Oathbringer

  She removed two more spear tips beneath the waves before finally reaching the wall. Here, the spearheadlike formations had been grown so close together, there was barely a handspan gap between them. It took three tries to get the dinghy close enough—as soon as they got into position, some turning of the waves would pull them away again.

  Finally, the sailors managed to keep the dinghy steady. Kaza reached out with the Soulcaster—two of the three gems were almost out of Stormlight, and glowed only faintly. She should have enough.

  She pressed her hand against the spike, then convinced it to become smoke. It was … easy this time. She felt the explosion of wind from the transformation, her soul crying in delight at the smoke, thick and sweet. She breathed it in through the hole in her cheek while sailors coughed. She looked up at the smoke, drifting away. How wonderful it would be to join it.…

  No.

  The island proper loomed beyond that hole. Dark, like its stones had been stained by smoke themselves, it had tall rock formations along its center. They looked almost like the walls of a city.

  The captain’s dinghy pulled up to hers, and the captain transferred to her boat. His began to row backward.

  “What?” she asked. “Why is your boat heading back?”

  “They claim to not be feeling well,” the captain said. Was he abnormally pale? “Cowards. They won’t have any of the prize, then.”

  “Gemstones lay around just for the plucking here,” Droz added. “Generations of greatshells have died here, leaving their hearts. We’re going to be rich, rich men.”

  As long as the secret was here.

  She settled into her place at the prow of the boat as the sailors guided the three dinghies through the gap. The Aimians had known about Soulcasters. This was where you’d come to get the devices, in the old days. You’d come to the ancient island of Akinah.

  If there was a secret of how to avoid death by the device she loved, she would find it here.

  Her stomach began acting up again as they rowed. Kaza endured it, though she felt as if she were slipping into the other world. That wasn’t an ocean beneath her, but deep black glass. And two suns in the sky, one that drew her soul toward it. Her shadow, to stretch out in the wrong direction …

  Splash.

  She started. One of the sailors had slipped from his boat into the water. She gaped as another slumped to the side, oar falling from his fingers.

  “Captain?” She turned to find him with drooping eyes. He went limp, then fell backward, unconscious, knocking his head against the back seat of the boat.

  The rest of the sailors weren’t doing any better. The other two dinghies had begun to drift aimlessly. Not a single sailor seemed to be conscious.

  My destiny, Kaza thought. My choice.

  Not a thing to be carted from place to place, and ordered to Soulcast. Not a tool. A person.

  She shoved aside an unconscious sailor and took the oars herself. It was difficult work. She was unaccustomed to physical labor, and her fingers had trouble gripping. They’d started to dissolve further. Perhaps a year or two for her survival was optimistic.

  Still, she rowed. She fought the waters until she at long last got close enough to hop out into the water and feel rock beneath her feet. Her robes billowing up around her, she finally thought to check if Vazrmeb was alive.

  None of the sailors in her dinghy were breathing, so she let the boat slip backward on the waves. Alone, Kaza fought through the surf and—finally—on hands and knees, crawled up onto the stones of the island.

  There, she collapsed, drowsy. Why was she so sleepy?

  She awoke to a small cremling scuttling across the rocks near her. It had a strange shape, with large wings and a head that made it look like an axehound. Its carapace shimmered with dozens of colors.

  Kaza could remember a time when she’d collected cremlings, pinning them to boards and proclaiming she’d become a natural historian. What had happened to that girl?

  She was transformed by necessity. Given the Soulcaster, which was always to be kept in the royal family. Given a charge.

  And a death sentence.

  She stirred, and the cremling scrambled away. She coughed, then began to crawl toward those rock formations. That city? Dark city of stone? She could barely think, though she did notice a gemstone as she passed it—a large uncut gemheart among the bleached white carapace leftovers of a dead greatshell. Vazrmeb had been right.

  She collapsed again near the perimeter of the rock formations. They looked like large, ornate buildings, crusted with crem.

