Chapter 66

Be content to play with your toys on their world of storms. Or do I have to broadcast what I have learned of your goals? I certainly do not think it a coincidence that you have made a special study of the worlds where legends abound of the dead being raised.

W hat was this feeling Szeth felt?

Was it … fondness? For this monastery in the small city on the island? Strange, to feel fondness, considering his hatred for it when he’d first arrived.

Those had seemed the darkest possible times—black as the hateful hour between moons. His imagination had been flawed, unable to grasp true, penetrating misery. Fortunately, experience had solved that deficit. A moonless night still had stars. He hadn’t understood that until each and every one of them had been ripped away, leaving him in a nothingness so absolute, pain itself was a relief.

“What a strange place to put a city,” Kaladin said, oblivious as usual. “Every time it rains, you’ll have to wait until the river dries out to cross.”

“The river,” Szeth said, “does not dry out.”

“Never?” Kaladin asked. “But …” He frowned. “It has to run out sometime. Where does the water come from?”

“Ice melting,” Szeth said. “There are some permanent rivers like this in the East. Merely fewer.”

“Huh,” Kaladin said.

Szeth started toward the bridge, and the others trailed along. None of them flying—to avoid revealing themselves. That meant a long hike beside the river, which flowed fat with rainwater. They crossed the wooden bridge to the city, which was empty. Just wooden walkways, clay brick cobbles, streets flowing with muddy water, buildings applauding with raindrops. It wasn’t until they’d searched a half dozen structures that they found a woman in one … sweeping the floor.

She jumped as they entered, then her hand went to her lips as she saw Kaladin, his uniform marking him as an outsider.

“It is well,” Szeth said quietly. “We’re simply travelers. We thought the town empty.”

The woman wore a splash. A ragged blue apron. Though she was thin as a sapling, she did not have that same cast to her eyes as the haunted people he’d seen before.

“Please,” Szeth said, gesturing for Kaladin to back away. “What happened to the people of the city?”

“It … feels like a dream,” the woman said at last, clutching her broom. This was a finer house, a merchant’s or an officer’s quarters, but strewn with recent refuse.

“The shadow has passed,” Szeth said. “You know of what I speak? The darkness that came from the monastery?”

The woman nodded, relaxing when Kaladin stepped back out into the rain.

“How long has it been?” she whispered. “Since it began …”

“Years,” Szeth said.

She gasped.

“The others?” Szeth asked. “The rest of the town? They should be free now. Where are they?”

“Most were … sent at the start …” she said, looking into the distance. “To the first monastery. The Bondsmith. We were to gather there with weapons, then patrol the borders of Shinovar because someone was coming …” She focused on him, and her eyes widened. “ You were coming.”

This was not unanticipated, as there had been many reports of Shin troops on the northern borders. Hopefully none would be deployed against him. Szeth did not relish the idea of cutting through innocents to reach the final monastery.

“I stayed behind,” the woman explained. “My leg, you see. So when my mind cleared …” She glanced around the room. “I lived in this filth. I can’t … believe that …”

Szeth left her with a suggestion she make her way southward, then joined Kaladin, who had been listening at the door with Syl interpreting. Like most spren, her shape was disturbed slightly by the falling water.

With his bundle of swords on his back, Szeth walked toward the monastery at the center of the city. He thought he periodically heard Nightblood speaking softly, talking to the Honorblades. Learning from them, it seemed.

Kaladin and his spren hurried after. “Szeth, did you hear that?” Kaladin said. “They went to the final monastery?”

“Then to the border, yes,” Szeth said.

“Maybe the Unmade is at that first monastery, the last one on your list.”

“I think it must be. But before I go there, I want to free as many people as possible.” The rain was slackening, and sunlight—pure sunlight—began to break through the clouds above. “You may go on without me, if you wish.”

“I told you I’d stay,” Kaladin said, “and I mean it. But Szeth … you never told me about your meeting with an Unmade. Maybe we can identify which one it is; I learned of them all in officer meetings with Jasnah. This sounds like Ashertmarn.”

