POV: kaladin
Summary
Kaladin wakes thrashing in the dark of his hideout — the worst battle-shock nightmare yet, full of red light and laughing shadows and a single watching figure that takes something from beside the wall and vanishes out the door — and only slowly registers Syl sitting on the floor in front of him and Teft asleep on the stone bench and fearspren undulating in the corners. He has slept until midday. He stands, embarrassed at being huddled against the wall like a child, drinks water from a tin cup — and then sees what is gone. His spear. His fabrial bracer. Syl tells him, finally rising, that the Sibling contacted them: another node has been found, this one in the well in the Breakaway market, and the enemy has already reached it. Dabbid tried to wake Kaladin and could not, and saw the way Kaladin sat muttering to no one, and went to defend it himself.
Kaladin sprints from the room, Syl at his shoulder, and finds Dabbid only two hallways down at the first stairwell, the spear and bracer held tight to his chest, staring down at them in panic. Dabbid jumps when he sees him, then sighs in pure relief and surrenders the gear. Kaladin tells him bluntly that he barely knows how to use a spear. Dabbid does not respond, of course, but helps strap on the bracer and offers the spear with both hands. Kaladin takes it and gives the Bridge Four salute. Dabbid returns it — and then, in a voice soft and gravelly, speaks the first words Kaladin has ever heard from him. *Life. Before. Death.* Kaladin grips the man's shoulder. *Life before death, Dabbid.* And he is running again, the screams from the nightmare still ringing behind his eyes. He cannot use the stairs; he has to go straight down through the atrium.
Elsewhere in the tower, Navani sets her own piece moving. She charges out of the library proclaiming a discovery of incalculable value for the Lady of Wishes — she must speak with Raboniel at once, it cannot wait — and the stormform Regal at her door, who does not even need the rest of the speech, simply walks. He takes her up to the great stairwell, where a Deepest One is waiting at the bottom with her fingers laced before her and asks, in her heavily-accented Alethi, whether Navani has fallen ill. No, Navani says, a discovery — she thinks she has found what the Lady of Wishes was looking for. *But of course you can't share it with anyone but Raboniel herself,* the Fused says, faintly amused. Navani trails off. The Fused glides slowly — too slowly — to a cabinet by the wall and selects a spanreed from a collection already arranged there, with the air of a tool produced for an expected occasion. Storms. They have been expecting an attempted distraction. They selected this Fused specifically and waited her here, with a reed picked out, for exactly this. It is a reverse distraction. They knew Navani would attempt one — and the implication runs ice through her. They had also known that Navani would know that, which means Kaladin is walking into something far worse than a node defence.
Barefoot, half-armoured, spear in his right hand, Kaladin reaches the atrium walkway eleven storeys above the floor and hurls himself off it into open air. Fully infused for safety, he points his bracer-hand straight down and engages the device — and lurches mid-fall to a stop with his arm in a near-handstand, the weight in the distant shaft pinning him in place. He hits the speed bar and the weight begins to fall, dragging him with it down through the great room — a pace just below insanity. From up here he can see out the atrium's enormous window: outside it is dark, though it should be midday, and lightning silhouettes a highstorm against the glass. Even deep in the tower he had not felt a tremor of it. His descent is not subtle. Heavenly Ones turn from their midair meditations at every level; shouts go up from Regals along the walkways. He cannot tell if Leshwi is among them. He slows just before he hits the floor, drops the last five feet on Stormlight cushioning, and lands among startled humans and singers shopping at the secondary market the Fused now allow to thrive on the atrium floor.
His light against the dark window will have been impossible to miss. He launches off a crate stack into the air, points his hand forward and flies upright through the corridor toward the Breakaway market — body bent, elbow in, like a true Windrunner cruising, but on a single fixed line of motion, with no Lashings to redirect him. People duck. Syl streaks beside him as a stormcloud. He worries about exciting a revolt that will get hundreds killed. Best to get in, destroy the fabrial, and get out. Whisper of a much bigger problem: there are four nodes, he is about to destroy the third, the fourth will fall in days — and then what?
