Chapter 78

I’m sorry.

L osing a squire wore on Sigzil, but he threw himself into the next phase of his plan. The trick was going to be to divert the enemy to Narak Three—southwest of the Oathgate platform—instead of the Oathgate itself. A difficult proposition, as the enemy was shrewd.

“They’ll obviously want to take Narak Two next,” General Winn explained, pointing to their maps. “Holding the Oathgate is of utmost strategic importance.” The others nodded.

Was it though? In a traditional battle, yes, it would be. It would cut off the human retreat, make them desperate. Isolate them. Yet … Sigzil considered as he stood by the table with the others, men more experienced than he. Should he say what he was thinking? Surely it wasn’t wise to contradict them.

But why was he here, if not to lead?

“Is it though?” he asked them. “They have only three days now to capture Narak Prime. Will they waste time on Narak Two?”

“It’s our retreat,” General Balivar said. He was younger, like Sigzil. “Seems a wise way to break us.”

“Or galvanize us to fight to the last man,” Sigzil said, gesturing. “Which isn’t what they want. They want to break us, make us retreat. If they take the Oathgate, we can’t do that, and they are more likely to lose than win—because of the deadline. They can’t afford to make us hunker down.”

The others stared at the maps. “Storms,” Winn said. “I think he’s right. Our plans are stale as last week’s bread. We need to be looking at the situation as it stands now.”

“If they throw everything they have at Narak Prime,” Sigzil said, “they might overwhelm us. But here’s the key: they may not know how low we are on Stormlight, and Narak Prime has the tallest walls and the strongest defenses.

“They have to be worrying about the looming deadline. So what we need to do is make them think that by attacking Narak Three, they’ll be getting what they want: a way to demoralize us. We have to make it too tempting a strike to pass up.”

“A feint,” Ka said, with a nod, holding her silvery Shardpen at the writing station. “Like how you pretend weakness in a sword fight, and make the enemy strike there.”

“Pull back troops to Narak Prime and Narak Two,” Sigzil said, rubbing his chin. “Then … we still have those Lightweavers?”

“Yes, sir,” Winn said.

“Send for Stargyle.”

Within minutes, the handsome Lightweaver was ushered in, his hair immaculate as usual. Maybe he kept it that way through rain and storm with an illusion. Sigzil sat him down with the generals.

“We have been using Narak Three as a supply depot,” he explained. “And those Deepest Ones have always been prowling around, watching. In this largest building, I want you to make an illusion of gemstones—our storage for it. Then we, in the fighting, need to find a way to let the enemy get a glimpse inside—so they assume taking Narak Three would be a huge blow to us. See if we can trick them into throwing everything they have at it.”

It took a little while to get a plan in place, but Stargyle was confident—he seemed to like the idea of having something relevant to do on the battlefield other than using illusions to hide groups of archers or medical staff, to move them into position covertly. As he left, Sigzil shared a look with his command staff, and left the most worrying part unsaid.

They were laying a trap to feign losing their Stormlight cache … but in reality, it was a partial truth. They were dangerously low on Stormlight. And if the Bondsmiths didn’t return soon …

He emerged from the meeting into a camp doing its preparations between battles. Swords being sharpened, soldiers catching sleep while they could. He walked across the courtyard, receiving salutes, answering a few questions—bolstering each person he talked to, which he now did by habit.

That done, he forced himself to climb a ladder—not fly up it—to the wooden wall walk, constructed alongside the hulking stone fortification the Stonewards had built.

“How long do you suppose we can last,” he whispered, “before we run out?”

“Hard to say,” Vienta whispered back. “There are a lot of variables. But each shipment of Light from Urithiru is smaller than the one before, and each fight takes more than the previous, as the enemy pushes harder and harder.”

“Three days?” he asked, reaching the top of the wall. “Can we last three days?”

“I … do not think it likely,” she admitted.

Up here he found Leyten leaning against the wall. Sigzil fell in beside his friend, enjoying a rare moment of peace, gazing out over the darkened Plains—which were occasionally lit red by bursts of lightning. It was … pretty, actually, if he removed the context.

“Is it strange?” Leyten said. “That I miss them? The chasms? Not merely making armor down there, as I mentioned before. I like the feel of those chasms. Teeming with life, never fully quiet, but with a quietude. Like today, in fact. With that gentle lightning and a plain pretending to sleep.”

“I feel it too,” Sigzil said. “Hard to believe at times like this, how much blood and death this quiet place has caused.”

“I wasn’t supposed to be a bridgeman,” Leyten said. “Most of you were forced into the army; I came willingly, as a way to send money home to my family. Had a good job as an apprentice armorer. Respected. Until …”

Sigzil knew the story. A petty lighteyes’s armor had failed, and the blame had eventually fallen on Leyten. Shipped off to die running bridges to soothe the ego of a highborn soldier.

