Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

Shallan stepped from the carriage into a light rainfall. She wore the white coat and trousers of the darkeyed version of herself that she’d named Veil. Rain sprinkled on the brim of her hat. She’d spent too long talking with Adolin after his duel, and had needed to rush to make it to this appointment, which was happening in the Unclaimed Hills a good hour’s ride out of the warcamps.

  But she was here, in costume, on time. Barely. She strode forward, listening to the rain patter on stone around her. She had always liked rainfalls like these. The younger sisters of highstorms, they brought life without the fury. Even the desolate stormlands here west of the warcamps bloomed with the advent of water. Rockbuds split, and though these didn’t have blossoms like the ones back home, they did put out vibrant green vines. Grass rose thirstily from holes and refused to retreat until it was practically stepped on. Some reeds produced flowers to entice cremlings, which would feast upon the petals and in so doing rub themselves with spores that would give rise to the next generation, once mixed with the spores of other plants.

  If she’d been at home, there would be far more vines—so many that it would be hard to walk without tripping. Going out in a wooded area would require a machete to move more than a couple of feet. Here, the vegetation became colorful, but not an impediment.

  Shallan smiled at the wonderful surroundings, the light rainfall, the beautiful plant life. A little dampness was a small price to pay for the melodious sound of sprinkling rain, for fresh clean air and a beautiful sky full of clouds that varied in every shade of grey.

  Shallan walked with a waterproof satchel under her arm, the hired carriage driver—she couldn’t use Sebarial’s coach for today’s activity—awaiting her return as she’d instructed. This coach was pulled by parshmen instead of horses, but they were faster than chulls and had worked well enough.

  She hiked toward a hillside ahead of her, the destination indicated on the map she’d received via spanreed. She wore a nice pair of sturdy boots. This clothing of Tyn’s might be unusual, but Shallan was glad for it. The coat and hat kept off the rain, and the boots gave her sure footing on the slick rock.

  She rounded the hill and found that it was broken on the other side, the rock having cracked and fallen in a small avalanche. The strata of hardened crem were clearly visible on the edges of the chunks of rock, which meant this was a newer fracture. If it had been old, new crem would have obscured that coloring.

  The crack made a small valley in the hillside—full of clefts and ridges from the crumbled rock. These had caught spores and windborne stems, and that in turn had created an explosion of life. Wherever sheltered from the wind, plants would find purchase and start to grow.

  The snarl of green grew haphazardly—this was not a true lait, where life would be safe over time, but instead a temporary shelter, good for a few years at most. For now, plants grew eagerly, sometimes atop one another, sprouting, blossoming, shaking, twisting, alive. It was an example of raw nature.

  The pavilion, however, was not.

  It covered four people who sat in chairs too fine for the surroundings. Snacking, they were warmed by a brazier at the center of the open-sided tent. Shallan approached, taking Memories of the people’s faces. She’d draw those later, as she had done with the first group of the Ghostbloods she’d met. Two of them were the same as last time. Two were not. The discomforting woman with the mask did not seem to be present.

  Mraize, standing tall and proud, inspected his long blowgun. He did not look up as Shallan stepped under the awning.

  “I like to learn to use the local weapons,” Mraize said. “It is a quirk, though I feel it is justified. If you want to understand a people, learn their weapons. The way men kill one another says far more about a culture than any scholar’s ethnography.”

  He raised his weapon toward Shallan, and she froze in place. Then he turned toward the crack and puffed, blowing a dart into the foliage.

  Shallan stepped up beside him. The dart pinned a cremling to one of the plant stems. The small, many-legged creature spasmed and thrashed, trying to get free, though surely having a dart sticking through it would prove lethal.

  “This is a Parshendi blowgun,” Mraize noted. “What does it say about them, do you suppose, little knife?”

  “It’s obviously not for killing big game,” Shallan said. “Which makes sense. The only big game I know of in the area are the chasmfiends, which the Parshendi are said to have worshipped as gods.”

