Oathbringer: Book Three of the Stormlight Archive

“I don’t know,” Sah whispered. “Storms, Khen. I don’t know anything.”

I do, Moash thought. But he couldn’t find the will to say anything to them. Instead, he found himself annoyed, angerspren boiling up around him. He felt frustrated both at himself and at the Voidbringers. He slammed his bundle down, but then stalked off, out of the lumberyard.

An overseer yelped loudly and scuttled after him—but she didn’t stop him, and neither did the guards he passed. He had a reputation.

Moash strode through the city, tailed by the overseer, searching for one of the flying type of Fused. They seemed to be in charge, even of the other Fused.

He couldn’t find one, so he settled for approaching one of the other subspecies: a malen that sat near the city’s cistern, where rainwater collected. The creature was of the heavily armored type, with no hair, the carapace encroaching across his cheeks.

Moash strode right up to the creature. “I need to talk to someone in charge.”

Behind him, Moash’s overseer gasped—perhaps only now realizing that whatever it was Moash was up to, it could get her in serious trouble.

The Fused regarded him and grinned.

“Someone in charge,” Moash repeated.

The Voidbringer laughed, then fell backward into the water of the cistern, where he floated, staring at the sky.

Great, Moash thought. One of the crazy ones. There were many of those.

Moash stalked away, but didn’t get much farther into the town before something dropped from the sky. Cloth fluttered in the air, and in the middle of it floated a creature with skin that matched the black and red clothing. He couldn’t tell if it was malen or femalen.

“Little human,” the creature said with a foreign accent, “you are passionate and interesting.”

Moash licked his lips. “I need to talk to someone in charge.”

“You need nothing but what we give you,” the Fused said. “But your desire is to be granted. Lady Leshwi will see you.”

“Great. Where can I find her?”

The Fused pressed its hand against his chest and smiled. Dark Voidlight spread from its hand across Moash’s body. Both of them rose into the air.

Panicking, Moash clutched at the Fused. Could he get the creature into a chokehold? Then what? If he killed it up here, he’d drop to his own death.

They rose until the town looked like a tiny model: lumberyard and parade ground on one side, the single prominent street down the center. To the right, the man-made ward provided a buffer against the highstorms, creating a shelter for trees and the citylord’s mansion.

They ascended even farther, the Fused’s loose clothes fluttering. Though the air was warm at ground level, up here it was quite chilly, and Moash’s ears felt odd—dull, as if they were stuffed with cloth.

Finally, the Fused slowed them to a hovering stop. Though Moash tried to hold on, the Fused shoved him to the side, then zoomed away in a flaring roil of cloth.

Moash drifted alone above the expansive landscape. His heart thundered, and he regarded that drop, realizing something. He did not want to die.

He forced himself to twist and look about him. He felt a surge of hope as he found he was drifting toward another Fused. A woman who hovered in the sky, wearing robes that must have extended a good ten feet below her, like a smear of red paint. Moash drifted right up beside her, getting so close that she was able to reach out and stop him.

He resisted grabbing that arm and hanging on for dear life. His mind was catching up to what was happening—she wanted to meet him, but in a realm where she belonged and he did not. Well, he would contain his fear.

“Moash,” the Fused said. Leshwi, the other had called her. She had a face that was all three Parshendi colors: white, red, and black, marbled like paint swirled together. He had rarely seen someone who was all three colors before, and this was one of the most transfixing patterns he’d seen, almost liquid in its effect, her eyes like pools around which the colors ran.

“How do you know my name?” Moash asked.

“Your overseer told me,” Leshwi said. She had a distinct serenity about her as she floated with feet down. The wind up here tugged at the ribbons she wore, pushing them backward in careless ripples. There were no windspren in sight, oddly. “Where did you get that name?”

“My grandfather named me,” Moash said, frowning. This was not how he’d anticipated this conversation going.

“Curious. Do you know that it is one of our names?”

“It is?”

She nodded. “How long has it drifted on the tides of time, passing from the lips of singers to men and back, to end up here, on the head of a human slave?”

“Look, you’re one of the leaders?”

“I’m one of the Fused who is sane,” she said, as if it were the same thing.

“Then I need to—”

“You’re bold,” Leshwi said, eyes forward. “Many of the singers we left here are not. We find them remarkable, considering how long they were abused by your people. But still, they are not bold enough.”

She looked to him for the first time during the conversation. Her face was angular, with long flowing parshman hair—black and crimson, thicker than that of a human. Almost like thin reeds or blades of grass. Her eyes were a deep red, like pools of shimmering blood.

“Where did you learn the Surges, human?” she asked.

“The Surges?”

“When you killed me,” she said, “you were Lashed to the sky—but you responded quickly, with familiarity. I will say, without guile, that I was furious to be caught so unaware.”

“Wait,” Moash said, cold. “When I killed you?”

She regarded him, unblinking, with those ruby eyes.

“You’re the same one?” Moash asked. That pattern of marbled skin … he realized. It’s the same as the one I fought. But the features were different.

“This is a new body offered to me in sacrifice,” Leshwi said. “To bond and make my own, as I have none.”

“You’re some kind of spren?”

She blinked but did not reply.

Moash started to drop. He felt it in his clothes, which lost their power to fly first. He cried out, reaching toward the Fused woman, and she seized him by the wrist and injected him with more Voidlight. It surged across his body, and he hovered again. The violet darkness retreated, visible again only as faint periodic crackles on her skin.

“My companions spared you,” she said to him. “Brought you here, to these lands, as they thought I might wish personal vengeance once reborn. I did not. Why would I destroy that which had such passion? Instead I watched you, curious to see what you did. I saw you help the singers who were pulling the sledges.”

Moash took a deep breath. “Can you tell me, then, why you treat your own so poorly?”

“Poorly?” she said, sounding amused. “They are fed, clothed, and trained.”

“Not all of them,” Moash said. “You had those poor parshmen working as slaves, like humans. And now you’re going to throw them at the city walls.”