POV: kaladin
Summary
Kaladin scrambles down the chasm beside Shallan, the chasmfiend's claws scraping behind them. She keeps up better than he expects — Alethi-soldier-fit, in fact, though her dress catches on the debris. They pick a corridor at random, then a second, then a third. A four-voiced trump rolls down the rift like a thousand horns and the whole jungle on the chasm floor shrinks back as if a highstorm is coming. He tries to draw Stormlight out of one of the spheres in his hand and nothing comes. Syl is still nowhere.
Shallan takes over picking turns at the next intersection. He follows, swearing at her under his breath. She loops them in a circle and hisses for him to kill the light. They wait there, crouched, while the scraping passes — and he realises she has brought them back to the killing ground from earlier. The chasmfiend is feeding. She wants to go closer. *We're so close*, she whispers. *I have to see it.* Inadvertently he grabs her by the safehand to stop her and immediately lets go. She goes anyway. He sets down their things on his spheres to muffle them and follows.
Around the bend they crouch and watch. The beast fills the chasm. Sleek, sinuous, legs braced against both walls so its body barely touches the rock, an arrowlike face and segmented mandibles tearing the corpse of a soldier in half. *Like something from a nightmare*, he thinks. Light dances around it from a school of small glowing arrow-shaped spren, each occasionally drifting away from the body and dissipating like smoke. Shallan has seen those before — they follow skyeels, too. She murmurs aloud that the claws are made for cracking shells and that there must be wild chulls somewhere these things naturally hunt; the Plains are only a pupation ground, and this one has stayed past its time. He pulls her away before it finishes eating, and they slip into the dark.
They walk for hours in a direction away from the kill, Kaladin leading again, Shallan secretly trying to keep track of the route in her head. She is tired in a way she has not been before — her spheres are dun, drained during the flight, and she suspects the Light inflated her endurance and is now letting her crash. They stop to camp on a relatively dry patch of chasm floor. Spheres in the middle like a mock fire, rations from a dead man's pack: stale Soulcast flatbread and chull jerky. The plateau-tops feel impossibly distant. She trades the bridgeman grunt for some banter — what the open vest and short trousers of a bridgeman uniform would look like on her — and gets him almost smiling.
Then she pulls out her sketchbook. While he eats, she draws their route through the chasms not as a few lines but as a picture seen from above, every plateau in place. He notices. She admits she was guessing at most of it; she is not. Pattern hums softly from her skirts, content to stay silent in Kaladin's presence. From her sketch they read that they have been making their way southward, not westward. They will fix it in the morning by the sun. Shallan finishes a quarter of a chasmfiend portrait, lies down with the pack as a pillow, and falls hard asleep.
Kaladin wakes her in the dark hours later. She drools on her pack and grumbles. They trade jabs over the dried chull meat she throws and he catches, then they walk. The sky brightens from the right direction and his good mood evaporates back into his familiar quiet. She baits him into giving her an insult on demand. He delivers it on cue — that he'd rather have a homicidal companion. No murderer would consent to his company anyway, she allows; standards exist.
She presses him for an honest answer about why he is willing to walk in silence: he is suspicious of her, but he does not actually understand her. He admits as much. She tells him, then, why she came to the Shattered Plains — because Jasnah Kholin's scholarship cannot be allowed to die, and because she believes the world itself is in danger. Adolin is a delightful surprise.
He probes the parshmen question. His guards overheard her on the terrace and reported she wanted them murdered. She corrects him — she fears they will betray Alethkar and wants them exiled, no more, and even that she will not get past the highprinces without proof. She snatches a chasm-vine tip into an ink jar for a future cutting. He works out aloud that she did not need to come herself just to study a chrysalis; there is more out here for her, and he is increasingly certain of it.
They cross a low rock ridge over a deep pool, her satchel passed to him for safe-keeping. On the other side she draws his attention and swears, by the Almighty's tenth name, that she means no harm to Adolin or his family — that her purpose is to prevent a disaster, that she may be wrong, that she is sincere. He searches her eyes and grants that he believes her. Then he looks up. The sun is climbing the wrong ridge: they have strayed south again. She takes back her satchel. She needs to map this.