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zipping out of the city and toward the beach. Whoever was watching this place, they’d gone to great lengths to prevent them from arriving. But once that plan had been foiled, they’d probably been willing to let the expedition gather up fake gemhearts and sail away. So long as they didn’t find the real secret of the island. But he and Rushu had done just that. Which meant the entire group was in serious danger, even if Huio’s gemstone wasn’t blinking. He needed to get to the others quickly. He was glad for his instincts. Because when he arrived at the beach, he found Huio being eaten by a monster. And that wasn’t the sort of event a cousin should miss. Rysn’s first clue came as a curious sound. A clicking, like moving carapace? She’d been waiting for a rowboat to return to take her to join the shore team. She wanted to inspect the greatshell remains there, see if she could spot anything that gave her a clue on how to help Chiri-Chiri. Now, she turned around in her seat on the quarterdeck and looked toward the strange sound. Had Chiri-Chiri returned? But no. This sound she was hearing was too loud to be made by one creature. It was . . . the sound of hundreds of legs moving at once. What she saw in the water made her feel as if she’d been struck by a bolt of lightning. Hundreds of cremlings—crustaceans smaller than a person’s fist—were crawling out of the ocean and up the side of the ship. And each seemed to be carrying a piece of flesh on it. She even spotted one with an eyeball on its back. Had these things ripped apart a person? Were they carrion feeders? Something worse? She screamed, but did so a fraction too late to be of help—for a shout went up across the ship’s deck. Sailors on watch called out as the water around the Wandersail boiled, spitting out thousands of similar cremlings. Clacking and chittering and scrambling as they swarmed up the sides of the ship. Violet fearspren gathered at Rysn’s feet. Never before had she felt more trapped by her inability to walk. Cord muttered something in Horneater and backed away. Rysn, however, had to unstrap herself before she could escape. She was too slow. Her trembling fingers didn’t seem to work as she fought with the buckles. The strange cremlings flooded over the side railing. She finally got the belt undone, but by then the things were swarming all around her. She couldn’t flop onto the deck and crawl away. She’d be overrun. Instead she tried to pull herself farther up into the seat. However, instead of crawling up her legs and attacking her, some of the cremlings pooled on the deck nearby. Then, in a bizarre display, they began to fit together. Like people grabbing hands and forming a line, the cremlings interlocked their wriggling legs, putting their backs outward. The bits of flesh and skin on them fit together like pieces of a puzzle.
Humanlike feet formed, then legs. Cremlings crawled up, pulling together into a writhing heap that became a torso—then finally the full figure of a nude man, lacking genitals. The head came last, eyes popping into place as cremlings squeezed inside the “skull.” Lines of tattoos hid the seams in the skin. For a moment, the look of it was nauseating—the figure’s stomach pulsed with the creatures moving within. Lumps twitched on the arms. The skin of the legs split as if sliced open, revealing the insectile horrors within. Then it all seemed to tighten and settle down, and appeared human. A near-perfect likeness, though the lines across the stomach and thighs were far more visible than the ones on the hands and face. “Hello, Rysn,” Nikli said. He smiled, and his face creased along lines she now knew weren’t merely wrinkles, but splits in the skin. “Your expedition has, unfortunately, proven very persistent.” Storms. Nikli wasn’t a man or a Voidbringer. He was something worse: one of the gods from Cord’s stories, a monster from Jasnah’s tales. An abomination made up of hundreds of tiny pieces pretending to be a single entity. Cord put her hand on Rysn’s shoulder—making her jump—then stepped deliberately forward to position herself between Nikli and Rysn. The Horneater woman spoke in her musical language, and the creature—remarkably—responded in kind. “Cord?” Rysn whispered, trembling. “What is happening?” “I did not realize . . .” Cord whispered in Veden. “The Gods Who Sleep Not . . . they can appear as people.” “Do you know how to fight one?” “I told you, you cannot,” Cord said. “Lunu’anaki—he is trickster god—warned of them during my grandmother’s time when she was the watcher of the pool.” “We had not expected to find one of the Sighted on this trip,” Nikli said in Veden. “You have long guarded Cultivation’s Perpendicularity. It is regrettable that you joined this expedition. We do not kill your people lightly, Hualinam’lunanaki’akilu.” Some of the other swarms formed into similar individuals on the deck, though several remained scuttling masses. The captain gathered the remaining ten or so sailors, but they were quickly surrounded by the strange creatures. Storms. The men had grabbed spears, but how did you fight something like this? One man stabbed a creature that drew close, and the spear stuck straight through the body, then cremlings began to swarm out of the body cavity along the spear’s length. “Stop this,” Rysn said, finding her voice. “Nikli, let us negotiate. Please, tell me what you want.” “All opportunity for negotiation has passed,” Nikli said softly, looking away—a very humanlike gesture of shame. “You ignored my warnings, and your friends on the island did not take the bait we offered them. That was your last chance to escape safely, and some of us argued long to give you even that chance. “But you are persistent, as I said. Some of us knew it would come to this. Some who are less idealistic than I. For what it is worth, Rysn, I’m sorry. I genuinely enjoyed our time
together. But the very cosmere is at stake. A few deaths now, however regrettable, will prevent catastrophe.” Cord shouted something at Nikli in Horneater, and he retorted, sounding angry, then turned to shout toward the others on the deck. “That was a distraction,” Cord whispered to Rysn, turning. “Be ready. Hold your breath.” “Hold my—” Rysn yelped as Cord grabbed her around the waist. The tall woman heaved Rysn over her shoulder, leaped onto the chair, then launched them over the side of the ship toward the dark waters beyond. For a moment, Rysn was transported back to the Reshi Isles. Falling. Falling. Hitting water. For a moment she was in that deep again, after having plunged from such an incredible height. Numb. Watching the light retreat. Unable to move. Unable to save herself. Then the two moments separated. She wasn’t in the Reshi Isles; she was in the frigid ocean near Akinah. The shock of the cold made her want to gasp or scream. Fortunately, she kept her mouth closed as Cord—swimming mostly with her legs—propelled them downward. Deeper. Deeper. Fearspren trailed behind Rysn like bubbles. Cord was an unexpectedly powerful swimmer. But being carried this way, pulled into the dark, made Rysn panic. It brought back not only the terror of her near-death experience, but the helplessness of the awful weeks that had followed. Previously mundane acts—like getting out of bed, visiting the washroom, or even getting herself something to eat—had suddenly become near-impossible. The resulting fear, frustration, and helplessness had almost overwhelmed Rysn. She’d spent days lying in bed, feeling that she should have died rather than becoming such a burden. She had surmounted those emotions. With effort, and help from her parents and Vstim, she’d realized there was so much she could still do. She could make her life better. She was not a burden. She was a person. However, as the ocean swallowed her again, she found her old fears alive and well, festering inside. The abject sense of helplessness. The terror at being entirely at the mercy of other people. And then she saw the spren. Not the fearspren, but luckspren—like arrowheads with stubby, rippling bodies. They darted through the water around her and Cord. Dozens. Hundreds. Light from the clouded sky above vanished, and Rysn’s ears hurt so much she was forced to equalize by blowing with her nose pinched. But those spren were glowing, lighting the way, urging them forward. I know you, spren, she thought. She should have panicked, should have worried about drowning. Instead she watched the spren. How did I fall from so high and not die? Everyone called it a miracle. . . . She twisted in Cord’s grip. The spren led them toward a shimmering light emanating from some rocks ahead. A small tunnel? At last Rysn noticed her lungs beginning to burn. She slipped out of Cord’s grasp and turned, then pulled herself along the rocks. Cord came behind, and the spren ushered them, guided them through the dark depths until— Rysn pulled herself up into the air.
Cord emerged a moment later. Rysn gasped for breath, trembling in the darkness. What had happened to the light? The spren? Suddenly it was completely dark, though the sound of their breath echoed against nearby walls. They seemed to have emerged into some kind of cavern under the island. Rysn grabbed some rocks at the side of the pool, clinging to them with her right arm as she reached to the money pouch in her left skirt pocket for spheres. She fiddled in it, then brought out a bright diamond mark, gripping it through the thin cloth of her safehand glove. The light revealed Cord, her red hair plastered to her skin, holding to the rocks nearby. They were indeed in a cavern—well, a tunnel that ended in a small pool. Cord climbed up onto the rocks, then helped Rysn out. They sat for a moment, coughing, breathing deeply. “Are they still here?” Rysn eventually asked. “The luckspren?” “Apaliki’tokoa’a,” Cord said, pointing in the air, though Rysn saw nothing. “They appeared to you?” “Yes,” Rysn whispered. “Under the water.” “They guided us, sped us as we swam . . .” Cord said. “My father has always had the blessings of spren. They used to strengthen his arm, when he drew the Bow of Hours in the Peaks, but I’ve never known such blessings.” Her finger traced a path leading down the tunnel. “They are going this way.” “The creatures that came onto the ship,” Rysn said. “Nikli . . . whatever he is. They can swim. I doubt we’re safe down here.” “Perhaps there is a way out,” Cord said. “I will look?” Rysn nodded, though she didn’t have much hope. During her travels with her babsk, they’d visited the Purelake, where he’d made her read a book on the local people. There had been an entire chapter on how the place drained during storms, and though she hadn’t been able to make much sense of it, she was pretty certain a chamber this far down couldn’t have air unless there was no way for it to escape upward. That meant they were cornered. Rysn settled her back against a stone, her legs stretched in front of her. Cord hurried off, dripping water and carrying a sphere for light. Rysn fished in her pockets. What did she have of use? A few more spheres and some ruby fabrials? For a moment, she thought they were from spanreeds. But no, these were the rubies from her chair, secured in metal housings with straps to tie them into place. They were paired with a set on the anchor rigged to the mast of the ship. Strange, to think how optimistic she’d been only a short time ago. Before she’d led the entire crew to their doom. Would Radiants Lopen and Huio be able to save them, maybe? And so you’re helpless again? she thought. Just sitting around, waiting for someone else to come and take care of you? Vstim had put her in command for a reason. He trusted her. Couldn’t she do herself
the same honor? “Rysn!” Cord called, her voice echoing in the tunnel. The Horneater woman appeared a short time later, panting, her eyes wide. Her figure threw crazy shadows across the walls as she waved the hand holding the sphere. “You must see!” “See what?” Rysn asked. “Treasure,” Cord said. “Plate, Rysn. Shardplate. The gods heard my prayers and have led me to him!” She stooped to heave Rysn over her shoulder again. “Wait,” Rysn said. “Let’s try these, maybe?” She held up a ruby and activated it with a twist of part of the housing. That left it hanging in the air. Cord ran off, then returned shortly with a small bench and an antiquated spear. That worked fairly well; using the leather straps on the fabrials, Rysn tied them to the legs of the small bench. When Cord lifted the bench and Rysn activated the fabrials, they made it hover. It did rise and fall slightly with the movements of the ship up above, but with the still ocean around here, that variation wasn’t much. A short time later, Rysn poled herself through the air with the spear, hovering alongside Cord. Though the place where they’d emerged had been unworked stone, the next section of the tunnel had been carved into a corridor. On its walls they found strange murals. People with hands forward, falling through what appeared to be portals, emerging into . . . light? Not far past these, they entered a small room. It was perhaps fifteen feet square, and Rysn’s eyes were immediately drawn to the incredible mural that dominated the far wall. It depicted a sun being shattered into pieces. Cord showed her the set of Shardplate, which had been carefully piled in one corner of the small chamber, along with some ornate weapons and clothing. None of those seemed to be Shardweapons, but . . . those were Soulcaster devices, arranged in little boxes by the wall. Four were on a bench identical to the one Rysn floated upon, and four were on the ground, probably moved by Cord. A metal door set into the stone at the left side of the room was cracked slightly open. Rysn poled herself over and peeked through to see an even larger corridor, this one with a vaulted ceiling and fine worked stone walls. Light shimmered somewhere farther along it, illuminating large carapace skulls with deep black eye sockets. Though she was tempted to continue exploring, something about the grand mural in the small room drew Rysn back. She poled over to it as Cord attempted to activate the Shardplate—not a bad idea, considering their situation. Cord asked her for gemstones, and Rysn absently handed over her sphere pouch. That mural . . . it was circular and—inlaid with golden foil—it seemed to glow with its own light. The writing on parts of it was unfamiliar to Rysn; she hadn’t seen the script during any of her travels. It wasn’t even the Dawnchant. The peculiar letters were art themselves, curling around the outside of the exploding sun—which
was divided into mostly symmetrical pieces. Four of them, each in turn broken into four smaller sections. Her spear slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor. She swore she could feel the heat of that sun, burning, washing over her. It was not angry, though she knew it was being ripped apart like a person on some awful torture device. She felt something emanating from it. Resignation? Confidence? Understanding? This is the real treasure, she thought, although she didn’t know why. Those words. Burning on the wall. Who had created this? She had never experienced such grandeur. She traced the pieces of breaking sunlight with her eyes. Gold foil on the inside. Red foil tracing the outer lines to give them depth and definition. She counted the shards in her mind, over and over, feeling a reverence to the number. The sun held her. You were brought here, she thought to herself, by one of the Guardians of Ancient Sins. Of course she had been. That made sense. Wait. Did it? Yes, she thought. You were. There are few of them left. And so the Sleepless take up the task. Naturally. All that nonsense on the surface of the island? Distractions. Intended to keep anyone from looking for this. Rysn shook herself, tearing her eyes away from the mural. Those had felt like someone else’s thoughts intruding into her mind. What was happening to her? Why had she dropped her spear? After all that work to be able to move on her own, she’d simply let go? She reached down, but she was too far up in the air. As she leaned over, she felt a pressure on her mind. The mural. Calling to her. Nearby, Cord muttered softly. Rysn glanced over to find the Horneater woman had the Shardplate boots on, and was now trying to force the breastplate to take her spheres. “I think you need free gemstones, Cord,” Rysn said. “Not ones encased in glass.” “I don’t have enough of those,” Cord said. “We could use these.” Rysn gestured to the rubies under her bench. Cord hesitated. “It’s all right,” Rysn said. “If you can get that Plate working, you might be able to defend us.” Cord nodded, striding over to help Rysn down. She felt . . . regretful. Every time she had a taste of freedom, something happened to steal it away from her. Cord sat Rysn on the cold stones, then pried the four rubies from their housings. She hooked them into the greaves of the Plate, which she then attached to her legs. They tightened immediately, locking into place. She glanced at the breastplate. “We need more.” Rysn pointed to the cracked door on the other side of the room. “I saw light that direction, in the larger tunnel. Maybe gemstones?” Cord rushed over and pulled open the door, looking past the enormous carapace skulls toward the distant light. “There are spren,” Cord said, then began walking that way, her metal boots clomping on the ground. She carried the breastplate with her, though
it seemed extremely heavy. Rysn turned, trying not to look at the wall, which was growing even warmer. Unfortunately, she soon heard splashes coming from the direction of the pool. Their enemy had found them. Guardian of Ancient Sins, she thought. What did that mean? Why did the idea repeat over and over in her mind? She felt the mural looming. Overshadowing her. Slowly, she turned and gazed up at the exploding sun. Accept it. Know it. CHANGE. It stilled, waiting. Waiting for . . . “Yes,” Rysn whispered. Something slammed into her mind. It streamed from the mural through her eyes, searing her skull. It gripped her, held to her, joined with her. Light consumed Rysn entirely. A moment later, she found herself panting on the ground. She blinked, then felt at her eyes. Though tears leaked from the corners, her skin wasn’t on fire, and she hadn’t been blinded. She glanced up at the mural and noted it was unchanged. Except . . . she no longer felt warmth from it. It was only a mural. Beautiful, yes, but no longer . . . No longer what? What had changed? Scuttling sounds. Hundreds of little footsteps on the stone coming from behind. She twisted and grabbed the spear that she’d been using to move earlier, but she was no soldier. So what was she? Useless? No, she thought, determined never to sink into that self-pity again. I am far from useless. It was time to prove she deserved Vstim’s trust. Lopen zipped straight toward the giant sea monster. It looked vaguely like an enormous grub with a wicked beak of a face. It had spindly arms running all the way along its body, and had reared up so it was mostly vertical, using its pointed limbs like spears to try to skewer the sailors beneath. Huio was literally inside the thing’s mouth, holding its mandibles apart with a spear, barely preventing himself from being crushed. So Lopen was able to soar up and grab Huio by the arm, then tow him out of the way. The thing snapped its mouth closed behind them, breaking the spear with an awful crack. Sailors huddled in the skulls on the beach, using the carapace as cover, clutching spears and cowering before the monster. It was as tall as a building, swarming with arrowhead luckspren. Lopen pulled to a stop in the air, holding Huio. The cousins met one another’s eyes. Then Huio groaned. “I’m never going to hear the end of this, am I?” “Ha!” Lopen said. “You were going to get eaten! You were going to be swallowed by a giant monster that looks like something you’d step on during worming season!” “Can we focus on the fight?” “Hey, have you heard about the time I saved Huio from being swallowed? Oh yes. He was going to get eaten. By a monster uglier than the women he courts. And I flew into the thing’s mouth to save him. Off the tongue. Then I was very humble about having done such a heroic
deed.” “Leave that last part off,” Huio said. “It will make them easily discern that you are lying.” He breathed in, borrowing Stormlight from Lopen’s spheres. “Watch out. There are some cremlings around here that steal Stormlight.” “Is it the one the boss-lady had?” “No, smaller,” Huio said, Lashing himself so he hovered in the air. “And of a different breed. I didn’t get a good look, but I think they flew around in a little swarm.” Huio swooped down and snatched a new spear off the ground. Lopen raised his, glancing at Rua, who had changed shape to mimic that of the monster. He bounced around growling. The monster turned toward them and swiped with a spearlike limb, causing a rush of wind as Lopen ducked it. “You know,” Lopen said to Rua, “now would be an excellent time for you to decide that you’d like to be a Shardblade.” Rua wagged a crustacean finger at him. An annoyed gesture that conveyed, “You know you have to earn that.” “I will protect even those I hate,” Lopen said. “See? I can say it.” He dodged again. “It’s easy.” Rua-monster wagged another limb. “But I don’t hate anyone!” Lopen complained. “And nobody hates me. I’m The Lopen. How could they? These rules, sure, aren’t fair!” Rua-monster shrugged. “You used to be on my side on this one, naco,” Lopen grumbled. “This is Phendorana’s fault, isn’t it? You shouldn’t listen to her lectures.” This probably wasn’t the time for such a conversation. They had a monster to defeat. Spear in hand, Lopen swooped in to distract it as it tried to go after some of the sailors. Rysn arranged herself meticulously. She pulled over the bench she’d been sitting on earlier and placed it in front of her. It was a little too high and thin to be a Thaylen merchant’s deal table, but it was a reasonable approximation. If you wanted to deal in the traditional way, you sat on mats on the floor, opposite the table from one another. She managed to get her legs crossed, her back to the wall with the mural to help prop herself up. She put her hands palm down on the table in the formal dealing posture and tried to remember her lessons. The creatures came in along the walls and ceiling. They swarmed in that same nauseating way: heaps of cremlings snapping together into something that imitated a human, but with distressing lumps shifting under the “skin.” Soon Nikli stood in front of her. Rysn controlled her trembling as best she could, ignoring the fearspren, then turned her hands palm upward. “This,” she said, “is the traditional sign inviting the initiation of a trade deal between two Thaylen merchants. I’m not sure how much of our culture you picked up during your time imitating a human.” “I picked up enough,” Nikli said, stepping forward. Two other figures remained behind. One might have been imitating a male, the other a female, though it was hard to tell. Nikli picked up a robe draped across a
few spears in the pile of armor, then pulled it on. “I’m young among my people, but I have lived quite a long time. I sailed with Longbrow, you know. I liked him, for all his boasting.” Storms. Longbrow was four hundred years dead. Rysn steeled herself. Oh, storms. She was swimming in water far over her head. And there was still that strange heat in the back of her mind. The pressure. The Command. She gestured toward the other side of the table. “Sit. Let us negotiate.” “There is nothing to negotiate, Rysn,” Nikli said. “I’m sorry. But I have a duty to the entire cosmere.” “Everyone wants something,” Rysn said, sweat trickling down the sides of her face. “Everyone has needs. It is my job to connect the needs to the people.” “And what is it you assume I need?” Nikli asked. She met the thing’s gaze. “You need someone to keep your secrets.” “Hey, Huio,” Lopen shouted. “I was wrong about this monster resembling the women you court. It actually looks like you in the mornings, before you’ve had your ornachala!” A leg speared down near Lopen, tossing up chips of rock as it struck the ground. “Acts like you too!” Lopen said, Lashing himself backward. Mostly he was keeping the beast’s attention. He wanted it focused on him and Huio, not the sailors. Indeed, because of Huio’s efforts earlier, it looked like only one sailor had been seriously injured so far. Fimkn was trying to bind the man’s wounds while the rest had grabbed an extra stock of spears from the rowboats. The men proved adept with the weapons, throwing them to try to stick them in the creature’s eyes. One got close, bouncing off the carapace right near an eye. The thing roared and reared up, a giant pink-white tube of death covered in carapace. Though the dozen or so arms seemed spindly by comparison, they were thick as tree trunks. They alternated between trying to spear Lopen and trying to swat him from the sky. Lopen wiped his brow, then ordered the sailors to back up farther ashore. Unfortunately, while the creature seemed like it belonged in the water, it was mobile enough on the shore to be dangerous, using its legs to scoot along, sluglike. It turned toward the sailors again, so Lopen buzzed in close, Rua at his side, and drew its attention. He tried spearing the thing in the head near the neck, but his weapon bounced off. The monster was bulbous like a grub, but far better armored. Damnation. Lopen Lashed himself and wove between its swinging arms. Ha! At least it was slow-moving like a grub. The thing could barely— WHAM. Lopen ended up sprawled against a boulder, upside down, ribs screaming as they knit back together with Stormlight. “Radiant Lopen!” Kstled said, ducking in close. “Are you all right?” “Feel like a piece of snot,” Lopen said, groaning, “following a sneeze.” He peeled himself off the rock and flopped down next to Kstled. “My spear can’t get through that thing’s
carapace.” “We need a Shardblade!” Kstled said. “Can’t you summon one?” “Afraid not,” Lopen said. “It’s political.” Nearby, Huio was drawing the thing’s attention, but his Stormlight was waning. “Don’t get eaten again!” Lopen called. “But if you do, try not to get sneezed out! It’s awful!” “Political?” Kstled asked. “You’ve got to say these words,” Lopen said, “and I said them, because they’re good words. But the Stormfather, sure, he has no sense of style.” He glanced up at the sky. “This would be a great time, O blustery one! I will protect those I hate! I’ve got it, you den gancho god thing!” No response. Lopen sighed, then shouldered his spear. “All right, so Huio and I will try to lead it farther inland. Then you and your sailors, sure, you grab those boats and try to get to the ship.” “We can’t let it follow us to the Wandersail!” Kstled said. “A greatshell like that could sink the ship!” “Yeah, well, then we need to all retreat and try to lead it inward. We can maybe take shelter in the buildings inland!” “What if in running, we encourage it to move out and attack the ship?” “We’ll just have to deal with that if it happens, all right? Huio and I will distract it; the rest of you prepare to retreat up to the fallen city.” Kstled hesitated, then nodded. Lopen Lashed himself into the air and shot toward the thing. Maybe if he could get in close while it was focused on Huio, he could stab it real good. He also needed to give Huio some more Stormlight. Lopen had plenty, sure, in his pouches. He flew around behind the thing, but it seemed ready for this. It kept shifting, keeping one of its beady jet-black eyes toward Lopen while it slammed its arms toward Huio. Huio shouted at it, fortunately drawing its attention. There! Lopen thought, preparing his spear. He got in closer. When it glanced toward him again, he’d Lash the spear directly into its eye. Lopen felt a sudden chill. A coldness began at his back, right between his shoulder blades, then washed through him. Cold enough that it made him jerk upright, stunned. Unable to move as he felt something leeched from him. His Stormlight. He managed to spin in the air, trying to swing his spear and attack. But it was too late. He glimpsed a swarm of small cremlings flying behind him—different from the one Rysn had as a pet. Smaller—maybe the size of his fist—and more bulbous, the two dozen creatures barely managed to hang in the air. But their feeding had been enough to drain him. As he dropped through the air, he felt panic. They’d gotten his pouches too. There was nothing left to suck in. He— He hit. Hard. Something snapped in his leg. The monster undulated toward him, opening its awful maw and glaring with those terrible eyes. It seemed eager as it raised its arms to smash him. “You were there when I met Navani Kholin,”
Rysn said to Nikli. “You know she isn’t the type to be easily dissuaded.” “The Mother of Machines,” Nikli said it like a distinctive title. “Yes. We are . . . aware.” “You tried to scare away her Windrunners when they investigated this island,” Rysn said, “so she sent a ship. What do you think will happen if that ship vanishes mysteriously? You think she’ll give up? You’ll see a fleet next.” Nikli sighed, then met her eyes. “You assume we don’t have plans in place, Rysn,” he said. He seemed genuine. Though he was made up of monsters inside, he appeared to be the person she’d come to know during their travels. “Your plans so far haven’t worked,” Rysn said. “Why would you assume one to scare off the Radiants will?” “I . . . I wish you’d taken our bait,” he said. “Some of us wanted to sink your ship as soon as it breached the storm. But we persuaded them. We told them you’d be happy with the gemhearts. You were supposed to also locate a little stash of maps and writings from long ago; we would have made sure you found it before leaving. “Once you returned to Queen Navani, you’d have discovered that the gemhearts were fake. The writings would prove to be the remnants of an old pirate scheme, from the days before this place was surrounded with a storm. You’d have learned those pirates used legends of treasure to lure people to Akinah—that they’d spread fake gemstones on the beaches to draw their marks in and distract them before attacking. “It would have been so neat, so easy. With those stories in hand, everyone would dismiss the legends about riches on Akinah. They’d leave us alone. No one would have to die. Except . . .” “Except there’s an Oathgate here,” Rysn said. “They’ll never leave it alone, Nikli.” “They will think it destroyed,” Nikli said. “After . . . what must regrettably be done here to you and your crew . . . some of us will imitate sailors. Your ship will limp back to port, and we will tell the story. A storm that cost too many lives while getting through it. A fight with a strange greatshell. A destroyed Oathgate. Fake gemhearts. Everyone will leave us alone after that.” Damnation. That might work. But Vstim’s calm voice seemed to whisper to her from across the ocean. This was her moment. The most important deal of her life. What did they want? What did they say they wanted? Storms, I’m not ready for something like this, she thought. You’ll have to do it anyway. She took a deep breath. “You truly think you can imitate my ship’s sailors well enough to fool people who knew them? You use a body with tattoos, I assume to hide the seams in your skin. You don’t quite know how to act Thaylen, so you imitate a foreigner. You actually think this subterfuge will work? Or will it instead spread more mystery?” Nikli met her eyes, but
didn’t reply. “That’s been your problem all along,” Rysn said. “Each lie you spin makes the mystery more entrancing. You want to protect this place. What if I could help you?” Rysn’s mouth had gone dry. But she continued holding the creature’s eyes. No, Nikli’s eyes. She had to see him as the person she knew. That was someone she could talk to, persuade. He might be some nightmare from the depths, but he was still a person. And people had needs. They were interrupted by footsteps at the door. Cord stepped in wearing the breastplate, which she’d apparently managed to power. Indeed, her fist glowed with gemstones she’d found. On one hand, she looked somewhat comical wearing only half of the armor. Her exposed head and arms seemed child-size with the rest of the Plate in place and functioning. Yet her solemn expression, the way she slammed the butt of a spear down beside her . . . Rysn found herself bolstered by the young woman’s determination. Cord said something loudly in her own language. “We may speak in Veden,” Nikli said, “so Rysn may understand.” “Very well,” Cord said. “I challenge you! You must duel me now to the death!” “I think you’ll find I cannot be defeated by a mortal,” Nikli said. “You don’t know what you’re asking.” “Is that a yes?” Cord bellowed. “If you insist.” “Ha!” she said. “You have been tricked, god! I am Hualinam’lunanaki’akilu, the daughter of Numuhukumakiaki’aialunamor, the Fal’ala’liki’nor, he who drew the Bow of Hours at the dawn of the new millennium, heralding the years of change! If you were to kill me, you would be violating the ancient pact of the Seven Peaks, and so must now forfeit the battle!” Nikli blinked in what seemed like a very human show of utter confusion. “I . . . have no idea what any of that means,” he said. “. . . You don’t?” Cord asked. “No.” “Excuse me.” She hurried over to Rysn, each footstep clanking on the stone. She knelt. “Are you well?” “Well as I can be,” Rysn said. “Cord . . . I think they’re going to kill everyone to keep their secret.” “They don’t seem to know about the ancient treaties,” Cord whispered. “And in truth, those treaties were made with other gods. I had hoped the Gods Who Sleep Not would be similarly bound, but now I am not certain.” She looked down. “I am no warrior, Rysn. I wish to be one, and have claimed this Plate, but I haven’t trained to fight. I don’t know if these gods can even be fought. In the stories, you must always trick them.” “I would rather,” Rysn said, her voice loud enough for Nikli to hear, “simply reach an agreement. Surely they can be persuaded.” “Perhaps,” Cord said. “The Gods Who Sleep Not are guardians of life. They seek to prevent its end. Use that.” Rysn studied Nikli. He and the others could have killed her by now. But they waited; they were willing to talk. They said there
was no solution. But if that were the case, why was she still alive? “Is Cord right?” Rysn said. “Are you protectors of life?” “We . . .” Nikli said. “We have seen the end of worlds, and vowed never to let such an awful event happen again. But we will kill the few to protect the many, if we must.” “What if I could provide you with another option that didn’t involve murdering any more people?” “We tried,” Nikli said. “We did everything we could to frighten you away.” His skin split along the seams, as if in agitation. “The storm has protected this place for centuries. It is only recently that it weakened enough to let people through. But . . . we are committed, Rysn. By now we’ve killed hundreds.” “And you’ve never wondered whether your method is flawed? Yes, you could create another fabrication. But will it work? Or will more of the truth seep out? Will you end up with people swarming this island? Coming ever closer to the real secrets? The ones you hide in these caves? “You say you wish to protect life. But if you continue on your current course, you’re going to have to kill Cord and me. You are going to kill Knights Radiant. If you truly are sorry you have to take such desperate actions, don’t you owe it to yourself—and the cosmere—to sit and at least see if there is another way?” She turned her hands up, again signaling her desire to begin a deal. Nikli glanced at his two companions. One barely made an effort to appear human; her skin split at wide seams, and cremlings crawled up and down her body. Neither gave a response Rysn could understand, though the unnerving buzzing surrounding them grew louder. Finally, Nikli stepped forward and—to Rysn’s immense relief—sat at the table. Lopen managed—barely—to roll out of the way of the arm that speared down at him. But his foot screamed in pain and flopped awkwardly on the end of his leg, causing him to see stars and blink away tears. So many painspren crawled around him that he could have started a storming parade. “Please, gods of the ancient Herdazians,” Lopen whispered. “Don’t let me get killed by a monster that looks so stupid. Please.” The sailors shouted, throwing spears that bounced off the creature, trying to distract it from him. Lopen attempted to push himself up onto one leg to maybe hop away, but it was way too painful. He could barely crawl. And storms, he didn’t know any one-legged Herdazian jokes. He flopped to the stones as the thing roared and turned fully toward him. Somehow it knew that a Radiant was a better feast than those sailors. Either that or it was captivated by Lopen’s majesty. His lying-on-the-ground-crying-his-eyes-out-all-bloody majesty. So maybe not. Rua tried to urge Lopen on by taking the shape of an axehound. He bounced around, worried. Huio dropped out of the sky directly in front of Lopen, spear in hand, but his glow faded. Had the
