“He walked right up to us, sir. He’s sitting on a rock over there.”
Dalinar looked to Shallan, who shrugged. Dalinar started off in the direction Teleb had pointed.
“Sir?” Teleb said, voice resonating inside his helm. “Should you . . .”
Dalinar ignored the warning, and Shallan hastened after him, collecting Vathah and his two guards.
“Should you head back?” Vathah said under his breath to her. Storms, but that face of his looked dangerous in the dim light, even if his voice was respectful. She couldn’t help but still see him as the man who had almost killed her, back in the Unclaimed Hills.
“I will be safe,” Shallan replied softly.
“You might have a Blade, Brightness, but you could still die to an arrow in the back.”
“Unlikely, in this rain,” she said.
He fell in behind her, offering no further objection. He was trying to do the job she had assigned him. Unfortunately, she was discovering that she didn’t much like being guarded.
They found the Parshendi after a hike through the rain. The rock he sat on was about as high as a man was tall. He seemed to have no weapons, and about a hundred Alethi soldiers stood around the base of his seat, spears pointed upward. Shallan couldn’t make out much more, as he sat across the chasm from them, a portable bridge in place to his plateau.
“Has he said anything?” Dalinar asked softly as Teleb stepped up.
“Not that I know of,” the Shardbearer said. “He just sits there.”
Shallan peered across the chasm toward the solitary Parshendi man. He stood up, and shaded his eyes against the rain. The soldiers below shuffled, spears rising into more threatening positions.
“Skar?” the Parshendi’s voice called. “Skar, is that you? And Leyten?”
Nearby, one of Dalinar’s bridgeman guards cursed. He ran across the bridge, and several other bridgemen followed.
They returned a moment later. Shallan crowded in closely to hear what their leader whispered to Dalinar.
“It’s him, sir,” Skar said. “He’s changed, but storm me for a fool if I’m wrong—it’s him. Shen. He ran bridges with us for months, then vanished. Now he’s here. He says he wants to surrender to you.”
Q: For what essential must we strive? A: The essential of preservation, to shelter a seed of humanity through the coming storm. Q: What cost must we bear? A: The cost is irrelevant. Mankind must survive. Our burden is that of the species, and all other considerations are but dust by comparison.
—From the Diagram, Catechism of the Back of the Flowered Painting: paragraph 1
Dalinar stood with hands behind his back, waiting in his command tent and listening to the patter of rain on the cloth. The floor of the tent was wet. You couldn’t avoid that, in the Weeping. He knew that from miserable experience—he’d been out on more than one military excursion during this time of year.
It was the day after they’d discovered the Parshendi on the Plains—both the dead one and the one the bridgemen called Shen, or Rlain, as he had said his name was. Dalinar himself had allowed the man to be armed.
Shallan claimed that all parshmen were Voidbringers in embryo. He had ample reason to believe her word, considering what she’d shown him. But what was he to do? The Radiants had returned, the Parshendi had manifested red eyes. Dalinar felt as if he were trying to stop a dam from breaking, all the while not knowing where the leaks were actually coming from.
The tent flaps parted and Adolin ducked in, escorting Navani. She hung her stormcoat on the rack beside the flap, and Adolin grabbed a towel and began drying his hair and face.
Adolin was betrothed to a member of the Knights Radiant. She says she’s not one yet, Dalinar reminded himself. That made sense. One could be a trained spearman without being a soldier. One implied skill, the other a position.
“They are bringing the Parshendi man?” Dalinar asked.
“Yes,” Navani said, sitting down in one of the room’s chairs. Adolin didn’t take his seat, but found a pitcher of filtered rainwater and poured himself a cup. He tapped the side of the tin cup as he drank.
They were restless, all of them, following the discovery of red-eyed Parshendi. After no attack had come that night, Dalinar had pushed the three armies into another day of marching.
Slowly, they approached the middle of the Plains, at least as Shallan’s projections indicated. They were already well beyond the regions that scouts had explored. Now, they had to rely on the young woman’s maps.
The