Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson
The others remained, a mottled collection of clouds, ribbons, people, bunches of leaves, and other natural objects. They flitted overhead, watching the practicing men and women.
Sylphrena crossed the air to stand beside Lunamor’s head.
“They are looking,” Lunamor whispered. “This thing is happening. Not just bridgemen. Not just squires. Radiants, as Kaladin wishes.”
“We’ll see,” she said, then huffed softly before zipping away as a ribbon of light herself.
Lunamor left the bowls in case any of the others wished to partake of his offering. At his cook station, he stacked up the flatbread, intending to give the plates to Hobber to hold and distribute. Only, Hobber didn’t respond to his request. The lanky man sat on his little stool, leaning forward, his hand in a tight fist that glowed from the gemstone inside. The cups he’d been washing lay in an ignored stack beside him.
Hobber’s mouth moved—whispering—and he stared at that glowing fist in the same way a man might stare at the tinder in his firepit on a very cold night, surrounded by snow. Desperation, determination, prayer.
Do it, Hobber, Lunamor thought, stepping forward. Drink it in. Make it yours. Claim it.
Lunamor felt an energy to the air. A moment of focus. Several windspren turned toward Hobber, and for a heartbeat Lunamor thought that everything else faded. Hobber became one man alone in a darkened place, fist glowing. He stared, unblinking, at that sign of power. That sign of redemption.
The light in Hobber’s fist went out.
“Ha!” Lunamor shouted. “HA!”
Hobber jumped in surprise. His jaw dropped and he stared at the now-dun gemstone. Then he held up his hand, gawking at the luminescent smoke that rose from it. “Guys?” he called. “Guys, guys!”
Lunamor stepped back as the bridgemen left their stations and came rushing over. “Give him your gemstones!” Kaladin called. “He’s going to need a lot! Pile them up!”
Bridgemen scrambled to give Hobber their emeralds, and he drew in more and more Stormlight. Then the light suddenly dampened. “I can feel them again!” Hobber cried. “I can feel my toes!”
He tentatively reached out for support. Drehy under one arm, Peet under the other, Hobber slipped off his stool and stood up. He grinned with a gap-toothed expression, and almost fell over—his legs obviously weren’t very strong. Drehy and Peet righted him, but he forced them back, to let him stand precariously on his own.
The men of Bridge Four waited only briefly before pressing in with cries of excitement. Joyspren swirled around the group, like a sweeping gust of blue leaves. Amid them, Lopen shoved in close and made the Bridge Four salute.
It seemed to mean something special, coming from him. Two arms. One of the first times Lopen had been able to make the salute. Hobber saluted back, grinning like a boy who’d just hit his first center shot with the bow.
Kaladin stepped up beside Lunamor, Sylphrena on his shoulder. “It will work, Rock. This will protect them.”
Lunamor nodded, then by habit checked toward the west as he’d been doing all day. This time he spotted something.
It looked like a plume of smoke.
* * *
Kaladin flew to check it out. Lunamor, along with the rest of them, followed along on the ground, carrying their mobile bridge.
Lunamor ran at the center front of the bridge. It smelled of memories. The wood, the stain used to seal it. The sounds of several dozen men grunting and breathing in the enclosed spaces. The slapping of feet on plateau. Mixed exhaustion and terror. An assault. Arrows flying. Men dying.
Lunamor had known what might happen when he chose to come down from the Peaks with Kef’ha. No nuatoma from the Peaks had ever yet won a Shardblade or Shardplate from the Alethi or Vedens they challenged. Still, Kef’ha had determined the cost was worth the risk. At worst he had thought he would end up dead, and his family would become servants to a wealthy lowlander.
They hadn’t anticipated the cruelty of Torol Sadeas, who had murdered Kef’ha without a proper duel, killed many of Lunamor’s family who resisted, and seized his property.
Lunamor roared, charging forward, and his skin started to glow with the power of the Stormlight from his pouch and the spheres he had collected before leaving. He seemed to be carrying the bridge all on his own, towing the others.