things drained him too, or had he run out normally? Lopen waved for him to go, to run for it with the sailors. But he stayed firm. Stupid chull-brain—he stepped squarely between the monster and Lopen. As it reared to swing, Huio looked right at Lopen, then turned toward the oncoming spear-leg and set himself. “Huio!” Lopen cried. His cousin exploded with light. A blast of something frigid washed over Lopen, and he found himself disturbing a large frost pattern on the ground in the shape of a glyph. As the creature’s arm reached Huio, mist appeared in the man’s hand—forming the biggest, most awesome Shardhammer Lopen had ever seen. Huio slammed it with all his might against the monster’s arm, and the carapace cracked and split, spraying violet goo across the stones. Nikli winced. “What?” Rysn asked. “Your friends fight very well,” he said. “They’re still alive? You haven’t killed them?” “We have the captain and the crew on the ship held captive,” Nikli said. “I persuaded the others to wait to put them down until I’d spoken to you.” He held out his hands. “How does this usually proceed?” “I am the one initiating the trade,” Rysn said. “So it is upon me to make an offer.” “You have nothing that we want.” “You want to find a way to avoid killing,” Rysn said, keeping her voice steady. “I can help you.” “Wrong,” Nikli said. “We wish to avoid losing control of a force that could destroy the cosmere. That is what we want, though we do desire to accomplish it with as little suffering as is reasonable.” “Then I can help you,” Rysn said. “You want to create a fabrication that others will believe? I will be far better at that than you would be. Both Queen Navani and the Thaylen council will respond better to me telling them that Akinah was a trap than they would to someone like you.” “Except that requires me to trust you with a secret too dangerous to let escape,” Nikli said. “Besides, the crew that remains on the ship saw my kind. The sailors will have to die, even if we come up with an accommodation between us.” “No,” Rysn said. “You have no position from which to—” “I will not give up the lives of the captain or any of my crew. That is not negotiable. They are my responsibility.” Nikli lifted his hands to the sides as if to say, “I told you there was no accommodation to be made.” It was unnerving how—in the gesture—each of his fingers came free a little, revealing the insectile legs beneath. Rysn couldn’t help staring. “What . . . what are you?” she found herself whispering, though she probably should have stayed on task. “I am like you,” Nikli said. “Your body is made up of tiny individual pieces called cells. My body is made up of pieces as well.” “Cremlings,” she said. “As I and my kind are not native to this planet, we prefer the term ‘hordelings.’ ” “And one of
them is your brain?” she asked. “Many of them. We store memories in specialized hordelings bred for the purpose. Cognitive facilities are shared across many different members of the swarm.” He waved his fingers, and again the different little cremlings—no, hordelings—separated. “It took my people three hundred years of selective breeding to achieve hordelings capable of imitating human fingers. And still, most of us are terrible at pretending to be humans. We don’t have the mannerisms, the thoughts. “I’m younger than the others, but am more . . . skilled at using these things.” He regarded her. “I have come to understand humans a little, Rysn. I like talking to you, being with you. Though I love your kind, even I am persuaded as to what must be done. Our impasse cannot be resolved.” “No,” Rysn said. “There is a way.” She forcibly made herself use the careful, reasonable tone her babsk had drilled into her. “You say that the sailors have seen you—this can work to our advantage. The best fabrications are mostly true, and having many witnesses corroborate what I say will help.” Nikli shook his head. “Rysn, there are forces in the cosmere that we can barely identify, let alone track. Evil forces, who would end worlds if they could. They are hunting this place. Now that the Ancient Guardians of Akinah are all but extinct, we Sleepless must protect it. For if our enemies locate it, they could cause the deaths of billions.” He waved toward the mural. “The Dawnshard is . . .” He stopped. Then he squinted. Then he leaped to his feet. Winged hordelings crawled out of his skull and flew through the air to land on the mural. They scrambled across it, and were joined by hordelings sent by the other two. “What have you done?” Nikli bellowed. It was unnerving to watch him speak with his head split in two, one of his eyes crawling across the side of his face. “What have you done?” “I— All I did was look at it and—” Nikli moved suddenly, all conversation abandoned. He reached across the table and grabbed Rysn by the front of her vest. Cord cried out and tried to strike at him, but his body split into pieces before the blow and individual hordelings began crawling up her arms, into her armor. Others swarmed over Rysn as the man became the monster. He was going to kill her. She didn’t know what she’d done, but it clearly meant the end of the negotiations and the beginning of her execution. In the midst of this, a low, rumbling roar shook the cavern. Lopen was so stunned by Huio’s transformation, he was able to ignore the pain for a short time. Huio. Huio had beaten him to the Third Ideal? Storm it! Rua was cheering, and . . . well, Lopen was happy for Huio and his spren too. But storm it! His cousin didn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed as he dodged the next leg, then hefted his Shardhammer—which obligingly became
a spear—and hurled it. It flew straight and true, like a silvery line of light, and struck the creature in the head. Not in the eye, but with a Shardweapon that didn’t matter so much. It went right through the thick carapace and sliced out the other side. The giant grublike monster teetered, then collapsed with a cracking sound that reminded Lopen how hungry he was. Nothing like crab legs after a hard day of being beaten up. Huio puffed in and out, then stared at his hands in awe as his Shardhammer re-formed. He turned with a stupid grin on his face. Then he rushed over to help Lopen sit up. That gave both of them a great view of the bay, which started to bubble and churn. Six more of those monsters began to rise. “Damnation,” Huio muttered. “You have any more Stormlight, cousin?” “No. You?” “No. I got a burst when I said the Ideal, but that ran out fast.” “I see,” Lopen said. “Tell me. What are your thoughts on, say, carrying your wonderful cousin on your back as you run for safety?” The roar was so loud that chips fell from the ceiling of the chamber. The hordelings swarming over Rysn and Cord stopped. Nikli had only a semblance of humanity left, his face and chest split open, skin hanging from the backs of the various pieces with twitching legs, his insides squirming and buzzing. But many of the hordelings turned toward the sound. The door to the side blew open farther, revealing the larger hall with the skulls of dead greatshells. Rysn could have sworn that they’d turned to stare in toward the smaller chamber. Six of them lined the hall, which narrowed as it extended, letting each set of dead eyes look past the ones in front. Rysn felt something fluttering around her. Glowing white arrowhead spren, moving like fish in an unseen stream, swirling around her and Cord. That roar reverberated in her ears, in her memory. It didn’t repeat, but a higher-pitched squeal echoed in the hallway. And then a small figure leaped up and landed on top of one of the skulls, flapping her wings and letting out a mighty—yet diminutive—roar. Chiri-Chiri had returned. Surely she hadn’t made that other roar, the one that had vibrated Rysn to the core. Yet Chiri-Chiri gave it her best, calling out again. She seemed . . . rather tiny atop the big skull, like a child with a wooden sword standing in a line of fully armored knights. Still, she hopped off the carapace skull and came loping across the stones, roaring and buzzing her wings to fly at the top of each leap. She yelled her little heart out, as angry as Rysn had ever seen her. The larkin bounded over to Rysn and hopped onto the table, then trumped with all her might at the three Sleepless. Nikli’s hordelings withdrew into his body, forming the semblance of a human again. Chiri-Chiri looked much better. The chalky white cast to her carapace had vanished,
her natural violet-brown colors returning. She wasn’t terribly fearsome, considering her size, but she did her best, bless her. She stood between Rysn and Nikli. Growling, snapping, and howling in challenge. “Ancient Guardian,” Nikli said to Chiri-Chiri—still speaking Veden—standing up on the other side of the table. “We should have realized you would find your way to this chamber, but you are no longer needed to protect the secret. At the fall of your kind, mine took up the mantle.” “The secret,” Rysn said, “that has . . . somehow entered my brain.” “That will soon be fixed,” Nikli said. “These creatures . . .” Cord said. “They protected this place once, you said?” She shivered, and Rysn couldn’t blame her, after feeling those strange insects on her skin. Cord glanced down the hallway at the skulls, then back at Chiri-Chiri. “She’s one of them. She returned to protect the treasure.” “Coincidence!” Nikli said. “Chiri-Chiri simply reached the size where she needed to bond a mandra to continue growing.” “Others of her kind don’t grow at all,” Rysn said. “Chiri-Chiri did. She brought me here.” “The spren guided us,” Cord said. “This thing was the gods’ will.” “The force inside my mind asked me to choose,” Rysn said. “It wanted me to accept it, whatever it is.” “No it did not!” Nikli said. “The Dawnshard isn’t alive. It doesn’t want things. You have stolen it!” And Rysn knew, or at least felt, he was partially right. It wasn’t a living thing that she’d taken upon herself. It was . . . something else. A Command. It didn’t have a will, and it hadn’t led her here or chosen her. But Chiri-Chiri had done both. “Do you see them?” Cord asked, gesturing to the roof of the cavern. “Joining us, watching us? Do you see the gods?” Rysn took a deep breath, then turned her palms upward again. “It appears,” she said, “that I do have something you want. Shall we continue the negotiations?” “You are a thief!” Nikli said, his body dropping hordelings as he stepped toward Rysn. “You cannot bargain with stolen goods!” He reached for Rysn, but Chiri-Chiri reared up and let out another shout. This one was different somehow. Not a tantrum, not just a warning. An ultimatum. Something about the way it resonated in the room made Nikli hesitate. Think, Rysn. You need to give him something. Many traders tried to sell people a “bargain” they did not want, but that was not the path to a sustainable partnership. You had to give them something they actually needed. Nikli stepped forward again. Chiri-Chiri growled. “Do not assume we would not kill an Ancient Guardian if we had to,” Nikli said to her. “You claim to want to protect this thing,” Rysn said, “but all you threaten to do is destroy.” “If you knew what the Dawnshard was capable of . . .” “It’s now inside me. Whatever it is.” “Fortunately, you would not be able to employ it,” Nikli said. “It is beyond your capacity. But there are
those in the cosmere who could use it for terrible acts.” Rysn glanced at the other two, noting how distressed their hordelings seemed. She heard uncertainty in Nikli’s voice now. And for the first time, she saw them as they truly were. Terrified. They were unraveling. They were failing. They clung to a secret that was escaping despite their best efforts. As Vstim had taught her, she saw through their eyes. Felt their fears, their loss, their uncertainty. “How far you have fallen,” she whispered. “You would murder the very guardians you revere? You would rip the Dawnshard forcibly from the mind of the one who bears it? You would become the things you pretend to defend against.” Nikli slumped to the ground. His skin split, making him look like a husk. Don’t give them what they say they want, she thought. Give them what they need. “You say you fight hidden enemies you cannot locate,” Rysn said. “They could use this thing, but I cannot. It seems to me that the safest place for it is in my mind.” “How?” Nikli demanded. “Your secret is escaping, Nikli. You know you can’t hold it in. The storm ever blows, and the walls crack. You furiously plug the leaks, but the entire structure is collapsing. Your lies undermine one another. “They will come. The ones you fear. How valuable would it be for you to be able to watch and see who they are? What if you could trap them, instead of innocent crews of sailors?” “Innocent?” Nikli asked. “You came for loot.” “Salvage,” Rysn said. “It sounds more civilized. Plus, you know that was only a small part of our quest here.” Nikli thought. “It is too dangerous,” he said. “If our enemies came here, they’d find our secret.” “Unless it wasn’t here,” Rysn said. “Unless it was somewhere completely unexpected—like in the mind of a random human woman. Who would assume you’d let one leave with something so powerful? “Nikli, too many people, when they get something valuable, sit on it and sit on it—anticipating the trade they will someday make. They imagine how grand it will be! How much they will earn! In the meantime, they eat scraps. Do you know how many die with that nest egg, never spent, never used? “What you want—the safeguarding of this mystery—is possible, but you need to be active. You need to make a trade, build alliances, and identify your enemies. Sitting here, hoping to simply hold on so tightly . . . it won’t work. Trust me, Nikli. Sometimes you need to accept what you’ve lost, then move forward. Then you can instead realize what you’ve gained.” He slumped, but many of the hordelings looked at her. It was unnerving, yet it seemed promising. “Nikli,” Rysn whispered. “Remember what I taught you. About coming to know the sailors. About the hazing. Not a perfect solution . . .” “But instead an imperfect solution,” he whispered, “for an imperfect world.” He remained like a husk, but his hordelings started buzzing to the other
two swarms. After a long time of buzzing back and forth, Nikli spoke. “What would it take,” he said, “to make this deal?” “Not much. I can tell the story exactly as it happened, but leave out that mural. Cord and I swam down here, found the Plate and Soulcasters. You were going to attack us, to protect these treasures, but you were impressed by Chiri-Chiri—one of the Ancient Guardians of this place. “Her valiance in defending me made you pause. Because of the time we spent together, and because of my persuasive nature, I convinced you that we are not your enemies. You decided to let us go.” “People will hear of the Oathgate. You cannot hide that. Everyone will come to the island.” “Exactly!” Rysn said. “That’s what we want. Let the Oathgate be opened, and allow scholars to swarm this place! The enemies you fear? They will drive themselves mad searching the island for the secret that’s not here!” “Because it is in your mind,” Nikli said. “Something they’d never believe that we would allow. We, who protect planets, letting this power enter a mortal . . . An imperfect solution, yet perhaps . . .” He met her eyes. “There is a flaw. Your people might believe that we just let you go, but our enemies? They will push to find out the truth.” “So we need another layer,” Rysn said, nodding. “A secret for them to ‘discover.’ We tell everyone that you let us go because you were impressed. Or maybe something a little more . . . mythological. Cord, how would the stories say a meeting like this might play out?” Cord gave it some thought, then looked up again. “Luckspren. There are legends of them leading to treasure, yes? But there are always guardians of treasure. And in the stories, you complete their challenges, then get a reward.” “So we tell everyone that,” Rysn said, “but to our queens and other dignitaries we tell a more subtle lie, one very close to the truth. That I negotiated with you for the treasure—the Shardplate and Soulcasters, saying nothing of the thing in my mind. Those who spy and push for secrets will discover this.” “We would still need a trade,” Nikli said, “that is plausible. Something our enemies believe we’d trade to you. Yet my people have few wants. . . .” “But you do,” Rysn said. “You said it earlier. Your kind are bad at pretending to be humans—so our trade is for training. I agree to take some of you with me, and to show you how to be human. We train you.” “That . . .” Nikli said. “That could work. Yes, they’d believe that lie. The Soulcasters are practically useless to my kind. We keep them out of reverence, as they were offerings to the Ancient Guardians long ago. But one is with you, so it makes sense to trade them to you . . . and we do need training. It’s something we’ve often complained about.” He glanced toward Cord. “This
one will know our secret.” “I am of the Peaks,” Cord said. “Guardians of the pool. You know I can be trusted.” Nikli buzzed with the others of his kind, then he looked Cord up and down. “If we agree to this deal, we will trade the Soulcasters to Rysn for training and aid in imitating humans. That armor you wear, however, has long been reserved for guardians of the Dawnshard. If you would bear it, you will bear that burden as well.” “I . . . will ponder this task,” Cord said. “I have many loyalties that come before this thing.” “If we are going to accept—and I cannot promise we will, as all the Sleepless must vote—this woman must be protected. She will need bodyguards!” “I will have the Dawnshard’s larkin guardian,” Rysn said. “Who is its true defender, if what you’ve said to me is true. I would welcome more help, but remember, the point of all this is to not hint at what I’ve done. Too many people watching me would defeat that purpose. I assume your hordelings can monitor me quietly. I wouldn’t be able to prevent you, and honestly, I’d rather know you’re there.” “Plus,” Cord said, “this thing will help with the lie—if your enemies spot you near Rysn, they will think you are training, as per the deal we have made.” “The deal we are considering,” Nikli said. “It is not agreed. You don’t even know what it is you’ve done, Rysn. You don’t understand what it is that is now inside your head.” “So . . . tell me?” Nikli laughed. “Mere words cannot explain. The Dawnshards are Commands, Rysn. The will of a god.” “I feel what you say is right, but . . . I had always imagined the Dawnshards as weapons, like the mythical Honorblades.” To be honest, she’d rarely heard the term “Dawnshard,” but she was pretty sure she’d always conflated them with Honorblades. “The most powerful forms of Surgebinding transcend traditional mortal understanding,” Nikli said. His body began to re-form, hordelings crawling back into place. “All their greatest applications require Intent and a Command. Demands on a level no person could ever manage alone. To make such Commands, one must have the reasoning—the breadth of understanding—of a deity. And so, the Dawnshards. The four primal Commands that created all things.” He paused. “And then eventually, they were used to undo Adonalsium itself. . . .” Cord whispered something in her own language. “So you do know,” Nikli said to her. “There are songs . . .” Cord said. “From long ago. Of when this . . . Command came through the pool.” She whispered again in her tongue, and it sounded like a prayer. Rysn was watching several hordelings that had slipped around near her. These looked strikingly like Chiri-Chiri in miniature. “We once assumed,” Nikli said, noticing her attention, “that the last of the lanceryn had died, and the few hordelings we had bred with them were all that remained. Inferior bloodlines, though they give us the
ability to negate some applications of Stormlight. Yours is the third larkin we now know to have survived—but the only one that has grown mature enough to return here.” Chiri-Chiri had settled down on the table, though she watched the three Sleepless and clicked warningly. “Why . . . did you say she needed to return?” Rysn asked. “Will she grow sick again?” “Larger greatshells need to bond mandras—you call them luckspren—to keep from crushing themselves to death with their own weight. The mandras of this place are special. Smaller, yet more potent, than the common breeds. It is no simple thing to make a creature as heavy as a lancer—or larkin, as they are now called—fly. Chiri-Chiri will need to return every few years until she is fully grown.” “Fully grown?” Rysn said, turning again toward those skulls. “Oh storms . . .” “You should never have come here,” Nikli said. “You should have been dissuaded. But . . . we cannot deny that what you said is true. You were brought by the needs of an Ancient Guardian. And unfortunately, the rest of what you say is also true. Our secret leaks into the world. This Dawnshard is no longer safe. I must say . . . I had not anticipated being persuaded in this matter.” “It is the job of a trademaster to see a need, then fulfill it,” Rysn said. She felt the strange pressure in the back of her mind. It was a Command? How had it been in the mural, but now invaded her head? She hadn’t been able to read the writing. What kind of Command wasn’t written, but infused a subject like Stormlight in a sphere? Nikli stood up, his hordelings snapping together. He pulled his robe tight. “We will discuss.” Behind, the other two disintegrated completely, turning into piles. “Then we will vote. It will not take long, as the others have been relaying our conversation to all the swarms. We communicate faster than humans.” “Nikli,” Rysn said. “When you speak to them, I have a request. Among my people, during important treaty negotiations, both parties often bring a witness of integrity. Someone to speak to the moral character of the diplomats involved. Tell me, are you the same person who has traveled with me these months? You didn’t somehow replace the real Nikli?” “I am the same person you hired,” Nikli said. “My initial task was to watch the Ancient Guardian and assess whether she was being cared for. Beyond that, we had a reasonable guess that an expedition would soon come here via a Thaylen ship. And yours is the finest of the fleet. It was a simple decision to place me in the crew of the Wandersail.” “Then you’ve sailed with me,” Rysn said. “You know me. When you speak to the others, I want you to tell them—honestly—what you think of me.” “I don’t know if—” “All I ask is honesty,” Rysn said. “Tell them about me, and what kind of trademaster I am.” He nodded, then broke into
hordelings—like a person who had frozen in cold Southern winds, then shattered. Cord knelt beside her. “You did well,” she whispered. “As well as anyone in the songs, when dealing with dangerous gods. But you did not trick him.” “Hopefully this is better,” Rysn whispered back. Cord nodded, but then immediately began working on the Plate to get the last pieces powered. She plainly wanted to be ready, just in case. It wouldn’t be enough. Rysn waited, tense, watching the hordelings chitter and move, as if the many pieces were at least slightly autonomous. Nikli had said his conference with the others would not take long, but Rysn found the wait almost unbearable. After about five minutes, Nikli re-formed. “It is done.” “And . . . how did it go?” Rysn asked. “They . . . listened. The others think this is a promising idea you propose, and appreciate the dual nature of the lies, layered to trick our enemies. My kin insisted on two further terms, though. You must never bond a spren to become a Radiant.” “I . . . doubt Chiri-Chiri would be willing to share me,” she said. “I hadn’t considered it, not seriously.” “Also, you may not tell anyone what has happened to you,” Nikli said. “Unless you ask us first. I . . . explained to them that humans often need people to confide in. They pointed to Cord as one, but I suggested we might need more. If we are going to maintain this secret, and work with humans to protect the Dawnshard, there could be others we need. You will speak to us before you do these things, and you may only tell them what we agree to let you.” “I agree to these terms,” Rysn said, “so long as you promise that none of my crew are to be harmed by your kind. They are . . . still alive, aren’t they?” “Regrettably, there has been a conflict on the beach with some of our more . . . specialized hordelings,” Nikli said. “The Radiants have led the crew to the city to hide, and I believe three of the sailors have died. Those on the ship have been kept safe, per my request.” Rysn felt a twist in her stomach for those she’d failed. At the same time, she had worried that far more had died. This was much better than she’d feared. “And you,” Nikli said to Cord. “You will protect the Dawnshard, fight for its defense?” “No,” Cord said, standing up, helm under her arm. “But—” Nikli began. “I am no soldier,” Cord said, her voice growing softer. “I am no warrior. I must train if I am to be of any use. I will go to war and learn to use this gift. I will fight the Void, as my father refuses to do. Once I’ve accomplished that goal, then I will consider your request.” Nikli glanced toward Rysn, who shrugged. “I mean . . . she has a point, Nikli.” “Fine,” Nikli said, with a very human sigh.
“But Cord, you will vow upon the honor of both your mother and your father that you will bear this secret and tell no one. Not even blood relatives.” “I had not thought you knew my people that well,” Cord said. “I will take this vow.” She then spoke it in her own tongue. “Our accommodation is reached?” Rysn asked, hopeful. “Yes,” he said. “There will be smaller details to arrange at a later date. But we give our agreement to your terms, Rysn Ftori bah-Vstim. Your life for being honorable. These Soulcasters and Plate for the promise to train and help us.” She felt an overwhelming sense of relief. Never, when listening to Vstim’s lessons, had she imagined she might one day need them to bargain for her life. And perhaps more. “So, Rysn is a Shardbearer now?” Cord asked. “A . . . Dawnshardbearer?” “No,” Nikli said. “She bears nothing. She is the Dawnshard now. That is how it works.” He bowed to Rysn. “We will speak again.” Rysn braced herself on the bench, then bowed back. Storms, she thought. What have I done? What you needed to, another part of her thought. You have adapted. You have Remade yourself. It was then that she grasped, in the smallest way, the nature of the Command inside her. The will of a god to remake things, to demand they be better. The power to change. Lopen patted the rocks fondly. “I will never forget you,” he said to them. “Or the time we shared together.” Rushu tucked away her notepad, apparently having finished her final sketch of the broken city. They were doing one last round of the place, some hours after the battle. “It was a brave thing you did,” Lopen said to the rocks. “Though I know you are only rocks and cannot listen to me—because you are dead, or really were never alive—you must hear that I appreciate your sacrifice.” “Could you be . . . less weird maybe?” Rushu asked. “For a day at least. To try it out? Experience the world the way the rest of us do?” “You saw what these rocks did.” “I saw one of the monsters trip,” Rushu said, “if that’s what you mean.” They’d made it all the way to the city ruins—Lopen on Huio’s back—before the monsters had caught up to them. He remembered huddling in one of the fallen buildings—Rushu had scouted a location for them that had a roof—waiting for the end to come. And then one of the monsters had stumbled. Of course, sure, five minutes later the things had all turned around and returned to the ocean. Lopen hadn’t known it at the time, but this was because Brightness Rysn had negotiated peace. Still, that time the monster had tripped on the rocks had bought at least ten seconds. “Didn’t your cousin literally save your life?” Rushu said, joining Lopen as they walked to the beach. “Yeah, he did,” Lopen said. Thanking Huio was going to be harder than thanking a bunch of rocks. So Lopen
had wanted to practice. At the beach, Kstled waited with two rowboats to take them to the Wandersail. They’d somehow transitioned from near death to leaving with a ridiculous haul. Shardplate, a mountain of gemstones—real this time—and some Soulcasters? “Remind me never to cross Brightness Rysn,” Lopen said. “I don’t know what those challenges are she passed, but I can’t believe it ended with us so rich. And so, well, alive.” “Yes, I agree,” Rushu said. “There is something strange about all this, isn’t there?” She tapped her pen against her lips, then shook her head and walked down to climb into a boat. They were leaving for Thaylenah—they’d been offered the chance to stay, now that the mysterious trials were done, but nobody wanted to hang around. Why tempt fate? At the beach, Lopen nodded to Kstled, who got into the boat with Rushu, leaving Lopen and Huio alone in the other one. Huio seemed surprised by this, but Lopen had arranged it. He settled into the seat and began rowing. Wasn’t too difficult, so long as you had two arms. “Can’t believe we’re getting away,” Huio said, watching the island retreat. “What do you suppose happened in that cavern underneath?” “None of our business, I think,” Lopen said. Huio grunted. “Wise words, younger-cousin. Sure. Wise words.” They sat quietly for a time, Lopen navigating the boat toward the Wandersail. “So,” Lopen finally said. “Third Ideal, eh? Congratulations, older-cousin.” “Thanks.” “That’s . . . the ideal where you agree to protect people you hate. Least it was for Kaladin, Teft, and Sig.” “Yeah,” Huio said. “And you looked right at me,” Lopen said softly, “before you achieved it.” “Doesn’t have to mean what you think,” Huio said. “You heard Teft tell us about his oath. For him, it meant coming to realize he couldn’t keep hating himself.” “Was it the same for you, then?” Lopen asked, slowly pulling the oars. One stroke after another. When Huio didn’t respond, he continued more softly, “It’s okay, Huio. I can hear it. I need to.” “I don’t hate you, Lopen,” Huio said. “Who could hate you? It would take a special kind of bitter soul.” “That statement, like the Lopen himself, sounds like it comes with a quite spectacular butt attached.” Huio smiled, then leaned forward. He was so often solemn, Lopen’s older-cousin. Built like a boulder and kind of resembling one, with that balding head. Everyone misunderstood Huio. Maybe even the Lopen himself. “I don’t hate you,” Huio said. “But you can be a pain, younger-cousin. Me, Punio, Fleeta, even Mama Lond. The way you joke can sometimes hurt us.” “I joke with the people I love. It’s how I am.” “Yes, but does it have to be?” Huio asked. “Could you, sure, tease a little less?” “I . . .” Storms. Was it true? Was that how they thought of him? Lopen pasted a smile on and nodded to Huio, who seemed relieved that the conversation had gone so well. They reached the ship, and Rua hovered about Lopen’s head as he
laughed with the sailors he met—but he slowly made his way to the small cabin he shared with Huio. For now, Huio gave him space to go in. Sit down. And stare. “Do . . . others complain about me?” Lopen asked Rua, who settled onto the table. “Do my jokes . . . actually hurt people?” The little spren shrugged. Then nodded. Sometimes they did. “Stormfather,” Lopen whispered. “I just want people to be happy. That’s what I try to do. Make them smile.” Rua nodded again, solemn. Lopen felt a sudden sharp pain in his breast, accompanied by shamespren sprinkling around him like red flower petals. It threatened to spread, to encompass him. It made him want to curl up and never say another word. Maybe they’d like that. A quiet Lopen. Storm it, he thought. No. No, I gotta take this like Bridge Four. Arrow straight to the heart, but I can pull it out and heal. Huio could have held the truth back, laughed everything off. But he’d trusted Lopen with this wound. “I’ll do it, then,” Lopen said, standing up. “I’ve got to protect people, you know? Even from myself. Gotta rededicate to being the best Lopen possible. A better, improved, extra-incredible Lopen.” Rua lifted his hand into the air in a fist. Then the little spren toppled over to the side. “Rua?” Lopen said, leaning down. “You playing a trick on me, naco?” Rua vanished. Then a silvery little dagger appeared in his place. What on Roshar? Lopen picked it up. It was physical, not insubstantial. It was . . . These Words are accepted. A burst of frost and power exploded around Lopen. “Storm me!” Lopen shouted, looking at the ceiling. “You did it again? I almost died out there, and you accept the Words now?” It is the right time. “Where’s the drama?” Lopen demanded at the sky. “The sense of timing? You’re terrible at this, penhito!” I take offense at that. Be glad for what you have. “I didn’t even know I’d said it!” Lopen muttered. Storm it. Stupid oath. But he tried out the dagger, and it changed to a nice silvery sword, beautiful and ornate. He’d expected a little engraving of Rua making a rude gesture. And of course as he thought about it, that exact thing appeared on the blade. Huh. This offered a ton of possibilities. . . . No, no. He would be better. No pranks. Or, well, fewer pranks. He could do that. Protect people from himself. Who’d ever heard of an oath like that? But, well, he was the Lopen. Things should be different for him. “Hey Huio!” he shouted, yanking open the door. “You’re never going to guess what just happened!” Rysn didn’t let herself relax until the winds finally stopped blowing and calm sunlight streamed in through the porthole of her cabin. The ship was free of the storm around Akinah. They had actually been allowed to leave. Not that she was alone. A few hordelings accompanied her in secret. Representatives of the Sleepless,
who would train with her and keep watch over her. Likely for the rest of her life. But the arrangement had been made, the details hammered out. The lie was the best kind, as it required very little actual lying. Almost all of what they had to say was true, and of the crew, only Rysn and Cord knew the full secret. Chiri-Chiri chirped nearby from a set of towels she’d arranged into a nest. She looked so content now, full of color. She’d spent the ride bouncing around and prancing through the room, then flying near the ceiling. As full of energy as Rysn had ever seen her. Would Chiri-Chiri retain the ability to fly as she grew big as a chasmfiend? Nikli had implied she would. Stormwinds. How would Rysn deal with that? How long would it take? Well, she’d handle it when the time came. She was less confident about the other burden, the one in her mind. She’d spent this entire voyage wondering if she belonged here, in this seat. And now she’d entered territory no babsk could ever have trained her to traverse. But she’d certainly had lots of practice sitting up straight these last years. And in a way, she found that she felt comforted. If no one had traveled this path before, then she didn’t have to compare herself to anyone, did she? She didn’t have to be Vstim. Not in this task. “Is that why you chose me?” Rysn asked Chiri-Chiri. “Did you know I could bear this?” The larkin chirped encouragingly. And it was incredible how much better that made her feel. Rysn used her arms to scoot her body along the bench and poured some tea. At last she felt relaxed enough to read through the responses from the monarchs. Mostly confirmations of what she’d sent. They would want to speak to her in person to get the details. There, she would confide in them the second half-lie. That she had agreed to train the Sleepless. Storms. Was it her, or did this tea taste extra good? She inspected it, then glanced at the sunlight pouring through the porthole. Was it . . . brighter than usual? Why did the colors in her room look so exceptionally vivid all of a sudden? A knock came at her door. “Come in,” she said, taking another sip of the wonderful tea. Captain Drlwan entered, then bowed. Outside, Cord continued her vigil of guarding Rysn’s door—wearing full Shardplate. “You’re really going to let her keep it?” Drlwan said softly as she came up from her bow. “Cord discovered it,” Rysn said. “It’s traditional to let the one who first claims a Shard keep it.” The Command pulsed with warmth as she said that. “Besides, Cord saved my life.” “The Alethi won’t be happy,” Drlwan said. “They have a history of laying dubious—but strongly enforced—claim to Shards.” “They’ll deal with the pain of losing this one,” Rysn said. “They’re getting three Soulcasters, after all.” Drlwan smiled at that. Five of the new Soulcasters would go to
Thaylenah. For years the Alethi had possessed a near monopoly on food-creating Soulcasters, but Thaylenah would now possess two—along with one that could form metals, one that created smoke, and another focused on wood, matching the one that the city had used for ages to make the best seafaring lumber. A true wealth that would benefit Thaylenah for generations. And with the gemstones found in the caverns, the crew would have their promised riches, in compensation for the danger they’d undertaken. She still mourned the three men she’d lost. It seemed such a waste of their lives when an agreement had been reached so soon after. She wondered if generals ever grieved for the last people who died before a treaty was signed. Captain Drlwan settled down in the seat beside the desk. She didn’t speak for a long moment, instead looking past Rysn at the sunlight streaming in through the porthole. “I didn’t think we’d see the sun again,” Drlwan finally said. “Not once those . . . things arrived. Even after you returned, I expected them to make some beast sink the Wandersail as it was leaving, then blame it on the storm.” “I’ll admit,” Rysn said, “those same fears occurred to me.” “What are they, Rysn?” the captain asked. “Truly? They seem like monsters of nightmare and the Void.” “Most people who are different from us are frightening at first,” Rysn said. “But one thing Vstim taught me was to see past my own expectations. In this case, it meant looking past what I assumed made someone a person, and seeing the humanity—and the fear—in what appeared to be a nightmare.” “They told me,” the captain said, “what you did.” Rysn felt a spike of alarm, cup held halfway to her lips. What? They’d talked about the Dawnshard, after all this? “As the ones on the ship were leaving,” Drlwan said. “Before you returned. They told me you had a chance to bargain for your own life. They said you would not enter into a negotiation unless it included the safety of the entire crew.” Ah. That part. Rysn’s anxiety faded. “I did what any rebsk would do.” “Pardon,” the captain said. “But you did what any good rebsk would do. A rebsk worthy of this crew.” They shared a look, then Rysn nodded her thanks. “After we leave port on our third journey,” Drlwan said, standing, “it would be good for the crew to see you steer the ship for a short time, would it not?” “I would be honored,” Rysn said, her voice catching as she said it. “Truly.” Drlwan smiled. “Let us hope the next one is a more . . . traditional voyage.” Rysn’s eyes flicked to a purple hordeling hiding on the wall, near where it met the ceiling, shadowed. Strange, how she saw the contrast of shadows much more starkly now. And . . . why did Drlwan’s voice sound more musical? “I think,” Rysn said, “I shall select the most boring, most mundane trade expedition I can find, Captain.” That satisfied Drlwan.