“I have said what I intend to say.” He left Kaladin stewing and walked up to the monastery, feeling again that stirring sense of familiarity. How dare this place feel like home? This was where he’d taken his first step toward being Truthless. It was where he’d discovered the shamans lied.

He stepped inside the great hall, as the gates had been left open. The voices of the dead grew … softer here, as if in reverence. He could hear the water outside, drops pouring from the rooftop sounding louder than the rain had.

The monastery was empty. I wonder … Szeth thought, then found himself turning right, Kaladin and Syl following. He trailed down a hallway windowed with thin slits. The acolyte rooms were beyond, wooden, with metal door handles and stone floors. Purposely designed to force the shaman acolytes to become accustomed to touching metal, as some arrived without first becoming soldiers. Szeth remembered listening to many of them sobbing in the night after arriving.

The soldiers had not cried. They’d bled their tears out long ago. He counted down seven rooms, walked to his bunk inside. Strange, how he could remember each place he’d ever slept for any length of time. Was that normal? Close his eyes, and he could easily imagine the floor of his home, beside his family. The barracks at Talmut’s monastery. Then here. A bunk that was a little too small, even for him. He knelt beside it and ran his fingers over the wood of the frame.

He removed the loose block by the wall, reached in, and came out with a handful of scratchy wool. Sewn together into the shape of a lamb.

Oh, glories within …

Arrow slits in the hall sent lines of light through the doorway to the floor, one on either side of him, like glowing spikes. He’d been so strong, so sure he didn’t need anything, until that moment. Until he trembled, squeezed his eyes shut, then put the small toy to his forehead.

And wept.

Kaladin haunted the doorway into the small chamber, feeling weirdly out of place. Szeth had come directly here. Now he was … crying?

The Assassin in White, kneeling on the floor by his discarded pack of swords, blubbering over a toy? It made sense after only a moment’s consideration.

“You had a younger brother,” Kaladin said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“No,” Szeth said hoarsely. “I … didn’t mention this toy in my story to you … did I?”

“You came here for it,” Kaladin said. “Who was the child who died, the one you couldn’t protect?”

Szeth still knelt, head bowed, and Syl tapped Kaladin on the arm. “Kal,” she whispered. “Can’t you see? It’s his. He was the child.”

The words shook Kaladin, inverting his perspective like that first time he’d stood on the wall of a chasm. Szeth’s toy?

“Storms,” Kaladin whispered. All this time, he’d been looking for the connection between him and Szeth, wanting to see that Szeth was like him.

However, that wasn’t quite right. Szeth wasn’t so much like Kaladin as …

“Szeth,” Kaladin said. “How old were you when they took you from your home?”

“Eleven,” Szeth whispered, hoarse. “I was eleven.”

Szeth wasn’t Kaladin.

Szeth was Tien.

Szeth wasn’t the young man who had gone to war, determined to save and protect. He was the child who had been ripped from his peaceful life, then transformed into a killer against his will. A scared little boy who just yearned to go home.

Kaladin had been thrown off by Szeth’s competence—he moved like Kaladin did, seemed to know the weapon intrinsically. Except Szeth hated the spear, while Kaladin loved it. He should have seen.

Storms. Something broke in Kaladin. He stumbled away from the room and put his back to the stone wall of the hallway outside. Syl followed, concerned.

“I keep expecting him to become likable,” Kaladin whispered to her. “Or at least reasonable. I keep having trouble helping him because he’s not like the men at Urithiru, the ones I understood, the ones who wanted my help …”

“But …?” she asked.

“Those were foolish expectations on my part,” Kaladin said. “A child taken from his home and twisted into a killer isn’t going to be likable. People who need help aren’t going to be reasonable all the time. Stormfather knows, I often wasn’t.”

Suddenly, he needed to help Szeth. Not because of Dalinar’s request, not because of past failures. But because this was a person in pain, and Kaladin was perhaps one of the few people in a position to help.

