Words of Radiance

The humming was Pattern on the comforter beside her. He looked almost like lace embroidery. The window shades had been drawn—she didn’t remember doing that—and it was dark outside. The evening of the day she’d arrived at the Plains.

“Did someone come in?” she asked Pattern, sitting up, pushing stray locks of red hair from her eyes.

“Mmm. Someones. Gone now.”

Shallan rose and wandered into her sitting room. Ash’s eyes, she almost didn’t want to walk on the pristine white carpeting. What if she left tracks and ruined it?

Pattern’s “someones” had left food on the table. Suddenly ravenous, Shallan sat down on the sofa, lifting the lid off the tray to find flatbread that had been baked with sweet paste in the center, along with dipping sauces.

“Remind me,” she said, “to thank Palona in the morning. That woman is divine.”

“Mmm. No. I think she is . . . Ah . . . Exaggeration?”

“You catch on quickly,” Shallan said as Pattern became a three-dimensional mass of twisting lines, a ball hanging in the air above the seat beside her.

“No,” he said. “I am too slow. You prefer some food and not others. Why?”

“The taste,” Shallan said.

“I should understand this word,” Pattern said. “But I do not, not really.”

Storms. How did you describe taste? “It’s like color . . . you see with your mouth.” She grimaced. “And that was an awful metaphor. Sorry. I have trouble being insightful on an empty stomach.”

“You say you are ‘on’ the stomach,” Pattern said. “But I know you do not mean this. Context allows me to infer what you truly mean. In a way, the very phrase is a lie.”

“It’s not a lie,” Shallan said, “if everyone understands and knows what it means.”

“Mm. Those are some of the best lies.”

“Pattern,” Shallan said, breaking off a piece of flatbread, “sometimes you’re about as intelligible as a Bavlander trying to quote ancient Vorin poetry.”

A note beside the food said that Vathah and her soldiers had arrived, and had been quartered in a tenement nearby. Her slaves had been incorporated into the manor’s staff for the time being.

Chewing on the bread—it was delightful—Shallan went over to her trunks with the intent of unpacking. When she opened the first, however, she was confronted by a blinking red light. Tyn’s spanreed.

Shallan stared at it. That would be the person who relayed Tyn’s information. Shallan assumed it was a woman, though since the information relay station was in Tashikk, they might not even be Vorin. It could be a man.

She knew so little. She was going to have to be very careful . . . storms, she might get herself killed even if she was careful. Shallan was tired, however, of being pushed around.

These people knew something about Urithiru. It was, dangerous or not, Shallan’s best lead. She took out the spanreed, prepared its board with paper, and placed the reed. Once she turned the dial to indicate she had set up, the pen remained hanging there, immobile, but did not immediately start writing. The person trying to contact her had stepped away—the pen could have been in there blinking for hours. She’d have to wait until the person on the other side returned.

“Inconvenient,” she said, then smiled at herself. Was she really complaining about waiting a few minutes for instantaneous communication across half the world?

I will need to find a way to contact my brothers, she thought. That would be distressingly slow, without a spanreed. Could she arrange a message through one of these relay stations in Tashikk using a different intermediary, perhaps?

She settled back down on the couch—pen and writing board near the tray of food—and looked through the stack of previous communications that Tyn had exchanged with this distant person. There weren’t many. Tyn had probably destroyed them periodically. The ones remaining involved questions regarding Jasnah, House Davar, and the Ghostbloods.

One oddity stood out to Shallan. The way Tyn spoke of this group wasn’t like that of a thief and one-off employers. Tyn spoke of “getting in good” and “moving up” within the Ghostbloods.

“Pattern,” Pattern said.

“What?” Shallan asked, looking toward him.

“Pattern,” he replied. “In the words. Mmm.”

“Of this sheet?” Shallan asked, holding up the page.

“There and others,” Pattern said. “See the first words?”

Shallan frowned, inspecting the sheets. In each one, the first words came from the remote writer. A simple sentence asking after Tyn’s health or status. Tyn replied simply each time.