“He died, you know,” Leyten said, with a half smirk. “Two bridge runs later. Gabaron, the man who consigned me to the bridge crews? Dead.” He eyed Sigzil. “Bad riveting to his armor straps. Whole cuirass snapped off. Turns out if you keep killing the guys who maintain your equipment, you stop having well-maintained equipment.”

“Once in a while,” Sigzil said, smiling, “fate hits us with something that’s downright poetic, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah …” Leyten trailed off. “Sig … do I belong here?”

Sigzil frowned, regarding his friend, with his curly hair wet from the drizzle. Leyten looked down. “I’m not a true Radiant, Sig. I’m a guy who likes to sit and count how many uniforms we need before we run out. I don’t belong in the sky, glowing. I’ve never felt comfortable with people paying attention to me. And during this fighting, I’ve lost two squires. I just … I wonder …”

Storms, what to say to that? Sigzil considered, and took his friend by the shoulder, drew his eyes. Then he smiled and said, “I know. I feel it too.”

Leyten smiled back. “You do? You’ve been so confident lately.”

“An act,” Sigzil said.

“But … Sig, what if I’m not good enough? Those squires … they’re my fault. Their deaths. I …”

“Blame Kaladin.”

Leyten frowned, glancing at him.

“Kal put us in charge,” Sigzil said, trying a calculated gambit. “He could have been here. He isn’t. So it’s his fault.”

“He led us well!” Leyten snapped, pulling out of his funk, eyes alight with determination. “He did everything he could, then more. He’s not to blame.”

“Oh, so you trust his decisions?”

“I …” Leyten trailed off, and smiled sheepishly. “I suppose I do.”

“Then you have to trust that he was correct to leave us in charge, Leyten,” Sigzil said. “If you blame yourself for your squires dying, then you’ll have to blame Kal for when Maps died, or Teft, or any other losses. Can’t have it both ways.” He leaned closer. “And we both know Kaladin is a storming hero. So …”

Leyten stood taller. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.” He looked to Sigzil. “Thank you. Sig … I miss him, Kaladin. But you should know, I’m just as proud to serve under you.”

Sigzil gave the man’s arm a squeeze, then sent him to get the Windrunners ready for the next clash. Oddly, the things he’d said to Leyten resonated with him too. Inside, he still wondered … but those voices were growing quieter. As the camp rushed to execute his plans, and his generals found his ideas worthwhile, Sigzil discovered something remarkable.

This was him. This man who could lead. He finally had a place to channel all of his thoughts and ideas. He had reasons to make those ideas as precise and calculated as possible. His love of engineering and physics actually came into play in this defense, and his interactions with the others bolstered him.

He wasn’t so lofty that he thought he deserved command. But somehow, in being forced into it, he’d discovered something important. Here, beneath red lightning and on a plain full of chasms he’d claimed as his own, Sigzil found himself. In a way that training with Master Hoid, or learning beneath Kaladin, had never done for him.

Sigzil was, at long last, the man he’d always wanted to be.

Hiking through the chasms reawakened Venli’s childhood, and she loved it. Even with the red lightning above and the terrible way thunder echoed down here. Even with the otherwise absolute darkness broken only by their frail gemstones. Even with a flow of water that came up to her knees at times. Even with the stench of death and the ancient corpses they sometimes passed.

Even with all that, she found she loved this place.

Loved that life had conquered such depths, as marked by the bobbing green glow of circular lifespren with their delicate spines. They’d weave through the holes in skulls or past chunks of cracked carapace, then dance with patches of rotspren, like punch lines to one another’s jokes, red and green. Each meaningless without the other.

She loved the sounds of trickling water, of vines constricting, of cremlings on the walls—and the steady, dangerous splashing of the chasmfiends behind. She would periodically glance back and see them there—wedged between the walls, using their many legs to maneuver, their faces like chunks of broken rock. She’d panic briefly, then attune Awe. These were their allies now.

She closed her eyes, listening to that strange tone she followed, growing more firm and pure as they traveled inward. She breathed in the potent air, walked through the darkness with her hands out to the sides.

And immediately tripped, her foot snagging on a vine beneath the flowing water. She caught herself before she fell, and attuned Embarrassment. Maybe best to keep her eyes open.

The water flow, although shallow, was growing treacherous. The chasms had a mostly flat floor, the result of crem settlement competing against erosion and creating a kind of equilibrium that prevented the chasms from filling in. She thought the erosion would eventually win, especially after seeing it had already done so on the far eastern side of the Shattered Plains, but that was probably eons away.

“I don’t like walking through this water,” Bila said from nearby, splashing as she stepped. “My brain keeps attuning the Terrors, telling me this is the trickle at the start of a highstorm.”

“The Everstorm rains far less than the highstorm,” Venli said. “We should be fine.”

