I suspect that he is more a force than an individual now, despite your insistence to the contrary. That force is contained, and an equilibrium reached.
Kaladin stared at the glistening length of metal, which dripped with condensation from its summoning. It glowed softly the color of garnet along several faint lines down its length.
Shallan had a Shardblade.
He twisted his head toward her, and in so doing, his cheek brushed the flat of the blade. No screams. He froze, then cautiously raised a finger and touched the cold metal.
Nothing happened. The screech he had heard in his mind when fighting alongside Adolin did not recur. It seemed a very bad sign to him. Though he did not know the meaning of that terrible sound, it was related to his bond with Syl.
“How?” he asked.
“It’s not important.”
“I rather think it is.”
“Not at the moment! Look, are you going to take this thing? Holding it this way is awkward. If I drop it by accident and cut off your foot, it’s going to be your fault.”
He hesitated, regarding his face reflected in its metal. He saw corpses, friends with burning eyes. He’d refused these weapons each time one was offered to him.
But always before, it had been after the fight, or at least on the practice grounds. This was different. Besides, he wasn’t choosing to become a Shardbearer; he would only use this weapon to protect someone’s life.
Making a decision, he reached up and seized the Shardblade by the hilt. At least this told him one thing—Shallan wasn’t likely to be a Surgebinder. Otherwise, he suspected she’d hate this Blade as much as he did.
“You’re not supposed to let people use your Blade,” Kaladin said. “By tradition, only the king and the highprinces do that.”
“Great,” she said. “You can report me to Brightness Navani for being wildly indecent and ignorant of protocol. For now, can we just survive, please?”
“Yeah,” he said, hefting the Blade. “That sounds wonderful.” He barely knew how to use one of these. Training with a practice sword did not make you an expert with the real thing. Unfortunately, a spear was going to be of little use against a creature so large and so well armored.
“Also . . .” Shallan said. “Could you not do that ‘reporting me’ thing I mentioned? That was a joke. I don’t think I’m supposed to have that Blade.”
“Nobody would believe me anyway,” Kaladin said. “You are going to run, right? As I instructed?”
“Yes. But if you could, please lead the monster to the left.”
“That’s toward the warcamps,” Kaladin said, frowning. “I was planning to lead it deeper into the chasms, so that you—”
“I need to get back to my satchel,” Shallan said.
Crazy woman. “We’re fighting for our lives, Shallan. The satchel is unimportant.”
“No, it’s very important,” she said. “I need it to . . . Well, the sketches in there show the pattern of the Shattered Plains. I’ll need that to help Dalinar. Please, just do it.”
“Fine. If I can.”
“Good. And, um, please don’t die, all right?”
He was suddenly aware of her pressed against his back. Holding him, breath warm on his neck. She trembled, and he thought he could hear in her voice both terror and fascination at their situation.
“I’ll do my best,” he said. “Get ready.”
She nodded, letting go of him.
One.
Two.
Three.
He leaped out into the chasm, then turned and dashed left, toward the chasmfiend. Storming woman. The beast lurked in the shadows in that direction. No, it was a shadow. An enormous, looming shadow, long and eel-like, lifted above the floor of the chasm and gripping the walls with its legs.
It trumped and surged forward, carapace scraping on rock. Holding tightly to the Shardblade, Kaladin threw himself to the ground and ducked underneath the monster. The ground heaved as the beast smashed claws toward him, but Kaladin came up unscathed. He swung wildly with the Shardblade, carving a line in the rock wall beside him but missing the chasmfiend.
It curled in the chasm, twisting underneath itself, then turning about. The maneuver went far more smoothly for the monster than Kaladin would have hoped.
How do I even kill something like this? Kaladin wondered, backing up as the chasmfiend settled on the floor of the chasm to inspect him. Hacking at that enormous body was unlikely to kill it quickly enough. Did it have a heart? Not the stone gemheart, but a real one? He’d have to try to get underneath it again.
Kaladin continued to back down the chasm, trying to lead the creature away from Shallan. It moved more carefully than Kaladin would have expected. He was relieved to catch sight of Shallan escaping the crack and scrambling away down the passage.