Rysn settled back—a single gloryspren fading overhead—and thought upon those words. Mundane. Boring. She had an inkling that neither would ever accurately describe her life again. For Kathleen Dorsey Sanderson Who is the person I know that best deserves her own larkin. (For now, her cats will have to do.) THE SUNLIT MAN ILLUSTRATIONS FOR ALL OF YOU, THE FANS OF THE COSMERE, Who make my dreams come to life. WHEW! WHAT A YEAR! This was quite the wild ride, involving a ton of work from everyone involved. I’ll make sure to get to them all in this section, but I just wanted to say a big thank-you to everyone. It was a herculean effort to get these books edited, illustrated, and delivered. Our editor on this book was Moshe Feder, my longtime partner in crime and the man who discovered me. We were thrilled to work with him again, and I’m glad he was here to help me with this next step of Nomad’s journey. A special thank-you goes to Dr. Joseph Jensen for his help with the astrophysics, as this one is a bit of a doozy as far as that is concerned. Also, the Cosmere Arcanist team—you guys are great. I’m represented by the remarkable team at the JABberwocky Literary Agency, with Joshua Bilmes at the helm. Thanks also to Susan Velazquez and Christina Zobel. This book is odd compared to the other secret projects, as we have three illustrators, not one. We wanted to try out some new people and found some individuals who worked well for this specific novel. Thank you to all of them for their amazing work. These projects became extra special because of their involvement. Ernanda Souza did the endpapers, full-color illustrations, and concept art. She really did a great job and was awesome to work with. Nabetse Zitro did our interior drawings, joining us again after the incredible work he did on the new comic pages in the White Sand graphic novel omnibus. And kudriaken did our spectacular cover illustration. Bill Wearne, our print rep at American Print and Bindery, made magic happen with each of the secret projects. We appreciate him, the printer, the bindery, and all those who helped with the manufacturing of this book. Debi Bergerson was instrumental on the print side, and Chad Dillon went above and beyond to ensure high-quality binding materials. From here, let’s go to the departments at Dragonsteel. I have the best team in the business, and they all put a lot of work into these secret projects. Isaac StÙart is our vice president of Creative Development. His team includes Ben McSweeney (who did great concept work to keep the vision of the project cohesive), Rachael Lynn Buchanan (who did a lot of heavy lifting helping Isaac work with the artists, choosing scenes to illustrate, and keeping track of details), Jennifer Neal, Hayley Lazo, Priscilla Spencer, and Anna Earley. The Instructional Peter Ahlstrom is our vice president of Editorial. His team includes Karen Ahlstrom, Kristy S. Gilbert, Jennie Stevens (our in-house editor of this book),
Betsey Ahlstrom, and Emily Shaw-Higham. Kristy Kugler did the copyedit. The Narrative department is just Dan Wells, who is also its VP. But we let him boss Ben around to make up for it. Our COO is Emily Sanderson, and the Operations team includes Matt “Matt” Hatch, Emma Tan-Stoker, Jane Horne, Kathleen Dorsey Sanderson, Makena Saluone, Hazel Cummings, and Becky Wilson. Adam Horne, a.k.a. the Grand Master of Corgis, is our vice president of Publicity and Marketing. His team includes Jeremy Palmer, Taylor D. Hatch, and Octavia Escamilla. Kara Stewart is our vice president of Merchandising, Events, and making sure you all get your boxes of stuff. Her team includes Emma Tan-Stoker, Christi Jacobsen, Kellyn Neumann, Lex Willhite, Mem Grange, Michael Bateman, Joy Allen, Ally Reep, Richard Rubert, Katy Ives, Brett Moore, Dallin Holden, Daniel Phipps, Jacob Chrisman, Alex Lyon, Matt Hampton, Camilla Cutler, Quinton Martin, Esther Grange, Logan Reep, Laura Loveridge, Amanda Butterfield, Gwen Hickman, Donald Mustard III, Zoe Hatch, Pablo Mooney, Braydonn Moore, Avery Morgan, Nathan Mortensen, Christian Fairbanks, Dal Hill, George Kaler, Kathleen Barlow, Kaleigh Arnold, Kitty Allen, Rachel Jacobsen, Sydney Wilson, Katelyn Hatch, and Judy Torsak. I’d like to thank Oriana Leckert from Kickstarter, and Anna Gallagher, Palmer Johnson, and McKynzee Wiggins (chief button maker) from BackerKit. My writing group consists of Emily Sanderson, Kathleen Dorsey Sanderson, Peter Ahlstrom, Karen Ahlstrom, Darci Stone, Eric James Stone, Alan Layton, Ethan Skarstedt, Ben Olsen, and Dan Wells. Alpha readers for this book include Karen Ahlstrom, Joy Allen, Christi Jacobsen, Brett Moore, Brad Neumann, Kellyn Neumann, Ally Reep, Emma Tan-Stoker, Sean VanBlack, and Dan Wells. Our beta readers are Ravi Persaud, Ian McNatt, Brandon Cole, Shannon Nelson, Ben Marrow, Jennifer Neal, Poonam Desai, Chris McGrath, Sumejja Muratagić-Tadić, Kendra Alexander, Zenef Mark Lindberg, Paige Phillips, Rosemary Williams, Eric Lake, David Behrens, William Juan, and Erika Kuta Marler. Special thanks to Mikah Kilgore for xyr beta feedback on the image descriptions found in the ebook and audiobook. Our gamma readers include many beta readers, along with Evgeni “Argent” Kirilov, Joshua Harkey, Ross Newberry, Tim Challener, Jessica Ashcraft, Ted Herman, Brian T. Hill, Rob West, Paige Vest, Gary Singer, Darci Cole, Kalyani Poluri, Jayden King, Lingting “Botanica” Xu, Glen Vogelaar, Bob Kluttz, Billy Todd, Megan Kanne, Eliyahu Berelowitz Levin, Aaron Ford, Jessie Lake, and Sam Baskin. The Arcanist team includes Eric Lake, Evgeni “Argent” Kirilov, Ben Marrow, David Behrens, Ian McNatt, and Joshua Harkey. As this is the last book of the Secret Projects Kickstarter, I wanted to take one final opportunity to thank you all. I might have written the books, but you created the event that they became. You made this year so very special. After you’ve read the book, see the postscript for more. Brandon Sanderson NOMAD WOKE UP among the condemned. He blinked, his right cheek in the dirt. Then he focused on the incongruous sight of a plant growing in fast-motion before his eyes. Was he dreaming? The fragile sprout quivered and twisted, heaving up from the earth. It seemed to stretch with joy, its seedpods parting like arms
after a deep sleep. A stalk emerged from the center, testing the air like a serpent’s tongue. Then it stretched left toward the dim light shining from that direction. Nomad groaned and lifted his head, mind fuzzy, muscles sore. Where had he Skipped to this time? And would it be far enough away to hide from the Night Brigade? Of course it wouldn’t be. No place could hide him from them. He had to keep moving. Had to… Storms. It felt good to lie here. Couldn’t he just rest for a while? Stop running for once? Rough hands grabbed him from behind and hauled him to his knees, jolting him from his stupor. He became more aware of his surroundings: the shouting, the groaning. Sounds he’d been oblivious to in his post-Skip grogginess. The people here, including the man who grabbed him, wore unfamiliar clothing. Long trousers, sleeves with tight cuffs, shirts with high collars all the way up to the chin. The man shook him, barking at Nomad in a language he didn’t understand. “Trans…translation?” Nomad croaked. Sorry, a deep, monotone voice said in his head. We don’t have enough Investiture for that. Right. He’d barely reached the threshold for his last Skip, which would leave him nearly drained. His abilities relied on reaching or maintaining certain thresholds of Investiture, the mystical power source that fueled extraordinary events on most planets he visited. “How much?” he croaked. “How much do we have left?” Around fifteen hundred BEUs. So, in other words, under eight percent Skip capacity. Damnation. As he’d worried, the cost to come here had left him destitute. As long as he maintained certain levels, his body could do exceptional things. Each cost a tiny bit of Investiture, but that cost was minimal—so long as he kept his thresholds. Once he had over two thousand Breath Equivalent Units, he could play with his Connection. Then he could Connect to the planet using his skills and speak the local language. Which meant Nomad wouldn’t be able to speak to the locals until he found a power source to absorb. He winced at the breath of the shouting man. He wore a hat with a wide brim, tied under the chin, and thick gloves. It was dim out, though a burning corona lit the horizon. Just before dawn, Nomad guessed. And even by that light, sprouts were growing all across this field. Those plants…their movements reminded him of home—a place without soil, but with plants that were so much more vigorous than on other worlds. These weren’t the same, though. They didn’t dodge to avoid being stepped on. These plants were merely growing quickly. Why? Nearby, people wearing long white coats pounded stakes into the ground—then others chained down people who didn’t have those coats. Both groups had a variety of skin tones and wore similar clothing. Nomad couldn’t understand the words anyone was shouting, but he recognized the bearing of the condemned. The cries of despair from some, the pleading tones of others, the abject resignation in most as they were
chained to the ground. This was an execution. The man holding Nomad shouted at him again, glaring through eyes a watery blue. Nomad just shook his head. That breath could have wilted flowers. The man’s companion—dressed in one of those long white coats—gestured to Nomad, arguing. Soon his two captors made a decision. One grabbed a set of manacles off his belt, moving to cuff Nomad. “Yeah,” Nomad said, “I don’t think so.” He grabbed the man’s wrist, preparing to throw him and trip the other man. But Nomad’s muscles locked up—like a machine that had run out of oil. He stiffened in place, and the men pulled away from him, surprised by his sudden outburst. Nomad’s muscles unlocked, and he stretched his arms, feeling a sudden, sharp pain. “Damnation!” His Torment was getting worse. He glanced at his frightened captors. At least they didn’t seem to be armed. A figure emerged from the crowd. Everyone else was swathed in clothing—male or female, they showed skin only on their faces. But this newcomer was bare chested—wearing a diaphanous robe split at the front—and had on thick black trousers. He was the sole person on the field not wearing gloves, though he did wear a pair of golden bracers on his forearms. He was also missing most of his chest. Much of the pectorals, rib cage, and heart had been dug out—burned away, leaving the remaining skin seared and blackened. Inside the cavity, the man’s heart had been replaced by a glimmering ember. It pulsed red when wind stoked it—as did similar pinpricks of crimson light among the char. Black burn marks radiated from the hole across the man’s skin, extending as far as a few specks on his face, which occasionally glittered with their own much smaller sparks. It was like the man had been strapped to a jet engine as it ignited—somehow leaving him not only alive, but perpetually burning. “Don’t suppose,” Nomad said, “you fellows are the type who enjoy a comical blunder made by a newcomer to your culture?” He stood and raised his hands in a nonthreatening way, ignoring the instincts that told him—as always—that he needed to run. The ember man pulled a large bat off his back. Like a police baton, but more begrudging in its nonlethality. “Didn’t think so,” Nomad said, backing up. A few of the chained people watched him with the strange, yet familiar, hope of a prisoner—happy that someone else was drawing attention. The ember man came for him, supernaturally quick, his heart light flaring. He was Invested. Wonderful. Nomad barely dodged a mighty blow. “I need a weapon, Aux!” Nomad snapped. Well, summon one then, my dear squire, said the voice in his head. I’m not holding you back. Nomad grunted, diving through a tall patch of grass that had sprung up in the minutes since he’d woken. He tried to make a weapon appear, but nothing happened. It’s your Torment, the knight helpfully observes to his moderately capable squire. It has grown strong enough to deny you weapons. As usual,
Aux’s voice was completely monotone. He was self-conscious about that, hence the added commentary. Nomad dodged again as the ember man slammed his baton down in another near miss—making the ground tremble at the impact. Storms. That light was getting brighter. Covering the entire horizon in a way that felt too even. How…how large was the sun on this planet? “I thought,” Nomad shouted, “that my oaths overrode that aspect of the Torment!” I’m sorry, Nomad. But what oaths? The ember man prepared another swing, and Nomad took a deep breath, then ducked the attack and bodychecked the man. As soon as he went in for the hit, though, his body locked up again. Yes, I see, the knight muses with a conversational tone. Your Torment now attempts to prevent even minor physical altercations. He couldn’t so much as tackle someone? It was getting bad. The ember man hit Nomad across the face, throwing him to the ground. Nomad managed to roll and avoid the baton and, with a groan, heaved himself to his feet. The baton came in again, and by instinct, Nomad put up both hands—catching it. Stopping the swing cold. The ember man’s eyes widened. Nearby, several of the prisoners called out. Heads turned. Seemed like people around here weren’t accustomed to the sight of a person going toe-to-toe with one of these Invested warriors. The ember man’s eyes widened further as—with teeth gritted—Nomad stepped forward and shoved him off balance, sending him stumbling backward. Behind the strange warrior, blazing light warped the molten horizon, bringing with it a sudden, blasting heat. Around them, the plants that had grown so rapidly began wilting. The lines of chained people whimpered and screamed. Run, a part of Nomad shouted. Run! It’s what he did. It was all he knew these days. But as he turned to dash away, another ember man behind him prepared to swing. Nomad tried to catch this blow too, but his storming body locked up again. “Oh, come on!” he shouted as the baton clobbered him in the side. He stumbled. The ember man decked him across the face with a powerful fist, sending him to the dirt again. Nomad gasped, groaning, feeling gritty soil and rocks on his skin. And heat. Terrible, bewildering heat from the horizon, still building in intensity. Both ember men turned away, and the first thumbed over his shoulder at Nomad. The two timid officers in the white coats hastened over and—while Nomad was in a daze of pain and frustration—manacled his hands together. They appeared to contemplate pounding a spike into the earth and pinning him there, but rightly guessed that a man who could catch the bat of an Invested warrior could rip it out. Instead they hauled him over to a ring that had been affixed to a section of stone, locking him there. Nomad fell to his knees in the line of prisoners, sweat dripping from his brow as the heat increased. His instincts screamed at him to run. Yet another piece of him…simply wanted to be done.
How long had the chase lasted? How long had it been since he’d stood proud? Maybe I’ll just let it end, he thought. A mercy killing. Like a man mortally wounded on the battlefield. He slumped, the soreness in his side pulsing, though he doubted anything was broken. So long as he maintained around five percent Skip capacity—around a thousand BEUs—his body would be more powerful, more endurant. Where others broke, he bruised. Fire that would sear others only singed him. Healing engaged, the hero says with a confident voice to his humiliated valet. You’re under ten percent Skip capacity, so your healing won’t be as efficient as you’re used to. At times he wondered if the enhancements he bore were a blessing or another part of the Torment. The light increased with the heat, becoming blinding. That smoke in the distance…was that the ground catching fire? From the light of the sun? Damnation. Damnation itself was rising over the horizon. That light, Aux said. It’s far too powerful for ordinary sunlight—at least on any habitable planet. “Think the light is Invested?” Nomad whispered. “Like on Taldain?” A plausible theory, the knight says with a musing curiosity. “Think you can absorb it?” Possibly. We’ll likely soon see… If he could absorb enough, he could Skip right off this planet and put even more space between himself and the Night Brigade. Wouldn’t that be nice for once? To have a head start? Still, something about the intensity of that light daunted Nomad. Worried him. He stared at it as the nearby officers—including the ember men—finished locking down the prisoners. Once done, they ran to a line of machines. Long and thin, they had six seats each. Open to the air, with a windshield in front and controls for the front left operator. They kind of looked like…six-seater hovercycles? An odd construction, but he wasn’t sure what else to call them. You apparently straddled each seat—there was an opening for the inner leg—though they were all locked together along a central fuselage with no outer wall or door. Regardless, he wasn’t surprised when fires blasted underneath the first of these, raising it in the air a half dozen feet or so. What did it matter? He turned toward the ever-increasing light as the plants—vibrant only minutes ago—browned and withered. He thought he could hear the roar of flames in the distance as the full-intensity sunlight advanced, like the front of a once-familiar storm. He had a guess, watching the strength of that light, that he wouldn’t be able to absorb it. No more than a common cord and plug could handle the raw output of a nuclear reactor. This was something incredible, a force that would fry him before he could make use of its power. Uh, Nomad, Aux said in his monotone voice. I get the feeling that trying to absorb and use Investiture from that is going to be like trying to pick out a snowflake from an avalanche. I…don’t think we should let it hit you. “It will kill me if
it does…” Nomad whispered. Is that…what you want? No. No, even though he hated much about his life, he didn’t want to die. Even though each day he became something more feral…well, feral things knew to struggle for life. A sudden frantic desperation struck Nomad. He began pulling and flailing against the chains. The second of the four hovercycles took off, and he knew—from the speed of the advancing sunlight—that they were his only hope of escape. He screamed, voice ragged, straining against the steel, stretching it—but unable to pull it free. “Aux!” he shouted. “I need a Blade! Transform!” I’m not the one preventing that, Nomad. “That light is going to kill us!” Point: it is going to kill you, my poor valet. I am already dead. Nomad yelled something primal as the third hovercycle took off, though the last one was having troubles. Perhaps he— Wait. “Weapons are forbidden to me. What about tools?” Why would they be forbidden to you? Nomad was an idiot! Auxiliary was a shapeshifting metal tool that, in this case, he could manifest physically as a crowbar. It formed in his hands as if from white mist, appearing out of nothing. Nomad hooked it into the ring on the boulder, then threw his weight against it. SNAP. He lurched free, hands still manacled, but with two feet of slack between them. He stumbled to his feet and dashed toward the last of the hovercycles as the fires finally ignited underneath it. He summoned Auxiliary as a hook and chain, which he immediately hurled at the cycle. It struck just as the machine took off. At Nomad’s command, once Auxiliary caught it, the hook fuzzed briefly and sealed as a solid ring around a protrusion on the back of the vehicle. The other end of the chain locked onto Nomad’s manacles. The sunlight reached him. An incredible, intense, burning light. Prisoners burst into flame, screaming. Oh, storms, the knight shouts. In that moment, the slack on the chain pulled tight. Nomad was yanked out of the sunlight, his skin screaming in agony, his clothing aflame. He was dragged away from certain death. But toward what, he had no idea. NOMAD SLAMMED TO the ground side-first, dragged with frightening speed after the hovercycle. Your healing is engaged, Aux said. And your body has adjusted to the local environment’s lower air pressure. But, Nomad, you’ve got so little Investiture left. Try not to get too beat up by this next part, all right? Even as Aux said it, Nomad ripped through barriers of withered plants and smashed repeatedly against rocks, dirt grinding into his skin. But again, Nomad was built of strong stuff. A base level of Investiture toughened him. Though healing would use Investiture up faster than other abilities, so long as he kept a minimum baseline, he might not need much healing. He wasn’t immortal. Most advanced weapons would be instantly lethal to him—storms, even many primitive ones could kill him if used persistently, running him out of Investiture. However, where an ordinary man’s arms would
have been twisted from their sockets—their skin flayed as plant detritus became like razors in the high speed—he stayed together. And even managed to heal from the burns. Down to six percent, Aux informed him. That wasn’t too bad, all things considered. But…did you feel that heat? It was unreal. There was Investiture involved for sure, but I couldn’t grab any of it. Opening myself up to absorb that would have destroyed me. We will need a safer way to harvest it. Nomad grunted as he crashed into the ground again. With effort, he managed to turn himself to put the brunt of the further damage on his thigh and shoulder. Though the wind put out the flames on his clothing, the force of slamming against things ripped the remnants of his jacket and shirt away. His skin held, though. He didn’t mind the rough treatment of his escape. It was better than being left in that sunlight. He closed his eyes, trying to banish a greater pain. The memory of the unfortunate prisoners’ screams when the sunrise hit them, turning them to ash in seconds. He was sure some of them had been calling to him for help. Once, he’d have been unable to ignore that. But millions, perhaps billions, of people died each day around the cosmere. He couldn’t stop that. He could barely keep himself alive. It hurt regardless. Even after years of torment, he still hated watching people die. He tucked in his chin, protecting his face from the jolting chaos of being hauled across the rough surface of this harsh world. He could see the sky darkening. The fearsome sunlight vanished beneath the horizon as if it were dusk, though Nomad was the one moving. The hovercycle was fast enough to round the planet ahead of the rising sun, staying out of the dawn’s burning clutches. This planet must have a slow rotation, the hero observes to his erratic valet. Note how these vehicles can easily outrun the sun. Ahead, opposite the sun, an enormous planetary ring rose in the sky—a broad arc that reflected the sunlight. Nomad had little opportunity to enjoy the return to safe twilight. Several of the people on the cycle tried to pry loose his chain, but at such speeds—and with him as a weight on the end—that would be difficult even if he hadn’t sealed the loop. He wondered if perhaps they’d stop to deal with him, but they kept on flying after the other cycles, never more than a few feet off the ground. Eventually they slowed, then stopped. Nomad came to rest in a patch of wet soil, appreciating the sensation of something soft. He groaned and flopped over, trousers a mess of rips and tatters, freshly healed skin beaten and battered, hands still manacled. After a moment of agony—spent trying to appreciate the fact that at least no new pains were being added—he turned his head to see why they’d stopped. He could see no reason. Perhaps it was just for the drivers to get their bearings—because after
a short conversation, the hovercycles took off again. This time, they rose higher in the air, leaving Nomad to dangle. This was better, at least, because as they flew, he didn’t get slammed into anything. He assumed they stayed low earlier because they hadn’t wanted to risk rising too high into the sunlight. They flew for what felt like an hour until they finally reached something interesting: a floating city. It moved through the landscape, an enormous plate, lifted by the thrust of hundreds of engines burning underneath it. Nomad had been on flying cities before, including one on a planet near his homeworld, but rarely had he seen one so…ramshackle. A motley collection of single-story buildings, like an enormous slum, somehow raised up above the ground—but only thirty or forty feet. Indeed, it seemed like even getting to that modest height was straining the city’s engines, their lift barely enough to clear the landscape’s obstacles. This wasn’t some soaring metropolis of technological splendor. It was a desperate exercise in survival. He looked back into the distance, where the light on the horizon had faded to invisibility. Yet he knew the sun was there. Looming. Like the date of your execution. “You have to remain ahead of it, don’t you?” he whispered. “You live in the shadows because the sun here will kill you.” Storms. An entire society that had to keep moving, outrunning the sun itself? The implications of it set his mind working, and old training—the man he’d once been—started to worm through the corpse he’d become. Why wasn’t the weather on this planet, even in the darkness, a tempest? If the sun was superheating one side all the time, you’d never be able to survive on the other side. That they could was evident, so he was missing something. How did they feed themselves? What fuel powered those engines, and how did they possibly have time to mine or drill for it while moving? And speaking of mines, why not live in caves? They obviously had metal to spare. They’d used some to chain those poor sods to the ground. He’d always been inquisitive. Even after he’d become a soldier—pointedly turning away from the life of a scholar—he’d asked questions. Now they teased him until he beat them back with a firm hand. Only one mattered. Would the power source of those engines be enough to fuel his next Skip and get him off this planet before the Night Brigade found him? The hovercycle roared, climbing toward the city. He dangled under the last of the four, weighing it down, the engines underneath throwing fire his direction and heating his chain. Auxiliary could handle it, fortunately. Curiously this small rise in elevation made Nomad’s ears pop. Once the cycles reached the surface level of the city, they didn’t park in the conventional way. They moved in sideways and locked into the city’s edge, their engines remaining on, adding their lift to that of the main engines. Nomad dangled by his hands and chain, his pains fading as he healed
once again, though this healing was minimal compared to what he’d needed to recover from that sunlight. From this vantage, he could see lumps of barren hills and muddy pits below, like sludge and moors. The city had left a wide trail of burned, dried-out dirt behind it. Obviously, with a scar like that to follow, it was easy for those flying cycles to track their way home. He was surprised how well he could see. He blinked, sweat and muddy water dripping into his eyes, and looked up at that ring again. Like most, it was actually a collection of rings. Brilliant, blue and gold, circling the planet—sweeping high in the air, extending as if into infinity. They pointed toward the sun, tipped at a slight angle, reflecting sunlight down onto the surface. Now that he could study it, a part of him acknowledged how stunning the sight was. He’d visited tens of planets and had never seen anything so stoically magnificent. Mud and fire below, but in the air…that was majesty. This was a planet that wore a crown. His chain shook as someone began to haul him upward. Soon he was grabbed by his arms and heaved up onto the metal surface of the city, into a crooked street lined with squat buildings. A small crowd chattered and gestured at him. Ignoring them, he focused instead on the five distinctive figures behind them—people with embers in their chests. They stood with heads bowed, eyes closed—embers having cooled. Two were women, he thought, though the fire that consumed their chests had left no semblance of breasts, only that hole stretching two handspans wide, bits of the ribs poking through the charred skin. Embers in place of hearts. The rest of the people were dressed as he’d seen below: high collars that reached all the way to the chin, swathed in clothing, each wearing gloves. Several wore the white coats, formal, with open fronts but insignias on the shoulders. Officers or officials. The rest wore muted colors and seemed to be civilians. Some of the women wore skirts, though many preferred long, skirtlike jackets, their fronts open to reveal trousers underneath. Many—both men and women—wore hats with wide brims. Why did they wear those when there was barely any light? Don’t think about it, he told himself, exhausted. Who cares? You’re not going to be here long enough to learn anything about their culture. Many had pale skin, though nearly as many had darker skin like his. A smaller number had a variety of shades between. The crowd soon stilled, then lowered their eyes and backed away, parting to make way for some newcomer. Nomad settled back on his heels, breathing in and out deeply. The newcomer proved to be a tall man in a black coat—with eyes that glowed. They simmered a deep red color, as if lit from behind. The effect reminded Nomad of something from his past, long ago—but this was less like the red eyes of a corrupted soul, and more like something that was burning inside
the man. His black coat glowed too, along the edges, in a similar red-orange shade. Nomad thought he had one of those embers in his chest as well, though that was covered with thin clothing. It didn’t seem to have sunk as deeply into the skin as the others, as he still had the shape of his pectorals. His glow was mimicked by many of the buildings, the rims of walls glowing as if by firelight. Like the city had recently been aflame, and these were its ashes. The man with the glowing eyes raised a thick gloved hand to quiet the crowd. He took in Nomad, then nodded to two officers and pointed, barking an order. The officers fell over themselves to obey, scrambling to undo Nomad’s manacles. Nervous, they backed away as soon as the manacles were off. Nomad rose to his feet, making many of the civilians gasp, but didn’t make any sudden moves. Because, storms, he was tired. He let out a long sigh, pains having become aches. He told Auxiliary to stay in place as a chain; he didn’t want them to realize he had access to a shape-changing tool. The man with the glowing eyes barked something at him, voice harsh. Nomad shook his head. Glowing Eyes repeated his question, louder, slower, angrier. “I don’t speak your tongue,” Nomad said hoarsely. “Give me a power source, like one from the engines of those cycles. If I absorb that, it might be enough.” That depended on what they were using as fuel—but the way they kept an entire city floating, he doubted their power source was conventional. The idea of fueling a city like this with coal was laughable. They’d be using some kind of Invested material, perhaps charged in that sunlight. The leader, finally realizing that Nomad wasn’t going to respond, raised his hand to the side—then carefully pulled off his glove, one finger at a time. People gasped, though the move revealed only an ordinary, if pale, hand. The man stepped up to Nomad and seized him by the face. Nothing happened. The man seemed surprised by this. He shifted his grip. “If you lean in for a kiss,” Nomad muttered, “I’m going to bite your storming lip off.” It felt good to be able to joke like that. His distant, former master would be proud of him. In his youth, Nomad had been far too serious and rarely allowed himself levity. More because he’d been too embarrassed and frightened by the idea of possibly saying something cringeworthy. Get dragged through the dirt enough times—get beaten to within an inch of your life, to the point where you barely remembered your own name—well, that did wonders for your sense of humor. All you had left at that point was to laugh at the joke you had become. The onlookers were really amazed by the fact that nothing happened when Glowing Eyes touched him. The man took Nomad one final time by the chin, then let go and wiped his hand on his coat before replacing