Unfortunately, by the time he stepped back to the room, Szeth had recovered. He’d returned the stuffed toy to its hole, and was wiping his hands on his white trousers. He replaced his long white raincloak with a flourish that sprayed water across the room, then he picked up the bundle of swords.

“Szeth?” Kaladin said as the man pushed past him and into the hallway.

“We must be moving,” Szeth said. “I would like to check the Edgedancer monastery, though we’ll then need to retrace our steps a little. Fortunately, we have recharged our Stormlight, and can afford to fly.”

“Szeth, it’s not your fault, what they did to you.”

Szeth stopped a little farther down the hallway.

“The world needs killers,” Kaladin said. “So if it can’t find them, it makes them out of whatever raw materials are at hand. Like children who love to dance.”

“I murdered a man,” Szeth said, facing away from Kaladin. “I wasn’t some random choice.”

“You protected yourself, Szeth.”

“I meant to kill him, even before he tried to strangle me.”

“But you weren’t going to, ” Kaladin said. “Don’t lie. You told me what happened.” He glanced at Syl—who nodded, encouraging him.

Szeth started walking again.

“Rule number one,” Kaladin called after him. “You’re not a thing. You’re a person. Rule number two, you get to choose. And there’s a third rule, Szeth. You deserve to be happy.”

Szeth put one hand to the wall and let the bundle of swords slump from his other hand onto the floor. “Why?” he asked, his back bowed. “Why would I deserve happiness? Give me a single good reason, bridgeman.”

Kaladin took a gamble. A line that wouldn’t be true for everyone, and would be dangerously untrue to say to some who had come from places of abuse. But he’d heard enough of Szeth’s story, despite the parts that the man obviously hadn’t shared.

“One good reason, Szeth?” Kaladin replied. “I’ll give you two. One mother. One father. I don’t know where your parents are, if they’re still alive or if they’ve passed, but I’ll tell you this. They loved you. They want you to be happy.”

“I don’t deserve their names,” Szeth said. “The things I’ve done …”

“Things you were made to do,” Kaladin said, stepping forward. “I spent years believing my parents would hate me for my failings, but I knew—I always knew—that was a lie. You know too, don’t you?”

Szeth looked away. So Kaladin stepped forward again, careful, as if he were approaching a timid animal.

“You are not a thing,” Kaladin whispered. “You can choose. What do you want, Szeth?”

“You’re wrong,” Szeth said, harsh. He turned, then cocked his head—and was probably hearing the spren. That cursed highspren who hovered around him, unseen, whispering lies. “I … I’m flawed. My choices can’t be trusted. I do not know right and wrong.”

“No,” Kaladin said. “Szeth, listen to what that spren is saying, then think. When you were about to hit that soldier as a child? You said you stopped, until he tried to kill you. When you killed at Taravangian’s demands, you knew it was wrong. Damnation, you knew there was something wrong in your homeland. They exiled you, but you knew. Each time, you knew. If you’d been the one to decide, if you’d truly been in control, people would still be alive. You can choose. So don’t lie to me and say otherwise.”

“I …” Szeth blinked. “People … people are still dead, Kaladin. I still killed them.”

“Then do better, ” Kaladin said. “Try to fix the problem, make restitution. But Szeth, you can’t do better if you’re dead. I’m telling you that you, and all of us, can do better. Choose better.” Kaladin stepped right up to Szeth and extended his hand. “We talk a lot about taking responsibility, Szeth. It’s what Dalinar teaches, and storm me if it’s wrong, but I don’t think you have any difficulty taking responsibility.

“The truth is, there’s a balance. You are a product of what life, society, and people have done to you. You bear blame for what you did, but others bear a lot of it too. It’s never too late to accept that your past might not be an excuse, but it is a valid explanation. So tell me. What do you—Szeth-son-Neturo—want for yourself? With no influence from anyone else, not even me. What do you want?”

Szeth gazed at Kaladin’s open, extended hand. The man was trembling, and Kaladin couldn’t tell what of the wetness on his face was rain, what was sweat, and what was tears.