Skar called out a marching song, and Bridge Four thundered the words. Bridge Four had grown strong enough to carry the bridge long distances without difficulty, but this day put those previous runs to shame. They ran at a sprint the entire distance, vibrant with Stormlight, Lunamor calling the commands as Kaladin or Teft had once done. When they reached a chasm, they practically tossed the bridge across. When they picked it up on the other side, it seemed light as a reed.
It felt like they’d barely started going before they neared the source of the smoke: a beleaguered caravan crossing the plains. Lunamor threw his weight against the bridge’s outer support rods, pushing it across the chasm, then he charged over. Others followed. Dabbid and Lopen unhooked shields and spears from the side of the bridge and tossed one to each bridgeman as they passed. They fell into squads, and the men who normally followed Teft fell in behind Lunamor, though he had—of course—refused the spear Lopen tried to toss him.
Many of the caravan wagons had been transporting lumber from the forests outside the warcamps, though some were piled high with furniture. Dalinar Kholin spoke of repopulating his warcamp, but the two highprinces who remained behind had been encroaching on the land—quietly, like eels. For now, it was best to scavenge what they could and bring it to Urithiru.
The caravan had been using Dalinar’s large, wheeled bridges to cross chasms. Lunamor passed one of these, lying on its side, broken. Three of the large lumber wagons near it had been set afire, making the air acrid with smoke.
Kaladin floated overhead, holding his brilliant Shardspear. Lunamor squinted through the smoke in the direction Kaladin was looking, and made out figures streaking away through the sky.
“Voidbringer attack,” Drehy muttered. “We should have guessed they’d start raiding our caravans.”
Lunamor didn’t care at the moment. He pushed his way through weary caravan guards and frightened merchants hiding under wagons. There were bodies everywhere; the Voidbringers had killed dozens. Lunamor searched through the mess, trembling. Was that red hair on a corpse? No, that was blood soaking a headscarf. And that …
That other body wasn’t human—it had marbled skin. A brilliant white arrow stuck from its back, fletched with goose feathers. An Unkalaki arrow.
Lunamor looked to the right, where someone had piled up furniture in a heap, almost like a fortification. A head poked up over the top, a stout woman with a round face and a deep red braid. She stood up tall and raised a bow toward Lunamor. Other faces peeked out from behind the furniture. Two youths, a boy and a girl, both around sixteen. Younger faces from there. Six in total.
Lunamor dashed toward them and found himself blubbering, tears streaming down his cheeks as he crawled up the outside of their improvised fortification.
His family, at long last, had arrived at the Shattered Plains.
* * *
“This is Song,” Lunamor said, pulling the woman close, one arm around her shoulders. “Is best woman in all the Peaks. Ha! We made snow forts as childs, and hers was always best. I should have known to find her in castle, even if it was made of old chairs!”
“Snow?” Lopen asked. “How do you make forts out of snow? I’ve heard all about this stuff—it’s like frost, right?”
“Airsick lowlander.” Lunamor shook his head, moving to the twins. He put one hand on each of their shoulders. “Boy is Gift. Girl is Cord. Ha! When I left, Gift was short like Skar. Now he is nearly my height!”
He struggled to keep the pain from his voice. It had been almost a year. So long. Originally, his intent had been to bring them as soon as possible, but then everything had gone wrong. Sadeas, the bridge crews …
“Nex
Song—Tuaka’li’na’calmi’nor—put her hand on his back. Nearby, Kaladin introduced Bridge Four, but only Gift and Cord had been taught lowlander languages, and Cord spoke only Veden. Gift managed a passable greeting in Alethi.
Little Song sought her mother’s legs. Lunamor blinked away tears, though they were not completely sad tears. His family was here. His first saved wages had paid for the message, sent by spanreed to the Peaks message station. That station was still a week’s travel from his home, and from there, traveling down from the slopes and crossing Alethkar took months.
Around them the caravan was finally limping into motion. This was the first chance Lunamor had found to introduce his family, as Bridge Four had spent the last half hour trying to help the wounded. Then, Renarin had arrived with Adolin and two companies of troops—and for all Renarin’s worries about not being useful, his healing had saved several lives.