  She wasn’t convinced that they actually did. Early reports—which she’d read in detail at Jasnah’s insistence—made the assumption that the Parshendi gods were the chasmfiends. It wasn’t actually clear.

  “They probably used it for stalking small game,” Shallan continued. “Which means they hunted for food, rather than pleasure.”

  “Why do you say this?” Mraize asked.

  “Men who glory in the hunt seek grand captures,” Shallan said. “Trophies. That blowgun is the weapon of a man who simply wants to feed his family.”

  “And if he used it against other men?”

  “It wouldn’t be useful in war,” Shallan said. “Too short a range, I’d guess, and the Parshendi have bows anyway. Maybe this could be used in assassination, though I’d be very curious to discover if it was.”

  “And why is that?” Mraize asked.

  A test of some sort. “Well,” Shallan said, “most indigenous populations—the Silnasen natives, the Reshi peoples, the runners of the Iri plains—have no real concept of assassination. From what I know, they don’t seem to have much use for battle at all. Hunters are too valuable, and so a ‘war’ in these cultures will involve a lot of shouting and posturing, but few deaths. That kind of boastful society doesn’t seem the type to have assassins.”

  And yet the Parshendi had sent one. Against the Alethi.

  Mraize was studying her—watching her with unreadable eyes, long blowgun held lightly in his fingertips. “I see,” he finally said, “Tyn chose a scholar to be her apprentice this time around? I find that unusual.”

  Shallan blushed. It occurred to her that this person she became when she put on the hat and dark hair was not an imitation of someone else, not a different person. It was just a version of Shallan herself.

  That could be dangerous.

  “So,” Mraize said, fishing another dart from his shirt pocket, “what excuse did Tyn give you today?”

  “Excuse?” Shallan asked.

  “For failing in her mission.” Mraize loaded the dart.

  Failing? Shallan began to sweat, cold prickles on her forehead. But she’d watched to see if anything out of the ordinary happened at Amaram’s camp! This morning, she’d gone back—the real reason she’d been late to Adolin’s duel—while wearing the face of a worker. She’d listened to see if anyone spoke of a break-in, or of Amaram being suspicious. She’d found nothing.

  Well, obviously Amaram had not made his suspicions public. After all the work she’d done to cover up her incursion, she had failed. She probably shouldn’t be surprised, but she was anyway.

  “I—” Shallan began.

  “I’m beginning to wonder if Tyn really is sick,” Mraize said, raising the blowgun and shooting another dart into the foliage. “To not even try to carry out the assigned task.”

  “Not even try?” Shallan asked, baffled.

  “Oh, is that the excuse?” Mraize asked. “That she made an attempt, and failed? I have people watching that house. If she had . . .”

  He trailed off as Shallan shook the water from her satchel, then carefully undid it and lifted out a sheet of paper. It was a representation of Amaram’s locked room with its maps on the walls. She’d had to guess at some of the details—it had been dark, and her single sphere hadn’t illuminated much—but she figured it was close enough.

  Mraize took the picture from her and raised it. He studied it, leaving Shallan to sweat nervously.

  “It is rare,” Mraize said, “that I am proven a fool. Congratulations.”

  Was that
a good thing?

  “Tyn doesn’t have this skill,” Mraize continued, still inspecting the sheet. “You saw this room yourself?”

  “There is a reason that she chose a scholar as her assistant. My skills are meant to complement her own.”

  Mraize lowered the sheet. “Surprising. Your mistress might be a brilliant thief, but her choice of associates has always been unenlightened.” He had such a refined way of speaking. It didn’t seem to match his scarred face, misaligned lip, and weathered hands. He talked like a man who had spent his days sipping wine and listening to fine music, but he looked like someone who had repeatedly had his bones broken—and likely returned the favor many times over.

  “Pity there is not more detail to these maps,” Mraize noted, inspecting the picture again.

  Shallan obligingly got out the other five pictures she’d drawn for him. Four were the maps on the walls in detail, the other a closer depiction of the wall scrolls with Amaram’s script. In each one, the actual writing was indecipherable, just wiggled lines. Shallan had done this on purpose. Nobody would expect an artist to be able to capture such detail from memory, even though she could.

