nodding to several ardents who strolled past. They didn’t speak to her, fortunately, merely nodding back.
The monastery building, like most everything in Dalinar’s warcamp, was sliced through with dull, unornamented hallways. Shallan followed Pattern’s instructions to a thick door set into the stone. The lock clicked open with Pattern’s help, and Shallan quietly slipped inside.
A single small window—more of a slit—proved insufficient to fully illuminate the large figure sitting on the bed. Dark-skinned, like a man from the Makabaki kingdoms, he had dark, ragged hair and hulking arms. Those were the arms of either a laborer or a soldier. The man sat slumped, back bowed, head down, frail light from the window cutting a slice across his back in white. It made for a grim, powerful silhouette.
The man was whispering. Shallan couldn’t make out the words. She shivered, her back to the door, and held up the sketch Mraize had given her. This seemed to be the same person—at least, the skin color and stout build were the same, though this man was far more muscled than the picture indicated. Storms . . . those hands of his looked as if they could crush her like a cremling.
The man did not move. He did not look up, did not shift. He was like a boulder that had rolled to a stop here.
“Why is it kept so dark in this room?” Pattern asked, perfectly cheerful.
The madman didn’t react to the comment, or even Shallan, as she stepped forward.
“Modern theory for helping the mad suggests dim confines,” Shallan whispered. “Too much light stimulates them, and can reduce the effectiveness of treatment.” That was what she remembered, at least. She hadn’t read much on this subject. The room was dark. That window couldn’t be more than a few fingers wide.
What was he whispering? Shallan cautiously continued forward. “Sir?” she asked. Then she hesitated, realizing that she was projecting a young woman’s voice from an old, fat ardent’s body. Would that startle the man? He wasn’t looking, so she withdrew the illusion.
“He doesn’t seem angry,” Pattern said. “But you call him mad.”
“‘Mad’ has two definitions,” Shallan said. “One means to be angry. The other means broken in the head.”
“Ah,” Pattern said, “like a spren who has lost his bond.”
“Not exactly, I’d guess,” Shallan said, stepping up to the madman. “But similar.” She knelt down by the man, trying to figure out what he was saying.
“The time of the Return, the Desolation, is at hand,” he whispered. She would have expected an Azish accent from him, considering the skin color, but he spoke perfect Alethi. “We must prepare. You will have forgotten much, following the destruction of times past.”
She looked over at Pattern, lost in the shadows at the side of the room, then back at the man. Light glinted off his dark brown eyes, two bright pinpricks on an otherwise shadowed visage. That slumped posture seemed so morose. He whispered on, about bronze and steel, about preparations and training.
“Who are you?” Shallan whispered.
“Talenel’Elin. The one you call Stonesinew.”
She felt a chill. Then the madman continued, whispering the same things he had before, repeated exactly. She couldn’t even be certain if his comment had been a reply to her question, or just a part of his recitation. He did not answer further questions.
Shallan stepped back, folding her arms, satchel over her shoulder.
“Talenel,” Pattern said. “I know that name.”
“Talenelat’Elin is the name of one of the Heralds,” Shallan said. “This is almost the same.”
“Ah.” Pattern paused. “Lie?”
“Undoubtedly,” Shallan said. “It defies reason that Dalinar Kholin would have one of the Heralds of the Almighty locked away in a temple’s back rooms. Many madmen think themselves someone else.”
Of course, many said that Dalinar himself was mad. And he was trying to refound the Knights Radiant. Scooping up a madman who thought he was one of the Heralds could be in line with that.
“Madman,” Shallan said, “where do you come from?”
He continued ranting.
“Do you know what Dalinar Kholin wishes of you?”
More ranting.
Shallan sighed, but knelt and wrote his exact words to deliver to Mraize. She got the entire sequence down, and listened to it twice through to make sure he wasn’t going to say anything new. He didn’t say his supposed name this time, though. So that was one deviation.
He couldn’t actually be one of the Heralds, could he?
Don’t be silly, she thought, tucking away her writing implements. The Heralds glow like the sun, wield the Honorblades, and speak with the voices of a thousand trumpets. They could