Words of Radiance

The spren hovered nearby in his three-dimensional form full of twisting lines and angles. Sketching him had proven difficult, as whenever she looked closely at a section of his form, she found that it had so much detail as to defy proper depiction.

“Mmm?” Pattern asked in his humming voice.

Shallan climbed off her bed and tossed the book onto her white-painted writing desk. She knelt beside Jasnah’s trunk, digging through it before coming out with a map of Roshar. It was ancient, and not terribly accurate; Alethkar was depicted as far too large and the world as a whole was misshapen, with trade routes emphasized. It clearly predated modern methods of survey and cartography. Still, it was important, for it showed the Silver Kingdoms as they had supposedly existed during the time of the Knights Radiant.

“Urithiru,” Shallan said, pointing toward a shining city depicted on the map as the center of everything. It wasn’t in Alethkar, or Alethela as it had been known at the time. The map put it in the middle of the mountains near what might have been modern Jah Keved. However, Jasnah’s annotations said other maps from the time placed it elsewhere. “How could they not know where their capital was, the center of the orders of knights? Why does every map argue with its fellows?”

“Mmmmmm…” Pattern said, thoughtful. “Perhaps many had heard of it, but never visited.”

“Cartographers as well?” Shallan asked. “And the kings who commissioned these maps? Surely some of them had been to the place. Why on Roshar would it be so difficult to pinpoint?”

“They wished to keep its location secret, perhaps?”

Shallan stuck the map to the wall using some weevilwax from Jasnah’s supplies. She backed away, folding her arms. She hadn’t dressed for the day yet, and wore her dressing gown, hands uncovered.

“If that’s the case,” Shallan said, “they did too good a job of it.” She dug out a few other maps from the time, created by other kingdoms. In each, Shallan noted, the country of origin was presented far larger than it should have been. She stuck these to the wall too.

“Each shows Urithiru in a different location,” Shallan said. “Notably close to their own lands, yet not in their lands.”

“Different languages on each,” Pattern said. “Mmm… There are patterns here.” He started to try sounding them out.

Shallan smiled. Jasnah had told her that several of them were thought to have been written in the Dawnchant, a dead language. Scholars had been trying for years to—

“Behardan King… something I do not understand… order, perhaps…” Pattern said. “Map? Yes, that would likely be map. So the next is perhaps to draw… draw… something I do not understand…”

“You’re reading it?”

“It is a pattern.”

“You’re reading the Dawnchant.”

“Not well.”

“You’re reading the Dawnchant!” Shallan exclaimed. She scrambled up to the map beside which Pattern hovered, then rested her fingers on the script at the bottom. “Behardan, you said? Maybe Bajerden… Nohadon himself.”

“Bajerden? Nohadon? Must people have so many names?”

“One is honorific,” Shallan said. “His original name wasn’t considered symmetrical enough. Well, I guess it wasn’t really symmetrical at all, so the ardents gave him a new one centuries ago.”

“But… the new one isn’t symmetrical either.”

“The h sound can be for any letter,” Shallan said absently. “We write it as the symmetrical letter, to make the word balance, but add a diacritical mark to indicate it sounds like an h so the word is easier to say.”

“That— One can’t just pretend that a word is symmetrical when it isn’t!”

Shallan ignored his sputtering, instead staring at the alien script of what was supposedly the Dawnchant. If we do find Jasnah’s city, Shallan thought, and if it does have records, they might be in this language.

“We need to see how much of the Dawnchant you can translate.”

“I did not read it,” Pattern said, annoyed. “I postulated a few words. The name I could translate because of the sounds of the cities above.”

“But those aren’t written in the Dawnchant!”

“The scripts are derived from one another,” Pattern said. “Obviously.”

“So obvious that no human scholar has ever figured it out.”

“You are not as good with patterns,” he said, sounding smug. “You are abstract. You think in lies and tell them to yourselves. That is fascinating, but it is not good for patterns.”

You are abstract… Shallan rounded the bed and slipped a book from the pile there, one written by the scholar Ali-daughter-Hasweth of Shinovar. The Shin scholars were among the most interesting to read, as their perspectives on the rest of Roshar could be so frank, so different.