  She would keep the details of the script from them. She intended to gain their trust, to learn what she could, but she would not help them more than she had to.

  Mraize passed his blowgun to the side. The short, masked girl was there, holding the cremling that Mraize had speared along with a dead mink, a blowgun dart in its neck. No, its leg twitched. It was merely stunned. Some poison on the dart, then?

  Shallan shivered. Where had this woman been hiding? Those dark eyes stared at Shallan, unblinking, the rest of the face hidden behind the mask of paint and shell. She took the blowgun.

  “Amazing,” Mraize said of Shallan’s pictures. “How did you get in? We watched the windows.”

  Was that how Tyn would have done it, sneaking in during the dead of night through one of the windows? She hadn’t trained Shallan in that sort of thing, only accents and imitation. Perhaps she had spotted that Shallan, who sometimes stumbled over her own feet, would not be best at acrobatic larceny.

  “These are masterful,” Mraize said, walking to a table and setting out the pictures. “A triumph, certainly. Such artistry.”

  What had happened to the dangerous, emotionless man who had confronted her at her first meeting with the Ghostbloods? Animated with emotion, he leaned down, studying the pictures one at a time. He even got out a magnifying glass in order to inspect the details.

  She did not ask what she wondered. What is Amaram doing? Do you know how he got his Shardblade? How he . . . killed Helaran Davar? Her breath caught in her throat even still as she thought about it, but a part of her had admitted years ago that her brother wasn’t coming back.

  That didn’t stop her from feeling a distinct, and surprising, hatred for the man Meridas Amaram.

  “Well?” Mraize asked, glancing at her. “Come sit down, child. You did this yourself?”

  “I did,” Shallan said, shoving down her emotions. Had Mraize just called her “child”? She’d intentionally made this version of her look older, with a more angular face. What did she need to do? Start adding grey hairs to her head?

  She settled into the seat beside the table. The woman with the mask appeared beside her, holding a cup and a kettle of something steaming. Shallan nodded hesitantly, and was rewarded with a cup of mulled orange wine. She sipped it—she probably didn’t need to worry about poison, as these people could have killed her at any time. The others under the pavilion spoke with one another in hushed voices, but Shallan couldn’t make out any of it. She felt like she was on display before an audience.

  “I copied some of the text for you,” Shallan said, fishing out one page of script. These were lines she had specifically chosen to show them—they didn’t reveal too much, but might act as a primer to get Mraize talking about the topic. “We didn’t have much time in the room, so I only got a few lines.”

  “You spent so long in there drawing the pictures, and so little recording the text?” Mraize asked.

  “Oh,” Shallan said. “No, I did those pictures from memory.”

  He looked up at her, jaw lowered a fraction, an expression of genuine surprise crossing his face before he quickly restored his usual confident equanimity.

  That . . . probably wasn’t wise to admit, Shallan realized. How many people could draw so well from memory? Had Shallan publicly demonstrated her skill in the warcamps?

  So far as she knew, she hadn’t. Now she would have to keep that aspect of her skill secret, lest the Ghostbloods make a connection between Shallan the lighteyed lady and Veil the darkeyed con artist. Storms.

  Well, she was bound to make some mistakes. At least this one wasn’t life threatening. Probably.

  “Jin,” Mraize snapped.

  A golden-haired man with a bare chest beneath a flowing outer robe stood up from one of the chairs.

  “Look at him,” Mraize said to Shallan.

  She took a Memory.

  “Jin, leave us. You will draw him, Veil.”

  She had no choice but to oblige. As Jin walked off, grumbling to himself at the rain, Shallan started sketching. She did a full sketch—not just his face and shoulders, but an environment study, including the background of fallen boulders. Nervous, she didn’t do as good a job as she could have, but Mraize still cooed over her picture like a proud father. She finished and got out her lacquer—this was in charcoal, and would want it—but Mraize plucked it from her fingers first.

  “Incredible,” he said, holding the sheet up. “You are wasted with Tyn. You can’t do this with text, however?”

