Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson
Eshonai … no …
“Ah,” Ulim’s voice said. “Excellent.” The spren approached across the stone wall, like crackling lightning moving through the stone. “Demid, your hand.”
Demid obediently raised his hand, palm up, and Ulim shot across from the wall to the hand, then formed into his human shape, standing on the perch. “Hmmm. Plate looks completely drained. Broken along the back, I see. Well, it’s said to regrow on its own, even now that it is separated from its master from so long ago.”
“The … Plate,” Venli said softly, numb. “You wanted the Plate.”
“Well, the Blade too, of course. Why else would we be hunting a corpse? You … Oh, you thought she was alive?”
“When you said we needed to find my sister,” Venli said, “I thought…”
“Yes, looks like she drowned in the storm’s floodwaters,” Ulim said, making a sound like a tongue clicking. “Rammed the sword into the stone, held on to it to stay in place, but couldn’t breathe.”
Venli attuned the Rhythm of the Lost.
It was one of the old, inferior rhythms. She hadn’t been able to find those since transforming, and she had no idea how she happened upon this one. The mournful, solemn tone felt distant to her.
“Eshonai…?” she whispered, and nudged the corpse again. Demid gasped. Touching the bodies of the fallen was taboo. The old songs spoke of days when humans had hacked apart listener corpses, searching for gemhearts. Leave the dead to peace instead; it was their way.
Venli stared into Eshonai’s dead eyes. You were the voice of reason, Venli thought. You were the one who argued with me. You … you were supposed to keep me grounded.
What do I do without you?
“Well, let’s get that Plate off, kids,” Ulim said.
“Show respect!” Venli snapped.
“Respect for what? It’s for the best that this one died.”
“For the best?” Venli said. “For the best?” She stood, confronting the little spren on Demid’s outstretched palm. “That is my sister. She is one of our greatest warriors. An inspiration, and a martyr.”
Ulim rolled his head in an exaggerated way, as if perturbed—and bored—by the chastisement. How dare he! He was merely a spren. He was to be her servant.
“Your sister,” Ulim said, “didn’t undergo the transformation properly. She resisted, and we’d have eventually lost her. She was never dedicated to our cause.”
Venli attuned the Rhythm of Fury, speaking in a loud, punctuating sequence. “You will not say such things. You are spren! You are to serve.”
“And I do.”
“Then you must obey me!”
“You?” Ulim laughed. “Child, how long have you been fighting your little war against the humans? Three, four years?”
“Six years, spren,” Demid said. “Six long, bloody years.”
“Well, do you want to guess how long we’ve been fighting this war?” Ulim asked. “Go ahead. Guess. I’m waiting.”
Venli seethed. “It doesn’t matter—”
“Oh, but it does,” Ulim said, his red figure electrifying. “Do you know how to lead armies, Venli? True armies? Supply troops across a battlefront that spans hundreds of miles? Do you have memories and experiences that span eons?”
She glared at him.
“Our leaders,” Ulim said, “know exactly what they’re doing. Them I obey. But I am the one who escaped, the spren of redemption. I don’t have to listen to you.”
“I will be a queen,” Venli said to Spite.
“If you survive? Maybe. But your sister? She and the others sent that assassin to kill the human king specifically to keep us from returning. Your people are traitors—though your personal efforts do you justice, Venli. You may be blessed further, if you are wise. Regardless, get that armor off your sister, shed your tears, and get ready to climb back up. These plateaus are crawling with men who stink of Honor. We must be away and see what your ancestors need us to do.”
“Our ancestors?” Demid said. “What do the dead have to do with this?”
“Everything,” Ulim replied, “seeing as they’re the ones in charge. Armor. Now.” He zipped to the wall as a tiny streak of lightning, then moved off.
Venli attuned Derision at the way she’d been treated, then—defying taboos—helped Demid remove the Shardplate. Ulim returned with the others and ordered them to gather up the armor.
