place one like you should be visiting, if you don’t mind me saying.”
Even as a darkeyes, people thought her incapable of taking care of herself. “Thank you,” Shallan said, plucking out one of the sticks of candied fruit. She hastened away, crossing the flow to join those walking in the opposite direction through the market.
“Pattern?” she whispered.
“Mmm.” He was clinging to the outside of her coat, near the knees.
“Trail behind and watch to see if anyone follows me,” Shallan said. “Do you think you can do that?”
“They will make a pattern if they come,” he said, dropping to the ground. For a brief moment in the air, between coat and stone, he was a dark mass of twisting lines. Then he vanished like a drop of water hitting a lake.
Shallan hurried along with the flow, safehand securely gripping the sphere pouch in her coat pocket, freehand carrying the stick of fruit. She remembered all too well how Jasnah’s deliberate flashing of too much money in Kharbranth had lured thieves like vines to stormwater.
Shallan followed the directions, her sense of liberation replaced by anxiety. The corner she took out of the market led her to a roadway that was much less crowded. Was the fruit vendor trying to direct Shallan into a trap where she could be robbed easily? Head down, she hurried along the road. She couldn’t Soulcast to protect herself, not as Jasnah had. Storms! Shallan hadn’t even been able to make sticks catch fire. She doubted she’d be able to transform living bodies.
She had Lightweaving, but she was already using that. Could she Lightweave a second image at the same time? How was her disguise doing, anyway? It would be draining the Light from her spheres. She almost pulled them out to see how much was gone, then stopped herself. Fool. She was worried about being robbed, and so she considered revealing a handful of money?
She stopped after two blocks. Some people did walk this street, a handful of men in workers’ clothing heading home for the night. The buildings here certainly weren’t as nice as the ones she’d left behind.
“Nobody follows,” Pattern said from her feet.
Shallan jumped nearly to the rooftops. She raised her freehand to her breast, breathing in and out deeply. She really thought she could infiltrate a group of assassins? Her own spren often made her jump.
Tyn said that nothing would teach me, Shallan thought, but personal experience. I’m just going to have to muddle through these first few times and hope I get used to this before I get myself killed.
“Let’s keep moving,” Shallan said. “We’re running out of time.” She started forward, digging into the fruit. It really was good, though her nerves prevented her from fully enjoying it.
The street with the taverns was actually five blocks away, not six. Shallan’s increasingly wrinkled paper showed the meeting place as a tenement building across from a tavern with blue light shining through the windows.
Shallan tossed aside her fruit stick as she stepped up to the tenement building. It couldn’t be old—nothing in these warcamps could be more than five or six years old—but it looked ancient. The stones weathered, the window shutters hanging askew in places. She was surprised a highstorm hadn’t blown the thing over.
Fully aware that she could be striding into the whitespine’s den for dinner, she walked up and knocked. The door was opened by a darkeyed man the size of a boulder who had a beard trimmed like a Horneater’s. His hair did seem to have some red in it.
She resisted the urge to shuffle from one foot to the next as he looked her up and down. Finally, he opened the door all the way, motioning her in with thick fingers. She didn’t miss the large axe that leaned against the wall just next to him, illuminated by the single feeble Stormlight lamp—it looked like it only had a chip in it—on the wall.
Taking a deep breath, Shallan entered.
The place smelled moldy. She heard water dripping from somewhere farther inside, stormwater infallibly making its way from a leaking roof down, down, down to the ground floor. The guard did not speak as he led her along the hall. The floor was wood. There was something about walking on wood that made her feel as if she were going to fall through. It seemed to groan with every step. Good stone never did anything like that.
The guard nodded toward an opening in the wall, and Shallan stared into the