this.”
She raised an eyebrow at him as he opened his eyes. He looked dizzy.
“I have,” he insisted. “That’s not just soldier bravado.”
“This bad?” she asked. “How often?”
“Twice,” he admitted. He looked over the hulking form of the chasmfiend. “We actually killed the thing.”
“Sad, I know,” she said, feeling depressed. “It was beautiful.”
“It would be more beautiful if it hadn’t tried to eat me.”
“From my perspective,” Shallan noted, “it didn’t try, it succeeded.”
“Nonsense,” Kaladin said. “It didn’t manage to swallow me. Doesn’t count.” He held his hand out to her, as if for help getting to his feet.
“You want to try to keep going?”
“You expect me to just lie here in the chasm until the waters come?”
“No, but . . .” She looked up. The chasmfiend was big. Maybe twenty feet tall, as it lay on its side. “What if we climbed up that thing, then tried to scale up to the top of the plateau?” The farther westward they’d gone, the shallower the chasms had grown.
Kaladin looked up. “That’s still a good eighty feet of climbing, Shallan. And what would we do on the top of the plateau? The storm would blow us off.”
“We could at least try to find some kind of shelter . . .” she said. “Storms, it really is hopeless, isn’t it?”
Oddly, he cocked his head. “Probably.”
“Only ‘probably’?”
“Shelter . . . You have a Shardblade.”
“And?” she asked. “I can’t cut away a wall of water.”
“No, but you can cut stone.” He looked up, toward the wall of the chasm.
Shallan’s breath caught in her throat. “We can carve out a cubby! Like the scouts use.”
“High up the wall,” he said. “You can see the water line up there. If we can get above that . . .”
It still meant climbing. She wouldn’t have to go all the way to where the chasm got narrow at the top, but it wouldn’t be an easy climb, by any means. And she had very little time.
But it was a chance.
“You’re going to have to do it,” Kaladin said. “I might be able to stand, with help. But climbing while wielding a Shardblade . . .”
“Right,” Shallan said, standing up. She took a deep breath. “Right.”
She started by scaling the back of the chasmfiend. The smooth carapace made for slippery climbing, but she found footholds between plates. Once on its back, she looked up toward the water line. It seemed much higher than it had from below.
“Cut handholds,” Kaladin called.
Right. She kept forgetting about the Shardblade. She didn’t want to think about it . . .
No. No time for that now. She summoned the Blade and cut out a series of long strips of rock, sending chunks falling to bounce off the carapace. She tucked her hair behind her ear, working in the dim light to create a ladderlike series of handholds up the side of the wall.
She started climbing them. Standing on one and clinging to the highest one, she summoned the Blade again and tried to cut a step even higher, but the thing was just so blasted long.
Obligingly, it shrank in her hand to the size of a much shorter sword, really a big knife.
Thank you, she thought, then cut out the next line of rock.
Up she went, handhold after handhold. It was sweaty work, and she periodically had to climb back down and rest her hands from clinging. Eventually, she got about as high as she figured she could, just over the water line. She hung there awkwardly, then began hacking out sections of rock, trying to cut them so they wouldn’t tumble backward onto her head.
Falling stone made a beating sound on the dead chasmfiend’s armor. “You’re doing great!” Kaladin called up to her. “Keep at it!”
“When did you get so peppy?” she shouted.
“Ever since I assumed I was dead, then I suddenly wasn’t.”
“Then remind me to try to kill you once in a while,” she snapped. “If I succeed, it will make me feel better, and if I fail, it will make you feel better. Everyone wins!”
She heard him chuckling as she dug deeper into the stone. It was more difficult than she’d have imagined. Yes, the Blade cut the rock easily, but she kept cutting sections that just wouldn’t fall out. She had to chop them to pieces, then dismiss the Blade and grab chunks to pull them out.
After over an hour of frantic work, however, she managed to craft a semblance of a refuge. She didn’t get the cubby hollowed out as deeply