Tuaka rubbed Lunamor’s back, then knelt down beside him, pulling their daughter close with one arm, Lunamor with the other. “It was a long journey,” she said in Unkalaki, “and longest at the end, when those things came from the sky.”
“I should have come to the warcamps,” Lunamor said. “To escort you.”
“We’re here now,” she said. “Lunamor, what happened? Your note was so terse. Kef’ha is dead, but what happened to you? Why so long without word?”
He bowed his head. How could he explain this? The bridge runs, the cracks in his soul. How could he explain that the man she’d always said was so strong had wished to die? Had been a coward, had given up, near the end?
“What of Tifi and Sinaku’a?” she asked him.
“Dead,” he whispered. “They raised weapons in vengeance.”
She put her hand to her lips. She wore a glove on her safehand, in deference to silly Vorin traditions. “Then you—”
“I am a chef now,” Lunamor said, firm.
“But—”
“I cook, Tuaka.” He pulled her close again. “Come, let us take the children to safety. We will reach the tower, which you will like—it is like the Peaks, almost. I will tell you stories. Some are painful.”
“Very well. Lunamor, I have stories too. The Peaks, our home … something is wrong. Very wrong.”
He pulled back and met her eyes. They’d call her darkeyed down here, though he found infinite depth, beauty, and light in those deep brown-green eyes.
“I will explain when we are safe,” she promised, picking up little Beautiful Song. “You are wise to usher us forward. Wise as ever.”
“No, my love,” he whispered. “I am a fool. I would blame the air, but I was a fool above too. A fool to ever let Kef’ha leave on this errand of stupidity.”
She walked the children across the bridge. He watched, and was glad to hear Unkalaki again, a proper language. Glad that the other men did not speak it. For if they did, they might have picked out the lies that he had told them.
Kaladin stepped up, clapping him on the shoulder. “I’m going to assign your family my rooms, Rock. I’ve been slow in getting family quarters for the bridgemen. This will light a fire under me. I’ll get us an assignment, and until then I’ll bunk with the rest of the men.”
Lunamor opened his mouth to object, then thought better of it. Some days, the more honorable thing was to take a gift without complaint. “Thank you,” he said. “For the rooms. For other things, my captain.”
“Go walk with your family, Rock. We can handle the bridge without you today. We have Stormlight.”
Lunamor rested his fingers on the smooth wood. “No,” he said. “It will be a privilege to carry him one last time, for my family.”
“One last time?” Kaladin said.
“We take to the skies, Stormblessed,” Lunamor said. “We will walk no more in coming days. This is the end.” He looked back toward a subdued Bridge Four group, who seemed to sense that what he said was true. “Ha! Do not look so sad. I left great stew back near city. Hobber will probably not ruin it before we return. Come! Pick up our bridge. The last time, we march not toward death, but toward full stomachs and good songs!”
Despite his urging, it was a solemn, respectful group who lifted the bridge. They were slaves no longer. Storms, in their pockets they carried riches! It glowed fiercely, and soon their skin did as well.
Kaladin took his place at the front. Together they carried the bridge on one final run—reverently, as if it were the bier of a king, being taken to his tomb for his eternal rest.
Your skills are admirable, but you are merely a man. You had your chance to be more, and refused it.
Dalinar entered the next vision in the middle of a fight.
He had learned his lesson; he didn’t intend to mire another person in an unexpected battle. This time he intended to find a safe point, then bring people in.
That meant appearing as he had many months ago: holding a spear in sweaty hands, standing on a forlorn and broken plate of rock, surrounded by men in primitive clothing. They wore wraps of rough-spun lavis fibers and sandals of hogshide, and carried spears with bronze heads. Only the officer wore armor: a mere leather jerkin, not even properly hardened. It had been cured, then cut roughly into the shape of a vest. It proved no help against an axe to the face.
Dalinar roared, indistinctly remembering his first time in this vision. It had been one of the very earliest, when he still discounted them as nightmares. Today, he intended to tease out its secrets.