“If I choose this,” Szeth whispered, “it’s as good as admitting that there are no right answers. That no one knows the truth. That terrifies me.”

“It means, ” Kaladin said, “that neither truth nor answers are easy to find. We still have to try, rather than giving up that responsibility to someone else. Maybe someone has found the truth. I certainly hope so. But let’s talk about what you genuinely want, and work from there.”

“I want …” Szeth said. “I … want to stop killing.” He looked to Kaladin, wide-eyed, as if admitting this were some terrible transgression. “I want to be done with it. I want to cause no more pain.”

“Then we’ll figure that out.”

“It’s impossible,” Szeth whispered. “I have to cleanse my homeland. I’m too great a weapon to be left alone. Someone will find me. Someone will use me. That’s why I put myself in Dalinar’s care, because I hoped that at least I’d be used well. I can’t imagine a world where—”

“Szeth,” Kaladin cut in. “We’ll find a way.”

Szeth stared at Kaladin, then finally took his outstretched hand. Kaladin had anticipated a firm handshake, but Szeth went for the full hug, like a child needing reassurance from a parent. Which was strange, considering how much older Szeth was than him—only now, Kaladin could see the eleven-year-old boy in the assassin. A boy who was never allowed to grow up, and who had somehow maintained a fragile child’s view of morality.

So, Kaladin held Szeth, who quivered, whispering, “I want to stop hurting people. I want to stop being a source of pain. I never want to be forced to take another life. I want to be done, Kaladin. I want to be done. ”

Kaladin held tight as Syl popped up from behind Szeth and—grinning—gave Kaladin an encouraging double thumbs-up. Was this what Wit had meant by being a therapist? Kaladin supposed that once in a while, every person—even ruthless assassins—needed a hug.

Szeth took a deep breath and stepped back. “I don’t see how I can have what I want. My people do need me to help them. That requires killing the corrupted Honorbearers.”

“Does your spren have any ideas?” Kaladin said, picking up the bag of swords so Szeth wouldn’t have to carry it. A foolish question perhaps, but he was hoping he could involve the highspren and maybe get the thing to help, rather than hurt.

“He left this morning, running in shame,” Szeth said. “I think he realized that after his failings in Shadesmar, I would no longer look toward him as I once had.”

So Szeth hadn’t been hearing the spren earlier? That troubled Kaladin. He started to follow Szeth out, then turned as he noticed Syl ducking back into the room. He peeked in, finding her fiddling with the loose brick. She pulled on it, her arms straining, her back bent with the effort.

“Syl?” he said. “That’s far too heavy for you. You—”

The stone slid. Kaladin started as Syl, eager, reached into the hiding spot and pulled out the small toy. Kaladin could now see that it was in vaguely the shape of an animal with four legs and fluffy hair. A sheep—Kaladin had seen them grazing on the hillsides.

Syl pulled it close, with a grin. It was small, about the size of a child’s hand, but still. Kaladin remembered a time when she’d had trouble carrying a leaf.

“I’ve been practicing,” she said proudly. “It feels like the stronger our bond grows, the stronger I am in this realm, you know?” Then she held the toy out to him. “But, um, it’s going to get really tiring to carry this a long distance …”

He took it and slipped it into his pocket. She bobbed along next to him as he caught up with Szeth. Together they walked from the monastery and into the sunlight. To find an ominous figure waiting in the courtyard outside.

He stood with two highspren splitting the air near his head. An imperious man, dark skin with cool undertones, a crescent birthmark on his cheek. Tall, strong, bald, cut as if from stone. Wearing a sharp black uniform marked with silver.

Nalan’Elin, Herald of Justice.

“Sir?” Szeth stopped in place, then saluted.

“I have come,” Nale said with a deep voice, “to accompany you on your quest.” He focused on Kaladin. “As I’ve been told that you need … minding.”

Kaladin met the Herald’s eyes, and softly cursed. Szeth’s spren hadn’t gone “running in shame.”

It had gone running for reinforcements.