POV: shallan
Summary
In her cramped cabin that night, with no port to shelter in and water lapping against the hull, Shallan reads by the glow of a goblet of spheres in her nightgown. The book is one of Jasnah's earliest published works as a full scholar — a study of how difficult research before the Hierocracy is, because the Vorin Church spent its years of near-absolute eastern rule recopying old texts to fit its dogma and overemphasising the Recreance as a betrayal. Jasnah had been conspicuously reluctant to lend it to her, even though it speaks directly to what Shallan is now trying to understand, and Shallan cannot read the reluctance.
The pattern returns on the cabin wall beside the bunk. She has been catching it from the corner of her eye for days — in the grain of wood, in a sailor's shirt, in the shimmer of the water — and it has always vanished when she looked directly at it. This time she lets her gaze slide across rather than onto it, fixes the shape, and takes a Memory before it fades. Then she scrambles for paper. A pencil is wrong; she switches to pen and ink and works furiously to capture the impossible, self-repeating geometry that spirals down into infinity. Her safehand cradles the pad against the goblet's light, her hair tumbles unbound around her shoulders, and more creationspren than she has ever seen at once crowd the small table and the floor beside her knees, shifting through forms as she works.
As the last line of ink dries, the page sighs — distinctly, audibly — and the pattern lifts off the paper onto the wood of the floor, climbs the leg of her cot, and slides up onto the blanket. It is not a lump beneath the cloth, but the cloth itself raised into precise, eye-twisting ridges. It is the same kind of creature as the symbol-headed spren in her older nightmare-sketches, flattened to an abstraction, and against expectation it seems almost playful. She flees the room to fetch Jasnah and finds her teacher on the other side of the door, hand already raised toward the knob, a small inky figure shaped like a man in a long fashionable coat standing in her cupped palm. He melts away into shadow at sight of Shallan. Jasnah tells her to put on clothes.
Robed, with a thin white glove over her safehand, Shallan sits on the cot while the pattern bounces on her trunk like a child on furniture. Jasnah explains the framework. Each of the ten orders of the Knights Radiant had access to two of the ten Surges, with overlap between them; Soulcasting is one, the Surge she and Shallan share, though their orders are different. Neither of them is a Radiant — the orders were a human construct around a phenomenon — and the historical Radiants included a statistically appropriate number of women, of whom three in four spent their time on diplomacy and scholarship rather than the battlefield. Shallan is briefly, foolishly disappointed at the latter. She suppresses a half-memory of a silvered sword and a pattern of light, ten heartbeats away. Jasnah lets a name slip — Ivory — and immediately closes off the subject; her spren does not like to be spoken of, because what he has done is regarded by his kind as betrayal.
Jasnah identifies the pattern as a Cryptic — their own name for themselves; everyone else calls them liespren, which they dislike. The Cryptics rule one of Shadesmar's great cities and stand in some difficult, complicated conflict with the honorspren. This one will be Shallan's companion, and will grant her Soulcasting and almost certainly other Surgebinding besides — what kind, exactly, remains to be discovered. She is mildly disappointed that her first Cryptic, famed for fearsome reputation in the records, is bouncing imbecilically off the wall.
Jasnah, drawn out, then strays into the religious framing she usually keeps to herself. Honor — whom Vorinism calls the Almighty — was, in her reading, conceived by men personifying the emotion spren they saw around them; Cultivation, worshipped in the West, was conceived from the nature spren; the Voidspren with their nameless lord supply every culture with an antagonist; the Stormfather shifts with whichever era of Vorinism is doing the talking. She allows that the Almighty and the Stormfather may both be real powerful spren, like the Nightwatcher — only that she will not call them gods. Shallan catches her own freehand tracing a glyphward against the heresy on the blanket and blushes; Jasnah apologises for the tangent.
She then strips Shallan of all other duties of study. For the next several days her one assignment is to interact with the Cryptic and record everything she observes in detail — the first writing of significance Shallan is likely to have done, and possibly of utmost importance to the work ahead. The spren, meanwhile, has rolled over to bump against Shallan's foot, lightly and persistently, again and again.