“I don’t understand,” Shallan said.

“They form groups of five,” Pattern said. “Quintets, the letters. Mmm. Each message follows a pattern—first three words start with one each of three of the quintet of letters. Tyn’s reply, the two that match.”

Shallan looked it over, though she couldn’t see what Pattern meant. He explained it again, and she thought she grasped it, but the pattern was complex.

“A code,” Shallan said. It made sense; you’d want a way to authenticate that the right person was on the other end of the spanreed. She blushed as she realized she had almost ruined this opportunity. If Pattern hadn’t seen this, or if the spanreed had started writing immediately, Shallan would have exposed herself.

She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t infiltrate a group skilled and powerful enough to bring down Jasnah herself. She just couldn’t.

And yet she had to.

She got out her sketchbook and started to draw, letting her fingers move on their own. She needed to be older, but not too much older. She’d be darkeyed. People would remark upon a lighteyes they didn’t know moving through camp. A darkeyes would be more invisible. To the right people, though, she could imply that she was using the eyedrops.

Dark hair. Long, like her real hair, but not red. Same height, same build, but a much different face. Worn features, like Tyn’s. A scar across the chin, a more angular face. Not as pretty, but not ugly either. More . . . straightforward.

She sucked in Stormlight from the lamp beside her, and that energy made her draw more quickly. It wasn’t excitement. It was a need to go forward.

She finished with a flourish, and found a face staring back at her from the page, almost alive. Shallan breathed out Light and felt it envelop her, twist about her. Her vision clouded for a moment, and she saw only the glow of that fading Stormlight.

Then it was gone. She didn’t feel any different. She prodded at her face. It felt the same. Had she—

The lock of hair hanging down over her shoulder was black. Shallan stared at it, then rose from her seat, eager and timid at the same time. She crossed to the washroom and stepped up to the mirror there, looking at a face transformed, one with tan skin and dark eyes. The face from her drawing, given color and life.

“It works . . .” she whispered. This was more than changing scuffs in her dress or making herself look older, as she’d done before. This was a complete transformation. “What can we do with this?”

“Whatever we imagine,” Pattern said from the wall nearby. “Or whatever you can imagine. I am not good with what is not. But I like it. I like the . . . taste . . . of it.” He seemed very pleased with himself at that comment.

Something was off. Shallan frowned, holding up her sketch, realizing she’d left a spot unfinished on the side of the nose. The Lightweaving there didn’t cover up her nose completely, and had a kind of fuzzy gap in the side. It was small; someone else would probably just see it as a strange scar. To her, it seemed glaring, and offended her artistic sense.

She prodded at the rest of the nose. She’d made it slightly larger than her real one, and could reach through the image to touch her nose. The image had no substance to it. In fact, if she moved her finger quickly through the tip of the false nose, it fuzzed to Stormlight, like smoke that had been blown away by a gust.

She removed her fingers, and the image snapped back into place, though it still had that gap on the side. Sloppy drawing on her part.

“How long will the image last?” she asked.

“It feeds on Light,” Pattern said.

Shallan dug the spheres from her safepouch. They were all dun—she’d likely used those up in the conversation with the highprinces. She took one from the lamp on the wall, replacing it with a dun sphere of the same denomination, and carried it in her fist.

Shallan went back into the sitting room. She’d need a different outfit, of course. A darkeyed woman wouldn’t—

The spanreed was writing.

Shallan hastened over to the sofa, breath catching as she saw the words appear. I think some information I have today will work. A simple introduction, but it followed the right pattern for the code.

“Mmm,” Pattern said.

She needed the first two words of her reply to start with the proper letters. But you said that last time, she wrote, hopefully completing the code.

Don’t worry, the messenger wrote. You’ll like this, though the timing might be tight. They want to meet.

Good, Shallan wrote back, relaxing—and blessing the time Tyn had spent forcing her to practice forgery techniques. She’d taken to it quickly, as it was a kind of drawing, but Tyn’s suggestions now let her imitate the woman’s own sloppier writing with demonstrable skill.