his glove, his eyes—like the burning light of firemoss—illuminating the front brim of his hat and the too-smooth features of his face. He might have been fifty, but it was hard to tell, as he didn’t have a single wrinkle. Seemed there were advantages to living in perpetual twilight. One of the officers from before stepped up and gestured at Nomad, speaking in hushed tones. He looked incredulous, pointing toward the horizon. Another of the officers nodded, staring at Nomad. “Sess Nassith Tor,” he whispered. Curious, the knight says. I almost understood that. It’s very similar to another language I’m still faintly Connected to. “Any idea which one?” Nomad growled. No. But…I think…Sess Nassith Tor… It means something like… One Who Escaped the Sun. Others behind repeated the phrase, taking it up, until Glowing Eyes roared at them. He looked back at Nomad, then kicked him square in the chest. It hurt, particularly in the state Nomad was in. This man was definitely Invested, to deliver so strong a kick. Nomad grunted and bent over, gasping for breath. The man seized him, then smiled, now realizing that Nomad wouldn’t fight back. The man enjoyed that idea. He tossed Nomad to the side, then kicked him in the chest again, his smile broadening. Nomad would have loved to rip that smile off with some skin attached. But since fighting back would make him freeze, the best thing to do was to play docile. Glowing Eyes gestured to Nomad. “Kor Sess Nassith Tor,” he said with a sneer, then kicked Nomad again for good measure. A few officers scrambled forward and grabbed him under the arms to drag him off. He found himself hoping for a nice cell—someplace cold and hard, yes, but at least he could sleep and forget who he was for a few hours. Such modest hopes were shattered as the city started to break apart. THE ENTIRE CITY vibrated, and the buildings swayed sickeningly. Cracks appeared in the metal street beneath Nomad, but as he began to panic, his captors calmly stepped across the cracks and pulled him into a building. The city shook and split. It…it wasn’t breaking. It was disassembling. It shattered into hundreds of pieces, each chunk rising on its own jets, each with a single building on it. Each chunk was a ship. Earlier, he’d seen how the hovercycles had locked into place along the edge, adding their thrust to the city. In a discomfiting moment, he now realized that every piece of the platform was similar. It wasn’t one big flying city; instead it had been hundreds of ships joined together. Most of them were modest in size—the single-family-home version of a hovership. Many were smaller than that, built like tugboats, with wide decks and a cab on top. A few were larger, carrying wide buildings suitable for meeting halls or warehouses. They were all bounded with wide, flat decks that could be joined together to make the streets. As each ship flew off, railings rose at the decks’ edges and walls unfolded to reveal
windshields and control cabs. He got the impression that this city hadn’t been built as a cohesive whole that could also be disassembled—rather, this was a hodgepodge of individual vehicles that could work together. That helped explain the city’s eclectic quality. The place was like a caravan that, for the sake of convenience or defense, could assemble its pieces into a temporary town. The fact that it worked so well together was remarkable. Responding to shouts and instructions Nomad couldn’t understand, many of the ships flew off into the distance, engaged in some activity. Nomad squinted and saw that several were scattering some substance onto the ground. Seeds, he realized. They’re spreading seeds. A puzzle piece of this bizarre world fell into place. The Invested sunlight explained the fast-growing plants, maturing almost instantly as they absorbed the potent predawn light. He’d already proven he couldn’t siphon off that energy for himself, but the plants whispered there was a way—even if it was out of his reach. Regardless, this society had a harvest every day. They must sow crops, then reap them mere hours later, before fleeing into the darkness. Was that light from the rings sufficient, or did they need to get in close, dare the edge of the deadly sunlight? He had to fight back his curiosity with a bludgeon. You make, he thought at himself, a terrible cynic. The ship he was on didn’t follow those sowing the crops; it joined another group of ships that descended to the ground. Some here had buildings of two or three stories, the largest he had seen. They landed in a wide ring on the muddy ground. His ship came down and locked in next to an overbearing one with tiers of balconies on the front. Glowing Eyes stepped up onto one of these and settled into a seat. Nomad inspected the muddy ring as lesser ships locked in on top of one another, creating a tiered structure four or five ships tall. He felt a sinking feeling as he recognized this setup. It was an arena. While the farmers went out to work, the privileged gathered on the front decks of their ships to enjoy some kind of show. He groaned as his captors affixed a golden set of bracers to his forearms, just like the ones the ember people wore. Once these were in place, his captors hauled him to the front deck of their ship. When he tried to resist—instinctively taking a swing at one—he locked up. Then they easily tossed him down some twelve feet into a patch of rancid, waterlogged earth. It wasn’t the first arena he’d been in, but as he pulled his face from the muck, he decided it was certainly the dirtiest. Several larger vessels that resembled shipping containers landed and opened their front doors. Officials in white coats forced out three tens or so people in ragged clothing, herding them into the ring. Nomad sighed, pulling himself to his feet, trying to ignore the stench of the mud. Considering what he’d been through the
last few weeks, he figured the mud was probably trying to do him the same favor. The prisoners forced into the ring did not seem like the fighting type. The poor souls looked almost as tattered and worn as he felt. They stumbled and tripped as they tried to move through the thick sludge, which stained their clothing. No weapons were offered. So, Nomad thought, not a gladiatorial arena. They weren’t here to fight…but they might be here to die. Indeed, another door opened, and three of the ember people strode out, carrying weapons. A ship floated down—its engines’ heat uncomfortable—and dropped several large metal crates, each landing in the mud with a wet squelch. Obstacles, ranging in size. The ember people came in running. The crowd cheered. The unarmed peasants scattered like hogs before a whitespine, frantic. Delightful. Nomad dashed through the mud. It only came up to his ankles, but it was treacherously slick, and stuck to his feet with surprising suction. He skidded toward one of the larger boxes, fully eight feet tall, and heaved himself up onto it by his fingertips. He figured that if he made himself the most difficult target of the bunch, the ember people would chase easier prey first. That might give him time to figure some storming way out of this situation. But as soon as he got onto the box, a pair of black-gloved hands appeared, and a figure climbed up after him. Ember burning at the center of her heart, light green eyes fixed solely on him, her lips snarling. She had short black hair streaked with silver, and her left cheek was scored by a vein of blackness with a glowing line down its center. While the other two ember people carried whips, this one held a long, wicked machete. Damnation. Why come after him? Nomad glanced toward the throne above where Glowing Eyes watched with interest. Do you think, the knight asks his faithful squire, he wants to see what you can do? “No,” Nomad whispered, backing away from the ember woman. “Remember the anger the leader displayed? The others treated me with some reverence for escaping the sun. He hated that.” This wasn’t a test. Glowing Eyes wanted Nomad to be killed in public. Wanted him humiliated and defeated for everyone to see. The ember woman came in swinging at Nomad, so he turned and leaped from the top of the enormous crate toward a smaller one. Here, he rolled purposefully off into the mud, pretending to scramble and find something there. As the ember woman came bounding down toward him, he heaved upward with a newly formed crowbar—deliberately not trying to hit the woman, but only to deflect the machete. His body didn’t lock up. So long as he was focused solely on defense, it seemed that he could resist. He shoved the ember woman aside, causing her to lose her balance and fall. She was up a second later, half her face covered in mud, glaring at him in a feral way. She didn’t seem shocked
by the sudden appearance of his weapon, and he’d tried to hide how he’d obtained it with his roll and fall. He hoped those watching above would assume that he dug it from the sludge somehow, that it was some piece of junk left by some other passing group. Growling, the woman came scrambling for him. Behind, one of the poor peasants had been backed into a corner. An ember man grabbed her and thrust her aloft toward the sky with one arm. The crowd yelled in delight while the woman screamed in panic, though she didn’t seem to have been hurt. Nomad dodged once, twice, three times—narrowly avoiding machete blows from the ember woman, who moved with supernatural speed and grace. He had more trouble with the mud than she did. Despite his years on the run, soil still felt unnatural to him. It was wrong not to have solid stone underfoot. As a second person was caught, Nomad blocked another blow from the machete—then barely stopped himself from hitting the woman with a backswing. Storms, it was hard to restrain himself. But he also couldn’t dodge forever. Eventually those two other ember people would come for him. He hit the woman’s machete extra hard on the next clash, knocking the weapon free from her muddied hand. As she howled at him for that, he turned and ran, hooking his crowbar on his belt—covertly making a small loop to secure it. He didn’t look to see if she followed, instead leaping onto a set of smaller boxes, then hurling himself up toward the tallest one, some fifteen feet high. He barely grabbed the top, trying to haul himself up. Unfortunately his hands were slick with mud, and he started to fall. Until a gloved hand caught him by the wrist. There was a man on top of the box already, one of the peasants—a tad heavyset, with pale skin, brown eyes, and a dimpled chin. With a determined expression, the man heaved, pulling Nomad the rest of the way up. Nomad nodded to the grime-covered man, who gave him a gap-toothed smile in return. He glanced at Nomad’s weapon, then asked a question, sounding confused. Something about…you killing? Aux said. I’m sorry. I can barely make out any of this. You need to get some Investiture. “Sorry, friend,” Nomad said to the man. “Can’t understand. But thank you.” The man joined him in watching the arena. Another captive was giving the ember people some trouble, dodging well, scrambling through the mud. It took two to eventually capture the poor woman. The ember woman who had fought Nomad still ignored all other prey. She strode carefully around the large box, planning her ascent. As one more person was captured, the rest of the peasants gave up running, falling to their knees or leaning against walls, puffing in exhaustion. The ones who had been captured were herded toward a different ship, screaming and crying—though notably not fighting back. Curious. From the way they acted, Nomad got the sense that— “That bunch who were
caught first are another set of condemned, Aux,” he guessed. “To be left for the sun.” So… Auxiliary said in his head. This was some elaborate game of tag? To determine who’s next in line to be executed? “That’s my best guess,” Nomad said. “Look how relieved the others are not to have been caught.” Relieved, yes, the knight says with a morose sense of melancholy. But also…sad. Auxiliary was right. Many of the survivors turned pained eyes toward the ones who had been taken. One man even screamed in a begging posture, falling to his knees, gesturing to offer himself instead. These captives all knew each other. The ones who had been taken were friends, maybe family members, of those who had survived. Nomad’s ally started to climb down, but the contest wasn’t completely over. Not yet. Though the two other ember people had moved off after corralling the condemned, the third one—the woman with the silver in her hair—surged along the jumble of crates toward Nomad’s perch. She wouldn’t stop until he’d been killed, he was certain of it. Well then. Time to see if he could trick his Torment. He waited tensely as the ember woman approached. Nomad? Auxiliary asked. What are you doing? “How heavy an object can you become?” he asked. “Without using up any of our BEUs?” Every transformation I make uses a tiny bit of Investiture, but mostly not worth accounting. So I assume you’re asking what I can become without dipping into and greatly draining our reserves. Under those restraints, I can become a mass of metal weighing about a hundred pounds or so. Why? Nomad waited until the ember woman was nearly upon him—leaping for his box from the next perch over. At that moment, Nomad hurled himself toward her. He raised Auxiliary over his head—worrying that he’d have to reveal his secret—and created a barbell of the maximum weight. Nomad held it in front of him, as if poised to swing it. In response, his Torment sensed he was trying to do harm. His arms locked up. But the ember woman still slammed right into the large chunk of metal, gasping as the two of them smashed together in midair. He essentially became another deadweight. They both plummeted to the mud below, and he landed on top of her, his barbell hitting her in the chest, his elbow smashing her throat. The combined weight drove her into the soft ground. When Nomad stumbled to his feet, she remained down—conscious but stunned. Her ember fluttered, like an eye blinking in exhaustion. The crowd’s yelling became a deathly silence. “Doesn’t happen often, does it?” Nomad shouted, turning toward Glowing Eyes, seated on his balcony at the head of the arena. “Someone defeating your soldiers. Why would it ever happen, though? These are Invested warriors, and you pit them against unarmed peasants!” Glowing Eyes didn’t reply, of course. Storms, Nomad hated bullies. He stepped forward, as if to challenge the man. As he did, however, a piercing shock of cold swept through him, originating at
his wrists. He looked down at the bracers he’d been given. They were leeching body heat right out of him, leaving him frozen, his muscles immobilized. He exhaled, his breath misting. He glared at Glowing Eyes—who held a device with buttons on it. “B-bastard,” Nomad said through chattering teeth. Then fell face-first into the mud, unconscious. WHEN NOMAD WOKE this time, he found himself manacled to a wall. No…it was the outside of a boxy ship, one of those forming the arena. He’d been chained right up against the side of the thing, pulled spread-eagle on a flat piece of metal ten feet by ten feet. It seemed he hadn’t been out for very long, though it was impossible for him to be sure with no sun in the sky. Just those dramatic, sweeping rings. He tried to move, but was held tightly against the ship at both his wrists and ankles. The rowdy crowd was still in place, though a small ship with a podium framed by four ornate columns had settled into the center of the arena. It was open to the air and looked like its only purpose was to be a speaking platform—the small ship’s front deck giving a regal place for a leader to stand and address people. Glowing Eyes perched atop it, addressing the crowd, stoking their enthusiasm. “Auxiliary,” Nomad growled. “Did I miss anything relevant?” They moved the boxes out of the way, Aux replied. Then strapped you here. I’m trying to make sense of that speech, but I haven’t caught more than a word or two. Some of this is about you. And…an “example”? “Lovely,” Nomad said, struggling against the chains. I don’t think they realized or saw what you did with me, Auxiliary continued. With the barbell, I mean. The angle was wrong. So I turned into a crowbar again when they pulled you out of the mud. They examined me, then tossed me aside, assuming I was nothing important. I’m still out in the mud, off to your left. Well, that was something. Nomad could summon the weapon at any time, making it vanish, then appear in his hands. The bonds on his wrists were tight, but Auxiliary could become all kinds of odd shapes. One might work for freeing Nomad. But if he wasn’t in immediate danger, then there was no reason to reveal what he could do. So for now, Nomad considered other methods. Perhaps if he broke his thumb, he could get his hand out, then let it heal. Unfortunately he healed fractures much more slowly than bruises. Movement off to his left caught his eye. He turned his head as well as he could and noticed a swiveling black box with a blinking light. A security camera? It lingered on him for a moment, then rotated away toward the podium. Glowing Eyes’s voice rose to a crescendo as he gestured to Nomad. Damnation. Even if he could get free, he still had on the bracers that froze him. And he was still surrounded by enemies that he couldn’t
fight and cameras that could track him. What good would it do to get a hand free in such a situation? You might be in real trouble this time, Auxiliary said. “You think?” Do I think? I’m not sure. Depends on your definition. “You know, I liked you much better when you were alive.” And who is to blame for that? Nomad snarled and raged against the chains. His attention was finally drawn away from his predicament, however, as several officials led a few ragged captives up to the podium ship. Glowing Eyes seized each of them in turn by the throat, and they seemed to wilt, their skin growing ashen. When he tossed them aside, they were corpses, and the ember in his chest grew brighter. The crowd cheered, and then that cheering built as another captive was dragged to the podium ship. Two guards in white coats accompanied her, one carrying a long spear, while the other had a rifle. Glowing Eyes didn’t grab this captive, but instead raised his hands to let the crowd yell. Nomad’s eyes lingered on that rifle. It was the first modern weapon he’d seen here. Were those rare? He inspected this latest captive and realized it was the woman who had done so well avoiding capture. The one it had taken two ember people to catch. “That woman…” Nomad said. “She was one of the better fighters—or at least, better dodgers—in the arena earlier. Perhaps because she fought well, they’re going to reward her?” Glowing Eyes gestured to the woman, and the crowd roared. He slapped her on the shoulder in an almost congratulatory way. But then the captive woman started to struggle harder, and Nomad got a sinking feeling. Not my problem, he thought to himself. Glowing Eyes waved to the side, and one of the guards handed him the spear. Glowing Eyes removed a sheath, revealing that the spearhead itself had a glowing ember at the tip—so bright that it left a trail in Nomad’s vision. The captive screamed. Glowing Eyes rammed the spear into the woman’s chest. Nomad had just the right angle to see what happened next. Glowing Eyes yanked out the spear, leaving the ember behind. The officials scattered in a panic, though Glowing Eyes remained, unconcerned. The agonized captive fell to her knees, her screams intensifying as searing heat flared at her core. Sparks and jets of flame sprayed out, like from a stoked campfire, individual motes scoring the skin of her arms and face—leaving streaks that continued to glow even after the central fire in her chest subsided. The woman finally slumped to the side, although her eyes didn’t close. She lay there, staring sightlessly, the quiet flame in her chest illuminating the podium floor. Well, Auxiliary said, I guess now we know where those ember people come from. “Agreed,” Nomad said, feeling sick. “My guess is they choose the most agile captives to be elevated. After all, the ones he fed upon were some of the weaker captives.” A stretch, perhaps, but logical enough. Nomad took
a deep breath. “That might give us an opportunity. You think we could absorb whatever powers those spears? Maybe get enough BEUs to escape this planet?” No, I’d say it isn’t powerful enough for a Skip, Auxiliary said. Hard to say without more information, but I’d guess a spear like that has a couple thousand BEUs—maybe ten to twenty percent Skip capacity at most. More than enough to give you a Connection to the planet, though. You’d finally be able to understand what people are saying, and have a reserve left for healing or powering me up. As the guards returned to drag off the newly made ember woman, Glowing Eyes strode back onto the podium, and someone approached with two more spears. Glowing Eyes took one and whipped its sheath off, revealing a second glowing tip—like metal heated white-hot, yet somehow never cooling. The crowd shouted and cheered even louder. “I’ll bet,” Nomad said, “he’s going to use one of those on me. He tried to get me killed, but his people failed. So now he’s going to try something else.” Ah, the hero says with a sense of understanding. Yes, that’s reasonable. Why isn’t he worried that you’ll turn against him once you’re given powers? “I suspect he counts on the freezing bracers to control the others, and he just proved to himself they work on me.” Seems dangerous. “Agreed,” Nomad said. In this case, the situation wouldn’t play out as Glowing Eyes expected. If he touched the spear tip to Nomad, he’d be able to absorb the power from it. It was one of the few useful aspects of his Torment. Nomad had gained an unusual ability to metabolize nearly any kind of Investiture, although he sometimes required Auxiliary’s help. Right. But why are there two spears? “They’ll want to do me last,” Nomad said. “As the big finish. So I assume there is another poor captive to be…” He trailed off as they pulled a second person up onto the podium: the gap-toothed man who had helped Nomad earlier. As soon as he saw the poor fellow, Nomad realized it made sense. He’d just been theorizing that they turned the best fighters into ember people. This fellow might be a little overweight, but he’d managed to elude capture—and had even gone out of his way to help Nomad, who was aggressively being targeted. The man’s grit had earned him a terrible reward. The crowd cheered as Glowing Eyes raised the second spear. The poor captive screamed a piteous sound, pulling against his captors. Not my problem, Nomad told himself, closing his eyes. But he could still hear. And somehow, in shutting out the light—there within the blackness of his own design—he felt something. Something of the person he’d once been. Words once spoken. In a moment of glorious radiance. Damnation, he thought as the man’s terrified shouts shook him to the core. Nomad forced his eyes open and ripped his right hand out of the manacle, his supernatural strength shattering the thumb and tearing the skin along the
sides of his hand. He raised his bleeding hand above his head and to the side, then summoned Auxiliary from the mud. Holding the hilt with only his fingers against his palm, Nomad whipped his hand forward, throwing Auxiliary to spin—flashing and glorious—through the air. Aux slammed into one of the pillars on the podium right next to Glowing Eyes’s head—a six-foot-long glittering sword, Auxiliary’s truest form. It sank deeply into the pillar and hung there, quivering. The crowd hushed. Huh, Auxiliary said in his head. I thought you couldn’t do that anymore. He’d intentionally aimed away from Glowing Eyes. By not threatening anyone, Nomad could avoid triggering the Torment. That said, it had been a while since he had seen the full Blade, been able to access it in all its glory. As he’d hoped, Glowing Eyes was stunned by this spectacular apparition. He gaped at the sword in confusion, forgetting his captive. The gap-toothed man shrank back in the grip of his guards, but hadn’t been touched by the spear yet. Nomad resummoned Auxiliary, trying to form the Blade again. He failed. The Torment had slipped up once, but now it was on guard. No weapons. Nomad raised Auxiliary high in the form of a tall pole. His thumb screamed in pain, but a bracer at the bottom held it in place, letting him grip it with his unbroken fingers. He formed it into a wrench next, then a crowbar. Glowing Eyes watched the weapon, entranced, a visible hunger in his wide eyes. He stumbled off the platform, carrying the spear. Fixated on Nomad. “Good,” Nomad whispered. He met those glowing eyes, daring them forward. “Good. You want this. Come, try to take me as one of your slaves. Then you can command me to give it to you, right?” The man approached, paused, then held the spear in front of him, threatening. “I don’t fancy being stabbed as I absorb the Investiture,” Nomad said to Auxiliary. “You want to handle this one?” Yes, Auxiliary said. Just form me as a receptacle—or even a standard shield—on your chest as he stabs, and I’ll recycle the energy. Glowing Eyes hesitated a few feet from Nomad. “Come on, you!” Nomad shouted. “Stab me!” The man put the white-hot spear tip near Nomad’s eye and demanded something. “I don’t speak your tongue, idiot,” Nomad said. “Just stab me!” The man waved at Nomad’s hands, speaking again, sterner. He wants you to show him, the knight explains to his sometimes-dense squire, how you summon the tools. Instead Nomad summoned a nice dollop of spit—spiced with the mud that still crusted his lips—and delivered it right into the bastard’s eye. The spittle hissed, as if on a hot plate, and the man jerked back, furious. He pointed his spear at Nomad’s chest, growling, causing the crowd to cheer. Here we go, Nomad thought. At that moment, one of the nearby ships exploded. NOMAD CRIED OUT in frustration as Glowing Eyes turned toward the sound, then began shouting orders as he strode—tall and unflinching—back toward the
podium. Weapon fire—blasts with a distinctly red-white heat—rained from the sky. Glowing Eyes shouted something else, and ember people—a good two hundred of them—came running out onto the rims of ships. Then, as one, their embers dulled. Their bracers were activating. Nomad’s did as well, but in a panic, he summoned Auxiliary in a specific shape—two thin metal bracers underneath the ones on his arms, separating them from touching his skin. It was an odd construction, as he generally had to make Auxiliary into pieces that were touching—so these weird bracers-under-his-bracers were connected by a rod. It worked, though, keeping him from being frozen this time. Clever, the knight compliments his squire with true appreciation. That’s an odd shape, even for you. He could manage practically anything with Auxiliary, assuming he could make it from the appropriate amount of metal. And assuming he understood the construction on a fundamental level. He’d failed to make a clock, for example, until he’d carefully studied the schematics for one. The remnants of the scholar inside him whispered that he was too simple with this power—that he could do much greater things if he practiced. There just wasn’t a lot of time for anything in his life other than running, and the constant pressure sometimes left it difficult to summon the imagination for any but the most obvious solutions. Regardless, his bracers buzzed as if annoyed to be rendered nonfunctional by being unable to touch his skin. The ember people had no such protection—and they dropped like toddlers at nap time, collapsing where they were, falling into the mud. Glowing Eyes spun around, obviously shocked by this turn of events. Whatever was happening to them, it seemed to be the actions of the attacking enemy. In any other circumstance, the look on that man’s face would have been comical, but Nomad couldn’t pause to appreciate it, as the ship he was chained to slowly rose away from the arena floor. It got about five feet up before a blast hit it from above. A violent explosion ripped it apart, ejecting the part with Nomad from the rest of the disintegrating vessel. On the plus side, Nomad dropped to the ground. On the minus side, a smoking, sparking piece of the ship came with him. He hit the ground with it right on top of him. His body protested this rough treatment, and all the air was knocked out of him. Invested or not, if he hadn’t fallen into the soft mire, he’d have been crushed. As it was, he was stuck there in the muddy darkness, the huge weight pressing him down—his thumb still broken and healing slowly—as a firefight broke out above. Oh, come on. He could hold his breath practically forever—with his highly Invested soul renewing his cells in much the same way the sun here made the plants grow. But his chance to steal a weapon was dwindling by the moment. Nomad, the hero says to his exceptionally lazy valet, this is no time to take a rest. Nomad gurgled an annoyed reply
