stopped the murders at any time.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Kaladin said. “But you never had to kill.”
“My orders—”
“Excuses! If that was why you murdered, then you’re not the evil man I assumed. You’re a coward instead.”
Szeth looked him in the eyes, then nodded. He pushed Kaladin back, then moved to swing.
Kaladin drove his hands forward, forming Syl into a sword. He expected a parry. The move was intended to draw Szeth out of his attack pattern.
Szeth did not parry. He just closed his eyes.
Kaladin drove his Blade into the assassin’s chest right below the neck, severing the spine. Smoke burned out from beneath his eyelids, and his Blade slipped from his fingers. It did not vanish.
Get that! Syl sent him, a mental shout. Grab it, Kaladin. Don’t lose it!
Kaladin dove after the Blade, dropping Szeth’s corpse, letting it fall backward into the stormwall. It vanished among the wind, the rain, and the lightning, trailing faint wisps of Stormlight.
Kaladin grabbed the Blade just before the storm consumed it. Then he Lashed himself back upward, passing along the stormwall, the windspren he’d attracted spiraling about him and laughing with pure joy. As he crested the top of the storm, they burst around him and zipped away, moving off to dance in front of the still-advancing storm.
That left him with only one. Syl—in the form of a young woman in a fluttering dress, full-sized this time—hovered before him. She smiled as the storm moved beneath them.
“That was very nicely done,” she said. “Perhaps I’ll keep you around this time.”
“Thank you.”
“You almost killed me, you realize.”
“I realize. I thought I had.”
“And?”
“And . . . um . . . you are intelligent and articulate?”
“You forgot the compliment.”
“But I just said—”
“Those were simple statements of fact.”
“You’re wonderful,” he said. “Truly, Syl. You are.”
“Also a fact,” she said, grinning. “But I’ll let it slide so long as you’re willing to present me with a sufficiently sincere smile.”
He did.
And it felt very, very good.
Chaos in Alethkar is, of course, inevitable. Watch carefully, and do not let power in the kingdom solidify. The Blackthorn could become an ally or our greatest foe, depending on whether he takes the path of the warlord or not. If he seems likely to sue for peace, assassinate him expeditiously. The risk of competition is too great.
—From the Diagram, Writings upon the Bedstand Lamp: paragraph 4 (Adrotagia’s 3rd translation from the original hieroglyphics)
The Shattered Plains had been shattered again.
Kaladin strolled across them with Szeth’s Shardblade on his shoulder. He passed heaps of rock and fresh cracks in the ground. Enormous puddles like small lakes shimmered amid huge chunks of broken stone. Just to his left, an entire plateau had crumbled into the chasms around it. The jagged, ripped-up base of the plateau had a black, charred cast to it.
“This is going to happen again?” Kaladin said. “That other storm is still out there?”
“Yes,” Syl said, sitting on his shoulder. “A new storm. It’s not of us, but of him.”
“Will it be this bad every time it passes?” Kaladin asked, surveying the wreckage. Of the plateaus he could see, only the one had been destroyed completely. But if the storm could do that to pure rock, what would it do to a city? Particularly since it blew the wrong way.
Stormfather . . . Laits would no longer be laits. Buildings that had been constructed to face away from the storms would suddenly be exposed.
“I don’t know,” Syl said softly. “This is a new thing, Kaladin. Not from before. I don’t know how it happened or what it means. Hopefully, it won’t be this bad except when a highstorm and an everstorm crash into each other.”
Kaladin grunted, picking his way over to the edge of his current plateau. He breathed in a little Stormlight, then Lashed himself upward to offset the natural pull of the ground. He became weightless. He pushed off lightly with his foot and drifted across the chasm to the next plateau.
“So how did the army vanish like that?” he asked, removing his Lashing and settling down on the rock.
“Uh . . . how should I know?” Syl said. “I was kind of distracted.”
He grunted. Well, this was the plateau where everyone had been. Perfectly round. Odd, that. On a nearby plateau, what had once been a large hill had been cracked wide open, exposing the remnants of a building inside. This perfectly circular one was far more flat, though it looked like there was a hill or something at the