In the cavernous Breakaway market the well is at the centre, four storeys of shop tents and semi-permanent wooden stalls around it. The Edgedancer clinic is somewhere nearby, the one his parents and little brother had been hidden by, the clinic he had checked days ago and found empty — Storms, his family. Syl shouts a warning: the Pursuer is waiting at another entrance. Kaladin cuts the device, drops, tucks, and rolls clear as the relentless Fused materialises out of his bloodred ribbon. *Your death,* the Pursuer growls, *is growing tedious, Windrunner. How is it you recovered all of your Lashings?* Kaladin engages the bracer and shoots upward — painfully, since the device tugs only by one arm — drops down past the Pursuer's chasing ribbon, redirects sideways across the room, and is jerked to a halt as the first weight bottoms out. The Pursuer slams into him from behind, gets an arm around his throat. Syl shouts that more than a dozen Heavenly Ones are streaming in through the tunnels. *Good,* Kaladin grunts. He kills the bracer, drops them ten feet to the ground, lands with the Pursuer underneath, then tells Syl to turn the second-weight dial for him. She zips down to his wrist and shoves the raised section as an eel. Click. Kaladin reactivates, hauling them both into the air — too slowly to escape, but slowly enough to free his right hand. He gets the scalpel out of his belt sheath and slices the Pursuer's wrist tendons. The Fused dissolves, leaving a husk and a body to fall away below; Kaladin is hurled up in a wild arm-out arc he can barely control.
He hangs at the top, breathing, while a circle of Heavenly Ones keeps polite distance and the Pursuer's red ribbon weaves between them. He has burned two of the Fused's bodies; the third one will make this fight dangerous if it comes. He sees the ribbon's motions go uncommitted, hesitating, and works out why — the Pursuer wants only to delay him while the corruption finishes below. The market streets are emptying of people; he does not have forever in a standoff. He dives. The Pursuer commits, grabs him, gets a knife in him; Kaladin scores another arm-cut and the Pursuer breaks off again to heal a third time. Kaladin lets himself fall to a small empty street between two crowded tents and jogs back for his dropped spear. Up in the air above, the Heavenly Ones gather to drop on him in numbers. He picks one of them out and raises his spear: Leshwi, in robes too long for combat, caught unaware tonight.
*Please,* he thinks, *accept the fight.* It is his only chance — he cannot face a dozen Heavenly Ones at once, can barely face the Pursuer, and needs a single opponent who is not as relentless. Leshwi raises her lance to him. He turns to Syl, sends her down into the well to find the node fabrial — probably a sapphire, beside a glass pillar-globe, somewhere among the pump fabrials at the bottom — and tells her his plan: when she is in position, he will break from the duel and dive straight down on her marker, hit the fabrial in one strike, and get out before anyone realises what he is doing.
He fights Leshwi. He drops in air, redirects, lurches to halts, hangs by an aching shoulder — the bracer makes him a poor approximation of his old self in flight, but he tries to look the part. He stings her with a Reverse Lashing that pulls at the train of her robes; she cuts them free and drops the excess to the rooftop. She glides closer. *What is wrong, Windrunner? Your powers fail you.* *Fight me anyway,* he calls, and catches a glimpse of the Pursuer's red ribbon weaving up below. Leshwi follows his look and seems to understand; she presses her attack in earnest. For a moment the duel looks almost fair. Then she rises overhead, doubles to his side faster than he can pivot, and cuts his arm. His Stormlight heals slowly now and seems to be slowing further. He flees through the air; she sees that he cannot redirect side to side or accelerate past one weight's pull, lets him cross the room, then slams him into the far wall from behind, his own fist driving him into stone. She puts a knife to his neck and tells him this is a sham; this is no contest. He suggests they drop and fight without Surges. *Would you actually do that?* Leshwi asks. *I think you cannot spare the time. You're here to interfere with whatever the Lady of Wishes is doing.* He does not deny it.
Leshwi pulls away in the air; he turns awkwardly to face her again. Past her, Syl rises into view and traces a glyph: *Ready.* He fixes his eyes on Leshwi so she will not look. *Surrender,* she says. *If you give me your weapon now, I might be able to get the Lady of Wishes to turn aside the Pursuer. Together we could start to work toward a true government and peace for Roshar.* He scoffs — her people are conquering his. *And did your leader not conquer his way to the throne?* she answers, genuinely confused. *This is the way of your people as well. My people govern better. The humans under our control have not been treated unfairly.* And your god, he asks softly, can you promise that once humankind has been subdued he will not have them exterminated? She hums to a rhythm he cannot recognise and does not answer. *I know the kind of men who follow Odium,* he says. *I've known them all my life. I bear their brands on my forehead. I could almost trust you for the honour you've shown me — if it didn't mean trusting him as well.* She nods, almost in agreement, and begins to lower toward the floor, perhaps to take him up on the duel without Surges.
*Leshwi,* he calls, *I feel I should point out that I didn't actually agree to fight you below. I just noted it was an option.* *What is the distinction?* *I'd rather you not see this as a broken oath,* he says — and disengages, points the bracer at Syl, and launches himself over Leshwi's head toward the well.
