that your Shardblade was once a living spren, wielded by one of the Knights Radiant? Doesn’t that change how you look at it?”

  Adolin glanced toward his Blade, which he’d left summoned, strapped with the sheath and set across her blankets. “I’ve always kind of known. Not that it was alive. That’s silly. Swords aren’t alive. I mean … I’ve always known there was something special about them. It’s part of being a duelist, I think. We all know it.”

  She let the matter drop. Swordsmen, from what she’d seen, were superstitious. As were sailors. As were … well, basically everyone but scholars like Radiant and Jasnah. It was curious to her how much of Adolin’s rhetoric about Blades and dueling reminded her of religion.

  How strange that these Alethi often treated their actual religion so flippantly. In Jah Keved, Shallan had spent hours painting lengthy passages from the Arguments. You’d speak the words out loud over and over, committing them to memory while kneeling or bowing, before finally burning the paper. The Alethi instead preferred to let the ardents deal with the Almighty, like he was some annoying parlor guest who could be safely distracted by servants offering a particularly tasty tea.

  Adolin let her do some more strikes, perhaps sensing that she was growing tired of having her stance constantly adjusted. As she was swinging, he grabbed his own Blade and fell in beside her, modeling the stance and the strikes.

  After a short time of that she dismissed her Blade, then picked up her sketchbook. She quickly flipped past the drawing of Radiant, and started to sketch Adolin in his stance. She was forced to let some of Radiant bleed away.

  “No, stand there,” Shallan said, pointing at Adolin with her charcoal. “Yes, like that.”

  She sketched out the stance, then nodded. “Now strike, and hold the last position.”

  He did so. By now he’d removed his jacket, standing in only shirt and trousers. She did like how that tight shirt fit him. Even Radiant would admire that. She wasn’t dead, just pragmatic.

  She looked over the two sketches, then resummoned Pattern and fell into position.

  “Hey, nice,” Adolin said as Radiant performed the next few strikes. “Yeah, you’ve got it.”

  He again fell in beside her. The simple attack he’d taught her was obviously a poor test of his skills, but he executed it with precision nonetheless, then grinned and started talking about the first few lessons he’d had with Zahel long ago.

  His blue eyes were alight, and Shallan loved seeing that glow from him. Almost like Stormlight. She knew that passion—she’d felt what it was to be alive with interest, to be consumed by something so fully that you lost yourself in the wonder of it. For her it was art, but watching him, she thought that the two of them weren’t so different.

  Sharing these moments with him and drinking of his excitement felt special. Intimate. Even more so than their closeness had been earlier in the evening. She let herself be Shallan in some of the moments, but whenever the pain of holding the sword started to spike—whenever she really thought about what she was doing—she was able to become Radiant and avoid it.

  She was genuinely reluctant to see the time end, so she let it stretch into the late evening, well past when she should have called a halt. At long last, Shallan bade a tired, sweaty farewell to Adolin and watched him trot down the strata-lined hallway outside, a spring to his step, a lamp in his hands, blade guards held on his shoulder.

  Shallan would have to wait another night to visit taverns and hunt for answers. She trailed back into her room—strangely contented for all that the world might be in the middle of ending. That night she slept, for once, in peace.

  For in this comes the lesson.

  —From Oathbringer, preface

  A legend rested on the stone slab before Dalinar. A weapon pulled from the ancient mists of time, and said to have been forged during the shadowdays by the hand of God himself. The Blade of the Assassin in White, claimed by Kaladin Stormblessed during their clash above the storm.

  Upon cursory inspection, it was indistinguishable from an ordinary Shardblade. Elegant, relatively small—in that it was barely five feet long—it was thin and curved like a tusk. It had patterns only at the base of the blade near the hilt.

  He’d lit it with four diamond broams, placed at the corners of the altarlike stone slab. This small room had no strata or paintings on the walls, so the Stormlight lit only him and that alien Blade. It did have one oddity.

  There was no gemstone.

  Gemstones were what allowed men to bond to Shardblades. Often affixed at the pommel, though occasionally at the spot where hilt met blade, the gem would flash when you first touched it, initiating the process. Keep the Blade with you for a week, and the Blade became yours—dismissible and returnable in time with your heartbeat.

