The Way of Kings (29 page)

Ishikk listened with half an ear, trying to determine what language it was. He never had been good with other kinds of languages. Why did he need them? Didn’t help with fishing or selling fish.

He
had
searched for their man. He got around a lot, visited a lot of places around the Purelake. It was one of the reasons why he didn’t want to be caught by Maib. He’d have to settle down, and that wasn’t good for catching fish. Not the rare ones, at least.

He didn’t bother wondering why they were looking for this Hoid, whoever he was. Foreigners were always looking for things they couldn’t have. Ishikk sat back, dangling his toes in the water. That felt good. Eventually, they finished their argument. They gave him some more instructions, handed him a pouch of spheres, and stepped down into the water.

Like most foreigners, they wore thick boots that came all the way up to their knees. They splashed in the water as they walked to the entrance. Ishikk followed, waving to Maib and picking up his buckets. He’d be back later in the day for an evening meal.

Maybe I
should
let her catch me,
he thought, stepping back out into the sunlight and sighing in relief.
Nu Ralik knows I’m getting old. Might be nice to relax.

His foreigners splashed down into the Purelake. Grump was last. He seemed very dissatisfied. “Where are you, Roamer? What a fool’s quest this is.” Then, he added in his own tongue,
“Alavanta kamaloo kayana.”

He splashed after his companions.

“Well, you’ve got the ‘fool’ part right,” Ishikk said with a chuckle, turning his own direction and heading off to check on his traps.

Nan Balat liked killing things.

Not people. Never people. But animals, those he could kill.

Particularly the little ones. He wasn’t sure why it made him feel better; it simply did.

He sat on the porch of his mansion, pulling the legs off a small crab one at a time. There was a satisfying rip to each one—he pulled on it lightly at first, and the animal grew stiff. Then he pulled harder, and it started to squirm. The ligament resisted, then started ripping, followed by a quick pop. The crab squirmed some more, and Nan Balat held up the leg, pinching the beast with two fingers on his other hand.

He sighed in satisfaction. Ripping a leg free soothed him, made the aches in his body retreat. He tossed the leg over his shoulder and moved on to the next one.

He didn’t like to talk about his habit. He didn’t even speak of it to Eylita. It was just something he did. You had to keep your sanity somehow.

He finished with the legs, then stood up, leaning on his cane, looking out over the Davar gardens, which were made up of stonework walls covered with different kinds of vines. They were beautiful, though Shallan had been the only one who truly appreciated them. This area of Jah Keved—to the west and south of Alethkar, of higher elevation and broken by mountains such as the Horneater Peaks—had a profusion of vines. They grew on everything, covering the mansion, growing over the steps. Out in the wilds, they hung from trees, grew over rocky expanses, as ubiquitous as grass was in other areas of Roshar.

Balat walked to the edge of the porch. Some wild songlings began to sing in the distance, scraping their ridged shells. They each played a different beat and notes, though they couldn’t really be called melodies. Melodies were things of humans, not animals. But each one
was
a song, and at times they seemed to sing back and forth to one another.

Balat walked down the steps one at a time, the vines shaking and pulling away before his feet fell. It had been nearly six months since Shallan’s departure. This morning, they’d had word from her via spanreed that she’d succeeded in the first part of her plan, becoming Jasnah Kholin’s ward. And so, his baby sister—who before this had never left their estates—was preparing to rob the most important woman in the world.

Walking down the steps was depressingly hard work for him.
Twenty-three years old,
he thought,
and already a cripple.
He still felt a constant, latent ache. The break had been bad, and the surgeon had nearly decided to cut off the entire leg. Perhaps he could be thankful that hadn’t proven necessary, though he would always walk with a cane.

Scrak was playing with something in the sitting green, a place where cultivated grass was grown and kept free of vines. The large axehound rolled about, gnawing at the object, antennae pulled back flat against her skull.

“Scrak,” Balat said, hobbling forward, “what have you got there, girl?”

The axehound looked up at her master, antennae cocking upward. The hound trumped with two echoing voices overlapping one another, then went back to playing.

Blasted creature,
Balat thought fondly,
never would obey properly.
He’d been breeding axehounds since his youth, and had discovered—as had many before him—that the smarter an animal was, the more likely it was to disobey. Oh, Scrak was loyal, but she’d ignore you on the little things. Like a young child trying to prove her independence.

As he got closer, he saw that Scrak had managed to catch a songling. The fist-sized creature was shaped like a peaked disc with four arms that reached out from the sides and scraped rhythms along the top. Four squat legs underneath normally held it to a rock wall, though Scrak had chewed those off. She had two of the arms off too, and had managed to crack the shell. Balat almost took it away to pull the other two arms off, but decided it was best to let Scrak have her fun.

Scrak set the songling down and looked up at Balat, her antennae rising inquisitively. She was sleek and lean, six legs extending before her as she sat on her haunches. Axehounds didn’t have shells or skin; instead, their body was covered with some fusion of the two, smooth to the touch and more pliable than true carapace, but harder than skin and made of interlocking sections. The axehound’s angular face seemed curious, her deep black eyes regarding Balat. She trumped softly.

Balat smiled, reaching down and scratching behind the axehound’s ear holes. The animal leaned against him—she probably weighed as much as he did. The bigger axehounds came up to a man’s waist, though Scrak was of a smaller, quicker breed.

The songling quivered and Scrak pounced on it eagerly, crunching at its shell with her strong outer mandibles.