He charged the enemy, a group of men in similarly shoddy clothing. Dalinar’s companions had backed themselves up to the edge of a cliff. If they didn’t fight now, they’d be pushed off onto a steep incline that eventually ended in a sheer drop and a plummet of some fifty or sixty feet to the bottom of a valley.
Dalinar rammed into the enemy group trying to push his men off the cliff. He wore the same clothing as the others, carried their weapons, but had brought one oddity: a pouch full of gemstones tucked at his waist.
He gutted one enemy with his spear, then shoved the fellow toward the others: thirty or so men with ragged beards and callous eyes. Two tripped over their dying friend, which protected Dalinar’s flank for a moment. He seized the fallen man’s axe, then attacked to his left.
The enemy resisted, howling. These men weren’t well trained, but any fool with a sharpened edge could be dangerous. Dalinar cut, slashed, laid about himself with the axe—which was well balanced, a good weapon. He was confident he could beat this group.
Two things went wrong. First, the other spearmen didn’t support him. Nobody filled in behind to protect him from being surrounded.
Second, the wild men didn’t flinch.
Dalinar had come to rely on the way soldiers pulled away when they saw him fighting. He depended on their discipline to fail—even when he hadn’t been a Shardbearer, he’d counted on his ferocity, his sheer momentum, to win fights.
Turned out, the momentum of one man—no matter how skilled or determined—amounted to little when running into a stone wall. The men before him didn’t bend, didn’t panic, didn’t so much as quiver as he killed four of them. They struck at him with increased ferocity. One even laughed.
In a flash, his arm was chopped by an axe he didn’t even see, then he was shoved over by the rush of the attackers. Dalinar hit the ground, stunned, looking with disbelief at the stump of his left forearm. The pain seemed a disconnected thing, distant. Only a single painspren, like a hand made of sinew, appeared by his knees.
Dalinar felt a shattering, humbling sense of his own mortality. Was this what every veteran felt, when he finally fell on the battlefield? This bizarre, surreal sense of both disbelief and long-buried resignation?
Dalinar set his jaw, then used his good hand to pull free the leather strap he was using for a belt. Holding one end in his teeth, he wrapped it around the stump of his arm right above the elbow. The cut wasn’t bleeding too badly yet. Took a moment for a wound like this to bleed; the body constricted blood flow at first.
Storms. This blow had gone clean through. He reminded himself that this wasn’t his actual flesh exposed to the air. That it wasn’t his own bone there, like the center ring of a hunk of pork.
Why not heal yourself as you did in the vision with Fen? the Stormfather asked. You have Stormlight.
“Cheating,” Dalinar said with a grunt.
Cheating? the Stormfather said. Why in Damnation would that be cheating? You made no oath.
Dalinar smiled to hear a fragment of God cursing. He wondered if the Stormfather was picking up bad habits from him. Ignoring the pain as best he could, Dalinar seized his axe in one hand and stumbled to his feet. Ahead of him, his squad of twelve fought desperately—and poorly—against the frantic enemy assault. They’d backed right to the edge of the cliff. With the towering rock formations all around, this place almost felt like a chasm, though it was considerably more open.
Dalinar wavered, and almost collapsed again. Storm it.
Just heal yourself, the Stormfather said.
“I used to be able to shrug off things like this.” Dalinar looked down at his missing arm. Well, perhaps nothing as bad as this.
You’re old, the Stormfather said.
“Maybe,” Dalinar said, steadying himself, his vision clearing. “But they made a mistake.”
Which is?
“They turned their backs on me.”
Dalinar charged again, wielding the axe in one hand. He dropped two of the enemy, punching through to his men. “Down!” he shouted to them. “We can’t fight them up here. Skid down the incline to that ledge below! We’ll try to find a way to climb down from there!”
He jumped off the cliff and hit the incline in motion. It was a reckless maneuver, but storms, they’d never survive up above. He slid down the stone, staying on his feet as he approached the sheer drop into the valley. A final small ledge of stone gave him a place to lurch to a stop.