Bila raised a gemstone to light her face and stared up through the opening in the chasm toward the angry sky. “At least we shouldn’t have to suffer through a meeting of Everstorm and highstorm again.”

Venli had heard their tales of escaping into the night through the chasms when that horrific first meeting of storms had occurred. She’d been on the plateaus then, though it felt like a lifetime ago—and remembered through the eyes of another person.

Timbre thrummed. A theory: the meeting of storm and storm had never again been so violent as it had been that first time, when plateaus had been destroyed. Was that another clue? Had this location caused the violence of that convergence? Were others weaker because they happened elsewhere? Or was it what they’d guessed originally: that the violence of that first convergence had been caused by the Everstorm’s exultant inception?

She had no answers, so she led on until they hit an obstruction in the chasm: a damlike natural structure, created by a log wedged between the walls. A waterfall poured over it, and potential handholds of wood and bone were covered in moss. Her skin crawled, and she attuned the Terrors at the mere thought of climbing it. Of being required to touch the bodies of the dead.

The others hesitated around and behind her, but then a shadow—blocking the violent red light crackling in the sky above—fell across her. Thundercloud leaned down and studied the obstruction. Then the long mandibles beside its mouth—which were jointed, and roughly the thickness of a singer’s arms—reached to Venli. Her rhythm froze as the chasmfiend picked her up with those armlike appendages and held her beneath his chin. He crawled over the obstruction.

The other chasmfiends followed, carrying singers, and making several trips—easily cresting the dam by moving, as they often did in here, with their legs pressed against either side of the chasm. Their forelegs were strong and powerful, but not hinged in a way to grab or lift. These smaller ones below the head, though, had fine articulation.

Venli let her rhythm start again as she breathed deeply, now standing in waist-high water upstream from the dam—for it had formed something of a lake. The next person set down by the chasmfiends was Leshwi. Venli quietly attuned Tension; she and the Fused hadn’t interacted much in the last few days—both were uncertain about their new relationship.

Leshwi eyed her, then hummed to Agony. “I do not know if I can continue this way, Venli. I was a demigod for millennia. Now … I stand in wet clothing, shivering.”

“Would you go back to him?” Venli asked. “Become his again, fight in a war that you don’t believe in? Kill, so you can be comfortable again?”

Leshwi’s rhythm changed to Reprimand and she glanced at Venli in anger. Then, with obvious effort, she attuned Withdrawal instead, looking away.

“You were strong enough,” Venli said to Praise, “to turn against your orders, your own kind, and your god because you knew it was right. That was the difficult part, Leshwi. Just keep going.”

“It is not so simple,” Leshwi said. “Before, I’d perfected my role over so many, many years. Now …” She glanced down at her wet clothes, her hands outspread. “Now … why am I even here? What am I doing? I can’t help you.”

“But you can,” Venli said. “If we encounter a patrol from Odium’s army, there’s a chance they won’t know you’ve switched sides. They’ll obey a Fused of your renown. You’re our last defense against discovery.”

Leshwi paused at that, humming to Consideration.

“We’ll find a new place for you,” Venli promised. “With the listeners. You might not be a god among us—we will have no gods—but you’ll be something better. Free.”

“Free …” Leshwi said. “It has been a long, long time …” She glanced upward. “But can I ever be free if I cannot soar?”

Soon, the chasmfiends had carried each of the listeners across the obstruction. Venli’s gemstone lit Thundercloud’s dark eyes as he leaned down beside her. His entire face was made of plates, the eye peeking through a junction between a few. She could feel Curiosity pulsing from him.

“You want to know the source of the song as much as we do,” Venli said.

He looked inward toward the center, still many hours’ march away. Then he cocked his head, his long mandibles twitching. She followed his gaze, and crackling lightning illuminated something in the chasm. Another obstruction wedged between the walls, but higher up. Not creating a dam this time.

“Shall we see?” she asked.

In response, Thundercloud picked her up again—chill water streaming from her—and lifted her high to inspect …

A bridge.

One of those the humans used. Old, scarred, grown over with haspers and shalebark, wedged here twenty feet up. Moss covered the bottom side, and rockbuds had begun finding purchase on it. Venli could see nicks in the wood where arrows—launched by her kind—had stuck during an assault.

A different kind of corpse. Held up under her arms, Venli reached out and touched the wood, projecting in her mind to the chasmfiend what this would have looked like when new. They thought the beasts liked that kind of explanation.

Eventually Thundercloud set her down, and together they continued on, inward toward that sound. A discordant tone and chaotic rhythm becoming more clear the closer they approached.

Jasnah sat, tense, with Queen Fen and their scribes as the spanreed wrote.

We got in close, Your Majesty, explained the Windrunner scribe on the other end. We waited for early morning when the enemy aerial force seemed least alert, then came in under the waves. While the Fused know of this trick, and post sentries to make sure we don’t sink their boats from below, we were able to draw close without being spotted.