“Come on, you,” Kaladin said, waving the Shardblade at the chasmfiend. It reared up in the chasm, but did not strike at him. It watched, eyes hidden in its darkened face. The only light came from the distant slit high above and the spheres he’d tossed out into the chasm, which now were behind the monster.
Shallan’s Blade glowed softly too, from a strange pattern along its length. Kaladin had never seen one do that before, but then, he’d never seen a Shardblade in the dark before.
Looking up at the rearing, alien silhouette before him—with its too many legs, its twisted head, its segmented armor—Kaladin thought he must know what a Voidbringer looked like. Surely nothing more terrible than this could exist.
Stepping backward, Kaladin stumbled on an outcropping of shalebark sprouting from the floor.
The chasmfiend struck.
Kaladin regained his balance easily, but had to throw himself into a roll—which required dropping the Shardblade, lest he slice himself. Shadowy claws smashed around him as he came out of his roll and sprang one way, then the other. He ended up pressed against the slimy side of the chasm just in front of the monster, puffing. He was too close for the claws to get him, perhaps, and—
The head snapped down, mandibles gaping. Kaladin cursed, hurling himself to the side again. He grunted, rolling to his feet and scooping up the discarded Shardblade. It hadn’t vanished—he knew enough about them to understand that once Shallan instructed it to remain, it would stay until she summoned it back.
Kaladin turned around as a claw came down where he had just been. He got a swipe at it, cutting through the claw’s tip as it crashed into rock.
His cut didn’t seem to do much. The Blade scored the carapace and killed the flesh inside—prompting a trump of anger—but the claw was enormous. He’d done the equivalent of cutting off the tip of an enemy soldier’s big toe. Storms. He wasn’t fighting the beast; he was just annoying it.
It came more aggressively, sweeping at him with a claw. Fortunately, the confines of the chasm made it difficult for the creature to swing; its arms brushed the walls, and it couldn’t pull back for full leverage. That was probably why Kaladin was still alive. He got out of the way of the sweep, barely, but tripped in the darkness again. He could hardly see.
As another claw crashed toward him, Kaladin got to his feet and dashed away—running farther down the corridor, farther from the light, passing plants and flotsam. The chasmfiend trumped and charged after him, clacking and scraping.
Kaladin felt so slow without Stormlight. So clumsy and awkward.
The chasmfiend was close. He judged his next move by instinct. Now! He stopped with a lurch, then sprinted back toward the creature. It slowed with great difficulty, carapace grinding on the walls, and Kaladin ducked and ran beneath it. He slammed the Shardblade upward, sinking it deep into the creature’s underside.
The beast trumped more frantically. He seemed to have actually hurt it, for it immediately lifted upward to pull itself off the sword. Then it twisted down upon itself in an eyeblink, and Kaladin found those frightful jaws coming at him. He threw himself forward, but the snapping jaws caught his leg.
Blinding pain ran up the limb, and he struck out with the Blade even as the beast flung him about. He thought he hit its face, though he couldn’t be certain.
The world spun.
He hit the ground and rolled.
No time to be dizzy. With everything still spinning, he groaned and turned over. He’d lost the Shardblade—he didn’t know where it was. His leg. He couldn’t feel it.
He looked down, expecting to see nothing but a ragged stump. It wasn’t quite so bad. Bloodied, the trousers ripped, but he couldn’t see bone. The numbness was from shock.
His mind had gone analytical and focused on the wounds. That wasn’t good. He needed the soldier at the moment, not the surgeon. The chasmfiend was righting itself in the chasm, and a chunk of its facial carapace was missing.
Get. Away.
Kaladin turned over and climbed to hands and knees, then lurched to his feet. The leg worked, kind of. His boot squished as he stepped.
Where was the Shardblade? There, ahead. It had flown far, embedding itself in the ground near the spheres he’d tossed from the rift. Kaladin hobbled toward it, but had trouble walking, let alone running. He was halfway there when his leg gave out. He hit hard, scraping his arm on shalebark.
The chasmfiend trumped and—
“Hey! Hey!”
Kaladin twisted about. Shallan? What was that fool woman doing, standing in the chasm, waving her hands like a maniac? How had she even gotten past him?
She yelled again, getting the chasmfiend’s attention. Her voice echoed oddly.
The chasmfiend turned from Kaladin to Shallan, then began to smash at her.