  “Ah…” a voice said from behind her. “I should have guessed the drug would not affect you as quickly. You are barely human anymore.”

  Kaza rolled over and found someone approaching on quiet, bare feet. The cook? Yes, that was her, with the tattooed face.

  “You…” Kaza croaked, “you poisoned us.”

  “After many warnings not to come to this place,” the cook said. “It is rare I must guard it so … aggressively. Men must not again discover this place.”

  “The gemstones?” Kaza asked, growing more drowsy. “Or … is it something else … something … more…”

  “I cannot speak,” the cook said, “even to sate a dying demand. There are those who could pull secrets from your soul, and the cost would be the ends of worlds. Sleep now, Soulcaster. This is the most merciful end I could give.”

  The cook began to hum. Pieces of her broke off. She crumbled to a pile of chittering little cremlings that moved out of her clothing, leaving it in a heap.

  A hallucination? Kaza wondered as she drifted.

  She was dying. Well, that was nothing new.

  The cremlings began to pick at her hand, taking off her Soulcaster. No … she had one last thing to do.

  With a defiant shout, she pressed her hand to the rocky ground beneath her and demanded it change. When it became smoke, she went with it.

  Her choice.

  Her destiny.

  Taravangian paced in his rooms in Urithiru as two servants from the Diagram arranged his table, and fidgety Dukar—head of the King’s Testers, who each wore a ridiculous stormwarden robe with glyphs all along the seams—set out the tests, though they needn’t have bothered.

  Today, Taravangian was a storming genius.

  The way he thought, breathed, even moved, implicitly conveyed that today was a day of intelligence—perhaps not as brilliant as that single transcendent one when he’d created the Diagram, but he finally felt like himself after so many days trapped in the mausoleum of his own flesh, his mind like a master painter allowed only to whitewash walls.

  Once the table was finished, Taravangian pushed a nameless servant aside and sat down, grabbing a pen and launching into the problems—starting at the second page, as the first was too simple—and flicking ink at Dukar when the idiot started to complain.

  “Next page,” he snapped. “Quickly, quickly. Let’s not waste this, Dukar.”

  “You still must—”

  “Yes, yes. Prove myself not an idiot. The one day I’m not drooling and lying in my own waste, you tax my time with this idiocy.”

  “You set—”

  “It up. Yes, the irony is that you let the prohibitions instituted by my idiot self control my true self when it finally has opportunity to emerge.”

  “You weren’t an idiot when you—”

  “Here,” Taravangian said, proffering the sheet of math problems to him. “Done.”

  “All but the last on this sheet,” Dukar said, taking it in cautious fingers. “Do you want to try that one, or…”

  “No need. I know I can’t solve it; too bad. Make quick with the requisite formalities. I have work to do.”

  Adrotagia had entered with Malata, the Dustbringer; they were growing in companionship as Adrotagia attempted to secure an emotional bond with this lesser Diagram member who had suddenly been thrust into its upper echelons, an event predicted by the Diagram—which explained that the Dustbringers would be
the Radiants most likely to accept their cause, and at that Taravangian felt proud, for actually locating one of their number who could bond a spren had not, by any means, been an assured accomplishment.

  “He’s smart,” Dukar said to Mrall. The bodyguard was the final adjudicator of Taravangian’s daily capacity—an infuriating check necessary to prevent his stupid side from ruining anything, but a mere annoyance when Taravangian was like this.

  Energized.

  Awake.

  Brilliant.

  “He’s almost to the danger line,” Dukar said.

  “I can see that,” Adrotagia said. “Vargo, are you—”

  “I feel perfect. Can’t we be done with this? I can interact, and make policy decisions, and need no restrictions.”

  Dukar nodded, reluctantly, in agreement. Mrall assented. Finally!

  “Get me a copy of the Diagram,” Taravangian said, pushing past Adrotagia. “And some music, something relaxing but not too slow. Clear the chambers of nonessential persons, empty the bedroom of furniture, and don’t interrupt me.”