They hiked off, leaving Venli to bring the Blade. She lifted it from the stone, then lingered, regarding her sister’s corpse—which lay there in only padded underclothing.
Venli felt something stir inside her. Again, distantly, she was able to hear the Rhythm of the Lost. Mournful, slow, with separated beats.
“I…” Venli said. “Finally, I don’t have to listen to you call me a fool. I don’t have to worry about you getting in the way. I can do what I want.”
That terrified her.
She turned to go, but paused as she saw something. What was that small spren that had crept out from beneath Eshonai’s corpse? It looked like a small ball of white fire; it gave off little rings of light and trailed a streak behind it. Like a comet.
“What are you?” Venli demanded to Spite. “Shoo.”
She hiked off, leaving her sister’s corpse there at the bottom of the chasm, stripped and alone. Food for either a chasmfiend or a storm.
Dearest Cephandrius,
I received your communication, of course.
Jasnah was alive.
Jasnah Kholin was alive.
Shallan was supposed to be recovering from her ordeal, never mind that the bridgemen had handled the fighting. All she’d done was grope an eldritch spren. Still, she spent the next day holed up in her room sketching and thinking.
Jasnah’s return sparked something in her. Shallan had once been more analytical in her drawing, including notes and explanations with the sketches. Lately she’d only been doing pages and pages of twisted images.
Well, she’d been trained as a scholar, hadn’t she? She shouldn’t just draw; she should analyze, extrapolate, speculate. So, she addressed herself to fully recording her experiences with the Unmade.
Adolin and Palona visited her separately, and even Dalinar came to check on her while Navani clicked her tongue and asked after her health. Shallan endured their company, then eagerly returned to her drawing. There were so many questions. Why exactly had she been able to drive the thing away? What was the meaning of its creations?
Hanging over her research, however, was a single daunting fact. Jasnah was alive.
Storms … Jasnah was alive.
That changed everything.
Eventually, Shallan couldn’t remain locked up any longer. Though Navani mentioned Jasnah was planning to visit her later in the evening, Shallan washed and dressed, then threw her satchel over her shoulder and went searching for the woman. She had to know how Jasnah had survived.
In fact, as Shallan stalked the hallways of Urithiru, she found herself increasingly perturbed. Jasnah claimed to always look at things from a logical perspective, but she had a flair for the dramatic to rival any storyteller. Shallan well remembered that night in Kharbranth when Jasnah had lured thieves in, then dealt with them in stunning—and brutal—fashion.
Jasnah didn’t want to merely prove her points. She wanted to drive them right into your skull, with a flourish and a pithy epigram. Why hadn’t she written via spanreed to let everyone know she had survived? Storms, where had she been all this time?
A few inquiries led Shallan back to the pit with its spiraling stairs. Guards in sharp Kholin blue confirmed that Jasnah was below, so Shallan started trudging down those steps again, and was surprised to find that she felt no anxiety at the descent. In fact … the oppressive feelings she’d felt since they’d arrived at the tower seemed to have evaporated. No more fear, no more formless sense of wrongness. The thing she’d chased away had been its cause. Somehow, its aura had pervaded the entire tower.
At the base of the stair
She strode down the muraled hallway, the sphere lanterns set along the base of the walls making it pleasingly bright. Once she’d passed the empty library rooms to either side, she heard voices drifting toward her from ahead. She stepped up into the room where she’d faced the Midnight Mother, and got her first good look at the place when it wasn’t covered in writhing darkness.
The crystal pillar at the center really was something incredible. It wasn’t a single gemstone, but a myriad of them fused together: emerald, ruby, topaz, sapphire … All ten varieties seemed to have been melted into a single thick pillar, twenty feet tall. Storms … what would it look like if all those gems were somehow infused, rather than dun as they were at the moment?
A large group of guards stood at a barricade near the other side of the room, looking down into the tunnel where the Unmade had vanished. Jasnah rounded the giant pillar, freehand resting on the crystal. The princess wore red, lips painted to match, hair up and run through with swordlike hairspikes with rubies on the pommels.