through the mud. Yes, that was a joke on my part, Auxiliary said. Proof that I’m not completely mirthless since my death. But, to be more serious, you should probably try to get out of this. That sunrise is going to arrive eventually. I tasted the strength of it earlier. Let it catch you here and you’ll be vaporized. Right now I don’t have the strength to shield you from such power, and there’s no way we can absorb something so potent. An explosion shook the ground, vibrating Nomad where he was stuck. His left hand was still manacled to the large piece of wall on top of him. He could pull it free, maybe, but that would probably break his thumb or wrist at the same time, which seemed like a bad idea. His right hand was healing but mostly useless. Fortunately he could feel air on his legs and even move them. His ankles were sore. He guessed the bonds there had been ripped free in the blast and that the piece of wreckage holding him down covered only his top half. Right, then. He tried imagining Auxiliary as a knife first—but that didn’t work, even though Nomad insisted he was making a tool, not a weapon. He needed something else. He thought back to his days as an aspiring scholar—that seemed so, so long ago—and imagined a jack for lifting something heavy. The more complicated an item Nomad needed Auxiliary to be, the longer it took—unless he’d been turned into the same thing many times. The jack took a while and formed wrong the first time, so Nomad had to try again. But eventually he got Auxiliary to appear next to his right hand in the appropriate shape, with the jack’s saddle just underneath the metal’s edge. Nomad didn’t have much maneuverability, but he was able to move his free hand onto the specifically designed crank and rotate it a few times. It was enough to lift the metal up perceptibly. Another clever adaptation, Auxiliary said. Glad to see some of the old you shining through. Fresh air flowed in as he slowly turned the fallen piece of wall into a sort of lean-to over him. Eventually that gave him the room to get both knees underneath him. Then, with a supreme effort almost betrayed by the slipperiness of the mud, he heaved with his legs and flipped himself over. This planted the metal wall down into the mud with him lying on top—one manacle still in place—staring upward. Ships buzzed around. There wasn’t as much blaster fire as he’d thought—these ships didn’t have onboard guns. The explosions were from dropped bombs, and the gunfire he’d seen was all from people wielding rifles on the decks. The ships also couldn’t get very high; the highest he saw them flying was fifty or sixty feet. These weren’t proper warplanes, but more hovercraft with a little extra oomph. All through the arena, plants had started sprouting. Just weeds, but it was amazing how quickly this barren pit of mud was becoming
a field from only the light reflected off those rings. “There’s Investiture in the light coming from the rings,” Nomad said. “Can we absorb that?” Slowly, it seems, Auxiliary replied. There isn’t much. Maybe ten or twenty BEUs an hour? Damnation. Well, most of the ships that had formed the arena had launched into the air, and Glowing Eyes was nowhere to be seen—though many of his ember-hearted subordinates lay in the mud where they’d fallen. This was Nomad’s best chance to escape, maybe steal a ship. He tried to form Auxiliary as a pair of bolt cutters, but even that was too much of a weapon for the Torment at the moment. Why had it let him form a Blade one time, and now forbade bolt cutters? He tried a crowbar, leaning on it to get it to break him free of the wall, but he couldn’t get the leverage right with his broken thumb. As Nomad slipped in the mud, a smaller, four-person hovercyle came roaring down, frying plants with its jets. Two people jumped free, a man and a woman. The man carried a rifle, but neither had the white uniform coats of the guards he’d encountered before. They were the aggressors, it seemed—the ones who had attacked Glowing Eyes and his group. Enemies of his enemies, dared he hope? “Hey!” Nomad shouted as they dashed past. “Hey!” The woman glanced at him, but the man ignored him, searching the ground for something. A ship went roaring past, the narrow deck crowded with people in dirty clothing. It scooted off into the distance. It’s a rescue mission, Nomad realized. Those were captives from earlier. “Hey!” he shouted louder. He held up the crowbar, waving for them. “Help me!” The two people turned away from him, and he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what they were looking for in these weeds. Then, not far off, someone sat up—one of the ember men. He looked lethargic, but… “Whatever you did to them is wearing off!” Nomad yelled. The rescuers continued their frantic searching through the growing grass until the man called to the woman, who joined him, and together they heaved a muddy figure up from the grass. It was the ember woman who had hunted Nomad during the arena melee earlier. She was unmistakable with the silver mixed into her hair, the single glowing mark on her cheek. She looked dazed and disoriented as the two hauled her back toward their vehicle. They walked right past Nomad. “Storm you!” Nomad said, struggling against his bond. “At least look at me!” They didn’t, instead loading their captive onto their hovercycle, locking her with manacles to one of the back two seats. They didn’t trust this ember woman. Perhaps they were taking a captive for some kind of ransom or prisoner exchange? All right. Nomad would need to break his other hand to get free. At least the one he’d broken earlier was mostly healed. He tried yanking his captive hand out and heard—through his agony—the bone snap. But
the hand didn’t pull free. Damnation! This manacle was tighter than the other, and even with a broken thumb, he couldn’t get it out. Nomad, you’re dangerously low on Investiture, Auxiliary said. You’re going to start dipping beneath five percent if you need much more healing. It will weaken you, and remove many of your endurance and strength enhancements. Damnation. He waved toward the two people again, but the man of the pair suddenly screamed as a blast of energy hit him on the shoulder. He stumbled back, and the next shot vaporized his entire head. The body dropped to the weeds as the woman cried out in anguish, barely thinking to take cover behind her hovercycle. Overhead, a ship lowered—the one with a large podium on the back and four pillars at the sides. Glowing Eyes himself—face lit by the fire within him—stood on the edge, a rifle in hand, and sighted. He fired again at the woman, blasting off a small part of her long, four-seater hovercycle. She huddled in its shadow, facing Nomad. She managed to grab her fallen companion’s rifle, but when she popped up to fire, Glowing Eyes almost took her head off with an expert shot. She, in turn, only got a few wild blasts off that came nowhere near to hitting. She fired again and was even farther off. “You need my help,” Nomad said, gesturing to the crowbar. “Come on.” She glanced back at him. “Come on,” he said, tears in his eyes at the pain of his wounded hand. “Come on!” She said something unintelligible. Then, noticing he didn’t understand, she held up the rifle. “Yeah, I know how to fire one,” he said, nodding. “I’m better at aiming than you seem to be.” Liar, Auxiliary said. “It’s not a lie,” he said. “I am a good shot.” You’ll lock up the moment you touch a gun. “She doesn’t understand anyway,” he said, nodding eagerly to the woman. Meanwhile, beyond the uncomprehending woman, Glowing Eyes was forced to turn and deal with other ships threatening him—dropping bombs aimed at his ship. During that distraction, the woman rescuer finally scrambled over to Nomad and took the crowbar. She struggled, throwing her weight onto it, trying to break the chain where the manacle was tied to the wall. The motion jostled his broken thumb, and he cried out. Unfortunately the manacle was made of strong stuff. Before she could get him free, Glowing Eyes turned his attention back toward them. “Go!” Nomad said, pointing at the man. The woman caught on and ran away. Nomad twisted, dismissing Auxiliary, then immediately summoning him again as a shield on his arm. That intercepted the shots Glowing Eyes fired. Nomad crouched on his knees, sheltering behind his shield, one hand still trapped beneath him and attached to the wall. The woman huddled beside her hovercycle as—atop it—the ember woman groaned. She was waking up. “The gun,” Nomad said, pointing and waving. Hesitant, eyes distrustful, the woman tossed it to him as another barrage of fire rained down. He
didn’t dare dismiss the shield, but he could alter its shape—giving it long spikes at the bottom that he could ram into the earth so he no longer needed to hold it. He huddled there and—with a single hand—awkwardly moved the rifle around toward the lock. You’re going to blow your hand off, Auxiliary warned. “Eh,” Nomad said. “I’ve got two.” He fired. As he’d hoped, it blew the lock and let him pull his wounded hand free. He grabbed the shield and moved up close to the woman’s ship, huddling beside her. Healing your other broken thumb now. This is about it, unless you want to drop below five percent. “Fine, great,” he said, examining the hovercycle. “How hard would it be for me to steal this thing? Have you seen how they start the engines?” You’re despicable, Aux said. This woman saved you. You’d steal her ship? “She only did it under duress. How do I start the engines?” I haven’t seen. Blast. Well, he needed to get rid of Glowing Eyes. Nomad set up with the rifle right beside the seat where the ember woman was strapped down. She glared at him and growled as he insistently told himself he was not going to fire at any person in particular, just kind of randomly. It worked, though only if he aimed very far away. He blasted the air, and it was enough to frighten Glowing Eyes back for a moment. The woman who had saved Nomad glared at him, shouting something and waving her hands. I believe she’s mad about your bad aim. “Lady,” Nomad said, “I’m having a really bad day. If you’re going to scream at me, could you at least do it a little softer?” She grabbed the gun from him, then fired, keeping Glowing Eyes at bay. Then she gestured at the hovercycle and spoke. I believe she’s offering to take you, Auxiliary said, if you use the shield to protect her from behind as she flies. That would do. He shook his wounded hand, eager for the healing to take hold. Then he paused, scanning the field full of quickly growing tall grasses. The podium had been right over there, hadn’t it? He thought he saw something in the grass nearby. A body? Damnation. Cursing himself for a fool, Nomad held up Auxiliary for cover and dashed in that direction—ignoring the woman’s cries of surprise. There, in the muddy ground near where the center of the arena had been, he found the gap-toothed man. He was almost buried in the mud, leg twisted in the wrong direction, his face bleeding from what might have been a kick—doubtless one delivered by the soldiers who had thrown him free when the fighting started. The poor man looked up and saw Nomad. And even as bombs fell and a glowing line of automatic rifle rounds tossed up soil and burned grass nearby, something sparked in the man’s eyes. Hope. Nomad seized the man by the arm and heaved, ripping him out of the muddy soil and throwing
him across his shoulders. Unable to keep Auxiliary up with his wounded hand, Nomad dropped the shield and dashed through the battlefield, the weight of forgotten oaths on his shoulders. He somehow avoided being shot as he reached the hovercycle and threw the man onto one of the seats. The back left one, across from the ember woman. Hopefully her manacles would hold. The man, tears in his eyes, whispered a few words. Nomad didn’t need to know the language to sense the gratitude in them. That was uncharacteristic of you, Auxiliary said as Nomad summoned him again as a shield. “He reminds me of an old friend, that’s all.” Nomad looked to the woman, still taking cover beside the hovercycle, and gestured toward his shield. She growled something at him, then held up three fingers, counting down. At zero, he leaped onto the top of the hovercycle, kneeling on the middle of the fuselage between the seats. The woman took the operator’s seat, front left. Nomad expanded his shield, growing it big enough to cover them both. He couldn’t protect the gap-toothed man, but hopefully attention would be on the driver instead. Nomad watched carefully as she fired up the machine. Unlike the big ships, which doubled as buildings, these cycles were intended only as vehicles. She pulled a lever and pushed a button, then paused, gazing toward the headless corpse of her companion. “Fly!” Nomad said, nudging her as blasts hit his shield. Another enemy ship had noticed them and pivoted to come at them. Worse, the other ember people were all rising from the field of grass like Awakened corpses. Several turned toward them—particularly after the one tied to the back right seat, now fully awake, began shouting and raving. Finally the woman lifted off and sent them in a low flight just above the grass, following others of her group who—together—fled with the rescued captives. For a moment Nomad thought they’d escaped. He saw Glowing Eyes watching from a distance, standing tall on his podium ship. But the man didn’t need to give chase personally, because in moments, several ships landed to gather the people with embers in their chests. Most of the friendly ships that had executed the hit-and-run attack were far ahead, almost out of sight. Nomad’s craft was the lone straggler. So, naturally, the ships bearing the ember people targeted him. NOMAD TAPPED ON the driver’s shoulder and thumbed backward. She quickly glanced over her shoulder, said something he was quite certain was a curse, then bent lower over the controls. He reached for her rifle, but she put a protective hand on it and glared at him. Great. He could just kick her free and take the vehicle; he was relatively certain he could fly it. But then she pulled up, gaining elevation. Something about getting away from the dirty ground, up into the sky toward those rings…it had an effect on him. Wind against his face, the landscape shrinking below. It reminded him of better times. Pure, crisp air acting like a moral
decongestant. He smiled at that thought. It was wordplay his former master would have liked. And maybe there was something to be said for the thinner air up here. Maybe he had been, after all, a little bit airsick… Nah. That was absolutely going too far. Still, he kept his shield in place and didn’t try to steal the cycle. Instead he focused on the enemies behind. They crowded onto two sleek war barges. Long and flat, with large decks on the front and cabs at the back. Like flying speedboats, though with the control room farther back and more of a deck on the bow. Ember people stood on those decks, clinging to the railings. Their embers stoked in the wind, growing brighter, like headlights. Their postures determined, eager. And they were gaining. How had the rescuers expected to pull off their raid when flying inferior ships? A sharpshooter in a white coat stepped out the side door of the cabin onto the deck on one of the warships and took aim. Nomad raised Auxiliary as a shield and noticed that the sharpshooter wasn’t one of the ember people. Those appeared to have only melee weapons. The sharpshooter fired. Not at Nomad or the driver, but at the central fuselage between the seats. As he’d noticed earlier, this cycle he flew on had a strange construction. It featured a long central core with four open seats at the sides—each one designed to be straddled, with handholds on the front and its own windshield. It was…like four smaller cycles had been attached to a larger core. Three of the spots were taken, and while there was a seat for Nomad at the front right, he was instead clinging to the center of the machine—holding tightly to an improvised handhold with one hand, using his shield with the other to protect his driver’s back. The sharpshooter’s blast had hit about three feet away from Nomad, farther along the core fuselage. His driver cursed, looking back past him. He turned his shield transparent to let her see—because the sharpshooter fired again in the same spot, blowing off a piece of the cycle. This exposed some of the underlying mechanism, which glowed brightly. Nomad, sensing the driver’s panic, slid down the fuselage and blocked the next shot—which exploded into sparks against his shield. He’d positioned himself directly behind the place the sharpshooter had targeted, hanging on with one hand to the slick side of the metal housing. This gave him a good view of what the enemy had targeted: a small hatch on the fuselage. That, blown free, showed a compartment that cradled a brightly glowing chunk of stone…or maybe glass? Roughly the size of a grenade, it had the same red-orange glow as the engines and the blasts the guns were firing. “Power source?” Nomad guessed, blocking another shot. Almost assuredly, the knight says almost assuredly. “Think that is powerful enough to get us off of this planet?” Doubtful. “It’s powerful enough to fly these ships. That’s a lot of energy being expended.” Yes,
and that is a valid point, but different technologies across different planets are more efficient than others at converting energy to Investiture or vice versa. And your own efficiency at absorption and usage is less than many. My best guess is that you’d need twenty or thirty of those to achieve Skip capacity, but we’ll know better once you absorb it. Which I suggest you do only after we land. Unless you’d rather said landing be a little more abrupt than is normally desirable. “Noted.” Ahead of him, the driver somehow leaned even lower behind the short windshield, the throttle shoved forward as far as it would go. The gap-toothed man Nomad had rescued clung to his seat, eyes wide, hair fluttering in the wind. Nomad glanced ahead of them, hoping to see a fortress refuge, or a line of reinforcements speeding to their rescue. Instead there was only deep blackness. Above, the rings of the planet appeared to have moved in the sky. But they hadn’t actually moved; Nomad’s ship was flying forward so fast that it dramatically shifted the angle of the rings from his perspective. They were not only outpacing the rotation of the planet, but changing their orientation compared to stellar bodies. Storms. They weren’t flying that fast. How small must this planet be, if flying a short time could round it so quickly? He should have seen from the horizon line, would have seen if he’d been less distracted. But the gravitation was relatively normal, which must mean a dense core, perhaps beyond natural levels for— Stop, he thought at himself. The man who made calculations like that…you’re not that man any longer. Either way, they were quickly approaching shadows ahead. A place under oppressive cloud cover, where even the reflected sunlight off the rings didn’t shine. The sharpshooter had pulled back inside the cabin, but the enemy ships were gaining on them; Nomad could hear the ember people hooting and shouting. They crowded the front of their platforms, preparing to jump as soon as their ships got close enough to Nomad’s cycle. So, the knight asks, how are you going to survive this without fighting? “I’m hoping the Torment will relax a little,” he said. “Maybe take pity on me?” Good luck with that, the knight replies with an exhaustive amount of rueful skepticism. Nomad missed the days of inflection in that voice. Aux might have started their relationship hesitant to show his true self, but after decades together, his expressiveness had grown and grown. Until…that day. Nomad refocused on the task at hand, keeping his shield in place. The transparent metal let him watch the approaching ember people as four prepared to leap. Even if he could fight, he’d have trouble handling four at once—particularly with four more coming up on the second ship behind. Fortunately he had one advantage. Everything he’d seen so far indicated that these beings didn’t expect anyone to be as strong as they were. So Nomad took a deep breath, stood up, dashed along the length of the hovercycle, and
jumped. It felt familiar. Wind against his tattered clothing. An infinite expanse above. Land below, looking up, aspirational. Nomad and the sky weren’t currently on speaking terms. But they’d been intimate for some time in the past, and he still knew his way around her place. He felt…stronger now. Where he’d struggled to make the leap onto that box earlier in the day, this time he soared. The ember people watched with shock at the distance he covered. He soared over their heads, hitting the wall of the cabin behind them with enough force to shake the vessel. He slid down it to the front deck of the ship, grinning, summoning Auxiliary as a sword… Oh right. No swords. …summoning Auxiliary as an extra-large wrench. He pointed it at the four ember people, then charged them. They made way for him, sidestepping and surrounding him. He didn’t swing, though. He spun toward one of them and formed Auxiliary as a shield right as they attacked. He blocked the blow, then threw the ember person back before spinning to block the next attack. He met each attack with alacrity—though having a huge, transparent, moldable shield was an undeniable advantage. He had to be careful not to push them too aggressively, lest his Torment activate. Nomad, the knight warns, check the other ship. He glanced to the side, seeing that the second vessel had almost caught up to the hovercycle. His gap-toothed friend was listing, strapped in place but losing consciousness from his pain. The captive ember woman fought against her restraints and howled toward her allies, but the driver—leaning low—was concentrating on trying to fly. She couldn’t use her gun, as she had to keep weaving and darting to stay away from the enemy ship. To no avail. It was faster and more maneuverable. She’d soon have four enemy soldiers crawling along the fuselage toward her. Nomad blocked one more blow, then turned and shoved between two ember people, leaping the distance to the second enemy vessel. Again, a moment in the air. Glorious. Then he arrived, just barely grabbing the ship’s deck and slamming down beside the vessel, hanging off it. He formed Auxiliary as a ladder, hooked it to a railing above, then scrambled up to face a new group of surprised ember people. Shocked by his sudden appearance, the pilot lost control for a moment, causing the platform to veer toward its companion ship. That let the four ember people there—now wholly focused on Nomad—jump across the narrowed distance. That put all eight in position to fight him on one crowded deck. Perfect. In a fight of one against many, chaos favored him. A trained military squad would have easily surrounded and pinned him, but these people didn’t fight with coordination. They came at him individually, shouting angrily. They were quick and strong, but their usual advantage over others had taught them the wrong lessons. They thought they didn’t need to fight as a team. He’d seen it many times. He rolled to the deck, skidding and coming up with
his shield, blocking the machetes and maces that managed to track him. Other ember people stumbled or tripped one another in their eagerness to get to him. He jumped to his feet, throwing one man back into several others, then leaped closer to the cockpit at the back of the long deck. Through the window, he saw the pilot in her white coat, watching him with a panicked expression. She hit a button, and a blast shield slid up over her window, sealing her off. Fortunately he wasn’t after the pilot. Because Nomad spotted a hatch set into the floor of the deck, similar to the one that had been blown off the hovercycle. He formed Auxiliary as a crowbar and rammed it into the hatch’s lock. The hatch popped open, revealing the power supply. Ah… the knight says with begrudging admiration. The power cell inside glowed with a similar light to the spear tip that made the ember people, but the sheen wasn’t quite so…violent. To be careful, Nomad formed Auxiliary into a gauntlet on his hand and reached in, then ripped the power cell out. The ember people tried to rush him from behind, but the ship—now without power—dropped beneath them. Nomad got off one last good jump, hurling himself back toward the first warship. Behind him, the ember people howled as they fell. The unfortunate ship plowed into the ground below just as Nomad landed on its companion. You should be able to carry that power source without it hurting you, Aux said. It’s different from those spear tips somehow. It is more stable. He nodded, taking the glowing power source in one hand while dismissing the gauntlet. As he did, he leaned out over the side, looking down, and noticed that the ember people were pulling themselves from the mud. Here, the ground seemed as wet as it had been at the arena. Maybe rain fell in the darkness. Then, as the planet rotated that landscape toward the sun, the reflected light—and Investiture—of the rings made things grow. Finally the sunrise approached, burning it all away. What a strange life these people had, always a few hours from total annihilation. No wonder they didn’t trust one big, indivisible ship to carry them. Bunches of little engines gave much more redundancy. Not to mention the chance to detach your home from the others and move on ahead if something went wrong with the community. Remarkably he thought he counted all eight ember people climbing from the wreckage below. Damnation. These things were hard to kill. He raised his shield and turned toward the cockpit of this ship, where the pilot was accompanied by that sharpshooter. Both stared at him, wide-eyed, through the glass. The sharpshooter raised her rifle at him. And in a panic, she fired—melting holes through the windshield, unloading at him. Each shot bounced off his shield. Then predictably they tried to raise their own blast shield. So he tossed Auxiliary at the window—jamming him into the mechanism so it failed to cover the half-melted window. Nomad
advanced. Completely unarmed, of course—and worse, completely unable to harm these two. But they didn’t know that. He pointed at their gun, then glared down at them. He’d noticed that people here were, on average, shorter than those of his homeworld. He’d often felt short compared to the towering Alethi, but here he was the tall one. Intimidated by the strange man holding an energy core in his bare hand, the sharpshooter obeyed Nomad’s demand. She lowered the gun, then—in response to his miming—tossed it out through the ruined windshield. She stepped back, raising her hands. The pilot kept at his controls, and as Nomad seized the gun, the man rolled the ship. When they returned to verticality, the sharpshooter was collapsed on the cabin’s floor. The strapped-in pilot had kept his place. Nomad stood where he had before, Auxiliary having formed a magnetic boot around one of his feet. His heart pounded; he hadn’t been sure that would work. He smiled with relief, raised the energy core to his face, and breathed in. It had taken him months to get the trick of that. He was certain that the “breathing in” part was purely psychological, but it somehow facilitated the action. Being able to feed on Investiture was an aftereffect of the burden he’d once carried, the thing that had given him his Torment. He needed a power source that was potential, not kinetic. Scientific terms that, in this case, meant he was extremely good at leeching batteries or other stable sources of Investiture. However, something like an energy blast being shot at him or—unfortunately—the power of that sun wouldn’t work. Too intense, too kinetic. It was also storming difficult for him to get Investiture out of a person or another living being, requiring very unique circumstances. In this case, though, he had what he needed: a battery of some sort. He easily absorbed the Investiture of that fragment of the sun—a ball of molten light that somehow wasn’t the least bit hot in his fingers. As he took the Investiture in, the entire core dimmed, its energy drained. Depleted, it looked like dark glass or one of the gemstones from his homeworld, except there were more smooth ripples and bumps on its surface, like melted glass or slag. Inside his head, Auxiliary sighed in satisfaction. That’ll do, the knight tells his unwashed companion. “How much did we get?” Nomad asked. That jumped us up to over ten percent. Still want me to Connect you to this land so you can speak the language? “Absolutely,” Nomad said. “I’m tired of hearing only gibberish.” Right, Aux said. Give me a few minutes, and I’ll have it done. Nomad nodded. He pointed the rifle at the pilot, disguising the way his arms locked up by making it seem like he was standing there, stoic, ready to fire. The pilot grew even paler at the sight. Nomad lowered the gun as soon as his muscles relaxed, then gestured to the side. The pilot obediently took him in close to the fleeing hovercycle. Nomad nodded,
then pointed at the pilot and gestured dramatically backward with as much of an ominous expression as he could form. He tried to make the implication as clear as possible: I’d better not see you following. Nomad jumped onto the hovercycle. It seemed the enemy pilot had understood Nomad’s command, because he immediately turned his craft and fled toward the other ships that were giving chase in the distance. The landscape was growing darker, and ahead, rainfall masked the air further. As they sped toward it, that sheet of rainfall reminded Nomad of another storm back home. A place he missed terribly but could never visit again, lest he lead the Night Brigade to people who loved him. The gap-toothed man was staring at him in awe. When had he regained consciousness? The woman flying the hovercycle glanced back. Then paused. Her eyes went wide as she saw the one ship fleeing, the other one nowhere in sight. Storms. Hadn’t she been watching? Had she only now noticed what he’d done? Judging by her expression, that was indeed the case. He sighed. By this point, he had gotten accustomed to the way many outsiders looked. He didn’t think they were “childlike” because of their odd eyes; in fact, he had come to recognize the many nuances of countless ethnicities. He knew Alethi with eyes as open and wide as a Shin, while he’d met offworlders who could have passed for Veden—even within a population of people who generally wouldn’t have. Still, he couldn’t help thinking they looked a little bug-eyed when expressing surprise. Well, to each their own. He clambered forward to the seat to her right. In the process, though, he caught his foot and dropped his rifle over the side. He leaned out and reached for it, then came up empty-handed and shrugged. The driver said something to him, sounding frustrated. “Yeah,” he said, settling down in the seat across from hers, “I bet you’re annoyed I lost a gun. Those don’t seem plentiful around here. Ah, well.” He sighed and shook his hand. His thumb was working fine, and the pain had faded, the scrapes on the sides of his hand healed. “Don’t suppose you’ve got anything good to drink?” He said this in Alethi on purpose, which wasn’t his native tongue. Previous experiences had taught him not to speak in his own language, lest it slip out in the local dialect. That was how Connection worked; what Auxiliary was doing would make his soul think he’d been raised on this planet, so its language came as naturally to him as his own once had. Since he generally didn’t want people listening in on what he said to Auxiliary, it was better to get into the rhythm of speaking Alethi when he didn’t wish to be understood. Regardless, the driver of the hovercycle could only stare at Nomad as they passed into the darkness of this strange, oppressive cloud cover. THE RAIN HERE wasn’t nearly as bad as a storm back home. Just a quick wash of cold water.
