easily now. His leg twitched.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, unhooking her necklace. “Thank you for what you did for me.” She wrapped the necklace around his neck.
Then she began to twist.
She used the handle of one of the forks that had fallen from the table as her father tried to steady himself. She looped one side of the closed necklace around it, and in twisting, pulled the chain very tight around Father’s throat.
“Now go to sleep,” she whispered, “in chasms deep, with darkness all around you . . .”
A lullaby. Shallan spoke the song through her tears—the song he’d sung for her as a child, when she was frightened. Red blood speckled his face and covered her hands.
“Though rock and dread may be your bed, so sleep my baby dear.”
She felt his eyes on her. Her skin squirmed as she held the necklace tight.
“Now comes the storm,” she whispered, “but you’ll be warm, the wind will rock your basket . . .”
Shallan had to watch as his eyes bulged out, his face turning colors. His body trembling, straining, trying to move. The eyes looked to her, demanding, betrayed.
Almost, Shallan could imagine that the storm’s howls were part of a nightmare. That soon she would awaken in terror, and Father would sing to her. As he’d done when she was a child . . .
“The crystals fine . . . will glow sublime . . .”
Father stopped moving.
“And with a song . . . you’ll sleep . . . my baby dear.”
You, however, have never been a force for equilibrium. You tow chaos behind you like a corpse dragged by one leg through the snow. Please, hearken to my plea. Leave that place and join me in my oath of nonintervention.
Kaladin caught Shallan’s hand.
Boulders crashed above, smashing against the plateaus, breaking off chunks and tossing them down around him. Wind raged. Water swelled below, rising toward him. He clung to Shallan, but their wet hands started to slip.
And then, in a sudden surge, her grip tightened. With a strength that seemed to belie her smaller form, she heaved. Kaladin shoved with his good leg as water washed over it, and forced himself up the remaining distance to join her in the rocky alcove.
The hollow was barely three or four feet deep, shallower than the crack they’d hid in. Fortunately, it faced westward. Though icy wind twisted about and sprayed water on them, the brunt of the storm was broken by the plateau.
Puffing, Kaladin pulled against the wall of the alcove, his injured leg smarting like nothing else, Shallan clinging to him. She was a warmth in his arms, and he held to her as much as she did him, both of them sitting hunched against the rock, his head brushing the top of the hollowed hole.
The plateau shuddered, quivering like a frightened man. He couldn’t see much; the blackness was absolute except when lightning came. And the sound. Thunder crashing, seemingly disconnected from the sprays of lightning. Water roared like an angry beast, and the flashes illuminated a frothing, churning, raging river in the chasm.
Damnation . . . it was almost up to their alcove. It had risen fifty or more feet in moments. The dirty water was filled with branches, broken plants, vines ripped from their mountings.
“The sphere?” Kaladin asked in the blackness. “You had a sphere with you for light.”
“Gone,” she shouted over the roar. “I must have dropped it when I grabbed you!”
“I didn’t—”
A crash of thunder, accompanied by a blinding flash of light, sent him stuttering. Shallan pulled more tightly against him, fingers digging into his arm. The light left an afterimage in his eyes.
Storms. He could swear that afterimage was a face, horribly twisted, the mouth pulled open. The next lightning bolt lit the flood just outside with a sequence of crackling light, and it showed water bobbing with corpses. Dozens of them pulled past in the current, dead eyes toward the sky, many just empty sockets. Men and Parshendi.
The water surged upward, and a few inches of it flooded the chamber. The water of dead men. The storm went dark again, as black as a cavern beneath the ground. Just Kaladin, Shallan, and the bodies.
“That was,” Shallan said, her head near his, “the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Storms are strange.”
“You speak from experience?”
“Sadeas hung me out in one,” he said. “I was supposed to die.”
That tempest had tried to rip the skin, then muscles, from his skeleton. Rain like knives. Lightning like a cauterizing iron.
And