Rhythm of War (The Stormlight Archive #4) - Brandon Sanderson Page 0,478

can do? How did we ever let him fool us?

“Tell me what to do!” Lusintia said. “Do we carry her out to that Edgedancer?”

“It will take too long. She will die. Poor human whom I love very much. It will be tragic for her to die here, in the center of honorspren power and protection. Unless, of course, she were to be given Stormlight.”

“Wait … Stormlight?”

“Yes, she is Radiant,” Pattern said. “It would heal her.”

Shallan suppressed a smile. Pattern was a tad transparent, but the honorspren here plainly had little experience with humans. They swallowed the bait without question, and soon Shallan was being carried by a team of four. She tucked away the piece of cloth-wrapped stone she’d used to smack the ground as she landed, giving the impression that she’d hit her head.

In reality, her arm did ache. She had undoubtedly bruised it when she hit, though this wasn’t the worst self-inflicted wound she’d sustained in the name of science. At least this time her scheme hadn’t involved deliberately embarrassing herself in front of several attractive men.

She made sure to groan occasionally, and Pattern kept exclaiming how worried he was. That kept Lusintia and the other honorspren motivated as they hauled Shallan to a specific building, their footfalls echoing against enclosing stone.

They had a hushed but urgent conversation with a guard. Shallan made a particularly poignant whimper of pain at exactly the right moment, and then she was in. Light surrounded her as she was brought someplace brilliant. They hadn’t let her in here last time, when they retrieved Stormlight for Adolin’s healing.

She let her eyes flutter open and found that most of the Stormlight was contained in a large construction at the center of the room. A kind of vat, or tall jar. This was technology Shallan hadn’t heard of before coming to Shadesmar, and apparently not even the honorspren knew how it worked. They could be purchased from a group of strange traveling merchants called the Eyree.

Shelves nearby held a collection of loose gemstones, each glowing brightly. The wealth of Lasting Integrity: gemstones—gathered over millennia—so flawless, so perfect, that they didn’t leak. She’d been told a gemstone like this could, with repeated exposures to storms, absorb far more Stormlight than its size should be able to contain.

She tested this, reaching out with a weak hand toward one of them and sucking in a breath of Stormlight—which streamed to her as a glowing, misty white light.

She immediately felt better: invigorated, alert. Storms, how she’d missed that. Simply holding Stormlight was stimulating. She grinned—not part of the act—then decided to leap to her feet. The ache in her arm vanished; she felt like dancing with joy.

Instead she let Veil take over. This next part needed her—Shallan remained the better actress, but Veil was better at most other espionage skills.

Veil made a show of touching her head where she’d been “wounded.” “What happened?” she asked. “I don’t remember. I was trying to see if I could reach the barrier where the gravity of the plane ran out.”

“You were very foolish, human,” Lusintia said. “You are so fragile! How could you endanger yourself in such a manner? Do you not realize that mortals die if broken?”

“It was in the name of science,” Veil said, reaching to her waist where she’d secured her notebook before climbing. She yanked it out and dropped it in a flurry. At the same time she swept her safehand to the side and dropped a dun emerald in place of a brightly glowing one.

The sleight of hand—performed hundreds of times beneath Tyn’s watch, then perfected on her own—was covered as she stumbled and brushed the shelf, disturbing the many gems and shaking their light. She was able to slip the stolen emerald into her black leather glove.

This all happened in the moment the honorspren focused on her falling notebook. Veil quickly snatched it off the ground and held it to her chest, grinning sheepishly.

“Thank you,” she said. “You saved my life.”

“We would not have you die,” Lusintia said. “Death is a terrible thing, and we…” She trailed off, looking at the shelf and the dun emerald it now contained. “Storms alight! You ate the entire thing? Human, how…”

Another spren, an angry male in uniform, began shoving Shallan out. “That was years’ worth of stored Stormlight!” he exclaimed. “Get out! Go, before you eat anything more! If you fall again, I will have you turned away!”

Veil smothered her grin, apologizing as she stumbled out and met Pattern