The male began gathering up the cards. “I should know, Khen. How many times did I watch them play? Standing there with my tray of drinks. I should be an expert at this, shouldn’t I?”
“Apparently not.”
The female stood and walked over to another group, who were trying to build a fire under a tarp without much success. It took a special kind of luck to be able to get flames going outside during the Weeping. Kaladin, like most in the military, had learned to live with the constant dampness.
They had the stolen sacks of grain—Kaladin could see them piled underneath one of the tarps. The grain had swollen, splitting several of the sacks. Several were eating soggy handfuls, since they had no bowls.
Kaladin wished he didn’t immediately taste the mushy, awful stuff in his own mouth. He’d been given unspiced, boiled tallew on many occasions. Often he’d considered it a blessing.
The male who’d been speaking continued to sit on his rock, holding up a wooden card. They were a lacquered set, durable. Kaladin had occasionally seen their like in the military. Men would save for months to get a set like this, that wouldn’t warp in the rain.
The parshman looked so forlorn, staring down at his card, shoulders slumped.
“This is wrong,” Kaladin whispered to Syl. “We’ve been so wrong.…” Where were the destroyers? What had happened to the beasts with the red eyes that had tried to crush Dalinar’s army? The terrible, haunting figures that Bridge Four had described to him?
We thought we understood what was going to happen, Kaladin thought. I was so sure.…
“Alarm!” a sudden, shrill voice called. “Alarm! You fools!”
Something zipped through the air, a glowing yellow ribbon, a streak of light in the dim afternoon shade.
“He’s there,” the shrill voice said. “You’re being watched! Beneath those shrubs!”
Kaladin burst up through the underbrush, ready to suck in Stormlight and be away. Though fewer towns had any now, as it was running out again, he had a little left.
The parshmen seized cudgels made from branches or the handles of brooms. They bunched together and held the sticks like frightened villagers, no stance, no control.
Kaladin hesitated. I could take them all in a fight even without Stormlight. He’d seen men hold weapons like that many times before. Most recently, he’d seen it inside the chasms, when training the bridgemen.
These were no warriors.
Syl flitted up to him, prepared to become a Blade. “No,” Kaladin whispered to her. Then he held his hands to the sides, speaking more loudly. “I surrender.”
Shallan’s Sketchbook: Corridor
15. Brightness Radiant
I will express only direct, even brutal, truth. You must know what I have done, and what those actions cost me.
“Brightlord Perel’s body was found in the same area as Sadeas’s,” Shallan said, pacing back and forth in her room as she flipped through pages of the report. “That can’t be a coincidence. This tower is far too big. So we know where the murderer is prowling.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” Adolin said. He lounged with his back against the wall, coat unbuttoned while tossing a small leather ball filled with dried grain into the air and catching it again. “I just think the murders could have been done by two different people.”
“Same exact method of murder,” Shallan said. “Body positioned the same way.”
“Nothing else connecting them,” Adolin said. “Sadeas was slime, widely hated, and usually accompanied by guards. Perel was quiet, well-liked, and known for his administrative prowess. He was less a soldier than a manager.”
The sun had fully set by now, and they’d set out spheres on the floor for light. The remnants of their meal had been carted away by a servant, and Pattern hummed happily on the wall near Adolin’s head. Adolin glanced at him occasionally, looking uncomfortable, which she fully understood. She’d grown used to Pattern, but his lines were strange.
Wait until Adolin sees a Cryptic in Shadesmar form, she thought, with a full body but twisting shapes for his head.
Adolin tossed the little stitched ball into the air and caught it with his right hand—the one that Renarin, amazingly, had healed. She wasn’t the only one practicing with her powers. She was especially glad someone else had a Shardblade now. When the highstorms returned, and they began working the Oathgate in earnest, she’d have help.
“These reports,” Shallan said, tapping the notebook against her hand, “are both informative and useless. Nothing connects Perel and Sadeas save their both being lighteyes—that and the part of the tower they were in. Perhaps mere opportunity drove the killer’s choice of victims.”
“You’re saying someone happened to kill a highprince,” Adolin said, “by accident? Like … a back-alley murder outside a pub?”
“Maybe. Brightness Aladar suggests in here that your father lay down some rules on people moving alone through empty parts of the tower.”
“I still think there might be two murderers,” Adolin said. “You know … like someone saw Sadeas dead, and figured they could get away with killing someone else, blaming it on the first fellow.”
Oh, Adolin, Shallan thought. He’d arrived at a theory he liked, and now wouldn’t let it go. It was a common mistake warned of in her scientific books.
Adolin did have one point—a highprince being murdered was unlikely to be random chance. There were no signs of Sadeas’s Shardblade, Oathbringer, being used by anyone, not even a rumor of it.
Maybe the second death is a kind of decoy? Shallan thought, riffling through the report again. An attempt to make it seem like random attacks? No, that was too convoluted—and she had no more evidence for it than Adolin had for his theory.
That did leave her thinking. Maybe everyone was paying attention to these two deaths because they’d happened to important lighteyes. Could there be other deaths they hadn’t noticed because they’d happened to less prominent individuals? If a beggar had been found in Adolin’s proverbial back alley behind a pub, would anyone have remarked upon it—even if he’d been stabbed through the eye?
I need to get out there among them and see what I can find. She opened her mouth to tell him she should probably turn in, but he was already standing, stretching.
“I think we’ve done what we can with that,” he said, nodding toward the report. “At least for tonight.”
“Yeah,” Shallan said, feigning a yawn. “Probably.”
“So…” Adolin said, then took a deep breath. “There’s … something else.”
Shallan frowned. Something else? Why did he suddenly look like he was preparing to do something difficult?
He’s going to break off our betrothal! a part of her mind thought, though she pounced on that emotion and shoved it back behind the curtains where it belonged.
“Okay, this isn’t easy,” Adolin said. “I don’t want to offend, Shallan. But … you know how I had you eat that man’s food?”