Storms. She was perfect. A curvaceous figure, tan Alethi skin, light violet eyes, and not a hint of aberrant color to her jet-black hair. Making Jasnah Kholin as beautiful as she was brilliant was one of the most unfair things the Almighty had ever done.
Shallan hesitated in the doorway, feeling much as she had upon seeing Jasnah for the first time in Kharbranth. Insecure, overwhelmed, and—if she was honest—incredibly envious. Whatever ordeals Jasnah had been through, she looked no worse for wear. That was remarkable, considering that the last time Shallan had seen Jasnah, the woman had been lying unconscious on the floor while a man rammed a knife through her chest.
“My mother,” Jasnah said, hand still on the pillar, not looking toward Shallan, “thinks this must be some kind of incredibly intricate fabrial. A logical assumption; we’ve always believed that the ancients had access to great and wonderful technology. How else do you explain Shardblades and Shardplate?”
“Brightness?” Shallan said. “But … Shardblades aren’t fabrials. They’re spren, transformed by the bond.”
“As are fabrials, after a manner of speaking,” Jasnah said. “You do know how they’re made, don’t you?”
“Only vaguely,” Shallan said. This was how their reunion went? A lecture? Fitting.
“You capture a spren,” Jasnah said, “and imprison it inside a gemstone crafted for the purpose. Artifabrians have found that specific stimuli will provoke certain responses in the spren. For example, flamespren give off heat—and by pressing metal against a ruby with a flamespren trapped inside, you can increase or decrease that heat.”
“That’s…”
“Incredible?”
“Horrible,” Shallan said. She’d known some of this, but to contemplate it directly appalled her. “Brightness, we’re imprisoning spren?”
“No worse than hitching a wagon to a chull.”
“Sure, if in order to get a chull to pull a wagon, you first had to lock it in a box forever.”
Pattern hummed softly from her skirts in agreement.
Jasnah just cocked an eyebrow. “There are spren and there are spren, child.” She rested her fingers on the pillar again. “Do a sketch of this for me. Be certain to get the proportions and colors right, if you please.”
The careless presumption of the command hit Shallan like a slap in the face. What was she, some servant to be given orders?
Yes, a part of her affirmed. That’s exactly what you are. You’re Jasnah’s ward. The request wasn’t at all unusual in that light, but compared to how she had grown accustomed to being treated, it was …
Well, it wasn’t worth taking offense at, and she should accept that. Storms, when had she grown so touchy? She took out her sketchpad and got to work.
“I was heartened to hear that you had made it here on your own,” Jasnah said. “I … apologize for what happened on Wind’s Pleasure. My lack of foresight caused the deaths of many, and doubtless hardship for you, Shallan. Please accept my regret.”
Shallan shrugged, sketching.
“You’ve done very well,” Jasnah continued. “Imagine my amazement when I reached the Shattered Plains, only to discover that the warcamp had already relocated to this tower. What you have accomplished is brilliant, child. We will need to speak further, however, about the group that again tried to assassinate me. The Ghostbloods will almost certainly start targeting you, now that you’ve begun progressing toward your final Ideals.”
“You’re sure it was the Ghostbloods that attacked the ship?”
“Of course I am.” She glanced at Shallan, lips turning down. “Are you certain you are well enough to be about, child? You seem uncharacteristically reserved.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re displeased because of the secrets I kept.”
“We all need secrets, Brightness. I know this more than anyone. But it would have been nice if you had let us know you were alive.” Here I was assuming I could handle things on my own—assuming I’d have to handle things on my own. But all that time, you were on your way back to toss everything into the air again.
“I only had the opportunity upon reaching the warcamps,” Jasnah said, “and there decided that I couldn’t risk it. I was tired and unprotected. If the Ghostbloods wished to finish me off, they could have done so at their leisure. I determined that a few more days of everyone believing I was dead would not greatly increase their distress.”
