“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 center. He strode in that direction.
“So they’re all spren,” he said. “Shardblades.”
Syl grew solemn.
“Dead spren,” Kaladin added.
“Dead,” Syl agreed. “Then they live again a little when someone summons them, syncing a heartbeat to their essence.”
“How can something be ‘a little’ alive?”
“We’re spren,” Syl said. “We’re forces. You can’t kill us completely. Just… sort of.”
“That’s perfectly clear.”
“It’s perfectly clear to us,” Syl said. “You’re the strange ones. Break a rock, and it’s still there. Break a spren, and she’s still there. Sort of. Break a person, and something leaves. Something changes. What’s left is just meat. You’re weird.”
“I’m glad we established that,” he said, stopping. He couldn’t see any evidence of the Alethi. Had they really escaped? Or had a sudden surge of the storm swept them all into the chasms? It seemed unlikely such a disaster would have left nothing behind.
Please let it not be so. He lifted Szeth’s sword off his shoulder and set it down, point first, in front of him. It sank a few inches into the rock.
“What about this?” he asked, looking over the thin, silvery weapon. An unornamented Blade. That was supposed to be odd. “It doesn’t scream when I hold it.”
“That’s because it’s not a spren,” Syl said softly.
“What is it, then?”
“Dangerous.”
She stood up from his shoulder, then walked as if down a flight of steps toward the sword. She rarely flew when she had a human form. She flew as a ribbon of light, or as a group of leaves, or as a small cloud. He’d never noticed before how odd, yet normal, it was that she stuck to the nature of the form she used.
She stopped just before the sword. “I think this is one of the Honorblades, the swords of the Heralds.”
Kaladin grunted. He’d heard of those.
“Any man who holds this weapon will become a Windrunner,” Syl explained, looking back at Kaladin. “The Honorblades are what we are based on, Kaladin. Honor gave these to men, and those men gained powers from them. Spren figured out what He’d done, and we imitated it. We’re bits of His power, after all, like this sword. Be careful with it. It is a treasure.”
“So the assassin wasn’t a Radiant.”
“No. But Kaladin, you have to understand. With this sword, someone can do what you can, but without the… checks a spren requires.” She touched it, then shivered visibly, her form blurring for a second. “This sword gave the assassin power to use Lashings, but it also fed upon his Stormlight. A person who uses this will need far, far more Light than you will. Dangerous levels of it.”
Kaladin reached out and took the sword by the hilt, and Syl flitted away, becoming a ribbon of light. He hefted the weapon and set it back on his shoulder before continuing on his way. Yes, there was a hill up ahead, probably a crem-covered building. As he drew closer, blessedly, he saw motion around it.
“Hello?” he called.
The figures near it stopped and turned. “Kaladin?” a familiar voice called. “Storms, is that you?”
He grinned, the figures resolving into men in blue uniforms. Teft scrambled across the rock like a madman to meet him. Others came after, shouting and laughing. Drehy, Peet, Bisig, and Sigzil, Rock towering over them all.
“Another one?” Rock asked, eyeing Kaladin’s Shardblade. “Or is he yours?”
“No,” Kaladin said. “I took this from the assassin.”
“He is dead, then?” Teft asked.
“Yes.”
“You slew the Assassin in White,” Bisig breathed. “It’s truly over then.”
“I suspect that it is just beginning,” Kaladin said, nodding toward the building. “What is this place?”
“Oh!” Bisig said. “Come on! We need to show you the tower—that Radiant girl taught us how to summon the plateau back, so long as we have you.”
“Radiant girl?” Kaladin asked. “Shallan?”
“You don’t sound surprised,” Teft said with a grunt.
“She has a Shardblade,” Kaladin said. One that didn’t scream in his mind. Either she was a Radiant or she had another of these Honorblades. As he stepped up to the building, he noticed a bridge in the shadows nearby.
“It’s not ours,” Kaladin said.
“No,” Leyten said. “That belongs to Bridge Seventeen. We had to leave ours behind in the storm.”
Rock nodded. “We were too busy stopping lighteyed heads from becoming too friendly with swords of enemies. Ha! But we needed bridge here. Way platform works, we had to get off him for Shallan Davar to transport herself back.”
Kaladin poked his head into the chamber inside the hill, then paused at the beauty he found inside. Other members of Bridge Four waited here, including a tall man Kaladin didn’t immediately recognize. Was that one of Lopen’s cousins? The man turned around, and Kaladin realized what he’d mistaken for a cap was a reddish skullplate.
Parshendi. Kaladin tensed as the Parshendi man saluted. He was wearing a Bridge Four uniform.
And he had the tattoo.
“Rlain?” Kaladin said.
“Sir,” Rlain said. His features were no longer rounded and plump, but instead sharp, muscular, with a thick neck and a stronger jaw, now lined by a red and black beard.
“It appears you are more than you seemed,” Kaladin said.
“Pardon, sir,” he said. “But I would suggest that applies to both of us.” When he spoke now, his voice had a certain musicality to it—an odd rhythm to his words.
“Brightlord Dalinar has pardoned Rlain,” Sigzil explained, walking around Kaladin and entering the chamber.
“For being Parshendi?” Kaladin asked.
“For being a spy,” Rlain said. “A spy for a people who, it appears, no longer exist.” He said this to a different beat, and Kaladin thought he could sense pain in that voice. Rock walked over and put a hand on Rlain’s shoulder.
“We can give you the story once we get back to the city,” Teft said.