Syl streaks ahead. The Heavenly Ones above keep a polite duel-distance, assuming this is still Kaladin's fight with Leshwi. He cuts the bracer, points his hand straight down over the blue water, engages it, and slams into the pool in a column of bracer-pull and Stormlight. It hurts; his ears scream as he sinks. Down in the well's narrow shaft, lit on one side by a row of glowing gemstones, a Fused with a long topknot turns to face him with a dagger drawn — the same one who had been so fascinated with him before. Kaladin discovers immediately that the bracer works far better underwater than in air: he can cut and re-aim cleanly, with no drop or lurch, and the drag actually adds maneuvre. He spins past her, pivots lower; she pushes off a wall and just touches him, cutting his chest open; blood blooms into the water; but Syl highlights the right gemstone behind her shoulder and he hits it on the next pass — punches the sapphire free of its cage, drives his spear into the wires around the glass pillar-globe and pries it loose. That should do it.
He turns to surface and feels the world begin to go dim. His healing is barely keeping pace. Above him Syl rises faster, breaks out of the water — but the patch of light at the top of the shaft is shrinking. A lid. They are putting a wooden lid over the well. He bursts up into the last sliver of air against the underside of the boards. Thumps overhead: weights being set on it. Then more weights — and the lid does not lift when he tries to push it with the bracer. He realises with a fresh terror that they are not stones at all but people, dozens of them being herded onto the lid by the Pursuer, who had been ready for this — anything light enough to be moved fast and heavy enough to hold the lid in place. Why use stone, the Pursuer must have thought, when humans were already at hand. Kaladin pounds on the wood. His Stormlight fades. The walls of the shaft press in on him and the lid presses down and his nightmare comes back into the small dark column of air — blackness, hateful shadows, trapped. He thrashes and screams away the last of his Stormlight and goes hoarse.
Out of nowhere, in his memory, Hav's voice — his old sergeant from his recruit days. *Panic on the battlefield kills more men than enemy spears. Never run. Always retreat.* This water came from somewhere. There is another way out.
He sucks one last breath, dives, and follows the bracer downward into pitch black. He cannot tell which way the sky is anymore. He fumbles a gemstone out of his pouch; it slips from his fingers and sinks; *that way,* and he points the bracer at it and yanks himself after the falling light. Past the cluster of pump fabrials, past the swimming Fused who is heading back up and pays him no mind, into a deeper part of the shaft and then a level tunnel where his bracer pulls him on through the dark. He cannot draw in more Stormlight here — his mouth is shut — and if he opens it he will drown. He had never thought about how to take Stormlight underwater; nobody had. He passes a fallen garnet on the tunnel floor, picks up the sapphire he knocked loose, fumbles. The tunnel turns level. His lungs burn. Ahead — light, or the stars his vision invents from anoxia. He chooses to believe it is light. When he reaches it — another cluster of pump fabrials — he kills the bracer, points the hand up, and engages again. His mind goes once more entirely to black; the only thing he can still feel is Syl, somewhere distant, terrified, and he thinks that will be his last sensation.
Then he breaks into air. Gasps — pure reflex, not a choice. When his head clears he is hanging by his aching arm from the ceiling of a reservoir under the tower, the sapphire gone from his fingers, his pouch dry of Stormlight, his clothing leaking blood. He almost lets himself sleep. *No. They'll be coming for you.* If the enemy knew about the well, they may know about the reservoir too. He drops into the cold water, swims himself to the side with the bracer, crawls out, drinks the Stormlight out of two lamps set near the chamber wall, and stumbles down the hall toward the exit. Somewhere through the rock he hears thunder — the highstorm is still going, so he has not been gone for an eternity. He finds steps and cannot will himself to climb them, so he flies them in tugs — bracer aimed up one angle, then another, again and again, half-climbing, half-being-pulled.
He emerges onto the ground floor of the tower into a knot of singer soldiers shouting at people to return to their quarters. The storm rumbles in the near distance. A soldier levels a spear at him and Kaladin's body knows what to do without him — he wrests the weapon free, sweeps the next man's legs, draws a stolen spear and a fresh enemy. A Heavenly One — not Leshwi — rises in the hall and points a lance at him. Drawing Stormlight off the wall lanterns does nothing for his wounds at all now; either he has somehow further undermined himself by breaking the node, or — far more likely — the Sibling is too far gone toward corruption to support him. Chased by dozens of soldiers and with no way to fight, he runs for the only escape route he has: the great entry portal of the tower, where the highstorm is for once roaring in through the empty gateway. Today, the storms have come this high. Today, Kaladin reaches the winds.
And, like everything else today, they try their best to kill him.