her, because she didn’t even seem winded when they reached the next intersection.
No time for hesitation. He barreled down a pathway, ears full of the sound of grinding carapace. A sudden four-voiced trump echoed through the chasm, as loud as a thousand horns being blown. Shallan screamed, though Kaladin barely heard her over the horrible sound.
The chasm plants withdrew in large waves. In moments, the entire place went from fecund to barren, like the world preparing for a highstorm. They hit another intersection, and Shallan hesitated, looking back toward the sounds. She held her hands out, as if preparing to embrace the thing. Storming woman! He grabbed her and pulled her after him. They ran down two chasms without stopping.
It was still chasing, though he could only hear it. He had no idea how close it was, but it had their scent. Or their sound? He had no idea how they hunted.
Need a plan! Can’t just—
At the next intersection, Shallan turned the opposite way from the one he had picked. Kaladin cursed, pounding to a stop and running after her.
“This is no time,” he said, puffing, “to argue about—”
“Shut it,” she said. “Follow.”
She led them to an intersection, then another. Kaladin was feeling winded, his lungs protesting. Shallan stopped, then pointed and ran down a chasm. He followed, looking over his shoulder.
He could see only blackness. Moonlight was too distant, too choked, to illuminate these depths. They wouldn’t know if the beast was upon them until it entered the light of his spheres. But Stormfather, it sounded close.
Kaladin turned his attention back to his running. He nearly tripped over something on the ground. A corpse? He leaped it, catching up to Shallan. The hem of her dress was snarled and ripped from the running, her hair a mess, her face flushed. She led them down another corridor, then slowed to a stop, hand to the wall of the chasm, puffing.
Kaladin closed his eyes, breathing in and out. Can’t rest long. It will be coming. He felt as if he were going to collapse.
“Cover that light,” Shallan hissed.
He frowned at her, but did so. “We can’t rest long,” he hissed back.
“Quiet.”
The darkness was complete save for the thin light escaping between his fingers. The scraping seemed almost on top of them. Storms! Could he fight one of these monsters? Without Stormlight? Desperate, he tried to suck in the Light he held in his palm.
No Stormlight came, and he hadn’t seen Syl since the fall. The scraping continued. He prepared to run, but . . .
The sounds didn’t seem to be getting closer anymore. Kaladin frowned. The body he’d stumbled over, it had been one of the fallen from the fight earlier. Shallan had led them back to where they’d started.
And . . . to food for the beast.
He waited, tense, listening to his heartbeat thumping in his chest. Scraping echoed in the chasm. Oddly, some light flashed in the chasm behind. What was that?
“Stay here,” Shallan whispered.
Then, incredibly, she started to move toward the sounds. Still holding the spheres awkwardly with one hand, he reached out with the other and snatched her.
She turned back to him, then looked down. Inadvertently, he’d grabbed her by the safehand. He let go immediately.
“I have to see it,” Shallan whispered to him. “We’re so close.”
“Are you insane?”
“Probably.” She continued toward the beast.
Kaladin debated, cursing her in his mind. Finally, he put his spear down and dropped her pack and satchel over its spheres to muffle the light. Then he followed. What else could he do? Explain to Adolin? Yes, princeling. I let your betrothed wander off alone in the darkness to get eaten by a chasmfiend. No, I didn’t go with her. Yes, I’m a coward.
There was light ahead. It showed Shallan—her outline, at least—crouching beside a turn in the chasm, peeking around. Kaladin stepped up to her, crouching down and taking a look.
There it was.
The beast filled the chasm. Long and narrow, it wasn’t bulbous or bulky, like some small cremlings. It was sinuous, sleek, with that arrowlike face and sharp mandibles.
It was also wrong. Wrong in a way difficult to describe. Big creatures were supposed to be slow and docile, like chulls. Yet this enormous beast moved with ease, its legs up on the sides of the chasm, holding it so that its body barely touched the ground. It ate the corpse of a fallen soldier, grasping the body in smaller claws by its mouth, then ripping it in half with a gruesome