  It took them a frustratingly long time to accomplish, almost half an hour, which he spent on his balcony, contemplating the large space for a garden outside and wondering how big it was. He needed measurements.…

  “Your room is prepared, Your Majesty,” Mrall said.

  “Thank you, Uscritic one, for your leave to go into my own bedroom. Have you been drinking salt?”

  “… What?”

  Taravangian strode through the small room beside the balcony and into his bedroom, then breathed deeply, pleased to find it completely empty of furniture—only four blank stone walls, no window, though it had a strange rectangular outcropping along the back wall, like a high step, which Maben was dusting.

  Taravangian seized the maid by the arm and hauled her out, to where Adrotagia was bringing him a thick book bound in hogshide. A copy of the Diagram. Excellent. “Measure the available gardening area of the stone field outside our balcony and report it to me.”

  He carried the Diagram into the room, and then shut himself into blissful self-company, in which he arranged a diamond in each corner—a light to accompany that of his own spark, which shone in truth where others could not venture—and as he finished, a small choir of children started to sing Vorin hymns outside the room per his request.

  He breathed in, out, bathed in light and encouraged by song, his hands to the sides; capable of anything, he was consumed by the satisfaction of his own working mind, unclogged and flowing freely for the first time in what seemed like ages.

  He opened the Diagram. In it, Taravangian finally faced something greater than himself: a different version of himself.

  The Diagram—which was the name for this book and for the organization that studied it—had not originally been written merely on paper, for on that day of majestic capacity, Taravangian had annexed every surface to hold his genius—from the cabinetry to the walls—and while so doing had invented new languages to better express ideas that had to be recorded, by necessity, in a medium less perfect than his thoughts. Even as the intellect he was today, the sight of that writing enforced humility; he leafed through pages packed with tiny scrawls, copied—spots, scratches, and all—from the original Diagram room, created during what felt like a different lifetime, as alien to him now as was the drooling idiot he sometimes became.

  More alien. Everyone understood stupidity.

  He knelt on the stones, ignoring his aches of body, reverently leafing through the pages. Then he slipped out his belt knife, and began to cut it up.

  The Diagram had not been written on paper, and interacting with its transcription bound into codex form must necessarily have influenced their thinking, so to obtain true perspective—he now decided—he needed the flexibility of seeing the pieces, then arranging them in new ways, for his thoughts had not been locked down on that day and he should not perceive them as such today.

  He was not as brilliant as he’d been on that day, but he didn’t need to be. That day, he’d been God. Today, he could be God’s prophet.

  He arranged the cut-out pages, and found numerous new connections simply by how the sheets were placed next to each other—indeed, this page here actually connected to this page here … yes. Taravangian cut them both down the middle, dividing sentences. When he put the halves of separate pages beside one another, they made a more complete whole. Ideas he’d missed before seemed to rise from the pages like spren.

  Taravangian did not believe in any religion, for they were unwieldy things, designed to fill gaps in human understanding with nonsensical explanations, allowing people to sleep well at night, granting them a false sense of comfort and control and preventing them from stretching further for true understanding, yet there was something strangely holy about the Diagram, the power of raw intelligence, the only thing man should worship, and oh how little most understood it—oh, how little they deserved it—in handling purity while corrupting it with flawed understanding and silly superstitions. Was there a way he could prevent any but the most intelligent from learning to read? That would accomplish so much good; it seemed insane that nobody had implemented such a ban, for while Vorinism forbade men to read, that merely prevented an arbitrary half of the population from handling information, when it was the stupid who should be barred.

  He paced in the room, then noted a scrap of paper under the door; it contained the answer to his question about the size of the farming platform. He looked over the calculations, listening with half an ear to voices outside, almost overwhelmed by the singing children.