“No!” Kaladin yelled. But what was the use in shouting? He needed his weapon. Gritting his teeth, he twisted about and scrambled—as best he could—to the Shardblade. Storms. Shallan . . .
He ripped the sword from the rock, but then he collapsed again. The leg just wouldn’t hold him. He twisted back, holding out the Blade, searching the chasm. The monster continued to swipe about, trumping, the terrible sound echoing and reverberating in the narrow confines. Kaladin couldn’t see a corpse. Had Shallan escaped?
Stabbing the blasted thing through the chest only seemed to have made it angrier. The head. His only chance was the head.
Kaladin struggled to his feet. The monster stopped smashing against the ground and with a trump surged toward him. Kaladin gripped the sword in two hands, then wavered. His leg buckled beneath him. He tried to go down on one knee, but the leg gave out completely, and he slumped to the side and narrowly avoided slicing himself with the Shardblade.
He splashed into a pool of water. In front of him, one of the spheres he’d tossed shone with a bright white light.
He reached into the water, snatching it, clutching the chilled glass. He needed that Light. Storms, his life depended on it.
Please.
The chasmfiend loomed above.
Kaladin sucked in a breath, straining, like a man gasping for air. He heard . . . as if distantly . . .
Weeping.
No power entered him.
The chasmfiend swung and Kaladin twisted, and strangely found himself. The other version of him stood above him, sword raised, larger than life. It was bigger than him by half.
What in the Almighty’s own eyes . . . ? Kaladin thought, dumbfounded, as the chasmfiend smashed an arm down onto the figure beside Kaladin. That not-him shattered into a puff of Stormlight.
What had he done? How had he done it?
No matter. He lived. With a cry of desperation, he threw himself back to his feet and lurched toward the chasmfiend. He needed to get close, as he had before, too close for the claws to swing in these confines.
So close that . . .
The chasmfiend reared, then snapped down for a bite, mandibles extending, terrible eyes bearing down.
Kaladin thrust upward.
* * *
The chasmfiend crashed down, chitin snapping, legs spasming. Shallan cried out, freehand to mouth, from where she hid behind a boulder, her skin and clothing turned deep black.
The chasmfiend had fallen on Kaladin.
Shallan dropped her paper—it bore a drawing of her and another of Kaladin—and scrambled across the rocks, dismissing the blackness around her. She’d needed to be close to the fighting for the illusions to work. Better if she’d been able to send them on Pattern, but that was problematic because—
She stopped in front of the still-twitching beast, a heap of flesh and carapace like a fallen avalanche of stone. She shifted from one foot to another, uncertain what to do. “Kaladin?” she called out. Her voice was frail in the darkness.
Stop it, she told herself. No timidity. You’re past that. Taking a deep breath, she moved forward, picking her way over the huge armored legs. She tried to shove aside a claw, but it was far too heavy for her, so she climbed over it and skidded down the other side.
She froze as she heard something. The chasmfiend’s head lay nearby, massive eyes cloudy. Spren started to rise from it, like trails of smoke. The same ones as before, only . . . leaving? She held her light closer.
The bottom half of Kaladin’s body protruded from the chasmfiend’s mouth. Almighty above! Shallan gasped, then scrambled forward. She tried, with difficulty, to pull Kaladin from the closed maw before summoning her Shardblade and cutting away at several mandibles.
“Kaladin?” she asked, nervously peering into the thing’s mouth from the side, where she’d removed a mandible.
“Ow,” a weak voice trailed back to her.
Alive! “Hang on!” she said, hacking at the thing’s head, careful not to cut too close to Kaladin. Violet ichor spurted out, coating her arms, smelling like wet mold.
“This is kind of uncomfortable . . .” Kaladin said.
“You’re alive,” Shallan said. “Stop complaining.”
He was alive. Oh, Stormfather. Alive. She would have a whole heap of prayers to burn when they got back.
“Smells awful in here,” Kaladin said weakly. “Almost as bad as you do.”
“Be glad,” Shallan said as she worked. “Here, I have a reasonably perfect specimen of a chasmfiend—with only a minor case of being dead—and I’m chopping it apart for you instead of studying it.”
“I’m eternally grateful.”