The sprinkle lasted less than a minute, though they soon passed through another one. He guessed that those omnipresent clouds made for near-constant scattered showers in this dark zone. “This place is quite spectacular,” he said to Auxiliary. “Sun constantly driving forward, vaporizing all of this.” He glanced at the dash in front of him, which had a compass as one of the readings. That required him to reorient how he’d been viewing this all. “Sun rises in the west here, behind us. Chasing us, vaporizing everything in its path, superheating water in a flash. We don’t dare get too far ahead, lest we reach the sunlight again. So ahead of us, in the east, the planet rotates and plunges everything into sudden darkness. I’ll bet this storm here is the aftermath of that, created at sunset by sudden cooling of all that superheated water.” Indeed, the knight replies to his squire’s strange rambling. It’s been a long while since we’ve been on a planet with a persistent storm. Remind you of home? “In all the wrong ways,” Nomad said. “The weather pattern doesn’t make sense, considering the heat on the other side. I’m no meteorologist, but my gut tells me this entire planet should be a vortex of unlivable misery.” The hovercycle had consoles with lights to let the driver know what she was doing, so they weren’t completely blind. But there weren’t headlights on the thing, and the lack of even a token canopy or roof made him think that people didn’t fly these things into the darkness often. That made sense. This woman’s force attacked a clearly more dangerous power on a rescue mission. He seemed to have joined some sort of guerrilla force—one that hid in the darkness others feared to enter. A small nation of raiders, perhaps? But how had their people been taken in the first place? And if they were consistently doing this kind of work, why hadn’t they altered their ships to fly in the rain without soaking themselves? So he walked back his assumptions, returning to what he knew for certain, then worked forward again. Thinking methodically, logically. That part of him remained, the part that had pushed for evidence and statistics even when his friends had laughed. He was still the same person all these years later. Just as a hunk of metal was technically the same substance after being forged into an axe. They’re not raiders, he decided. They’re refugees. They were attacked by that larger group, then they went into hiding. Now they’ve dared strike back to rescue their friends. A working theory only, but it felt right. What he couldn’t figure out was why they’d kidnapped an ember person. To experiment on, or perhaps… I’m an idiot, he thought, looking at the driver and noting her dark black braid, woven with silver, resting over her shoulder. The shape of her youthful features mirrored those of the woman tied up behind them, both bearing light green eyes, of a shade that might have marked them as nobility back on his
homeworld. The ember woman was a family member. Probably an older sister, based on their relative ages. He should have seen it earlier. These people had been attacked, captives taken, and some of them had been subjected to terrible torment. The driver next to him had rescued one. Dangerous business, judging by how the ember woman continued to struggle and growl, the light from her chest glowing bloodred in the darkness. But who was he to judge? He was just here to steal a ship, then find a power source strong enough to get him off this planet. Though first, he figured he’d let the driver feed him and give him something to drink for saving her hide. He felt the Connection happening as they soared farther into the darkness. But the confirmation came as the woman spoke on her radio. “Beacon?” she said. “This is an outrider, requesting signal alignment.” “Rebeke?” a man’s voice asked. “Rebeke Salvage, that you?” “If it is agreeable,” she said, “it is me. Code for admittance is thankfulness thirteen.” “Good to hear your voice, girl,” the man replied, the words nearly lost to Nomad in the howl of the wind. “Is Divinity with you?” Rebeke’s voice caught as she replied. “No. He fell.” Silence through the line. Finally the man continued, “May his soul find its way home, Rebeke. I’m sorry.” “My brother chose this risk,” she said, tears mixing with the rain on her cheeks. “As did I.” Nomad glanced toward her across the fuselage. This Rebeke looked young to him suddenly. Barely into her twenties, perhaps. Maybe it was the tears. “Zeal,” Rebeke said. “I’m…bringing someone. If it pleases you to respond with temperance, I would appreciate it.” “Someone?” the man, Zeal, said. “Rebeke…is that why you fell behind? Did you go for your sister, explicitly against the will and guidance of the Greater Good?” “Yes,” Rebeke whispered. “She’s dangerous! She’s one of them.” “We exist because of Elegy,” Rebeke snapped, voice growing stronger. “She led us. She inspired us. I couldn’t leave her, Zeal. She’s no danger to us as long as she remains bound. And maybe…maybe we can help her…” “We’ll talk about this when you return,” Zeal replied. “Signal to Beacon has been granted. But Rebeke…this was reckless of you.” “I know.” She glanced at Nomad, who was making a great show of leaning back, eyes closed, pretending he didn’t understand. “I’ve got someone else too. A…captive?” “You sound uncertain.” “I rescued him from the Cinder King,” she said. “But something’s wrong with him. He can’t speak right. I think he might be slow in the head.” “Is he dangerous?” “Maybe?” she said. “He helped Thomos, who I missed spotting in the grass. Tell his family I have him. But before that, this stranger pretended to be a killer to get me to free him, then wasn’t much use in the fighting.” Not much use? Not much use? He’d brought down two enemy ships without even being able to fight back. He forced himself not to respond, but Damnation. Was she
lying or… Well, she hadn’t seen him back there. But she’d noticed him carrying a rifle after the other ships vanished. Where did she think he’d gotten that? Have you noticed the names? the knight asks curiously. “Elegy,” Nomad said in Alethi. “Divinity. Zeal. Yeah, I did notice. Do you think…” Threnodites, the knight replies, modestly confident in his wise assessment. An entire offshoot culture. Didn’t expect that. Did you? “No, but I should have,” he said. “The clothing is similar. Wonder how long ago they diverged?” Did you guess that the captive was this woman’s sister? “That I did pick out,” he said, thoughtful. “Threnodites. Don’t they…persist when they’re killed?” They turn into shades under the right circumstances, the hero explains to his dull-minded valet, who really should remember almost being eaten by one. “Right,” he said. “Green eyes, then red when they want to feed. Complete lack of memories. I feel like we would have seen those already. Shades come out in the darkness, and we’ve been in nothing but darkness since getting here.” Perhaps this group split off before the Shard’s death—and the event’s aftereffects—took them. Nomad nodded thoughtfully. The persistent clouds of this region—without even the rings glowing in the sky to orient him—felt more pernicious now. As if he were soaring through space itself, with nothing below or above. Eternal darkness. Perhaps populated only by the spirits of the dead. He was pleased, then, when some fires appeared up ahead—the light of blazing engines underneath a city. In this dark, rain-filled landscape with misty showers and tall black hillsides, they had to be practically upon the place before it became visible. It seemed smaller than the large city he’d left behind, and didn’t leave as much of a trail on the ground from its engines—and what it did leave probably washed away in this rain. All things considered, it was well hidden in here, even with those blazing engines. Rebeke flew the hovercycle up to the agglomeration and locked it into place at the side of the city—the place known as Beacon, he assumed. Despite its name, it was running impressively dark. He spotted a few lights here and there, but only small ones, always soft red. The engines underneath would be masked so long as they stayed low and let the hills and rain shield them. He didn’t get a good sense of Beacon’s size, though the easy way their hovercycle settled in and became just another part of its structure made him think it probably had the same architecture as the platform he’d been on before. A few people waited for them in the blowing drizzle, lit by the deep red hand-lantern carried by the lead man, who was tall, stern, and dour. Nomad pegged him immediately as the man named Zeal, the one Rebeke had spoken to on the radio. He was surprised, then, when Zeal’s voice instead came from the mouth of the very short man standing to the side. Not even four feet tall, the small man had a normal-sized head, but
shorter arms and legs than your average person. His eyes were a dark brown, like Nomad’s own. “Rebeke,” Zeal said. “What you’ve done is dangerous.” “More dangerous than Elegy’s plan?” she said. “Did you recover it, Zeal?” Instead of responding, he thoughtfully studied Nomad. “Is this the stranger? What is his name?” “I was not graced with such information,” Rebeke said. “He doesn’t seem able to understand the words I speak. As if…he doesn’t know language.” Zeal made a few motions with his hands, gesturing at his ears, then tapping his palms together. He thought maybe Nomad was deaf? A reasonable guess, Nomad supposed. No one else on this planet had tried that approach. Nomad spoke to him in Alethi, acting confused and gesturing while he talked. Zeal and the tall man moved to help Thomos, the gap-toothed man. The poor fellow was listing again, semiconscious and mumbling, held in his seat by only his belt. At Zeal’s orders, several others rushed him off, presumably for medical attention. “Take good care of him,” Nomad said in Alethi. “What is that gibberish?” the taller man said, raising his lantern. The fellow was so thin and so tall that with the lantern raised, he kind of resembled a lamppost. Especially in that long black raincoat. “He frequently makes such noises,” Rebeke said. “Curious,” the tall man replied. Zeal looked toward the locked-in hovercycle, then approached slowly. The tall man joined him, as did Rebeke, all three standing and staring at the ember woman tied in the back, growling. “Elegy,” Zeal said. “Elegy, it’s us.” This provoked only more growling. Zeal sighed. “Come. We must petition to the Greater Good and supplicate them for your sake. Adonalsium-Will-Remember-Our-Plight-Eventually, please see to her the best you can.” The tall man nodded. Wait. His name was Adonalsium-Will-Remember-Our-Plight-Eventually? That was the best one Nomad had heard yet. He really needed to keep a list of these Threnodite names. “Oh,” Zeal added, “and find quarters for Rebeke’s guest, if you would, Adonalsium-Will-Remember-Our-Plight-Eventually. Grant unto him one of the ships without local access controls, if it pleases you to do this task. He looks as if he would savor a bath and a bed.” Zeal and Rebeke started off together down the street, and Zeal turned on a red flashlight to lead the way. A bed and a bath did sound good, but knowing what was going on here sounded better. So Nomad started off after them. Naturally Adonalsium-Will-Remember-Our-Plight-Eventually hastened over to take his arm and gently tried to lead him away. Nomad smiled calmly, then pried his hand off and continued. When the man tried harder, Nomad yanked free more forcefully. It was belligerent, yes. Maybe a great way to get into trouble. Perhaps they’d attack him, and he’d have an excuse to steal that hovercycle. He probably should have just done that, but…well, he was feeling charitable. So he simply marched after the other two, tailed by a nervous Adonalsium-Will-Remember-Our-Plight-Eventually. Rebeke and Zeal entered a building—well, a ship with a larger structure on the deck. Nomad stepped in after
them, not letting the door close. He saw it was a dimly lit small antechamber with plain flat-black walls. Adonalsium-Will-Remember-Our-Plight-Eventually crowded in after him. “My greatest repentance, Zeal,” the tall man said, chagrined. “He just…won’t go with me.” “Maybe we should present him to the Greater Good,” Rebeke said. “It could be agreeable to them to see him, and perchance they might know what manner of person he is.” “It is agreeable to me,” Zeal replied after brief consideration. “You can trust him to us, Adonalsium-Will-Remember-Our-Plight-Eventually.” “What if he’s dangerous?” the tall man whispered. “Rebeke said…he might be a killer.” “Those bracers on his wrists,” Zeal said. “Presumably the Cinder King hasn’t yet had a chance to reset them. I think we shall be well.” Nomad had almost forgotten the bracers he was still wearing. He managed to keep from looking down at them as they were mentioned. This all but confirmed his earlier assumption that these people had been able to disable the ember people with some kind of hack or system exploit in the bracers. Adonalsium-Will-Remember-Our-Plight-Eventually left to deal with the chained-up woman, Elegy, and Rebeke pushed open a door at the far end of the antechamber and led them into a properly lit hallway. The contrast was briefly blinding, though the electric lights in the ceiling were set relatively low. There were no windows, of course. That small antechamber had been a lightlock. Meant to keep people from spilling the building’s light out onto the street, allowing them to keep moving invisibly in this darkness. A quick glance showed him that the wall and door separating them from the lightlock was made of a less sturdy wooden material, while the floor and ceiling were metal. That antechamber had been added recently. Yes, they were almost certainly a people who’d only recently gone on the run, hiding in this deeper darkness beneath the clouds. He joined the other two in crossing the hallway, and didn’t miss that Zeal kept a close eye on him—hand in his pocket, perhaps ready to control the bracers and freeze Nomad again. They led him into a room at the end of the hallway, and he entered, eager to meet the ones they called the Greater Good. They turned out to be three elderly women. OLD WOMEN? THAT wasn’t as exciting as he’d hoped. But, hey, maybe one was secretly a dragon. Nomad could tell from the behavior of the others that these women were in charge, though they weren’t wearing anything regal—just common black dresses, gloves like everyone else, and hats, even here indoors. The heavyset one was pale skinned, while the other two were of a more familiar, darker skin tone. The three ladies sat at a table, taking a report from a burly man with dark brown eyes and a black beard that could have hosted a fine topiary, if it had been trimmed. Nomad had a cousin back home that looked a lot like the fellow. He had a blast mark on one arm, the jacket there burnt, exposing the glancing
wound. Another member of the raiding party. “Confidence,” Rebeke said to the first and tallest of the women. She had blue eyes. “Compassion.” This was the shortest of them, and the frailest in appearance, with light brown eyes. “Contemplation.” This was the woman of wider girth, the one with pale skin but black hair—obviously dyed—curled up on top of her head. Her grey-green eyes matched the shawl she wore. “I have recovered my sister,” Rebeke continued after a nod of respect to each of the three. “So we’ve been informed,” Contemplation said, rubbing her chin. “I believe you were told not to be so brash.” “I was.” “And you lost your brother,” Confidence said. “One sibling sacrificed for the rescue of another?” “We couldn’t—” Rebeke started, but the short woman they called Compassion had risen. Walking unsteadily, she stumbled over and grabbed Rebeke in a hug. Rebeke lowered her head, stray locks of hair falling around her face, and held on. The room fell silent. It was probably heartwarming or something. Nomad was more interested in the kettle of tea on the table. He grabbed a chair and pulled it over, then got himself a drink. He dripped water on the floor from his sodden clothing as he did so. The tea was cold. But otherwise not bad. A little too sweet, maybe. Everyone in the room stared at him. So he leaned back and put his boots up on the table. The fellow with the beard pushed them off. “What type of person is this, with such terrible manners?” he demanded. The man trailed off as Nomad stood. Again, though considered a short man in his homeland, here he had a good half a foot on anyone in the room. With his clothing ripped, they undoubtedly could see his muscles—earned, not simply a result of his Invested status. The bearded man looked him over, then backed off, letting Nomad settle down again. He pointedly put his feet back up on the table, rattling the teacups of the three older women. “Before we sent Thomos to the healers,” Zeal said, pulling over his own chair, “he muttered something deliriously. That he’d seen this man touch the sunlight and live.” Thomos had seen that, had he? Nomad had almost forgotten his moment of feeling the sunlight before being yanked out of it. Perhaps the prisoners had been forced to watch the executions. Nomad’s opinion of Glowing Eyes went down even further. That was an act of distinct cruelty. “Sunlit,” Contemplation said. “A Sunlit Man.” “If it pleases the Greater Good, I disagree,” Rebeke said, taking her own seat at the increasingly crowded table. “Accept this observation: if he were a Sunlit One, he’d be helping us, not acting like…this.” “He speaks gibberish,” Zeal said. “Like a baby not yet weaned.” “Does he now?” Contemplation said. “Curious, curious…” “If it pleases you, I thought perchance you’d be able to say what manner of man he was,” Rebeke said. “And honestly…he insistently followed us in here. We’d probably have to freeze him to get him
to leave.” “Maybe he’s a killer!” the bearded man said, leaning forward. “Our own killer! Did you see how he glared at me?” That…was not how Nomad had expected this man to respond. The fellow was smiling, eager. Rebeke shook her head at the bearded man. “If he were a killer, I think I’d know it, Jeffrey Jeffrey.” Jeffrey Jeffrey? Nomad liked that one too. “Hey, Aux,” he said in Alethi. “What do you…” Oh wait. Right. Auxiliary wasn’t around. Everyone stared at him. “Such odd words,” Compassion said. “I offer this thought: do you suppose he’s from a far northern corridor? They speak in ways that, on occasion, make a woman need to concentrate to understand.” “If it pleases you to be disagreed with, Compassion,” Contemplation said, “I don’t think this is a mere accent. No, not at all. Regardless, there are more pressing matters. Zeal, may I be granted the blessing of seeing the object your team recovered?” The short man reached into his pocket and withdrew something wrapped in a handkerchief. Outside, the wind was rising, the rain drumming more furiously on the metal ceiling and walls. The tapping on the ceiling was like nervous fingers on a bell, demanding service. All of them ignored that, however, as Zeal unwrapped a metal disc almost as wide as a man’s palm, with an odd symbol on the front. One that Nomad could read, but which he absolutely hadn’t expected to find on this planet. Storms. What were Scadrians doing here? “It’s real…” Contemplation said, resting her fingers on it, feeling the grooves in the metal. “If it is not offensive,” Confidence said, “let me speak with bluntness. Do we know this is real?” The tall, elderly woman took the disc. “It could be a replica. Or the legends could be false.” “If it is not too bold of me to say,” Zeal replied, “I offer dissent. It would not be fake. Why would the Cinder King have cause to think anyone would steal it? Few even know about his pet project.” “This was my sister’s plan,” Rebeke said. “This is our way to freedom. Our only way. Zeal…you did it!” Curious. Nomad was piecing things together. This hadn’t simply been a rescue operation—indeed, the rescue might have been intended to cover up a more interesting heist: the theft of this item, which he knew for a fact to be a Scadrian authorization key. Plastic key cards were, of course, eschewed by them. They had a fetish for metal. This disc would open a door somewhere. And the people at the table seemed to know it, even if they didn’t understand completely what they were doing. “But can we operate it?” Compassion asked. “Can we find our way in, past the ancient barrier?” “We don’t even know if the legends are true,” Confidence said. “Yes, perhaps the Cinder King believes them. But I offer this contrast: what proof is there that these mythical lands beneath the ground exist? A place untouched by the sun? I speak with firm conviction: I will
not lead this people in confidence without evidence.” “Sometimes,” Contemplation said, “no evidence can be found. I offer that, for a time, we must move by faith alone. Elegy—our appointed Lodestar—believed. She is the one the Greater Good trusted to guide our way in the darkness. This was her goal; that is enough for me.” “I find that offering difficult and strange from your tongue, Contemplation,” Confidence said. “What of your calling, science and reason?” Contemplation took the disc and held it reverently, her face—though aged—marked with lines of joy, her eyes dancing and aglow with the fire of new knowledge. Her dyed black hair might have been seen by some as vanity, but Nomad recognized it as a token of self-possession. She knew how she liked to look. And she didn’t care that others knew it was artificial. In expressing herself, the artificial became more authentic than the original. “Even in science,” Contemplation said, “faith plays a role. Each experiment done, each step on the path of knowledge, is achieved by striking out into the darkness. You can’t know what you will find, or that you will find anything at all. It is faith that drives us—faith in answers that must exist.” She looked to the others in the room, skipping Nomad, but including Rebeke, Zeal, and Jeffrey Jeffrey. The respect she showed them proved that the leaders were not uniquely important in this society; everyone mattered. “It is a wild hope, these stories of a land untouched by the sun,” Contemplation admitted. “But we must ask ourselves. How long will we survive in this darkness? Elegy was right to move us here, but it was an act of desperation. And even now, our people wilt. We cannot grow food. We lose more ships and laborers every time we venture into the dawnlands. “I offer this grim truth: we will die out here. Yet undoubtedly if we return to our previous corridor, we will be consumed by the Cinder King. We haven’t the knowledge of warfare and killing to fight him; we have not been graced with such brutal and carnal instincts. “I offer a further grim insight: he will never again be taken by surprise as he was today. His killers will stand alert, prepared in wisdom against further hostility. The Cinder King will ne’er again allow a clever hack of their bracers, and his people will ne’er again let themselves become so distracted by their games that they slacken their guard. “Today was our greatest victory as the people of Beacon. But I offer, in contrast to that peak, that today is the day we begin to fade. Without a solution, we will die. And so I ask: Confidence, is a little faith—a little time spent chasing a legendary reward—not worth the chance that we can avoid our fate?” She turned the disc over. “We trusted Elegy to get us here. We should trust her again and find this Refuge.” “We should, by duty of our current accomplishments, test this key,” Compassion said. “And Zeal’s team should be commended
for their willingness to steal it for us.” “I offer this reminder:” Confidence warned, “the Cinder King will chase us for that token.” “If it pleases you to be contradicted,” Compassion said softly, “he would chase us anyway. He desires greatly to destroy us. And that sense of purpose will have been bolstered by today’s events. He must destroy us now, lest more of his people question how far his authority extends.” Nomad listened with interest to the exchange. Yes, they understood what that key was. But they didn’t know the truth of what they’d find by using it. He was confident that even if they did open a door somewhere with the key…it would not give them some mythical “refuge.” That was a modern device, borne by Scadrian surveyors, to let them be located and give them authorization to return to one of their small, exploratory starships. The conversation moved on as the winds raged even harder, rocking the city. They mentioned a “great maelstrom,” which he understood as a storm, not unlike a highstorm, that followed the sun at dusk. So he’d guessed right—this cloud cover was the aftermath of sunset, and right at sunset was some kind of terrible storm. He imagined the place as a planet with five phases. First: the lands he’d passed, where reflected sunlight grew plants. Second: the constant cloud cover, where rain was scattered. Third: the maelstrom at sunset, where sunlight vanished, leaving a cyclone born of pressure and humidity changes. Fourth: the superheated landscape where the sun reigned. Finally dawn, where men and women were left to die. How odd to have found a land where instead of being chased by a storm, the people snuck up on its tail and hid within the edges of its cloak. Regardless, Nomad’s earlier rudeness—his barbarity in shoving his way into this room—suddenly seemed shameful. Yes, he had moved on from the man he’d once been, overly concerned with propriety and order. He knew that, like a teen leaving home for the first time, he often went too far in trying to prove himself. He still rebelled against the man he’d been and, in his selfishness, had become a man who could blunder about like a blind chull. Nomad moved his boots off the table, feeling a loathing for himself that—remarkably—even he couldn’t blame on his circumstances. Not this time. He stood up and—surprising the people in the room—strode to the door and pushed his way out. Through the hallway, through the lightlock. Into the storm. WALKING INTO A STORM wasn’t something usually done on Nomad’s homeworld. Yet he’d traveled the cosmere enough by now to know that even a violent storm on other planets was nothing compared to those of Roshar. Indeed, the wind buffeted him here, but it did not lift him from his feet. The rain pelted him, but did not threaten to scour away his skin. Lightning flashed in the sky, but did not strike so often and so near that its deadly touch seemed inevitable. He did wish he had something
more than these ragged clothes, stolen from the cavern planet where he’d been last. They did little to keep off the chill. But then again, most of the cold he felt now came from within. He started down the miserable street, the metal slick beneath his boots. At least his boots were holding up. He’d learned long ago during his travels: skimp on shirts if you must, but never on footwear. He made his way vaguely toward the edge of the city, though he had to go slowly, waiting for lightning to illuminate the path. The dim lights he’d seen earlier had vanished. People were inside, locked up, hunkered down against the rain. That was universal. Whether on a planet where the rainfall could dent metal plates, or on one where it barely left you damp, people fled a storm. Perhaps they disliked the reminder that no matter how lofty their cities, they were mere motes in the grand expanse of planetary weather patterns. He’d come out here hoping he’d feel better in the rain. Hoping that its pelting would feel like the embrace of an old friend—that the wind’s howl would sound like the chatter of men having stew at a fireside. But today those memories came harshly into his mind. The winds made him remember who he had been: a man who would have died before treating people as he’d done today. No, the storm did not offer him refuge. As much as he liked the rain—as much as it felt right to him—the memories were too painful. He finally arrived back at the place where they’d left the hovercycle attached to the city’s side, lending its thrust to the rest. Bold, to keep this place in the air during a literal thunderstorm. Still, the air didn’t seem as electric as it might have in another storm—there were long stretches between lightning strikes. By the cloud glow, he saw that the ember woman had been removed from her bonds in the back seat. And the cycle had been cleverly altered, panels placed above each seat, protecting the leather cushions from the elements and making the cycle fit in to the surface of the city. With the windshields folded down and the panels in place, the oversized hovercycle resembled a thick rectangle of steel bolted to the edge of Beacon. Like how a multitool might look like a box before the implements were folded out. That made him worry as he crawled to the edge of the cycle—careful not to be swept off into the darkness by the wind. Here, he reached down to the very bottom of the vehicle. To his relief, the rifle he’d stowed there still waited for him. Masked by a stumble to convince Rebeke that he was clumsy, he’d feigned an accidental drop—then used Auxiliary as a specialized claw to latch it into place beneath the hovercycle. The mechanism he’d formed from Auxiliary to hold the gun in place vanished. He raised the rifle, hand slick with rainwater. And so, the knight says dramatically, his clever
plan is fully executed. And for some reason, his dull-minded squire is now armed with a weapon he can’t fire. “They’d have disarmed me when we arrived,” he said. And again…such a clever plan…to get a weapon that one can’t use. All it took was stranding me alone in the rain, to be soaked all the way through—then doing the same to yourself by the looks of you. “I needed a shower anyway,” Nomad said, wiping the water from his face, then running his fingers through the stubble on his head. His hair had been burned away in the flash of sunlight. Sunlit Man. He shook his hand, still kneeling on the hovercycle, feeling at the panels covering the seats of the cycle. Could he get these off? Did he want to? The lightning flashes left afterimages in his mind of a man he’d once been. A man that, in all honesty, he didn’t want to go back to being. Naive. Overly concerned with rules and numbers. Locked down by responsibility in a way that had slowly constricted him with anxiety, like barbed wire on his soul. He didn’t like who he’d become. But he didn’t miss who he’d been either—not really. He’d lived, grown, fallen, and…well, changed. There had to be a third option. A way not to put his former life on a pedestal, but also not to be a personified piece of garbage. What if he did climb onto this cycle and vanish into the darkness? What would that get him? Here he had people who seemed—in a small way—willing to trust him and let him in. Maybe because they were desperate. Probably because he hadn’t given them much choice. Beyond that, though, he got the sense that they weren’t practiced in fighting or killing. Yes, they’d pulled off a daring rescue and an even more daring thievery. For that, he commended them. But he’d seen the panicked way the captives had responded to the ember people—mirrored in the way that everyone treated him. This was not a group accustomed to violence. In many places, a struggle for survival brought out people’s most brutal aspects. Yet among this group, he saw something remarkable. Was it possible that being forced to always move—being forced to work together for survival—had forged them into a society that didn’t have time to kill one another? That perhaps this planet had created people who weren’t weak—that sun surely would not abide weakness—but who also valued life? If he wanted a power source strong enough to get him offworld, he would need allies. And he had a feeling that going to the Cinder King for help would not turn out well. He stepped back from the cycle, resting the rifle on his shoulder. Then he felt something. A tugging on his insides. A kind of…strange warmth. The storm seemed to slacken, the rain falling off. Damnation. It wasn’t possible. Not here on this world. This was a common storm, not the mythical tempest of his homeland. Things didn’t happen in the darkness of common storms
like they did there… Hey, the knight asks confusedly, what are we doing? Nomad? What’s our next step? He saw a light to his left. Farther along the rim of the city. Drawn to it, like a weary traveler drawn to a fragrant cookfire, he started walking. That…was a person standing there, wasn’t it? Holding something that glowed in his fingers, a sphere. Wearing a uniform, facing away from Nomad, looking out through the darkness. Storms. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t. Ignoring Auxiliary’s second prompting for an explanation, Nomad walked forward. Haunted by what he might find. Worried that he was going mad. Yet desperate to know. Could it… “Kal?” he asked into the storm. The figure turned, revealing a hawkish face and an eminently punchable grin. “Aw, Damnation,” Nomad said with a sigh. “Wit? What the hell are you doing here?” “WHAT?” WIT SAID, dusting off his blue uniform—which was untouched by the rain. “A master can’t check in on his favorite student now and then?” He glowed softly, visible even in the darkness, and his substance rippled at the rain’s interference. Like he was a reflection on a puddle. This was an illusion, but why now? How had he… “Auxiliary?” Nomad demanded. “Did you reinforce my Connection to Wit when you were playing with my soul earlier?” Since I am dead, the knight replies with a huff, I don’t really have to care if you’re angry at me or not. Oh, storms. That’s what had happened. Now that they had the proper threshold for it, Auxiliary had reached through the distance and let Wit Connect to Nomad. “So,” Wit said, looking him up and down, “that’s a…curious outfit.” “It’s what you get,” Nomad said, “when your clothing gets set on fire by the sunlight, then you are dragged behind a speeding hovercycle for a half hour.” “Chic,” Wit said. “I don’t have time for you, Wit,” Nomad said. “The Night Brigade is out there. Hunting me. Because of what you did to me.” “You may have saved the cosmere.” “I absolutely did not save the cosmere,” Nomad snapped, finding a pebble in his pocket and throwing it through Wit’s head. The image rippled and then restored. “I might have saved you though.” “Same difference.” “It’s not,” Nomad said. “It’s really not.” He stepped closer to Wit’s projection. “If they catch me, they’ll be able to connect the Dawnshard to you. And then they’ll be on your tail.” Wit didn’t respond. He clasped his hands behind his back and stood up straight, a trick he’d taught Nomad years ago to convince an audience you were thinking about something very important. “You’ve had a hard time of it lately,” Wit said, “haven’t you, apprentice?” “I’m not your apprentice,” Nomad said. “And don’t pretend to care now. You didn’t do anything when my friends and I were dying to arrows all those years ago. I went to Damnation then, and you sat around playing a flute. Don’t you dare presume to imply you care about me now! I’m just another tool to you.”
“I never did get a chance to apologize for…events in Alethkar.” “Well, it’s not like you had the opportunity to,” Nomad said. “After frequently talking to my superior officer, asking him to pass messages to me. After living together in the same city for years and never stopping by. You left me to rot. And it ate you away from the inside, didn’t it? Not because you care. But because someone knew what you really were, then had the audacity not to die and simplify your life.” Wit actually looked down at those words. Huh. It wasn’t often that one could stab him with a knife that hurt. Took familiarity. And truth. Two things Wit was far too good at avoiding. “There was a boy, once,” Wit began, “who looked at the stars and wondered if—” Nomad deliberately turned and walked away. He’d heard far, far too many of this man’s stories to care for another. “I was that boy,” Wit said from behind. “When I was young. On Yolen. Before this all began—before God died and worlds started ending. I…I was that boy.” Nomad froze, then glanced over his shoulder. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, but droplets of it still interrupted Wit’s figure. He didn’t often speak of his past. Of…those days long ago. He claimed to not remember much about his childhood—a time spent in a land of dragons and bone-white trees. “Are you lying?” Nomad called to him. “Is this a fabrication? The perfect hook designed to reel me in?” “No lies, not right now,” Wit said, gazing up at the sky. “I can remember…sitting on a rooftop. Looking up and wondering what the stars were. “I assumed I’d never know. The town philosophers had talked themselves hoarse arguing the matter, as was often their way. Talk until you can’t talk anymore, and then hope someone will buy you a drink to keep the words flowing.” He smiled at Nomad, eyes twinkling. “Yet here I am. Millennia later. Walking between the stars, learning each one. I got my answers eventually. Yet…I’d guess that, by now, you’ve seen more of the cosmere than I have.” “So it’s a blessing?” Nomad asked, gesturing to himself. “This Torment you’ve given me?” “Every Torment is,” Wit said, “even mine.” “Wonderful. Very comforting. Thanks for the chat, Wit.” Nomad continued on his way. As he walked, he found Wit appearing farther along the rim in front of him, turning to watch him pass. “You always wanted the answers,” Wit said. “That’s why I took you on. You thought you could find them, tease them out, write them down, and catalogue the world. So certain you could find every one, if you just tried hard enough…” “Yes, I was an idiot, thank you. Appreciate the reminder.” Wit, of course, appeared ahead of him again—though he was fading, his form becoming transparent. The little burst of Connection Auxiliary had used to make this meeting happen was running out, blessedly. “It’s a good instinct,” Wit said, “to search for answers. To want them.” “They don’t
exist,” Nomad said with a sigh, stopping to look at Wit. “There are too many questions. Seeking any kind of explanation is madness.” “You’re right on the first point,” Wit said. “Remarkable to think that I discovered the secret to the stars themselves. But then found questions abounding that were even more pernicious. Questions that, yes, have no answers. No good ones, anyway.” He met Nomad’s eyes. “But realizing that changed me, apprentice. It’s not—” “It’s not the answers but the questions themselves,” Nomad interrupted. “Yes, blah blah. I’ve heard it. Do you know how many times I’ve heard it?” “Do you understand it?” “Thought I did,” he said. “Then my oaths ended, and I realized that destinations really are important, Wit. They are. No matter what we say.” “Nobody ever implied they lacked importance,” Wit said. “And I don’t think you do understand. Because if you did, you’d realize: sometimes, asking the questions is enough. Because it has to be enough. Because sometimes, that’s all there is.” Nomad held his gaze. Fuming for reasons he couldn’t explain. Exasperated, though of course that part was normal when Wit was involved. “I’m not going back,” Nomad said, “to who I was. I don’t want to go back. I’m not running from him. I don’t care about him.” “I know,” Wit said softly. Then he leaned in. “I was wrong. I did the best with the situation I had, hoping it would prevent calamity. I ruined your life, and I was wrong. I’m sorry.” How…odd it was to hear him be so forthright, so frank. Sincere. Completely sincere. Storm that man, how did he keep surprising Nomad, even after all this time? Nomad turned to go, but then stopped, waiting for the final word. Wit always had the final word. This time, though, the man just gave Nomad a wan, sorrowful smile, then faded to nothing. Perhaps he knew there was nothing more of any use he could say, and so had fallen silent. If so, it was probably the first time that had happened in Wit’s life. Nomad sighed. He expected a wisecrack from Auxiliary, but the spren stayed silent as well. He usually did when Wit was around—he knew Nomad often felt double-teamed in situations like that. “Damnation,” Nomad said, “we need to get off this planet. And I know how we can do it.” How? the knight asks, wondering if his squire has missed the entire point of an important conversation. “The people running this place found an access disc that looks very familiar. Scadrian writing on it. And you can bet if there’s a power source on this planet powerful enough to get me offworld, it will be with them.” Ahhh… Auxiliary said. So what do we do? Nomad stalked to the building he’d left behind, picking it out easily because he’d left the doors cracked open by accident. He stomped inside, trailing water, rifle under his arm. He burst in on the people still in conference, his arrival causing them to stumble back in surprise and fear. Not a