  This Blade didn’t have one. Dalinar hesitantly reached out and rested his fingers on its silvery length. It was warm to the touch, like something alive.

  “It doesn’t scream when I touch it,” he noted.

  The knights, the Stormfather said in his head, broke their oaths. They abandoned everything they’d sworn, and in so doing killed their spren. Other Blades are the corpses of those spren, which is why they scream at your touch. This weapon, instead, was made directly from Honor’s soul, then given to the Heralds. It is also the mark of an oath, but a different type—and does not have the mind to scream on its own.

  “And Shardplate?” Dalinar asked.

  Related, but different, the Stormfather rumbled. You haven’t spoken the oaths required to know more.

  “You cannot break oaths,” Dalinar said, fingers still resting on the Honorblade. “Right?”

  I cannot.

  “What of the thing we fight? Odium, the origin of the Voidbringers and their spren. Can he break oaths?”

  No, the Stormfather said. He is far greater than I, but the power of ancient Adonalsium permeates him. And controls him. Odium is a force like pressure, gravitation, or the movement of time. These things cannot break their own rules. Nor can he.

  Dalinar tapped the Honorblade. A fragment of Honor’s own soul, crystallized into metallic form. In a way, the death of their god gave him hope—for if Honor had fallen, surely Odium could as well.

  In visions, Honor had left Dalinar with a task. Vex Odium, convince him that he can lose, and appoint a champion. He will take that chance instead of risking defeat again, as he has suffered so often. This is the best advice I can give you.

  “I’ve seen that the enemy is preparing a champion,” Dalinar said. “A dark creature with red eyes and nine shadows. Will Honor’s suggestion work? Can I make Odium agree to a decisive contest between me and that champion?”

  Of course Honor’s suggestion would work, the Stormfather said. He spoke it.

  “I mean,” Dalinar said, “why would it work? Why would this Odium ever agree to a contest of champions? It seems too momentous a matter to risk on something so small and inferior as the prowess and will of men.”

  Your enemy is not a man like you, the Stormfather replied, voice rumbling, thoughtful. Even … frightened. He does not age. He feels. He is angry. But this does not chan
ge, and his rage does not cool. Epochs can pass, and he will remain the same.

  To fight directly might coax out forces that could hurt him, as he has been hurt before. Those scars do not heal. To pick a champion, then lose, will only cost him time. He has that in plenitude. He still will not agree easily, but it is possible he will agree. If presented with the option in the right moment, the right way. Then he will be bound.

  “And we win…”

  Time, the Stormfather said. Which, though dross to him, is the most valuable thing a man can have.

  Dalinar slipped the Honorblade off the slab. At the side of the room, a shaft cut into the ground. Two feet wide, it was one of many strange holes, corridors, and hidden corners they’d found in the tower city. This one was probably part of a sewage system; judging by the rust on the edges of the hole, there had once been a metal pipe here connecting the stone hole in the floor to one in the ceiling.

  One of Navani’s primary concerns was figuring out how all this worked. For now, they’d gotten by using wooden frames to turn certain large, communal rooms with ancient baths into privies. Once they had more Stormlight, their Soulcasters could deal with the waste, as they’d done in the warcamps.

  Navani found the system inelegant. Communal privies with sometimes long lines made for an inefficient city, and she claimed that these tubes indicated a widespread piping and sanitation system. It was exactly the sort of large-scale civic project that engaged her—he’d never known anyone to get as excited by sewage as Navani Kholin.

  For now, this tube was empty. Dalinar knelt and lowered the sword into the hole, sliding it into a stone sheath he’d cut in the side. The upper lip of the hole shielded the protruding hilt from sight; you’d have to reach down and feel in the hole to find the Honorblade.

  He stood up, then gathered his spheres and made his way out. He hated leaving it there, but he could think of nothing safer. His rooms didn’t feel secure enough yet—he had no vault, and a crowd of guards would only draw attention. Beyond Kaladin, Navani, and the Stormfather himself, nobody even knew that Dalinar had this. If he masked his movements, there was virtually no chance of the Blade being discovered in this vacant portion of the tower.