  “Uscritic,” Adrotagia said, “seems to refer to Uscri, a figure from a tragic poem written seventeen hundred years ago. She drowned herself after hearing her lover had died, though the truth was that he’d not died at all, and she misunderstood the report about him.”

  “All right…” Mrall said.

  “She was used in following centuries as an example of acting without information, though the term eventually came to simply mean ‘stupid.’ The salt seems to refer to the fact that she drowned herself in the sea.”

  “So it was an insult?” Mrall asked.

  “Using an obscure literary reference. Yes.” He could almost hear Adrotagia’s sigh. Best to interrupt her before she thought on this further.

  Taravangian flung open the door. “Gum paste for sticking paper to this wall. Fetch it for me, Adrotagia.”

  They’d put paper in a stack by the door without being asked, which surprised him, as they usually had to be ordered to do everything. He closed the door, then knelt and did some calculations relating to the size of the tower city. Hmmmm …

  It provided a fine distraction, but he was soon drawn back to the true work, interrupted only by the arrival of his gum paste, which he used to begin sticking fragments of the Diagram to his walls.

  This, he thought, arranging pages with numbers interspersing the text, pages they’d never been able to make sense of. It’s a list of what? Not code, like the other numbers. Unless … could this be shorthand for words?

  Yes … yes, he’d been too impatient to write the actual words. He’d numbered them in his head—alphabetically perhaps—so he could write quickly. Where was the key?

  This is reinforcement, he thought as he worked, of the Dalinar paradigm! His hands shook with excitement as he wrote out possible interpretations. Yes … Kill Dalinar, or he will resist your attempts to take over Alethkar. So Taravangian had sent the Assassin in White, which—incredibly—had failed.

  Fortunately, there were contingencies. Here, Taravangian thought, bringing up another scrap from the Diagram and gluing it to the wall beside the others. The initial explanation of the Dalinar paradigm, from the catechism of the headboard, back side, third quadrant. It had been written in meter, as a poem, and presaged that Dalinar would attempt to unite the world.

  So if he looked to the second contingency …

  Taravangian wrote furiously, seeing words instead of numbers, and—full of ene
rgy—for a time he forgot his age, his aches, the way his fingers trembled—sometimes—even when he wasn’t so excited.

  The Diagram hadn’t seen the effect the second son, Renarin, would have—he was a completely wild element. Taravangian finished his notations, proud, and wandered toward the door, which he opened without looking up.

  “Get me a copy of the surgeon’s words upon my birth,” he said to those outside. “Oh, and kill those children.”

  The music trailed off as the children heard what he’d said. Musicspren flitted away.

  “You mean, quiet them from singing,” Mrall said.

  “Whatever. I’m perturbed by the Vorin hymns as a reminder of historic religious oppression of ideas and thought.”

  Taravangian returned to his work, but a short time later a knock came at the door. He flung it open. “I was not to be—”

  “Interrupted,” Adrotagia said, proffering him a sheet of paper. “The surgeon’s words you requested. We keep them handy now, considering how often you ask for them.”

  “Fine.”

  “We need to talk, Vargo.”

  “No we—”

  She walked in anyway, then stopped, inspecting the cut-up pieces of the Diagram. Her eyes widened as she turned about. “Are you…”

  “No,” he said. “I haven’t become him again. But I am me, for the first time in weeks.”

  “This isn’t you. This is the monster you sometimes become.”

  “I am not smart enough to be in the dangerous zone.” The zone where, annoyingly, they claimed he was too smart to be allowed to make decisions. As if intelligence were somehow a liability!

  She unfolded a piece of paper from the pocket of her skirt. “Yes, your daily test. You stopped on this page, claiming you couldn’t answer the next question.”

  Damnation. She’d seen it.

  “If you’d answered,” she said, “it would have proved you were intelligent enough to be dangerous. Instead, you decided you couldn’t manage. A loophole we should have considered. You knew that if you finished the question, we’d restrict your decision-making for the day.”