single one reached for a weapon. Yeah, they were doomed. But maybe their desires aligned with his. He grabbed the access disc off the table, held it up, and spoke in their tongue—perfectly, without accent. “I know what this is,” he said. “It’s a key to a large metal door, probably buried somewhere, right? With similar writing on it?” He tossed the key onto the table, where it hit and flipped, clattering against the wood. “I’m going there too. Maybe we can help each other.” CONTEMPLATION THREW HERSELF to her feet, pointing. “I knew it! I knew it! Your features, that gibberish you spoke. You’re too odd to be from another corridor. You’re one of them. A Sunlit Man.” “A legend,” Confidence said, folding her bony arms. “So is our exodus from Hell,” Contemplation said. “Both so far back in time, even the Chorus doesn’t remember the dates.” “Someone want to tell me what a Sunlit Man is?” Nomad said, frowning. He kept his eyes on Zeal, the one person in the room who had not jumped at his entrance. The short man had his hand in his pocket, presumably on the device that could freeze Nomad in place. “Accept this explanation,” Compassion said with her small, frail voice. “Long ago, a people existed who could live in the sunlight. People who could take it into themselves, rather than being destroyed by it. People who could use it. They were able to stay in one place long enough to build a city beneath the ground. These are the Sunlit Ones—those who could survive the light.” “I was touched by that sunlight, yes,” Nomad said. “But it nearly destroyed me.” “You touched sunlight and were not instantly killed?” Jeffrey Jeffrey whispered, looking to Nomad with eyes wide. “It’s true?” “For a few seconds only!” Nomad said. “Sunlit,” Compassion whispered. “With all respect and mindfulness,” Confidence said, “I find this entire story to be a notion for children, not a fact for adults. If these people went under the ground, mud would suffocate them.” “No,” Contemplation said. “There are places where the ground is all stone. There could be holes in it, like lava tubes. Places where people live. I’ve always felt I would see one, before my time arrived.” “Stone melts in the sunlight,” Zeal said. “The stones of the Sunlit People don’t,” Contemplation continued. “They are deep. The Cinder King believes this; that’s why he’s spent years trying to find a way through that door. And this man here, he came from the Refuge of Stone!” “Yeah, you’re wrong,” Nomad said. He’d expected outcries when he’d come barging in, maybe a fight. Not…whatever this was. “But I don’t particularly care what you believe. Do you know where this door is? The one the disc opens?” “We have some idea,” Compassion said softly. The smallest and oldest of the women considered him, then smiled. “It was the plan of Elegy, our Lodestar. To steal the Cinder King’s key and figure out how to use it, gaining entrance to the hidden lands of peace
beneath the ground.” “The only way we can escape him,” Zeal said with a grunt. “He’s the most powerful man in the world now. He controls the corridor at the equator, with the most resources. He forces everyone else to the bands closer and closer to the poles, where even a stumble leads to death…” Nomad filed that information away. “Well, I want to find that door too. I’ll help you get there.” And are you going to tell them? the hero asks sharply, voice laden with implication. Are you going to warn them what they’ll find inside? Not a refuge for outsiders, but a small alien installation, likely here to monitor the Investiture that sun is emitting? “Not our problem,” Nomad said in Alethi. “These people want to find that door. I want to find that door. I’ll help them get there. That’s where our responsibility to them ends.” Callous. Auxiliary didn’t push him further, though. He knew as well as Nomad did that their best chance to get off this planet was to get into that installation. “I find this man intriguing,” Zeal said. “Shall we accept his offer? Perhaps he can help.” “What can you do for us, stranger?” Confidence asked. “What aid do you offer?” “For one thing, I can read that,” he said, pointing at the disc. “It belonged to a person named Haridan, a lieutenant. It’s his authorization badge, letting him open the door. I’ll be able to read what is on the door too, and if there are people inside, I can communicate with them.” “Sunlit,” Contemplation whispered. The others nodded. “I offer my opinion that we should take his help,” Zeal said. “We must find this place and escape into it! Would it not be pleasing to us and all our people to pray for the safety of the poor Cinder King as we lock him and his minions outside the very door they’ve spent years trying to enter?” “Adonalsium will bless us in this endeavor, I feel certain,” Compassion said. “It could lead at last to real rest for our people. No more relying on sunhearts to power our cities. No more outrunning the sunrise. No more…loss.” “Adonalsium, eh?” Nomad said. “By the way, how’d a bunch of Threnodites end up worshipping the father god of an entirely different planet?” “We learned before our exodus,” Confidence said. “We were those who believed the words of the first Lodestar. We lived in Hell itself and were led by our faith to a new land.” “One that’s perpetually on fire?” Nomad asked. “Adonalsium,” Contemplation said, “will remember our plight eventually…” The cynical squire wisely chooses not to explain to these people the sad reality of their god’s demise some ten thousand years before. Hint hint. Nomad held his tongue. “Perhaps Adonalsium has remembered us,” Zeal said. “Maybe that is why the Sunlit Man is here.” “Call me Nomad, if you have to call me anything,” he interjected. They barely seemed to notice. “If he can get us past the doorway…” Jeffrey Jeffrey said, then looked
to him. “Can you activate this disc? Open the door? The Cinder King has tried for years and has never managed it. He can find the door, but not pass inside.” Could he? “I’m almost one hundred percent confident I can get that door open,” Nomad said. “I’m not from the place beyond, like you think, but…I do know the people inside. Some of their kind, at least. I speak their language.” Contemplation met his eyes. She understood, as the others didn’t seem to, about other languages. She believed. Gazing into those aged eyes, so full of hope, he found himself slipping. His ancient self reasserting just a little. “Look,” he said to her, “I…don’t think you’ll find what you want beyond that door. It’s…not a refuge, like you want it to be.” “Do you know that?” she asked. “For certain?” “No,” he admitted. There might be a large installation there. Storms, it could even be abandoned. That seemed very improbable. Most likely it was a survey ship, full of researchers investigating that sunlight. Such ships were tiny. Barely enough room for a complement of two dozen scientists. “No,” he repeated, “I don’t know for certain. But…I have a lot of experience with this. I don’t think that key will bring you salvation.” The group shared glances. “We need to try anyway, don’t we?” Confidence said. Words he was surprised to hear from her, considering her objections earlier. “This really is our only hope?” “We have dwindling power,” Jeffrey Jeffrey said. “And the Cinder King is enraged. No, we will not live much longer. This is our only hope.” The others nodded. Storms. Well, Nomad had tried. He had spoken up. That was enough. He’d do his part. Get them to the doorway, then open it for them. After that…well, they were on their own. And he would bear no guilt. It wasn’t his fault they were determined to pin their hopes on an impossibility. “We must ask the people before we commit for certain,” Compassion said softly. “If it pleases the others, I request this course.” “I agree with that, in wisdom,” Contemplation said. “There are no tyrants in Beacon, only family. We will bring this to the people and let them decide if we should risk the possible reward of entering the Refuge or if we should instead surrender to the Cinder King. I suspect the presence of this stranger will help them choose the former.” “Great,” Nomad said. “I need something to eat that isn’t mud. Something to drink that isn’t raining on me. Something to wear that isn’t hanging in shreds. Consider that my fee for translating that disc for you.” “And do you have a fee for helping us get to the door?” Rebeke asked. “I just want into that Refuge,” Nomad said. “Also, I’ll want these bracers off my arms.” “We don’t have the keys to—” Zeal started. Nomad glared at him. “You hacked the Cinder King’s system and knocked out his ember people—” “They’re called the Charred,” Rebeke said. “—whatever they are, you knocked them
all out at once. You absolutely can take these off me.” Zeal looked away. “We have yet to discuss,” Confidence said, “how you feigned the inability to speak merely to spy upon our workings.” “Can’t be too careful,” Nomad said, “when you meet someone new. Eh, Rebeke?” She glared at him. He smiled and winked. Then he held out his arms. “So how do I get them off?” “I’ll fetch the attuner,” Zeal said with a sigh. “With your blessing, Greater Good.” The three women nodded. He slipped out, leaving Nomad to settle down in a seat at the table. He tipped his chair back against the wall, but didn’t put his feet up this time. He was, after all, feeling far more respectful. “If it is agreeable, Nomad,” Confidence said to him, “I should like to inquire regarding the spirit that accompanies you. Rebeke tells us you can materialize objects at will?” “That’s one way of putting it,” he replied. “But the way I do it is my own secret. Sorry.” They let it drop, which he found surprising. How did they know that Auxiliary was a spirit? And why didn’t they push harder? One thing he’d noticed everywhere his travels took him was the universal fascination with Auxiliary. People often treated his abilities as a sign of divinity, or at least of extreme favor with divinities. Here, they simply let him brush them off with a single sentence? How odd. They turned to other topics, discussing how they’d gather the people and how to find the entrance to the facility—the Refuge of Stone, as they called it. Apparently it wasn’t easy to locate. Rebeke didn’t join the conversation; she turned to getting the others more tea. Curious. Outside, when they’d been running for their lives, she’d seemed a desperate rebel. Now he saw her differently. A young woman in a wet dress, her hat lost in the fighting. She was splattered with mud the rain hadn’t washed off, her shoulders drooping, her posture slumped. She had been through a lot today. What kept her here when she should have, quite justifiably, headed for her bed, or at least a change of clothing? Perhaps it had something to do with her sister. Hadn’t they said that the woman—now transformed into one of those Charred—founded this city and came up with their plan to escape into the Refuge? Where did that leave Rebeke? Her brother died today, he remembered. She watched his head get vaporized while rescuing their sister. Yeah, that dull expression, those rote motions. Rebeke was in shock. He knew what that was like. Carrying on by sheer force of will, trying to keep busy. Because if you stopped, if you did go to bed, you knew what would happen. You’d have to face it. “So, Aux,” Nomad said in Alethi as they waited. “Are we going to talk about how you went against my explicit orders and contacted Wit?” The knight shuffles uncomfortably beneath his squire’s pointed question, Aux said. He tries to reply with confidence, but the nervousness
in his voice betrays him. “What did you hope would happen?” Nomad asked. “Did you think Wit would sweep in here, prop me up with one of his little morality tales, and I’d just go back to whistling?” I remember…revelations in light. Transformation. “Those were rare days,” Nomad said, shifting his gun against his shoulder. “Most change doesn’t happen with a revelation in light, Aux. Most change happens as a slow, steady slide toward the pit. Like how we age, step by shuffling step toward the grave.” You don’t age anymore. “My body might not,” he whispered, “but my soul sure does. It’s been rounding that pit for years. Step by step, Aux. We wear away. Ideals are like statues in the wind. They seem so permanent, but truth is, erosion happens subtly, constantly.” The others continued to confer. “This will be dangerous, Greater Good,” Jeffrey Jeffrey was saying. “I offer this as fact: we will have to disassemble the entire city and bring it along, to be ready once the prospectors locate the entrance.” “We will make this clear to the people in our explanations,” Compassion said. “Thank you, Jeffrey Jeffrey, for your frank assessment. But this is where our hopes must rest. Contemplation is correct. We cannot survive as we are. Our sunhearts die, and our resources dwindle.” “Either we must access this Refuge,” Contemplation said, “or we must die by the Cinder King’s brutality. He will not accept our surrender, and the people will know that.” “Imagine,” Compassion said, “a place beyond his influence. A place where we can prove that our way is better, that we do not require his tyranny or false ‘unity’ to survive. If Zeal’s mission had failed, we would perhaps have to accept worse options. But with that key, we have a chance.” Confidence, tall and intense, turned away from the table. “Which provokes my memory. We have not yet discussed a punishment appropriate for the one who disobeyed our strict commands and in so doing, cleaved unto chaos and jeopardy, sowing both to all who accompanied her.” Rebeke, who had been quietly cleaning up the hotplate and teacups, stiffened. She looked back at the table, then cast her eyes down. “Hey,” Nomad said in their tongue, “maybe give the girl a break. Without her, you wouldn’t have me.” “This is not your concern, outsider,” Confidence said. “If you haven’t noticed,” Nomad said, “I don’t really care what you think is or is not my concern.” He stood up as Zeal returned, bearing some equipment. Nomad placed his gun on the table, then held out his hands. Zeal looked to the Greater Good—who nodded their approval—before beginning work on the bracers. “You keep saying,” Nomad continued, “that you’re different from the Cinder King. That you resist his tyranny. It seems to me that if you’re trying to establish a place different from the one that guy rules, you’d want to avoid punishing a person who is just doing their best to help.” The first bracer came off. Zeal set it on the table with
a thump, then moved underneath the other one, working. “Thank you for the lecture, young man,” Confidence said dryly. “Perhaps, with age, you will come to realize that a balance is needed. Tyranny is awful, but not all authority is to be rejected. It is common for the young to have trouble with this concept of moderation.” “How old do you think I am?” Nomad said, amused. “Older teens?” Confidence said. “No, older,” Contemplation replied. “Young twenties.” Storms. He knew that he looked a lot younger with the grey no longer appearing in his hair, but young twenties? He’d been thirty-eight when time had finally stopped tracking him, his soul bending under the Dawnshard’s influence—and that was by his planet’s accounting, which had longer years than most. Granted, he might have had trouble guessing their ages, living perpetually in darkness. But still. “I’ve experienced much more of life than you’d expect from my appearance,” Nomad said. “And I’ve seen a great deal of tyranny in the name of, to be blunt, what people called ‘the greater good.’ Names are irrelevant. You want to avoid being considered tyrants? Act like it.” The other bracer came off. Nomad nodded his thanks to Zeal, who backed away, eyeing him—as if worried he’d grab the rifle immediately and start shooting. A part of Nomad wanted to do just that: fire a few rounds into the ceiling, if only to give these people the shock of their lives. Shake them up. Auxiliary would chew him out, though. Instead he just shouldered his rifle. “Food. Clothing. Bed. That order.” “Rebeke can fulfill that assignment,” Compassion said. “As part of her punishment.” “Can you fly, outsider?” Contemplation asked. Nomad froze. He looked to the three of them, his mind racing, emotions surging…until he realized they meant fly a ship. “I could probably figure it out,” he said, “with a little instruction on the controls. I’ve flown similar craft. Why?” “Because the region holding the entrance to the Refuge will soon be upon us,” Contemplation said. “We will have to make our case to the people and have a decision soon after. Then we’ll need to divide the city and go hunting for the way. And I’d rather know…” “…IF YOU NEED a babysitter or not.” Contemplation’s smug tone still echoed in Nomad’s mind as, three hours later, he and Rebeke burst from the cloud cover back into the light of the rings. Previously faint to him, the illumination now seemed bright as…well, not day. A night with the largest of the moons shining, perhaps. They were again on Rebeke’s quadcycle. As she’d been the one to rescue him, the others seemed happy to make her play nursemaid to him. He wasn’t certain what she thought of that. She hadn’t said more than a few words to him as she found him a place to rest, then scrounged up some clothing for him. He’d worried they’d have trouble finding something that fit him, but the local seamstresses worked with serious efficiency. Perhaps that’s what happened to a society when it
was constantly on the run from superheated death. So he now wore a long brown duster coat with deep pockets, as he preferred. It was the second they’d offered him—the first had looked too much like a uniform. He was still ashamed of how he’d snapped at Rebeke for that. This one was rather nice. It had been a few worlds since he’d been able to obtain something this suited to his tastes. Under it, he wore sturdy trousers and a light shirt. As they soared out of the darkness on the large hovercycle, a small fleet of ships followed. He and Rebeke, along with other scouts on hovercycles, had come out first to make sure the Cinder King wasn’t here. Now that the way was confirmed clear, though, the rest of Beacon had arrived. Beacon, it turned out, was made up of around a hundred and fifty people—and around thirty ships. Most of those ships, as he’d seen at the larger city—called Union, he’d since learned—resembled bumblebees more than hornets. But all could fly, and fly well. He was still amazed that entire cities could just disassemble on command. He told himself that he’d seen tens of planets by now and ought to be too jaded to marvel at each novelty. Yet the truth was that each one had something like this—some fascinating quirk that made him want to linger, study, learn. If he did, of course, the Night Brigade would take him—all to find the next link in the chain leading to their prize. He was certain their treatment of him would be very illuminating. His insides would get to see the light for the first time. He turned his mind from that to surveying the landscape. He’d noticed the mud earlier, the leftovers of the passing storm in the darkness. The ground was basically grey slush here, no sign of plants or life at all—but that didn’t mean it was boring or flat. Improvised rivers had already carved channels in the mud, eroding soil, creating networks. It all had the feel of an estuary, where river met ocean. Except without the ocean. There were lakes, though. Shallow expanses of water that reflected the rings above in striking, colorful mimicry. The landscape had a strange variety to it. He’d imagined this entire place like one big salt flat or mud pit, but they passed steep hills and winding valleys with water running down them. Among them stood strange rock formations, wickedly jagged and pocked with holes. They passed a plain with hundreds of them, like sculptures made by a madman. What do you think of those? the studiously serious knight asks, somewhat confusedly. “You know,” he replied, “Master Wit always told me to avoid using too many adverbs in descriptions.” And how am I to project my emotions, then? he asks even more confusedly. “Through context. Tone of voice.” Tone of voice, he says flatly, he said flatly. I have exactly one tone, Nomad. Being dead has costs, you know. “Silence, unfortunately, not being one of them.” The rock formations,
Nomad, he says with mounting exasperation. What are they? “Strange. That’s what they are.” Normally he’d have expected those sorts of formations to come from prolonged weathering. But if that were the case, these would have smooth sides, not that craggy, cratered look, like… Like molten stone, suddenly frozen, he realized, in the process of being ejected from the earth. A volcanic eruption, suddenly hit by cold rain and locked in place. That’s what these felt like to him. “Hey,” he said, switching to the local tongue. He waved to Rebeke, who was in the driver’s seat to his left. “Those rock formations. Those are made by the sunlight? Superheating the ground, making magma erupt?” “Best we can guess,” she said, shouting over the rush of the wind. “The coming of the Sky Tyrant causes great distress to the land. Everything melts or breaks apart each day, and by the time we pass again, nothing is the same.” “Wait,” he said. “Nothing is the same?” “Nothing,” she called. “Though some generalities persist—there are highlands to the south—no individual features remain day to day. Those hills, they weren’t here last time. It’s all shaped anew. The Chorus tells of our old world. A land of quietude, where the landscape slumbered and didn’t transform daily. But that place was also Hell, so…” “I’ve been there,” he called back. “Food’s good, but the ghosts are a huge pain. I’m not surprised your ancestors wanted out.” She gave him a pointed look. “Don’t lie.” “Lie?” “You haven’t been to Hell,” she shouted. He shrugged. He’d been through many varieties of hell, though only the planet Threnody was literally called by the term. But who cared if she believed him or not? That magma thing. How’d you realize it was the case? the knight interjects. “No erosion on the formations,” he explained in Alethi. “Makes sense that this landscape would be subject to extreme forces. It’s remarkable. Like a primordial planet, still forming.” What would it be like to live in a place where you could make no maps? A land with no familiar landmarks? Nothing permanent except what you carried with you? Under those circumstances, he’d be looking for a quiet cavern to settle into as well. But it also explained why there weren’t many of those. If the surface got fried every day to the point it cracked and let molten rock come surging out…well, that wasn’t conducive to stable, habitable caverns. Again, he doubted that this Refuge could be any sort of cavern. Beyond that, a part of him whispered that something didn’t add up here. That he was missing a piece of the puzzle. Superheated light might make stone flow on the surface, but eruptions? He was no expert, but he thought those were usually caused by the opposite effect. Heat below and coolness above—with a generous helping of tectonic activity to create new pathways for that heat to escape. Highly Invested light would also make traveling in the system by starship nearly impossible. Yet he had evidence of Scadrians being here. So
what was really going on with the mechanics of this planet? “I assume,” he said to Rebeke, “the unstable landscape is why we have to search to find the doorway into the Refuge?” “Yes,” she said, pointing at a nearby group of five ships with round, flat bases. They swept along the ground at a low hover, moving together in a deliberate pattern. “We use prospector ships, which can sense energy sources under the soil. Every now and then, during regular searches, the Cinder King would find the doorway. He became obsessed with it and the stories of the Refuge. That only intensified when he got the key. It came from a body one of his outriders found, a stranger who had died in a mudslide.” Nomad nodded, thoughtful. Those prospectors were large machines for doing something as simple as sensing Investiture, but not everyone was lucky enough to have a Seeker on staff. “You were his subjects, then?” he said to her over the wind. “The Cinder King? Before you broke away and hid in the darkness?” “Essentially,” she said, slowing the cycle to drink from her canteen. Then she continued without having to shout. “He ‘keeps the law.’ Has influence over basically every habitable corridor and has incorporated any cities of significance or size into Union. “With smaller towns like ours, he’d send a few officials to represent him. Along with some of those Charred of his, of course, ready to enforce their orders. We just lived with it. For years—ever since I can remember, actually—we lived under his thumb. Until he started to change his rhetoric, get more aggressive, claiming that his destiny was to unite all people into one city. So then—” She glanced to the side as a ship flew past. They’d stowed Elegy, her sister, in there. A kind of improvised prison. Nomad found it wild they didn’t have an actual jail. “Elegy,” Rebeke said, “always had such grand dreams. She could persuade anyone of anything, so long as she was passionate about it. I hoped so much that we could…do something for her. When I locked her away earlier, she shouted at me. It was her voice, but there’s nothing of her in the eyes. I…” She slumped in her seat, head bowed. Storms, this girl needed sleep and time to mourn, not another mission. But the sun didn’t wait. They were constrained by its timetable. Maybe she’d be able to rest once they opened the doorway… But of course she wouldn’t. Because the doorway wouldn’t lead to a refuge. He steeled himself. “The Cinder King,” he said. “He’ll be looking for you out here, right?” “He’s always looking for us,” she replied. “However, Zeal replaced the key he stole with a fake. So with Adonalsium’s blessing, the Cinder King does not yet know what we have done. He will have patrols trying to spot us, but only the regular ones. And perchance we will find fortune today—in that he rarely patrols this region.” “Why?” “Because it is the way that his city, Union, will
come anyway, once their harvest is finished,” she explained. “Why would we be so foolish as to fly directly into his path? His riders usually search the far reaches of this corridor and those nearby, presuming to find us there, attempting our own harvests.” They fell silent. “You can’t flee to another corridor?” Nomad asked. “You said there are places he can’t influence?” “He influences all,” she said, “but there are some places he doesn’t care about—because they are inhospitable.” She pointed northward. “Travel up that way an hour or so, and it’s all his territory until you reach the deadband, where food does not grow. To be exiled there is a death sentence.” She turned, pointing south. “The southern band used to be habitable, but a mountain range has sprung up these last few years. It gets higher and higher. Like I said, while individual features vanish, some large-scale ones persist. We keep hoping this mountain range will melt away, but it hasn’t, and so all the people in that corridor had to relocate northward—crowding these corridors. Giving the Cinder King more sway because it is easier to oppress them.” “Wait,” Nomad said. “Why is a mountain range a big deal? Just fly over it.” “We can’t fly that high,” she said. “The ships can’t manage it. And it extends far enough that if you try to go around, you inevitably end up getting caught in some valley and dying. So instead we hide in the darkness and dodge his patrols.” Nomad found that curious. Their technology…some things about it baffled him. That wasn’t, however, an unusual experience for him. The more he’d traveled, the more he’d learned that technology didn’t follow a flat progression. Planets often had extreme knowledge in one area, but ignorance in others. He’d met one society capable of complex mathematics and with a brilliant understanding of architecture—but with no concept of the wheel, as they lived in a dense jungle, where developing it hadn’t made as much sense as it did in places with a lot of flat land and straight roads. So, the knight muses, they lived under the Cinder King. That—admittedly—sounds bad. But could it truly be worse than the rest of life on this planet? Was his rule so horrible that going off to live in pure darkness was better? That depended. In Nomad’s experience, it wasn’t when life was utterly terrible that people rebelled. It instead happened when life improved to the point that people had time to think, time to wonder. The capacity to imagine. So maybe things here had recently progressed enough to make people wonder if they needed a dictator or not. “The Cinder King,” Nomad said. “He taxed you? How badly?” “Badly,” she said softly. “The lottery happened once a rotation.” Lottery? Well, there was a word that varied widely by context. Remembering his experience on Union, he braced himself for the worst. “A…lottery of people?” She nodded. “What else would it be?” “And what did he do with them?” She frowned, studying him. Then she narrowed her
eyes. “You…don’t know?” He shook his head. “It’s true?” she whispered. “There’s a place where they don’t use sunhearts?” “The power sources?” he said, rapping his knuckles on the cycle’s housing. “I mean, everyone I’ve known uses power of one sort or another, but I’ve never seen these ones. Where do you get them? Is it…” He trailed off. Sunhearts. Lottery. “People?” he asked. “These power sources used to be people?” “This one here,” she said, resting her hand on the housing, “was my mother. Two weeks ago. We left her for the sun, then recovered her sunheart on the next rotation. Her body vaporized by the heat, her soul condensed into this stone.” STORMS. Storms. Suddenly his experiences upon arrival took on an even more sinister cast. That’s what the Cinder King had been doing. That’s what the strange game of tag had been about: choosing the next people to be sacrificed to the sun. Not in some primitive, pagan way—but in a modern one. Equally horrible, but with more economics. That’s terrible, the hero exclaims, imbuing his words with sickened disgust. It wasn’t unprecedented. Nomad hadn’t been to Nalthis—the place sounded nice, and nice places tended to be easy for the Night Brigade to find—but they bought, sold, and traded chunks of people’s souls like they were gemstones. BEUs as a measurement were based on this system—though at least there, the transaction left you alive. “That’s why there aren’t any ghosts here,” he said softly in Alethi. “Threnodites, they have this phantom echo to their souls. A sort of smoky shadow that lives on after they die. Here, there’s not a chance for that. Their souls are condensed, fused, turned into…” A power cell. One of which he’d consumed to make his Connection to this planet. Another event that took on a gruesome air in hindsight. He felt at his coat pocket, where he’d hidden the drained core after getting his new clothing. One soul’s worth, even with a shade attached, wouldn’t be enough for us to absorb over a thousand BEUs of Investiture like we did, Aux said. So there must be some other force filling the stone, like Stormlight on Roshar. The sunlight must be Invested, as we guessed. It’s supercharging the remnants of the soul as the person is killed. It was the only thing that made sense, as they’d never be able to power entire cities from souls alone. Not without running out of people very quickly. Still, the implications of it left him nauseous. “Your reaction,” Rebeke said. “It’s genuine, isn’t it? You had no idea what sunhearts were.” “I didn’t.” “Then, in truth, there’s hope. Authentic hope. A better life than even Elegy presumed to offer.” “Your city…still uses such sacrifices?” Nomad said. “What else are we to do? We can’t outrun the sun without power. Unlike the Cinder King’s lottery, my people have always used volunteers. From among the elderly, the sickly.” She absentmindedly traced the outline of the sunheart’s housing. “Mother was dying. She might have had months left, she might have
had days, she might have had years. But we had three spent sunhearts and ships that couldn’t flee. So…” She took a deep breath. “So you leave people out to die,” he said. “They become these…power sources. How do you find them again?” “The prospector ships,” she said. “It’s why we have them. Sunhearts float near the top of magma for some reason. You can find them in roughly the same place you left the people, though you often have to pry them from the stone.” Her hand stilled. “My brother installed Mother’s sunheart here, in our quadcycle, so I could have it near me. Now that he’s…he’s gone, and Mother, and even Elegy…” This storming world, the knight says with a breathless voice. Indicating horror, not arousal, since that word is sometimes used both ways. Just in case you were wondering. “When they captured me,” Nomad said, “the Cinder King took off his glove and seized me by the face. He expected something to happen. It didn’t.” That comment shook Rebeke out of her melancholy, prompting her to stare at him again. She looked at his hands. Ungloved. Clearly curious, Rebeke removed her right glove, then hesitated. “May I?” she asked. He shrugged. So she reached across and touched his wrist. “Nothing,” she said, amazed. “And what is supposed to happen?” “I should be able to draw out your heat,” she said. “Some of your soul. As I initiated the touch, I should be able to pull it forth from your body, cooling you—it’s what the bracers do. They did work on you, though?” “Unfortunately,” he said. “What is being drawn from you is something we call Investiture. A different state of energy, and the removal of it cools you in the process. That’s a side effect, though. Because of your heritage, your people have an interesting type of Investiture—as do I, though mine is of a different variety.” “Why did the bracers work on you,” she said, “but my touch does not?” It was tough to say. Though he’d once made a study of this sort of thing, it had been decades since he’d given it much thought. And the various nuances of Investiture could be tricky even for an expert. “Investiture is finicky,” he said. “Usually requires specific things—Intent, Commands, familiarity—to manipulate. It’s likely that the bracers were brutal enough to force through my protections, but your touch isn’t.” She pulled her hand away from him and blushed, quickly putting her glove back on. “It’s unusual,” she said, “to do that.” “What?” he asked. “Touch someone?” She nodded, embarrassed. “Normally it only happens because of accidents.” “I saw the Cinder King do it intentionally,” he said. “Killing people in the arena, consuming their Investiture.” “Yes,” she whispered. “He can draw forth heat quickly, powerfully, by force. He can feed upon a human being, leave them a dead husk. He has…fed on thousands of people at this point.” Wow, Aux said. Thousands? Watch that one, Nomad. If he’s that highly Invested…he could be seriously dangerous. “Regardless,” Rebeke continued, “any touch
can lead to heat being drawn or given—even for a normal person and even if not intended. It is rare for it to be dangerous, though.” “So, wait,” Nomad said. “If you touch, you start draining Investiture from one another?” “There are prayers to formalize it,” she said. “But…yes, a prolonged touch can cause it to begin. Accidents. Or…intimacy.” “You freeze each other during sex?” Well, that’s new, the hero says to his overly blunt valet. Certainly didn’t have that on the list of cultural features I was expecting to find on this world. Rebeke’s face grew redder. “In truth, we pass heat back and forth. It’s…not something I should have to explain to you.” “Fair enough,” he said, thinking. These people had a natural, biological ability to leech Investiture from one another. Almost everything had some Invested component, but the extremities of experience—specifically the strange things he could do and the strange things that had been done to him—were deeply related to the nature of Investiture. That included his Torment. There was a physical component. A mental component. But the real shackles were spiritual—Investiture. So maybe… A plan began to form in his mind. A way to potentially escape his affliction. Or at the very least lessen the symptoms of it. Nomad, the knight interjects—likely interrupting musings about his incredible nature—I see something. Ship twenty degrees to your right. Very distant. Nomad focused on the direction Auxiliary had indicated. While Aux didn’t have a physical shape unless Nomad called him as an object, the spren could use Nomad’s body to experience the world. Aux had been keeping watch, even if Nomad hadn’t. Nomad spotted it: a small ship approaching in the distance. “Scout,” he said to Rebeke. “I think it’s observing us. You should warn the others.” Rebeke followed his gaze, then cursed softly. She flipped a switch on the side of her seat, and the fuselage to Nomad’s left split open. Rebeke’s seat and the metal around it unlocked from the main body of the cycle. Sections at the front and sides folded out simultaneously, forming into her own one-person hovercycle, sleek, efficient. As he’d guessed, this quadcycle could eject the four portions with seats. The vessel wasn’t so much one large hovercycle as it was a carrier of four smaller ones. “Impressive,” he said. “Can everything on this planet break apart into smaller, functional pieces? If we crash this thing, is it going to disintegrate into a hundred even smaller cycles?” “Call in what you saw to warn the others,” she said to him, then leaned down, ready to go after the scout. “Don’t go right for it!” Nomad shouted. “It’s observing. See how it’s descending to the terrain to be harder to spot? It’s probably reporting in via radio. I’d bet that scout thinks they’ve caught us planting seeds. If you go screaming toward it, the scout will know it’s been spotted.” She paused, seeing the wisdom in that. “It can’t be reporting in,” she said. “We have our entire city here, including our radio jammers. That will
