Words of Radiance

The chasmfiend crashed down, chitin snapping, legs spasming. Shallan cried out, freehand to mouth, from where she hid behind a boulder, her skin and clothing turned deep black.

The chasmfiend had fallen on Kaladin.

Shallan dropped her paper—it bore a drawing of her and another of Kaladin—and scrambled across the rocks, dismissing the blackness around her. She’d needed to be close to the fighting for the illusions to work. Better if she’d been able to send them on Pattern, but that was problematic because—

She stopped in front of the still-twitching beast, a heap of flesh and carapace like a fallen avalanche of stone. She shifted from one foot to another, uncertain what to do. “Kaladin?” she called out. Her voice was frail in the darkness.

Stop it, she told herself. No timidity. You’re past that. Taking a deep breath, she moved forward, picking her way over the huge armored legs. She tried to shove aside a claw, but it was far too heavy for her, so she climbed over it and skidded down the other side.

She froze as she heard something. The chasmfiend’s head lay nearby, massive eyes cloudy. Spren started to rise from it, like trails of smoke. The same ones as before, only… leaving? She held her light closer.

The bottom half of Kaladin’s body protruded from the chasmfiend’s mouth. Almighty above! Shallan gasped, then scrambled forward. She tried, with difficulty, to pull Kaladin from the closed maw before summoning her Shardblade and cutting away at several mandibles.

“Kaladin?” she asked, nervously peering into the thing’s mouth from the side, where she’d removed a mandible.

“Ow,” a weak voice trailed back to her.

Alive! “Hang on!” she said, hacking at the thing’s head, careful not to cut too close to Kaladin. Violet ichor spurted out, coating her arms, smelling like wet mold.

“This is kind of uncomfortable…” Kaladin said.

“You’re alive,” Shallan said. “Stop complaining.”

He was alive. Oh, Stormfather. Alive. She would have a whole heap of prayers to burn when they got back.

“Smells awful in here,” Kaladin said weakly. “Almost as bad as you do.”

“Be glad,” Shallan said as she worked. “Here, I have a reasonably perfect specimen of a chasmfiend—with only a minor case of being dead—and I’m chopping it apart for you instead of studying it.”

“I’m eternally grateful.”

“How did you get in its mouth, anyway?” Shallan asked, prying off a piece of carapace with a sickening sound. She tossed it aside.

“Stabbed it through the roof of its mouth,” Kaladin said, “into the brain. Only way I could figure to kill the blasted thing.”

She leaned down, reaching her hand through the large hole she’d opened. With some work—and with a little cutting at the front mandibles—she managed to help Kaladin wiggle out the side of the mouth. Covered in ichor and blood, face pale from apparent blood loss, he looked like death itself.

“Storms,” she whispered, as he lay back on the rocks.

“Bind my leg,” Kaladin said weakly. “The rest of me should be fine. Heal right up…”

She looked at the mess of his leg, and shivered. It looked like… Like… Balat…

Kaladin wouldn’t be walking on that leg anytime soon. Oh, Stormfather,

she thought, cutting off the skirt of her dress at the knees. She wrapped his leg tightly, as he instructed. He seemed to think he didn’t need a tourniquet. She listened to him; he’d probably bound far more wounds than she had.

She cut the sleeve off her right arm and used that to bind a second wound on his side, where the chasmfiend had started to rip him in half as it bit. Then she settled down next to him, feeling drained and cold, legs and arm now exposed to the chill air of the chasm bottom.

Kaladin took a deep breath, resting on the rock ground, eyes closed. “Two hours until the highstorm,” he whispered.

Shallan checked the sky. It was almost dark. “If that long,” she whispered. “We beat it, but we’re dead anyway, aren’t we?”

“Seems unfair,” he said. Then he groaned, sitting up.

“Shouldn’t you—”

“Bah. I’ve had far worse wounds than this.”

She raised an eyebrow at him as he opened his eyes. He looked dizzy.

“I have,” he insisted. “That’s not just soldier bravado.”

“This bad?” she asked. “How often?”

“Twice,” he admitted. He looked over the hulking form of the chasmfiend. “We actually killed the thing.”

“Sad, I know,” she said, feeling depressed. “It was beautiful.”

“It would be more beautiful if it hadn’t tried to eat me.”

“From my perspective,” Shallan noted, “it didn’t try, it succeeded.”

“Nonsense,” Kaladin said. “It didn’t manage to swallow me. Doesn’t count.” He held his hand out to her, as if for help getting to his feet.

“You want to try to keep going?”

“You expect me to just lie here in the chasm until the waters come?”

“No, but…” She looked up. The chasmfiend was big. Maybe twenty feet tall, as it lay on its side. “What if we climbed up that thing, then tried to scale up to the top of the plateau?” The farther westward they’d gone, the shallower the chasms had grown.