“How did you get in its mouth, anyway?” Shallan asked, prying off a piece of carapace with a sickening sound. She tossed it aside.
“Stabbed it through the roof of its mouth,” Kaladin said, “into the brain. Only way I could figure to kill the blasted thing.”
She leaned down, reaching her hand through the large hole she’d opened. With some work—and with a little cutting at the front mandibles—she managed to help Kaladin wiggle out the side of the mouth. Covered in ichor and blood, face pale from apparent blood loss, he looked like death itself.
“Storms,” she whispered, as he lay back on the rocks.
“Bind my leg,” Kaladin said weakly. “The rest of me should be fine. Heal right up . . .”
She looked at the mess of his leg, and shivered. It looked like . . . Like . . . Balat . . .
Kaladin wouldn’t be walking on that leg anytime soon. Oh, Stormfather, she thought, cutting off the skirt of her dress at the knees. She wrapped his leg tightly, as he instructed. He seemed to think he didn’t need a tourniquet. She listened to him; he’d probably bound far more wounds than she had.
She cut the sleeve off her right arm and used that to bind a second wound on his side, where the chasmfiend had started to rip him in half as it bit. Then she settled down next to him, feeling drained and cold, legs and arm now exposed to the chill air of the chasm bottom.
Kaladin took a deep breath, resting on the rock ground, eyes closed. “Two hours until the highstorm,” he whispered.
Shallan checked the sky. It was almost dark. “If that long,” she whispered. “We beat it, but we’re dead anyway, aren’t we?”
“Seems unfair,” he said. Then he groaned, sitting up.
“Shouldn’t you—”
“Bah. I’ve had far worse wounds than this.”
She raised an eyebrow at him as he opened his eyes. He looked dizzy.
“I have,” he insisted. “That’s not just soldier bravado.”
“This bad?” she asked. “How often?”
“Twice,” he admitted. He looked over the hulking form of the chasmfiend. “We actually killed the thing.”
“Sad, I know,” she said, feeling depressed. “It was beautiful.”
“It would be more beautiful if it hadn’t tried to eat me.”
“From my perspective,” Shallan noted, “it didn’t try, it succeeded.”
“Nonsense,” Kaladin said. “It didn’t manage to swallow me. Doesn’t count.” He held his hand out to her, as if for help getting to his feet.
“You want to try to keep going?”
“You expect me to just lie here in the chasm until the waters come?”
“No, but . . .” She looked up. The chasmfiend was big. Maybe twenty feet tall, as it lay on its side. “What if we climbed up that thing, then tried to scale up to the top of the plateau?” The farther westward they’d gone, the shallower the chasms had grown.
Kaladin looked up. “That’s still a good eighty feet of climbing, Shallan. And what would we do on the top of the plateau? The storm would blow us off.”
“We could at least try to find some kind of shelter . . .” she said. “Storms, it really is hopeless, isn’t it?”
Oddly, he cocked his head. “Probably.”
“Only ‘probably’?”
“Shelter . . . You have a Shardblade.”
“And?” she asked. “I can’t cut away a wall of water.”
“No, but you can cut stone.” He looked up, toward the wall of the chasm.
Shallan’s breath caught in her throat. “We can carve out a cubby! Like the scouts use.”
“High up the wall,” he said. “You can see the water line up there. If we can get above that . . .”
It still meant climbing. She wouldn’t have to go all the way to where the chasm got narrow at the top, but it wouldn’t be an easy climb, by any means. And she had very little time.
But it was a chance.
“You’re going to have to do it,” Kaladin said. “I might be able to stand, with help. But climbing while wielding a Shardblade . . .”
“Right,” Shallan said, standing up. She took a deep breath. “Right.”
She started by scaling the back of the chasmfiend. The smooth carapace made for slippery climbing, but she found footholds between plates. Once on its back, she looked up toward the water line. It seemed much higher than it had from below.
“Cut handholds,” Kaladin called.
Right. She kept forgetting about the Shardblade. She didn’t want to think about it . . .
No. No time for that now. She summoned the Blade and cut out a series of long strips of rock, sending chunks falling to bounce off the carapace. She tucked her hair behind her ear, working in the dim light to create a ladderlike series of handholds up the side of the wall.