disrupt their signals.” Nomad wondered again at their varied technologies. Then again, maybe they weren’t using actual radio waves, and his mind interpreted the word that way for convenience. Might be some kind of Connection-based communication, if it was powered by these sunhearts. “Then it’s even more important not to alert the scout they’ve been seen,” he said. “Here. Let me show you.” He turned and looked down by his leg, in the same location where she’d reached to unlock her cycle. There, he found a handle, almost flush with the side of the craft. At her nod, he turned it, and his own cycle disconnected from the central fuselage. The resulting single seater was more like the hovercycles he’d flown on other worlds. He pulled it out beside hers. “This is as small as they get,” she noted. “These don’t even have their own sunhearts; they have a battery that will last you about an hour before needing to reattach to the main vehicle to recharge.” “Great,” he said. “Follow me.” He turned his cycle vaguely toward the distant scout ship. He made a wide loop, as if he were going to check on the prospectors. She followed, and as they passed the point closest to the still-distant scout, she pulled up beside Nomad. “Now?” she asked, eager. “No,” he said. “We’ll do one more loop. Make it seem like this is a normal part of our routine. This time, we’ll swing out wider, though.” She nodded, watching the scout intently. “Didn’t you just recently get into trouble for exceeding your orders?” he asked. “They’re going to yell at you again.” “If it pleases you to know, it is ever my lot,” she said. “Should I care?” He smiled. “I don’t see why you should.” She suddenly seemed uncertain. “I…I offer the concern that the scout might be a Charred. What would we do then?” “Then we’ll ask if they want some tea,” Nomad said. “What do you think we’ll do? We’ll kill the bastard before they kill us.” He leaned in, watching her. She was eager. Maybe it was the recklessness of someone who had nothing left to live for. Maybe it was a thirst for vengeance. Most likely it was just wanting to do something—anything—to keep her mind off her loss. He’d been there. Too many times. There is something odd about the way these people act, the knight muses to himself. I assume you’ve noticed. “Yes,” he said in Alethi. “There’s a kind of strange timidity to them. Even the sharpshooters don’t really feel like soldiers—I wouldn’t be surprised to find they are repurposed hunters.” After all, they used the term “killer” like it was a dividing line. As if some people were capable of it, and some people weren’t. Either way, he sensed a hunger in Rebeke. A desire to act, to fight back. He led her in another wide loop, getting closer to the scout’s location. The hovercycle controls were surprisingly intuitive. He supposed that made sense; if your entire society relied on constant flight, then
you’d want your ships to be simple to fly. The scout had taken cover beside a rock formation, like a large wave of magma that had been frozen in place. They were much closer now, but a distance still separated them—perhaps equal to what they’d already covered. Getting closer would be suspicious. “All right,” Nomad said to Rebeke. “Now!” TOGETHER THEY BOLTED to the side, punching their cycles to maximum speed, zipping straight toward that scout. He saw them immediately. A gaunt man in a white coat with red stripes, he spun his hovercycle and fled, keeping low to the ground and darting into what appeared to be a large lava tube. That was dangerous, but would reduce the chance of being shot from above or behind. Nomad swung in low to follow, and Rebeke joined him, an intense expression on her face, wind playing with her black and silver hair. Nomad let himself smile. It felt good to be in the air. Moving. A second later, they darted into the lava tube—a large circular stone tunnel. Broken in many places, open to the sky, twisting and turning. Requiring hairpin turns and careful judging of speed not to slam into the wall. You remember, the knight notes with a roll of his eyes, when we first met? You told me you were “the sensible one” who “didn’t rush headlong into every fight that came your way.” “Nope,” he said. “Doesn’t sound like something I’d say.” Yeah, and what happened to wanting to lie low? Taking the easy road? Does that sound like the current you? “Just trying to keep this girl alive.” That’s remarkably uncynical of you. “Eh. I’m bored.” Nomad took another turn, barely keeping sight of the scout ahead in the shadowed tunnel, dark enough between broken sections of rock that only the glow of an engine indicated their quarry. A moment later, a voice sounded over the radio. “What are you doing?” Contemplation demanded, barely audible against the rushing air. “We’re checking on something,” he replied, thumbing the communication button. “A scout, we think.” “Sunlit Man,” Contemplation said, “you are needed to open the doorway.” “Have you found it yet?” “No. The landscape is extremely difficult this time.” “Well, we won’t get the chance if the Cinder King arrives. So it’s best if we stop this scout before he can report.” “And if you die? You promised to activate the key—without you, we’ll be locked out.” “If I die,” he said, “that immediately stops being my problem, then, doesn’t it?” “Reckless fools,” she muttered. “If it pleases you—and I doubt anything does—you should stop encouraging Rebeke. She’s all we have left of her family, and I should prefer to see her safely ensconced in the Refuge before my time arrives.” Feeling the epiphany like a punch to the gut, he realized what she was referring to: her time to die in the sunlight, to become a powerpack for her people. This society was all kinds of wrong. But one did what one must to survive; he understood that better
than most. For now, he ignored the radio, leaned down, and enjoyed the chase. The scout flew well, staying ahead of them in the tunnel—but none of them were flying at full speed. These turns were too tight. And unfortunately the scout didn’t need to escape. He just had to get close enough to home to draw attention. So Nomad might have to do something foolish. “Take the next exit through the broken ceiling, Rebeke,” he said over the radio. “I’m going to punch this up a little.” “What?” Nomad slammed the accelerator beneath his left foot, zipping forward. He couldn’t directly attack this fellow, even if he did get close. His best bet was to get right on his tail and push the man to be reckless. The lava tube spat them out into a canyon a moment later. Nomad wove through it, noting how the rock walls were pocked with holes caused by escaping gases as the magma cooled. He could imagine this whole place forming as rainwater poured through the lava flow—stone solidifying amid explosions of steam as hot and cold clashed. The scout glanced over his shoulder, showing a face with a long mustache. Then he accelerated in a sudden burst—frantically banking around a tight curve. Nomad followed, closing in, trying to get close enough to breathe down the man’s neck. Indeed, as the two of them burst into the next section of canyon, the scout glanced over his shoulder again—and was startled to see how close Nomad had gotten. He sped up, even though this portion was narrower, and full of jagged lava stone occlusions. Engines aflame, twin roars echoing down the canyon, they slipped in and out of shadow as tall peaks alternately obscured and revealed the rings. The knight wonders, with increasing uncertainty, if his faithful servant has any storming idea what he is doing. He does realize what he is doing, right? Getting into a high-speed chase with someone who lives on a planet full of expert pilots? They might be expert pilots, but Nomad was an expert in being chased. While he doubted he was as good a pilot as his quarry, the scout’s motions were becoming increasingly erratic. He took turns too sharply, speeding up into curves instead of straightaways. Constantly checking over his shoulder. Such a familiar feeling. So many times, the Night Brigade had nearly gotten him. Right at his back, their sights on him. Nomad knew that sense of panic, that scrambling burst of adrenaline. The dangers ahead of you suddenly trivial compared to the one behind you. You fixated on it, taking greater and greater risks. It was the story of his life. The scout knew the sun’s pursuit. It too gave chase—but in a slow, inevitable, overbearing way. Not quick or immediate. Not like this. Nomad whizzed a little too close to a rock formation, felt it whoosh next to his head. At these speeds, a small miscalculation would cause a big explosion. Unfortunately, just when Nomad was sure he was about to win, they burst out
into an open section of the canyonlands. Surrounded by mesas and peaks, this flatter region was essentially the floor of a large crater. That let the scout maximize his speed. Their cycles were matched in that regard, so Nomad stayed in close pursuit—but there was little he could do if he caught up. He needed to— Lava erupted from the ground nearby. A geyser of brilliant orange-red heat sprayed flakes of fire, ash, and soot. Sparks washed over the front of Nomad’s cycle and kept burning, even when the wind should have extinguished them. Damnation, the knight exclaims. Voice full of emotion. The surprised kind. The scout probably should have taken them higher to avoid the eruptions. But he wasn’t thinking clearly, it seemed. Instead he turned, trying to swing out closer to the steep crater walls—perhaps thinking the ground might be more stable there. Another section of stone exploded, hurling chunks of melting rock into the air. They fell around the cycles, shattering on the ground and bursting like fireworks. Muttering a few curses, Nomad broke off from direct pursuit as an entire wall of fire erupted from the ground just ahead—a wave of crimson stone that sloshed back down, parts of it immediately blackening and slumping like wax. Other parts kept glowing, like the heat of life itself. He swerved around the obstacle, barely spotting another eruption from the buckling ground in time to dodge it. Reluctantly he pulled upward—out of the dangerous region, high into the sky. There, he resumed his pursuit, but the scout was far ahead. Too far. He’d almost reached the far side of the crater. Where— A shot of light from above blasted the man off his cycle. The body dropped, sending the machine itself tumbling across the earth in a dusty, end-over-end collapse. Nomad looked up to see Rebeke on her cycle a short distance ahead of him, rifle to her shoulder. Right. He had told her to get ahead, hadn’t he? He pulled up next to her, breathing deeply, heart racing. What had caused those geysers of magma? They were basically as far from the sunlight as one could get. This should be the most tectonically stable region of the planet, though maybe none of it was all that stable. Extreme convection or tidal forces might cause all kinds of issues with the crust breaking and— Nope. Stop. None of that. He wiped his brow as another molten geyser erupted below. “Your planet,” he said to her, “is rather emotional, isn’t it? Never met one that I could rightly say has tantrums.” She barely seemed to be paying attention. She stared down at the fallen scout. “Rebeke?” Nomad asked. “I…” She looked at him. “I shot him.” “Storms. Was that your first time?” She nodded. “I’ve shot before. At people. Never hit, though.” She shivered visibly. “I’m a hunter. All of us who can shoot are hunters; it’s how we get meat. But to shoot at people…I mean, the Cinder King’s people do it, but that’s always seemed so…awful.” And you’re right again,
the knight tells him. About the hunters. How do you do it? A lifetime of paying attention. “I don’t feel different,” Rebeke said, “but I feel like I should. Does that make sense?” Nomad shrugged. “My first time was with a spear. I had to keep fighting, didn’t even get time to pause as his blood ran down onto my fingers.” He shook his head. “That night, at stew, it just felt like a surreal day of training. I barely remembered the moment itself.” She nodded. She seems comforted, the knight notes, even though the squire didn’t say anything actually helpful. “Knowing you aren’t strange,” he explained in Alethi, “is helpful. Knowing others felt like you did. Sometimes it’s the only thing that is helpful.” “Why do you do that?” Rebeke asked. “Talk gibberish sometimes?” “It’s my own language,” he said. “In other places, Rebeke, people speak all kinds of words you wouldn’t recognize.” “But why speak it now? When nobody can understand?” “I’m offering prayers,” he said, picking a lie he thought might appeal to her, “to one of the ancient gods of my realm.” Please, no, the knight says. I’m no god. I work for a living. Nomad checked to make certain his cycle had some flight time left, then nodded down toward the crash. “Come on. Let’s go check on him.” “Why?” Rebeke said. “He’s dead.” “Lesson number one about being a killer, Rebeke,” he said. “Always make sure.” REBEKE POINTEDLY DIDN’T look at the corpse. Nomad considered forcing her to confront it. No use in her trying to pretend she hadn’t shot the fellow. If she really wanted to protect her people, this wouldn’t be the last man she’d have to kill. He didn’t bother. It wasn’t his job to train her. Instead he did a cursory inspection of the corpse—and when he found a treasured picture, obviously drawn by a child, tucked into a pocket, he slipped it back into place without mentioning it to Rebeke. She was kneeling beside the wreckage of the scout’s cycle. “We’ll salvage this,” she said, then walked to her own cycle, lifted the seat, and pulled out a tow cable stored inside. “Even if it’s beyond repair, salvaging this is easier than harvesting metal from the iron fields.” “Iron fields?” Nomad asked, crouching down. “Places where molten metal coats the surface each rotation,” she said, walking back. “One corridor north. We sneak in during the darkness and pry up some of it before the Cinder King’s forces arrive.” “And you use this how?” he asked, frowning. “Do you have full fabrication plants on your ships?” “Fabrication plants?” she asked, cocking her head. “We use the Chorus, obviously. The spirits, like the one that follows you, create the objects we need.” Ahhh, the knight intones. That sounds interesting. “Stop trying to bait me,” he muttered in Alethi, then switched to her language. “Send someone else to salvage this, Rebeke. What is that blinking light there on the dash of the cycle?” She cursed softly, lowering her towline. She knelt again, tapping a
small, green-on-black indicator screen that was cracked but still flickering. “What is it?” he asked. “That shows an incoming radio signal,” she said. “The speaker is busted, so we can’t hear what they’re saying. But…” “But someone was calling this fellow when he went down,” Nomad said. “Which means we got out of range of your signal blockers before he died. Damnation. He probably radioed in the moment he had a chance.” “It’s what I’d have done,” Rebeke said. “This means they know he’s down and that something, or someone, killed him.” “What if they send more troops? What if they send Charred? What if they bring the entire city?” Nomad stood up, dusting off his hands. “Surely you know the answer to that by now.” He started off toward his cycle. In front of him, the brilliant display of erupting earth had subsided, leaving the field pocked with holes and mounds of black lava rock. “Nomad!” she called from behind. “I don’t want this. To be a killer. To be like…like you.” He looked back, and a glib response came to his tongue. Nomad, she’s hurting, Auxiliary reminded him. Please. He hesitated, seeing Rebeke holding to the towline she’d fetched, looking anywhere but at the corpse. Eyes downcast. He’d noticed, of course. It would be a bright day in the Weeping before Auxiliary read a human’s emotions better than he did. Empathy, though…well, he should feel ashamed that a creature that was both dead and inhuman did a better job of that. “I know,” he said to Rebeke, letting his other response go. “Keep that in mind. It might help.” She nodded. He gave her a moment, walking over to his hovercycle to radio back to Contemplation. Perhaps he was supposed to call all three of the Greater Good at once, but their rules were irrelevant to him, and he liked Contemplation. She saw through him. “Hey,” he said. “We got the scout, but it seems likely he radioed home first. You might have company on the way. How’s the hunt going?” “Terribly,” Contemplation said. “There doesn’t seem to be anything here, though we’re in the right place.” “How can you tell?” he asked, curious. “Celestial navigation,” she said. “We can tell from the rings and the stars. Those are the glowing things—” “I know what stars are, thank you,” he said. “Just checking. Well, they can tell us with reasonable accuracy where we are on the planet. The corridor we’re in is easy to determine. Harder to tell the longitude, however. You need—” “Precise clocks,” he said. “Yes. I’m aware of that too.” “Strange, how much you know about the surface world for one who lived his life underneath it.” “Keep asking yourself questions like that, Contemplation,” he said, “and maybe you’ll eventually realize the erroneous assumptions you’ve made about me. Either way, we don’t have a lot of time left.” “We’re repeating our search,” she said. “The opening might be buried deeply this time, which would make our readings difficult. Still, we should have found it. This is the
longitude where the Cinder King stopped each time to test his key. Several of our people have seen the opening, Nomad. It’s real. Yet our prospectors can’t find it.” “Well, what do you want us to do?” “You’re taking orders from me now?” Contemplation asked. “Depends on how stupid they are.” She grunted. “If it pleases you, accept this direction—stay there a little while and see if you can spot anyone coming to check on the scout. Perchance they’ll just send a small group in to investigate.” “If this is the region where the door is,” Nomad said, “then the Cinder King might have guessed what we’re doing. He might realize you’ve swapped the keys.” “If we’ve been subjected to such ill luck, expect an entire military force. You will, at your pleasure, please warn us if that’s the case.” A good enough suggestion. “We’ll do it.” “I am pleased you find my direction agreeable. Did the scout have a sunheart in his vehicle?” Nomad glanced toward Rebeke, who was already checking on that herself. At his called question, she looked back at him and shook her head. “Looks like it was running on a battery,” he said to Contemplation. “Shades,” she muttered. “We could have used that.” “Your ships are running out of power?” “We decided not to make new sunhearts,” she explained, “though we are low on power. The decision was made instead to try Elegy’s plan of getting into the Refuge. Our failures so far have left us strained for resources. They come at a terrible cost, requiring—” “I know.” “I was to go next,” she said, “as were my sisters in the Greater Good. Three others were to take our place. I feel…a burden of guilt, not having gone as was my time. Yet our people need leadership right now. Unfortunately, if we don’t find the entrance…we now won’t have enough power to last another rotation.” Damnation. “Then you’d better find that entrance,” he said, nodding to Rebeke as she put away the towline and climbed onto her cycle. They left the wreckage and took off, then immediately hid behind a natural merlon at the lip of the crater. Far to Nomad’s left, the sky was growing light with a predawn glow. Faintly so—this wasn’t yet even what he’d have called twilight on another planet. But sunrise wasn’t deadly on other planets, and twilight had never felt quite so ominous to him as it did here. They powered down the cycles to conserve their batteries and kept watch—ignoring that looming light to the left. The rocks here were dark and glasslike. Obsidian, maybe. It reminded him of another place, another world he’d once traveled. A place where he’d met Auxiliary. Rebeke dug out bread and sausage, slicing them and making a sandwich, using a spread that looked like oil with herbs. No butter, which he supposed made sense. He didn’t know what they hunted for meat, but those flying ships didn’t have room for cultivated livestock. “Contemplation is wrong about you, isn’t she?” Rebeke asked, offering him some
of the food, which he took. “She thinks you’re from some strange underground place, but I think you’re from somewhere more normal.” “And where would that be?” he asked. She nodded her chin up, toward the stars. “Another world is more normal?” “We came from another world,” she said around bites of her food. Odd, how they even ate with gloves on. “Chased by an ancient force known as the Evil.” “It’s still there,” he said. “On your homeworld. I’ve seen it. Well, the manifestations of it.” Wild, unchained Investiture, come to life with its own alien will—forming mountain-sized figures with impossible, unnerving features and unknowable motivations. Threnody was not a place one visited to relax. This comment finally threw her for a loop. She almost dropped her sandwich as he said it. “Strangely, the Chorus—who hold our history—don’t speak of our leaving because of the Evil,” she continued. “No, they say it was the quarreling. The infighting that sprang up among our people. Conflict, hatred. My ancestors wanted to escape that, for it was more pernicious than the Evil itself. Strife destroyed our people. “During our flight from the Evil, there was more bickering among the people. My group…we listened to the preaching of a man: the servant of Adonalsium and the original Lodestar. We left with him to a new land. We chose this.” Nomad grunted, trying his own sandwich, which proved to be terribly bland. What he wouldn’t give for at least some chili powder. Half the planets he visited had diets with all the flavor of a cup of water. Storms, back home, even the bread was spicier than this sausage. Still, it was food, and he forced it down. Investiture could sustain him, but at barely ten percent Skip capacity, he would rather not waste it on mere metabolism. “We were supposed to be free here,” Rebeke said, still watching the horizon. “From each other. I often wonder if the first Lodestar brought us here specifically to keep us running, to give us something to focus upon. A sun that destroys, like the Evil itself, always pursuing us. Until now, it has prevented us from turning on each other.” “You’ve gone all this time without violence?” “We had violence,” she said. “Crimes of passion. Arguments. But no actual killers. No trained ones. That was the Cinder King’s innovation.” Remarkable, the knight says. I can’t decide if they’re naive or impressive. “It’s not human nature to kill, Aux,” he whispered in Alethi. “You must be trained to do it. If you want to be effective, at least.” From what he’d heard, there were as many as fifty groups on this planet, all running parallel to one another in these “corridors.” Enough of a population to foster interchange and prevent inbreeding, but it was also a situation begging for a tyrant’s hand. Scarce resources. Many small populations unaccustomed to working together. In that light, it was remarkable that it had taken so long for a Cinder King to arise. Nomad wasn’t an ethnographer. As much as his master had
pushed him, Nomad’s interest had always been in engineering, the nature of Investiture, and the mechanisms one could create by manipulating it. Still, he had training from Wit about the nature of stories and the people who told them. So he recognized that these peoples’ stories were bound to be fascinating. Enough so that part of him wished he could stay and learn them. But the pursuit, the chase, ever loomed. It drove away all other thoughts, like a predator ravaging a once-placid flock. He couldn’t linger. He had to get away. So he watched keenly, instead of asking for more information. And well that he did, for he soon spotted a ship coming to check on the fallen scout. A single vessel, larger than most—perhaps the size of a small bus. Its ornamented sides glowed golden in the ringlight. Rebeke gasped as he pointed it out. “That’s the Cinder King’s own ship!” THE CINDER KING’S own ship? By itself? Damnation. What was going on? “Why would he come on his own?” Rebeke asked, her confusion mirroring Nomad’s own. “It makes no sense.” His frown deepened as he saw the man himself stroll out onto the deck, hands behind his back, eyes burning in the twilight. The ship parked in the sky, hovering, with the Cinder King standing at the bow. It was an invitation if Nomad had ever seen one. “He’s here for me,” Nomad said. “What? How would he even know you’re here?” “Depends on how much that scout was able to report,” Nomad said. Nomad, the knight says trepidatiously, what are you thinking? “Trepidatiously? Is that even a word?” Not a proper one. Oh, you’re going to do something stupid, aren’t you? “I can’t stop moving,” he said. “If I stop, I die.” He switched to the local tongue. “Rebeke, I’m going to go up. Pretend that you’re not here. But if things go poorly, try to back me up.” “Uh…” the young woman said. “How will I know if things go poorly?” “I’ll most likely come crashing through one of those windows,” he said. “If I’m lucky, I’ll do so of my own choice.” He took a deep breath, pulled his cycle out of the overhang, restarted the engine, and went roaring into the sky. The Cinder King’s luxury ship was hovering at the peak of what the cycle could manage, height-wise. Nomad’s vehicle strained as it hovered up to the bow, and again he noticed that his ears popped from pressure change rather quickly as he climbed to that height. The Cinder King wore a high-collar shirt under a long coat marked with softly glowing ribbons of light, highly polished boots, and black leather gloves. He smiled, the light in his eyes mirrored by the ember in his chest. He turned and gestured toward a docking point at the side of the deck. This ship was shaped like a seafaring boat, with narrow decks that widened near the bow, a control cabin, and storage space within the hull. Nomad hadn’t seen much wood since coming here, and
this thing was emblazoned with it—and with gold trim that must glitter fiercely in brighter conditions. The docking point was a rectangle cut out of the deck, where a small craft could slot in. Nomad carefully moved into position—but didn’t fully dock. He left the cycle hovering on its own power and stepped out onto the deck. From the cabin, two Charred—their simmering embers impossible to miss in the shadows—moved closer. Their king, however, waved them back. With his other hand, he reached welcomingly to Nomad. Last time, the knight notes, he locked us up and tried to brand us. Why the change in behavior? The Cinder King waved over a white-jacketed servant, who carried a stack of…large pieces of paper? Yes, stiff paper—almost cardboard—with pictures on them and… “Oh,” Nomad said in their tongue as the man held up the first, depicting the Cinder King and Nomad shaking hands. “Yeah, you won’t need those. I figured out your language.” “You…figured it out?” the Cinder King said. Storms, those eyes were unnerving. Reminded Nomad of people he had once trusted, once loved. “In less than a day?” “I’m a quick learner,” Nomad said. “How did you know I would be here?” “Please,” the Cinder King said, smirking. “Someone brought down one of my best scouts? It was obvious. Would you kindly join me inside? No tricks, I promise.” “An oath?” Nomad said, curious. “Given so easily? Tell me what this is about, and I will consider it.” “Our initial meeting was unfortunate.” To put it mildly, the hero remarks. “But,” the Cinder King continued, “I’ve realized the mistake was mine. Having you be one of my Charred would have been delightful, but there is another way to have you serve me. I’d like to hire you.” “Hire me,” Nomad said flatly. “Yes,” the Cinder King said, walking briskly toward the cabin. “They do that on your planet, don’t they? That place you come from, of storms and stone? They hire men as soldiers?” He knew? How did he know? For the first time, Nomad was legitimately intrigued by this man. He found himself following the Cinder King into the cabin. Behind a door at the front were the pilot’s controls. A small bank of screens sat atop a desk, each showing a flickering scene of the Cinder King’s ship from a different angle. Nomad had almost forgotten about the security camera he’d seen while restrained in the arena, but here was evidence of the Cinder King’s tight control over his people. One of the swiveling images faced the ground beneath the ship, zoomed in so far that Nomad could see the wreckage of the scout’s cycle. He hoped they couldn’t spot Rebeke from here. He forced himself to turn away before someone noticed where he was looking. The majority of the space was a room with fine woods, a bar, and several plush seats. The Cinder King shooed back several Charred who haunted the room. He walked over and served himself a drink. “Would you like some?” he asked, holding up a
cup. He sipped it to prove it wasn’t poisoned, though Nomad’s body was Invested enough to handle any normal poison. He took the drink, had a smile about the codes he used to follow, then downed it in a single shot. It was good stuff. He wouldn’t have expected that from a planet full of religious types, but then again, the best moonshine on his own planet was made by a deeply religious people. So what did he know? “The first offworlder I killed,” the Cinder King said, sipping his own drink, “was weak. Plump, with strange long eyebrows. Tried to talk his way free through the use of some device that made his words work in our language. I didn’t know what he was. Seemed better to end him, as I thought he might be some kind of demon. “It was in his things that I found the books.” He slipped one out of a bookcase next to the bar and held it up. It was one of those Silverlight guidebooks, an antiquated volume—the type originally written through much travail by people visiting the various planets on difficult expeditions. That had grown easier with the advent of space travel, and Nomad felt something had been lost with the ease by which people now went from world to world. This old volume was a survey book, which spoke of many different planets. A little on each one. Curious. It was written in Thaylen, which—with the eyebrows of the man who’d been carrying it—indicated the former owner had been from Nomad’s own homeworld. “The translation device,” the Cinder King explained, “allowed me to read this book. The translator gave out eventually, but I’d been wise enough to commission written translations by then. The book speaks of all kinds of peoples from all kinds of places in the stars. I think this section is about you, though, isn’t it? Rosharan. A tall people with distinctive features, like here in this illustration. Warlike, extremely aggressive, dangerous.” “A generalization,” Nomad said. “In your case, though?” “True enough,” Nomad said. “I’m surprised you invited me in. Close quarters favor me with my greater reach.” That made the man’s grin grow even wider. “You are a killer. Tell me, you have them on your world, then? Kings, warlords, emperors?” “Too many,” Nomad said. “So?” The Cinder King closed the book and rested his fingers on it. “I always felt that there was more for me to do. A greater destiny. Surely I wasn’t meant to just live life in an endless rotation on the run from the light. I was important. In these books, I learned what I was to do, offworlder.” He looked to Nomad, eyes glowing brightly. “I was destined to unite all of my people.” Well, Nomad had heard that somewhere before. He smiled, then he laughed. Partially because he knew the Cinder King would hate that sound. But mostly because, even here, it chased Nomad. In his early life, he’d passed through royal hands, traded from tyrant to tyrant like coins in the pocket.
Until slavery had brought him low, and camaraderie finally led him to soar through the skies. But storms. Even here, how many worlds away, it chased him. A pursuit of a completely different kind from the Night Brigade’s. The Cinder King’s expression darkened. “Sorry,” Nomad said. “Just appreciating the irony of the situation. Please. Continue your megalomaniacal ranting.” The king walked over to one of his cabinets, from which he removed a very small sunheart. Barely glowing. “You know what this is?” he asked. “It’s all that remains of your kinsman, the one who visited our planet, the one I slew. Your people make for terrible sunhearts, offworlder.” “I’m surprised you got anything,” he said. “The man you killed probably had Breath. And he was no kinsman of mine. From an entirely different country.” “Your planet shouldn’t have different countries. You should have conquered and unified it all.” “Conquest doesn’t remove countries,” Nomad said. “It removes lines on a map. Unity requires something else.” The Cinder King growled softly, palming the tiny sunheart. “I thought, from what I read, you’d appreciate what I’m building here. I thought you might be inspired to find a taste of home.” “Wrong taste,” Nomad said. “Try some curry powder next time. It has a much better flavor than tyranny. Less nutty.” The Cinder King finished his drink, then returned the sunheart to its place. He rounded the room, passing behind one of the Charred—whom he seized by the throat. He squeezed, and the poor man didn’t fight back, barely even struggled. “I am the most powerful man on Canticle, offworlder,” he said, still squeezing. “You see how they can’t protest or resist? How they serve me regardless of how I treat them? I have absolute power over these.” He smiled. “Once, before I rose to my destiny, I was the man who marched prisoners to their fates. There, I realized that true power is not in the ability to kill, but in the ability to control the killers.” Well, that’s a perfectly normal and reasonable way of thinking, the knight observes sarcastically. I’m sure he’s absolutely the most well-adjusted man on the planet, eh? Nomad said nothing. He wished that this sort of sentiment was rarer. He’d seen it in guards, in watchmen, in soldiers. He saw it in the eyes of anyone who got a thrill from having others in their power. The stronger the person they could push around, the more intoxicating they found it. This man might not be brilliant or clever, though he’d think himself both. Truth was, he didn’t need either to be dangerous. Because he had power, and power—wielded by a fool—could crush anyone, smart or not. These types always gravitated toward positions of authority. During the time he’d been in command, Nomad had been forced to learn to spot them. If you didn’t, then…well, this happened. They grew, like a nest of rats. The worst kind of bully. Many were deeply afraid, which was why they lashed out. Those you could eventually help. This kind of man, though… Well,
it was refreshing. He’d faced far, far too many enemies with pictures from their kids in their pockets. Killed far too many people who never deserved it. But here was a man Nomad could run through with a hot poker and only feel bad for the poker. “What is it you want, offworlder?” the Cinder King asked, finally letting go of his Charred, who fell to his knees, gasping. Nice to know they could be strangled. That didn’t work on all Invested beings. “I’m a simple man,” Nomad said, helping himself—without asking—to more of the liquor. “I run. I just want to stay ahead of the people hunting me.” The Cinder King turned to the front of the cabin, where the open doorway to the pilot’s station let them see the windshield—and beyond that, the horizon, where light was growing ever brighter. “Understandable,” the Cinder King said. “I can protect you from those chasing you.” This time, Nomad almost choked on his drink as he belted out a laugh. “Yeah, all right, sure. Good luck.” “Stop laughing at me.” “Oh, don’t worry,” Nomad said, waving his fingers and finishing the drink. “I’m allowed to laugh at kings. I’ve got a card somewhere from my master, granting me authorization.” He shook his head. Damnation, that was good liquor. He almost felt something from it—a very, very light buzz—and it took a lot to get through his body’s protections. An official entered and whispered something to the Cinder King, and some of his good humor returned. A moment later, two more entered from the deck, dragging Rebeke. Her hair loose from its braid, her mouth gagged, her eyes wild as she struggled. Nomad snapped the shot glass down on the counter. The Cinder King, misinterpreting the motion, smiled more deeply. He slipped a handgun from a holster at his hip and pointed it at the young woman. Oh, the knight says, up until this moment I thought he might actually be smart. “Compassion?” the Cinder King asked Nomad. “From one such as you? I expected more from a man of your world. After all my studies, I expected you to be ruthless.” Nomad sighed. The official continued whispering to the Cinder King, and Nomad picked out the words “entire city” and “prospectors.” The Cinder King’s frown returned, and he thought for a moment—clearly aware of the area they were in. His eyes flickered to the safe on the wall where he likely kept his key, the one replaced with a fake in the chaos of the surprise attack. He was putting it together. Damnation. “You should have kept reading,” Nomad said, pulling back the man’s attention. “It’s not compassion that drives me, Cinder Fool. It’s not ruthlessness either.” He took a pointed step forward—putting himself closer to the Cinder King, and toward the line of sight between the man and Rebeke. “I really do only want to get away. But there’s one thing you need to know about my people. You promised me no tricks. And you should never break an oath to a
Rosharan.” Nomad lunged to the side as the king focused again, his gun aimed at Rebeke. At the same time, Nomad formed Auxiliary into a metal ball in his hand. The Cinder King fired. And Nomad’s thrown sphere knocked the blast from the air in a shower of sparks. NOMAD WASN’T TRULY faster than most projectiles. He missed stunts like this one more often than not. It depended on how well he could position himself, and how soon he could ready a throw before the trigger was pulled. He’d once spent weeks training to deflect bullets and had only managed about one in ten. Fortunately for Rebeke, today he was on point. It made a compelling trick when he succeeded. Even more so here, with the blast exploding into a firework of light, throwing sparks. “Idiot,” Nomad said, summoning Auxiliary back into his hand as a simple metal sphere. “I was considering your offer—until you gave me a reason to look forward to killing you.” Those in the room gaped at him. Their moment of stunned disbelief gave him a chance to lunge and grab Rebeke. The two Charred immediately blocked the exits on either side, so he shoved her through the door into the pilot’s station. Before Nomad could follow, one Charred bodychecked him, slamming him against the wall with the Cinder King’s treasure cabinet—including the tiny sunheart—causing the contents to rattle. Nomad turned and looked at this Charred; his face bore long red streaks, like someone had run burning pokers across his skin. The Charred grinned and stepped back. Nomad reflexively raised his fists—then froze against his will. This let the enemy punch him three times in succession, dropping him with ease. Nomad slammed to the metal floor and groaned softly. But there wasn’t time to stop and rest. Never seemed like there was time for that. He pushed himself into a crouch and hurled himself to his feet, dodging past the Charred who tried to pile onto him. Nomad’s quick steps brought him into the small control room with Rebeke. He immediately slammed the door, then formed Auxiliary into a door guard. Clamps at the side fuzzed and locked onto the frame around the door as he pressed it into place. When the two Charred tried to shove the door open, they found themselves completely blockaded. Not that this wooden door would last long with armed people on the other side. Rebeke backed into the cab’s control panel. “Did you just knock a bullet from the air?” she asked. Nomad grabbed the pilot’s metal stool and threw it at the windshield, cracking it. Glass, contrary to a lot of his master’s stories, was strong stuff. But the windshield rattled in its frame. Good enough. “Nomad?” she asked as he threw the stool again, which bounced off this time, then they ducked as bullets began blasting through the door. “Yes, I deflected a bullet,” he said. “I can manage it about one in ten times. Get ready to run for my cycle.” “One in ten?” she said, growing paler. “Fortunately

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