  “No,” Shallan lied.

  “Pity. Still, this is marvelous. Marvelous. There should be ways to use this, yes indeed.” He looked to her. “What is your goal, child? I might have a place for you in my organization, if you prove reliable.”

  Yes! “I wouldn’t have agreed to come in Tyn’s place if I hadn’t wanted that opportunity.”

  Mraize narrowed his eyes at Shallan. “You killed her, didn’t you?”

  Oh, blast. Shallan blushed immediately, of course. “Uh . . .”

  “Ha!” Mraize exclaimed. “She finally picked an assistant who was too capable. Delightful. After all of her arrogant posturing, she was brought down by someone she thought to make into a sycophant.”

  “Sir,” Shallan said. “I didn’t . . . I mean, I didn’t want to. She turned on me.”

  “That must be quite the story,” Mraize said, smiling. It was not a pleasant smile. “Know that what you have done is not forbidden, but it is hardly encouraged. We cannot run an organization properly if subordinates consider hunting their superiors to be a primary method of advancement.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your superior, however, was not a member of our organization. Tyn thought herself to be the hunter, but she was game all along. If you are to join us, you should understand. We are not like others you may have known. We have a greater purpose, and we are . . . protective of one another.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So who are you?” he asked, waving for his servant to bring back the blowgun. “Who are you really, Veil?”

  “Someone who wants to be part of things,” Shallan said. “Things more important than stealing from the odd lighteyes or scamming for a weekend of luxury.”

  “So it is a hunt, then,” Mraize said softly, grinning. He turned away from her, walking back to the edge of the pavilion. “More instructions will follow. Do the task assigned to you. Then we shall see.”

  It is a hunt, then. . . .

  What kind of hunt? Shallan felt chilled by that statement.

  Once again, her dismissal was uncertain, but she did up her satchel and started to leave. As she did so, she glanced at the remaining seated people. Their expressions were cold. Frighteningly so.

  Shallan left the pavilion and found that the rain had stopped. She walked away, feeling eyes on her back. They all know that I can
identify them with exactness, she realized, and can present accurate pictures of them for any who request.

  They would not like that. Mraize had made it clear that Ghostbloods didn’t often kill one another. But he’d also made it clear that she wasn’t one of them, not yet. He’d said it pointedly, as if granting permission to those listening in.

  Talat’s hand, what had she gotten herself into?

  You’re only considering that now? she thought as she rounded the hillside. Her carriage was ahead, the coachman lounging on top, his back to her. Shallan looked anxiously over her shoulder. Nobody had followed yet, at least not that she could see.

  “Is anyone watching, Pattern?” she asked.

  “Mmm. Me. No people.”

  A rock. She’d drawn a boulder in the picture for Mraize. Not thinking—working by instinct and no small amount of panic—she breathed out Stormlight and shaped an image of that boulder before her.

  Then, she promptly hid inside of it.

  It was dark in there. She curled up in the boulder, sitting with her legs pulled against her. It felt undignified. The other people Mraize worked with probably didn’t do silly things like this. They were practiced, smooth, capable. Storms, she probably didn’t need to be hiding in the first place.

  She sat there anyway. The looks in the eyes of the others . . . the way that Mraize had spoken . . .

  Better to be overly cautious than naive. She was tired of people assuming she couldn’t care for herself.

  “Pattern,” she whispered. “Go to the carriage driver. Tell him this, in my exact voice. ‘I have entered the carriage when you weren’t looking. Do not look. My exit must be stealthy. Carry me back to the city. Pull up to the warcamps and wait to a count of ten. I will leave. Do not look. You have your payment, and discretion was part of it.’”

  Pattern hummed and moved off. A short time later, the carriage rattled away, pulled by its parshmen. It didn’t take long for hoofbeats to follow. She hadn’t seen horses.

  Shallan waited, anxious. Would any of the Ghostbloods realize this boulder wasn’t supposed to be here? Would they come back, looking for her once they didn’t see her leave the carriage at the warcamps?