Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive #3)

More emerged in other directions. An enormous hand was reaching slowly upward through the glass beads. Deep beneath them a heartbeat began sounding, rattling the beads.

Adolin stumbled back, horrified, and nearly slipped into the bead ocean. He kept his balance, barely, and found himself face-to-face with the woman with scratches for eyes. She stared at him, completely emotionless, as if waiting for him to try to summon his Shardblade so she could scream again.

Damnation. No matter what Azure said, he was certainly in Damnation.

*

“What do I do?” Shallan whispered. She knelt on the white stone of the platform, searching among the beads. Each gave her an impression of an object in the Physical Realm. A dropped shield. A vase from the palace. A scarf.

Nearby, hundreds of little spren—like little orange or green people, only a few inches tall—were climbing among the spheres. She ignored those, searching for the soul of something that would help.

“Shallan,” Pattern said, kneeling. “I don’t think … I don’t think Soulcasting will accomplish anything? It will change an object in the other realm, but not here.”

“What can I do here?” Those spines or claws or whatever rose around them, inevitable, deadly.

Pattern hummed, hands clasped before him. His fingers were too smooth, as if they were chiseled of obsidian. His head shifted and changed, going through its sequence—the spherical mass was never the same, yet somehow still always felt like him.

“My memory…” he said. “I don’t remember.”

Stormlight, Shallan thought. Jasnah had told her to never enter Shadesmar without Stormlight. Shallan pulled a sphere from her pocket—she still wore Veil’s outfit. The beads nearby reacted, trembling and rolling toward her.

“Mmmm…” Pattern said. “Dangerous.”

“I doubt staying here will be better,” Shallan said. She sucked in a little Stormlight, only one mark’s worth. As before, the spren didn’t seem to notice her use of Stormlight as much as they had Kaladin’s. She rested her freehand against the surface of the ocean. Beads stopped rolling and instead clicked together beneath her hand. When she pushed down, they resisted.

Good first step, she thought, drawing in more Stormlight. The beads pressed around her hand, gathering, rolling onto one another. She cursed, worried that she’d soon just have a big pile of beads.

“Shallan,” Pattern said, poking at one of the beads. “Perhaps this?”

It was the soul of the shield she’d felt earlier. She moved the sphere to her gloved safehand, then pressed her other hand to the ocean. She used that bead’s soul as a guide—much like she used a Memory as a guide for doing a sketch—and the other beads obediently rolled together and locked into place, forming an imitation of the shield.

Pattern stepped out onto it, then jumped up and down happily. Her shield held him without sinking, though he seemed as heavy as an ordinary person. Good enough. Now she just needed something big enough to hold them all. Preferably, as she considered, two somethings.

“You, sword lady!” Shallan said, pointing at Azure. “Help me over here. Adolin, you too. Kaladin, see if you can brood this place into submission.”

Azure and Adolin hurried over.

Kaladin turned, frowning. “What?”

Don’t think about that haunted look in his eyes, Shallan thought. Don’t think about what you’ve done in bringing us here, or how it happened. Don’t think, Shallan.

Her mind went blank, like it did in preparation for drawing, then locked on to her task.

Find a way out.

“Everybody,” she said, “those flames are the souls of people, while these spheres represent the souls of objects. Yes, there are huge philosophical implications in that. Let’s try to ignore them, shall we? When you touch a bead, you should be able to sense what it represents.”

Azure sheathed her Shardblade and knelt, feeling at the spheres. “I can … Yes, there’s an impression to each one.”

“We need the soul of something long and flat.” Shallan plunged her hands into the spheres, eyes closed, letting the impressions wash over her.

“I can’t sense anything,” Adolin said. “What am I doing wrong?” He sounded overwhelmed, but don’t think about that.

Look. Fine clothing that hadn’t been taken out of its trunk in a long, long time. So old that it saw the dust as part of itself.

Withering fruit that understood its purpose: decompose and stick its seeds to the rock, where they could hopefully weather storms long enough to sprout and gain purchase.

Swords, recently swung and glorying in their purpose fulfilled. Other weapons belonged to dead men, blades that had the faintest inkling that they’d failed somehow.

Living souls bobbed around, a swarm of them entering the Oathgate control chamber. One brushed Shallan. Drehy the bridgeman. For a brief moment she felt what it was like to be him. Worried for Kaladin. Panicked that nobody was in charge, that he would have to take command. He wasn’t a commander. You couldn’t be a rebel if you were in charge. He liked being told what to do—that way he could find a method to do it with style.

Drehy’s worries caused her own to bubble up. The bridgemen’s powers will fade without Kaladin, she thought. What of Vathah, Red, and Ishnah? I didn’t—

Focus. Something reached out from the back of her mind, grabbed those thoughts and feelings, and yanked them into the darkness. Gone.

She brushed a bead with her fingers. A large door, like a keep’s gate. She grabbed the sphere and shifted it to her safehand. Unfortunately, the next bead she touched was the palace itself. Momentarily stunned by the majesty of it, Shallan gaped. She held the entire palace in her hand.

Too large. She dropped it and kept searching.

Trash that still saw itself as a child’s toy.

A goblet that had been made from melted-down nails, taken from an old building.

There. She seized hold of a sphere and pressed Stormlight into it. A building rose before her, made entirely out of beads: a copy of the Oathgate control building. She managed to make its top rise only a few feet above the surface, most of the building sinking into the depths. The rooftop was within reach.

“On top of it!” she shouted.

She held the replica in place as Pattern scrambled onto the roof. Adolin followed, trailed by that ghostly spren and Azure. Finally, Kaladin picked up his pack and walked with his spren onto the rooftop.

Shallan joined them with the aid of a hand from Adolin. She clutched the sphere that was the soul of the building, and tried to make the bead structure move through the sea like a raft.

It resisted, sitting there motionless. Well, she had another plan. She scurried to the other side of the roof and stretched down, held by Pattern, to touch the sea again. She used the soul of the large door to make another standing platform. Pattern jumped down, followed by Adolin and Azure.

Once they’d all piled precariously on the door, Shallan let go of the building. It crashed down behind them, beads falling in a tumult, frightening some of the little green spren crawling among the beads nearby.

Shallan reconstructed the building on the other side of the door, with only the rooftop showing. They filed across.