Words of Radiance

Kaladin felt at his legs, then his ribs. He found aches and scrapes, but nothing broken or ripped. That Stormlight he’d held at the end . . . it had protected him, perhaps even healed him, before running out. He finally reached into his pouch and fished out spheres, but found those all drained. He tried his pocket, then froze as he heard something scraping nearby.

He leaped to his feet and spun, wishing he had a weapon. The chasm bottom grew brighter. A steady glow revealed fanlike frillblooms and draping vines on the walls, gathered twigs and moss on the floor in patches. Was that a voice? He felt a surreal moment of confusion as shadows moved on the wall ahead of him.

Then someone wandered around the corner, wearing a silk dress and carrying a pack over her shoulder. Shallan Davar.

She screamed when she saw him, throwing the pack to the ground and stumbling backward, hands to her sides. She even dropped her sphere.

Rolling his arm in its socket, Kaladin stepped closer into the light. “Calm down,” he said. “It’s me.”

“Stormfather!” Shallan said, scrambling to grab the sphere off the ground again. She stepped forward, thrusting the light toward him. “It is you . . . the bridgeman. How . . . ?”

“I don’t know,” he lied, looking upward. “I’ve got a wicked crick in my neck and my elbow hurts like thunder. What happened?”

“Someone threw the emergency latch on the bridge.”

“What emergency latch?”

“It topples the bridge into the chasm.”

“Sounds like a storming stupid thing to have,” Kaladin said, fishing in his pocket for his other spheres. He glanced at them covertly. Also drained. Storms. He’d used them all?

“Depends,” Shallan said. “What if your men have retreated over the bridge and enemies are pouring across it after you? The emergency latch is supposed to have some kind of safety lock so it can’t be thrown by accident, but you can release it in a hurry if you need to.”

He grunted as Shallan shone her sphere past him toward where the two halves of the bridge had smashed into the ground of the chasm. There were the bodies he’d expected.

He looked. He had to. No sign of Dalinar, though several of the officers and lighteyed ladies who had been crossing the bridge lay in twisted, broken heaps on the ground. A drop of two hundred feet or more did not leave survivors.

Except Shallan. Kaladin didn’t remember grabbing her as he fell, but he didn’t remember much of that fall beyond Syl’s scream. That scream . . .

Well, he must have managed to grab Shallan by reflex, infusing her with Stormlight to slow her fall. She looked disheveled, her blue dress scuffed and her hair a mess, but she was apparently otherwise unharmed.

“I woke up down here in the darkness,” Shallan said. “It’s been a while since we fell.”

“How can you tell?”

“It’s almost dark up there,” Shallan said. “It will be night soon. When I woke I heard echoes of yelling. Fighting. I saw something glowing from around that corner. Turned out to be a soldier who had fallen, his sphere pouch ripped.” She shivered visibly. “He’d been killed by something before the fall.”

“Parshendi,” Kaladin said. “Just before the bridge collapsed, I heard horns from the vanguard. We got attacked.” Damnation. That probably meant that Dalinar had retreated, assuming he’d actually survived. There was nothing worth fighting for out here.

“Give me one of those spheres,” Kaladin said.

She handed one over, and Kaladin went searching among the fallen. For pulses, ostensibly, but really for any equipment or spheres.

“You think any of these might be alive?” Shallan asked, voice sounding small in the otherwise silent chasm.

“Well, we survived somehow.”

“How do you think that happened?” Shallan said, looking upward toward the gap far, far above.

“I saw some windspren just before we fell,” Kaladin said. “I’ve heard folktales of them protecting a person as he falls. Perhaps that’s what happened.”

Shallan went silent as he searched the bodies. “Yes,” she finally said. “That sounds logical.”

She seemed convinced. Good. So long as she didn’t start wondering about the stories told of “Kaladin Stormblessed.”

Nobody else was alive, but he verified for certain that neither Dalinar nor Adolin were among the corpses.

I was a fool not to spot that an assassination attempt was coming, Kaladin thought. Sadeas had tried hard to undermine Dalinar at the feast a few days back, with the revelation of the visions. It was a classic ploy. Discredit your enemy, then kill him, to make certain he didn’t become a martyr.