The news is both disturbing and encouraging, Brightness. Your theory is correct: the holds of every ship our spren surveyed are filled with chunks of stone, not soldiers. Those on deck are decoys intended to give the impression that the ships are so crowded, there is no room below. I highly suspect those on top are not trained soldiers, but laborers who have been given warform, judging by how they act—but of course I cannot be sure.

Regardless, I am convinced there is no invading army. Only an elaborate prop. We have reached a small island for stability to send this. We don’t think the enemy spotted our efforts; a Lightweaver on hand was useful, though I don’t think Red enjoyed the swimming portion all that much.

Awaiting instructions.

Fen breathed out as Jasnah passed the page to be copied by their scribes, then translated for the Thaylens and read out to the male generals. While that was happening, Jasnah ordered the Windrunners to hold position for now, in case they were needed for further reconnaissance.

They’d set up in a small room next to the larger planning chamber, which had—for two days—been full of the greatest living military minds discussing every avenue of defense. Against an assault that was not coming.

“This is bad, Jasnah,” Fen said softly.

“Bad?” Jasnah replied. “Fen, your city is almost certainly safe. Odium saw that it was unassailable in the time before the deadline, so he’s focusing on the two other battlefields.”

“Do you really think he’ll just give us up ?”

“Well, the being known as Odium—even with a new host—is intelligent beyond mortal measure.”

“That’s hardly reassuring,” Fen said.

“Fen,” Jasnah said, “the fact that he’s brilliant is a good thing for you. A smart general knows how to win battles, but a brilliant one knows when to walk away from them. Odium has seen that wasting resources here isn’t a viable strategy, and made a feint to divert resources from the Shattered Plains and Azimir, where he can win. You should be safe.”

“Should be,” Fen said. “Jasnah … how confident are you in a ‘should’?”

“Theories with strong evidence are the soul of scientific discovery,” Jasnah said.

“And if we acted on this intel? What would our next steps be? To send our troops and Radiants to reinforce the Shattered Plains, correct?”

Jasnah nodded. Careful watch in Shadesmar had prevented further Oathgate spren from being taken by Sja-anat—for now, and hopefully forever, the Oathgates at Thaylen City and the Shattered Plains continued to work for them. Therefore, the troops here could quickly be repositioned there. She wished the same could be said of Azimir.

“What if that’s what he wants?” Fen continued. “What if the empty holds are the ruse, and we’re meant to discover them? What if there’s a different plan to take this city?”

Storms, Jasnah should have expected that. Not that Fen was right—she was wrong, but in the most innocent of ways. It was a fallacy: the idea that you could never know anything because there was always something to learn. If you started to think that your enemy had planned for every decision you could make, then you’d let your fear of being wrong guide you instead of a reliance upon the facts you’d discovered.

“It’s possible,” Jasnah said, taking Fen’s hand. “I won’t lie and say otherwise. But the trick with the rocks in the holds is a clever one, and was difficult for us to confirm. Fen, the Shattered Plains is enduring the full wrath of the Everstorm and every Fused the enemy can throw at it. While we sit here waiting.”

“You’re saying I should abandon my city,” Fen said. “Send away the troops and leave Thaylen City exposed.”

“I’m saying we need to act on the information we have, not the information we think we don’t have.”

Fen looked away, though she held to Jasnah’s hand. “So close. Three days, and we will know peace. But what if by listening to you now, I throw everything away, Jasnah? We can’t leave Thaylen City undefended. I can’t.”

“I have to send the Radiants to bolster those at the Shattered Plains,” Jasnah said. “I have Dalinar’s authority to do so. We can’t reach Azimir with that Oathgate down, but we can do this much.”

“You could be killing me and my kind.”

“My moral philosophy is to do the most good I can in any situation,” Jasnah said.

Fen slipped her hand from Jasnah’s. “Will you give me time to talk with the Thaylen Central Council and see what they think?”

“Of course,” Jasnah said. “I want the Windrunners back here to report anyway—spanreeds can be stolen, so we need direct firsthand confirmation.” The Windrunner sending the message had given the proper code words at the start, but who knew what Odium could see?

Fen left the room, troubled. And Jasnah, if she let herself be empathetic for a moment, understood. To send troops away during this most important three-day window? It would be excruciating, whether or not you knew it was right. The enemy likely understood that. It was a curious quirk of medicine that a placebo often worked even if you knew you were being given a placebo. This situation showed why, with a kind of inverse example. A feint could work even if you knew it was a feint, because it left you worried about what else you might be missing.

Do the most good, she thought to herself. When decisions grew difficult, she relied on this guiding philosophy. With that in mind, she began drawing up the orders for her troops to reinforce the Shattered Plains.