“But how did you even survive in the first place?”
“Child, I’m an Elsecaller.”
“Of course. An Elsecaller, Brightness. A thing you never explained; a word which no one but the most dedicated scholar of the esoteric would recognize! That explains it perfectly.”
Jasnah smiled for some reason.
“All Radiants have an attachment to Shadesmar,” Jasnah said. “Our spren originate there, and our bond ties us to them. But my order has special control over moving between realms. I was able to shift to Shadesmar to escape my would-be assassins.”
“And that helped with the knife in your storming chest?”
“No,” Jasnah said. “But surely by now you’ve learned the value of a little Stormlight when it comes to bodily wounds?”
Of course she had, and she could probably have guessed all of this. But for some reason she didn’t want to accept that. She wanted to remain annoyed at Jasnah.
“My true difficulty was not escaping, but returning,” Jasnah said. “My powers make it easy to transfer to Shadesmar, but getting back to this realm is no small feat. I had to find a transfer point—a place where Shadesmar and our realm touch—which is far, far more difficult than one might assume. It’s like … going downhill one way, but uphill to get back.”
Well, perhaps her return would take some pressure off Shallan. Jasnah could be “Brightness Radiant” and Shallan could be … well, whatever she was.
“We will need to converse further,” Jasnah said. “I would hear the exact story, from your perspective, of the discovery of Urithiru. And I assume you have sketches of the transformed parshmen? That will tell us much. I … believe I once disparaged the usefulness of your artistic skill. I now find reason to call myself foolish for that presumption.”
“It’s fine, Brightness,” Shallan said with a sigh, still sketching the pillar. “I can get you those things, and there is a lot to talk about.” But how much of it would she be able to say? How would Jasnah react, for instance, to finding that Shallan had been dealing with the Ghostbloods?
It’s not like you’re really a part of their organization, Shallan thought to herself. If anything, you’re using them for information. Jasnah might find that admirable.
Shallan still wasn’t eager to broach the topic.
“I feel lost…” Jasnah said.
Shallan l
“For years I was at the very forefront of all this,” Jasnah said. “One short stumble, and I find myself scrambling to stay afloat. These visions that my uncle is having … the refounding of the Radiants in my absence …
“That Windrunner. What do you think of him, Shallan? I find him much as I imagined his order, but I have only met him once. It has all come so quickly. After years of struggling in the shadows, everything coming to light—and despite my years of study—I understand so very little.”
Shallan continued her sketch. It was nice to be reminded that, for all their differences, there were occasional things that she and Jasnah shared.
She just wished that ignorance weren’t at the top of the list.
I noticed its arrival immediately, just as I noticed your many intrusions into my land.
It is time, the Stormfather said.
All went dark around Dalinar, and he entered a place between his world and the visions. A place with a black sky and an infinite floor of bone-white rock. Shapes made of smoke seeped through the stone ground, then rose around him, dissipating. Common things. A chair, a vase, a rockbud. Sometimes people.
I HAVE HER. The Stormfather’s voice shook this place, eternal and vast. THE THAYLEN QUEEN. MY STORM HITS HER CITY NOW.
“Good,” Dalinar said. “Please give her the vision.”
Fen was to see the vision with the Knights Radiant falling from the sky, come to deliver a small village from a strange and monstrous force. Dalinar wanted her to see the Knights Radiant firsthand, as they had once been. Righteous, protecting.
WHERE SHALL I PUT HER? the Stormfather asked.
“The same place you put me my first time,” Dalinar said. “In the home. With the family.”
AND YOU?
“I’ll observe, then talk to her after.”
YOU MUST BE PART OF EVENTS, the Stormfather said, sounding stubborn. YOU MUST TAKE THE ROLE OF SOMEONE. THIS IS HOW IT WORKS.
“Fine. Pick someone. But if possible, make Fen see me as myself, and let me see her.” He felt at the side sword he wore at his belt. “And can you let me keep this? I’d rather not have to fight with a poker again.”