The corpses had little of value. A handful of spheres, some writing implements that Shallan greedily snatched up and stuffed into her satchel. No maps. Kaladin had no specific idea where they were. And with night imminent . . .

“What do we do?” Shallan asked softly, staring at the darkened realm, with its unexpected shadows, its gently moving frills, vines, polyplike staccatos, their tendrils out and wafting in the air.

Kaladin remembered his first times down in this place, which always felt too green, too muggy, too alien. Nearby, two skulls peeked out from beneath the moss, watching. Splashing sounded from a distant pool, which made Shallan spin wildly. Though the chasms were a home to Kaladin now, he did not deny that at times they were distinctly unnerving.

“It’s safer down here than it seems,” Kaladin said. “During my time in Sadeas’s army, I spent days upon days in the chasms, gathering salvage from the fallen. Just watch for rotspren.”

“And the chasmfiends?” Shallan asked, spinning to look in another direction as a cremling scuttled along the wall.

“I never saw one.” Which was true, though he had seen a shadow of one once, scraping its way down a distant chasm. Even thinking of that day gave him chills. “They aren’t as common as people claim. The real danger is highstorms. You see, if it rains, even far away from here—”

“Yes, flash flooding,” Shallan said. “Very dangerous in a slot canyon. I’ve read about them.”

“I’m sure that will be very helpful,” Kaladin said. “You mentioned some dead soldiers nearby?”

She pointed, and he strode in that direction. She followed, sticking close to his light. He found a few dead spearmen who had been shoved off the plateau above. The wounds were fresh. Just beyond them was a dead Parshendi, also fresh.

The Parshendi man had uncut gems in his beard. Kaladin touched one, hesitated, then tried to draw the Stormlight out. Nothing happened. He sighed, then bowed his head for the fallen, before finally pulling a spear from underneath one of the bodies and standing up. The light above had faded to a deep blue. Night.

“So, we wait?” Shallan asked.

“For what?” Kaladin asked, raising the spear to his shoulder.

“For them to come back . . .” She trailed off. “They’re not coming back for us, are they?”

“They’ll assume we’re dead. Storms, we should be dead. We’re too far out for a corpse-recovery operation, I’d guess. That’s doubly true since the Parshendi attacked.” He rubbed his chin. “I suppose we could wait for Dalinar’s major expedition. He was indicating he’d come this way, searching for the center. It’s only a few days away, right?”

Shallan paled. Well, she paled further. That light skin of hers was so strange. It and the red hair made her look like a very small Horneater. “Dalinar is planning to march just after the final highstorm before the Weeping. That storm is close. And it will involve lots, and lots, and lots of rain.”

“Bad idea, then.”

“You could say so.”

He’d tried to imagine what a highstorm would be like down here. He had seen the aftereffects when salvaging with Bridge Four. The twisted, broken corpses. The piles of refuse crushed against walls and into cracks. Boulders as tall as a man casually washed through chasms until they got wedged between two walls, sometimes fifty feet up in the air.

“When?” he asked. “When is that highstorm?”

She stared at him, then dug into her satchel, flipping through sheets of paper with her freehand while holding the satchel through the fabric of her safehand. She waved him over with his sphere, as she had to tuck hers away.

He held it up for her as she looked over a page with lines of script. “Tomorrow night,” she said softly. “Just after first moonset.”

Kaladin grunted, holding up his sphere and inspecting the chasm. We’re just to the north of the chasm we fell from, he thought. So the way back should be . . . that way?

“All right then,” Shallan said. She took a deep breath, then snapped her satchel closed. “We walk back, and we start immediately.”

“You don’t want to sit for a moment and catch your breath?”

“My breath is quite well caught,” Shallan said. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather be moving. Once back, we can sit sipping mulled wine and laugh about how silly it was of us to hurry all that way, since we had so much time to spare. I’d like very much to feel that foolish. You?”

“Yeah.” He liked the chasms. It didn’t mean he wanted to risk a highstorm in one of them. “You don’t have a map in that satchel, do you?”