Words of Radiance

Such delightful inventions, spectacles. To live was to be a fragment of the cosmere that was experiencing itself. How could he properly experience if he couldn’t see? The Azish man who had first created these devices was long deceased, and Ym had submitted a proposal that he be considered one of the Honored Dead.

Ym lowered the piece of wood and continued to carve it, carefully whittling off the front to form a curve. Some of his colleagues bought their lasts—the wooden forms around which a cobbler built his shoes—from carpenters, but Ym had been taught to make his own. That was the old way, the way it had been done for centuries. If something had been done one way for such a long time, he figured there was probably a good reason.

Behind him stood the shadowed cubbies of a cobbler’s shop, the toes of dozens of shoes peeking out like the noses of eels in their holes. These were test shoes, used to judge size, choose materials, and decide styles so he could construct the perfect shoe to fit the foot and character of the individual. A fitting could take quite a while, assuming you did it properly.

Something moved in the dimness to his right. Ym glanced in that direction, but didn’t change his posture. The spren had been coming more often lately—specks of light, like those from a piece of crystal suspended in a sunbeam. He did not know its type, as he had never seen one like it before.

It moved across the surface of the workbench, slinking closer. When it stopped, light crept upward from it, like small plants growing or climbing from their burrows. When it moved again, those withdrew.

Ym returned to his sculpting. “It will be for making a shoe.”

The evening shop was quiet save for the scraping of his knife on wood.

“Sh-shoe… ?” a voice asked. Like that of a young woman, soft, with a kind of chiming musicality to it.

“Yes, my friend,” he said. “A shoe for young children. I find myself in need of those more and more these days.”

“Shoe,” the spren said. “For ch-children. Little people.”

Ym brushed wooden scraps off the bench for later sweeping, then set the last on the bench near the spren. It shied away, like a reflection off a mirror—translucent, really just a shimmer of light.

He withdrew his hand and waited. The spren inched forward—tentative, like a cremling creeping out of its crack after a storm. It stopped, and light grew upward from it in the shape of tiny sprouts. Such an odd sight.

“You are an interesting experience, my friend,” Ym said as the shimmer of light moved onto the last itself. “One in which I am honored to participate.”

“I…” the spren said. “I…” The spren’s form shook suddenly, then grew more intense, like light being focused. “He comes.”

Ym stood up, suddenly anxious. Something moved on the street outside. Was it that one? That watcher, in the military coat?

But no, it was just a child, peering in through the open door. Ym smiled, opening his drawer of spheres and letting more light into the room. The child shied back, just as the spren had.

The spren had vanished somewhere. It did that when others drew near.

“No need to fear,” Ym said, settling back down on his stool. “Come in. Let me get a look at you.”

The dirty young urchin peered back in. He wore only a ragged pair of trousers, no shirt, though that was common here in Iri, where both days and nights were usually warm.

The poor child’s feet were dirty and scraped.

“Now,” Ym said, “that won’t do. Come, young one, settle down. Let’s get something on those feet.” He moved out one of his smaller stools.

“They say you don’t charge nothin’,” the boy said, not moving.

“They are quite wrong,” Ym said. “But I think you will find my cost bearable.”

“Don’t have no spheres.”

“No spheres are needed. Your payment will be your story. Your experiences. I would hear them.”

“They said you was strange,” the boy said, finally walking into the shop.

“They were right,” Ym said, patting the stool.

The urchin stepped timidly up to the stool, walking with a limp he tried to hide. He was Iriali, though the grime darkened his skin and hair, both of which were golden. The skin less so—you needed the light to see it right—but the hair certainly. It was the mark of their people.

Ym motioned for the child to raise his good foot, then got out a washcloth, wetted it, and cleaned away the grime. He wasn’t about to do a fitting on feet so dirty. Noticeably, the boy tucked back the foot he’d limped on, as if trying to hide that it had a rag wrapped around it.

“So,” Ym said, “your story?”

“You’re old,” the boy said. “Older than anyone I know. Grandpa old. You must know everythin’ already. Why do you want to hear from me?”

“It is one of my quirks,” Ym said. “Come now. Let’s hear it.”