“Am I a coward, Scrak?” Balat asked, sitting down on a bench. He set his cane aside and snatched a small crab that had been hiding on the side of the bench, its shell having turned white to match the stone.

He held up the squirming animal. The green’s grass had been bred to be less timid, and it poked out of its holes only a few moments after he passed. Other exotic plants bloomed, poking out of shells or holes in the ground, and soon patches of red, orange, and blue waved in the wind around him. The area around the axehound remained bare, of course. Scrak was having far too much fun with her prey, and she kept even the cultivated plants hidden in their burrows.

“I couldn’t have gone to chase Jasnah,” Balat said, starting to pull the crab’s legs off. “Only a woman could get close enough to her to steal the Soulcaster. We decided that. Besides, someone needs to stay back and care for the needs of the house.”

The excuses were hollow. He
did
feel like a coward. He pulled off a few more legs, but it was unsatisfying. The crab was too small, and the legs came off too easily.

“This plan probably won’t even work,” he said, taking off the last of the legs. Odd, looking at a creature like this when it had no legs. The crab was still alive. Yet how could you know it? Without the legs to wiggle, the creature seemed as dead as a stone.

The arms,
he thought,
we wave them about to make us seem alive. That’s what they’re good for.
He put his fingers between the halves of the crab’s shell and began to pry them apart. This, at least, had a nice feeling of resistance to it.

They were a broken family. Years of suffering their father’s brutal temper had driven Asha Jushu to vice and Tet Wikim to despair. Only Balat had escaped unscathed. Balat and Shallan. She’d been left alone, never touched. At times, Balat had hated her for that, but how could you truly hate someone like Shallan? Shy, quiet, delicate.

I should never have let her go,
he thought.
There should have been another way.
She’d never manage on her own; she was probably terrified. It was a wonder she’d done as much as she had.

He tossed the pieces of crab over his shoulder.
If only Helaran had survived.
Their eldest brother—then known as Nan Helaran, as he’d been the first son—had stood up to their father repeatedly. Well, he was dead now, and so was their father. They’d left behind a family of cripples.

“Balat!” a voice cried. Wikim appeared on the porch. The younger man was past his recent bout of melancholy, it appeared.

“What?” Balat said, standing.

Wikim rushed down the steps, hurrying up to him, vines—then grass—pulling back before him. “We have a problem.”

“How large a problem?”

“Pretty big, I’d say. Come on.”

Szeth-son-son-Vallano, Truthless of Shinovar, sat on the wooden tavern floor, lavis beer slowly soaking through his brown trousers.

Grimy, worn, and fraying, his clothing was far different from the simple—yet elegant—whites he had worn over five years before when he’d assassinated the king of Alethkar.

Head bowed, hands in his lap, he carried no weapons. He hadn’t summoned his Shardblade in years, and it felt equally long since he’d had a bath. He did not complain. If he looked like a wretch, people treated him as a wretch. One did not ask a wretch to assassinate people.

“So he’ll do whatever you say?” asked one of the mine workers sitting at the table. The man’s clothing was little better than Szeth’s, covered with so much dirt and dust that it was difficult to tell grimy skin from grimy cloth. There were four of them, holding ceramic cups. The room smelled of mud and sweat. The ceiling was low, the windows—on the leeward side only—mere slots. The table was precariously held together with several leather straps, as the wood was cracked down the middle.

Took—Szeth’s current master—set his cup down on the table’s tilted side. It sagged under the weight of his arm. “Yeah, he sure will. Hey, kurp, look at me.”

Szeth looked up. “Kurp” meant child in the local Bav dialect. Szeth was accustomed to such pejorative labels. Though he was in his thirty-fifth year—and his seventh year since being named Truthless—his people’s large, round eyes, shorter stature, and tendency toward baldness led Easterners to claim they looked like children.

“Stand up,” Took said.

Szeth did so.

“Jump up and down.”

Szeth complied.

“Pour Ton’s beer on your head.”

Szeth reached for it.

“Hey!” Ton said, pulling the cup away. “None of that, now! Oi ain’t done with this yet!”

“If you were,” said Took, “he couldn’t right pour it on his head, could he?”

“Get ’im to do something else, Took,” Ton griped.

“All right.” Took pulled out his boot knife and tossed it to Szeth. “Kurp, cut your arm up.”

“Took…” said one of the other men, a sniffly man named Amark. “That ain’t right, you know it.”

Took didn’t rescind the order, so Szeth complied, taking the knife and cutting at the flesh of his arm. Blood seeped out around the dirty blade.

“Cut your throat,” Took said.

“Now, Took!” Amark said, standing. “Oi won’t—”

“Oh hush, you,” Took said. Several groups of men from other tables were watching now. “You’ll see. Kurp, cut your throat.”

“I am forbidden to take my own life,” Szeth said softly in the Bav language. “As Truthless, it is the nature of my suffering to be forbidden the taste of death by my own hand.”

Amark settled back down, looking sheepish.

“Dustmother,” Ton said, “he always talks like that?”

“Like what?” Took asked, taking a gulp from his mug.

“Smooth words, so soft and proper. Like a lighteyes.”

“Yeah,” Took said. “He’s like a slave, only better ’cuz he’s a Shin. He don’t run or talk back or anything. Don’t have to pay him, neither. He’s like a parshman, but smarter. Worth a right many spheres, Oi’d say.” He eyed the other men. “Could take him to the mines with you to work, and collect his pay. He’d do things you don’t wanna. Muck out the privy, whitewash the home. All kinds of useful stuff.”