Kaladin’s mother gave him an embrace, then went into the other room to look over the books. Kaladin finally let himself relax, settling into a chair in the surgery room.
Syl landed on his shoulder and took the form of a young woman in a full havah, with her hair pinned up in the Alethi fashion. She folded her arms and glared up at him expectantly.
“What?” he asked.
“You going to tell them?” she said. “Or do I have to?”
“Now’s not the time.”
“Why not?”
He failed to come up with a good reason. She kept bullying him with her frustratingly insistent spren stare—she didn’t blink unless she pointedly decided to, so he’d never met anyone else who could glare quite like Syl. Once she’d even enlarged her eyes to disturbing proportions to deliver a particularly important point.
Eventually Kaladin stood, causing her to streak off as a ribbon of light. “Father,” he said. “You need to know something.”
Lirin turned from his study of the medications, and Hesina peeked her head into the room, curious.
“I’m going to be leaving the military,” Kaladin said. “I need a break from the fighting, and Dalinar commanded it. So I thought maybe I would take the room beside Oroden’s. I … might need to find something different to do with my life.”
Hesina raised her hand to her lips again. Lirin stopped dead, going pale, as if he’d seen a Voidbringer. Then his face burst with the widest grin Kaladin had ever seen on him. He strode over and seized Kaladin by the arms.
“That’s what this is about, isn’t it?” Lirin said. “The surgery room, the supplies, that talk of the clinic. You’ve realized it. You finally understand that I’ve been right. You’re going to become a surgeon like we always dreamed!”
“I…”
That was the answer, of course. The one Kaladin had been purposely avoiding. He’d considered the ardents, he’d considered the generals, and he’d considered running away.
The answer was in the face of his father, a face that a part of Kaladin dreaded. Deep down, Kaladin had known there was only one place he could go once the spear was taken from him.
“Yes,” Kaladin said. “You’re right. You’ve always been right, Father. I guess … it’s time to continue my training.”
The world becomes an increasingly dangerous place, and so I come to the crux of my argument. We cannot afford to keep secrets from one another any longer. The Thaylen artifabrians have private techniques relating to how they remove Stormlight from gems and create fabrials around extremely large stones.
I beg the coalition and the good people of Thaylenah to acknowledge our collective need. I have taken the first step by opening my research to all scholars.
I pray you will see the wisdom in doing the same.
—Lecture on fabrial mechanics presented by Navani Kholin to the coalition of monarchs, Urithiru, Jesevan, 1175
“I’m sorry, Brightness,” Rushu said, holding up several schematics as they walked around the crystalline pillar deep within Urithiru. “Weeks of study, and I can’t find any other matches.”
Navani sighed, pausing beside a particular section of the pillar. Four garnets stood out, the same construction used in the suppression fabrial. The layouts were too precise, too exact, to be a coincidence.
It had seemed like a breakthrough, and she’d set Rushu and the others comparing all other known fabrials to the pillar, searching for any that seemed similar. That once-promising lead, unfortunately, had reached another dead end.
“There’s another problem,” Rushu said.
“Only one?” When the young ardent frowned, Navani waved for her to continue. “What is it?”
“We inspected the suppression fabrial in Shadesmar, as you asked,” Rushu said. “Your theory is correct, it manifests a spren in Shadesmar as Soulcasters do. But on this side, there is no sign of that spren in the gemstones.”
“What’s the problem, then?” Navani asked. “My theory is correct.”
“Brightness, the spren that runs the suppression device … has been corrupted, very similar to…”
“To Renarin’s spren,” Navani said.
“Indeed. The spren refused to talk to us, but didn’t seem as insensate as the ones in Soulcasters. This reinforces your theory that ancient fabrials—things like the pumps, the Oathgates, and the Soulcasters—somehow imprisoned their spren in the Cognitive Realm. When we pressed it, the spren closed its eyes pointedly. It seems to be working with the enemy deliberately, which raises questions about your nephew’s spren. Dare we trust it?”
“We have no reason to assume that one spren serving the enemy means all of its type do,” Navani said. “We should assume they each have individual loyalties, like humans.”
She had to admit, however, that Renarin’s spren made her uncomfortable. Seeing the future? Well, she had already tied her mind in knots thinking about Glys. Instead, she tried to focus on the nature of this fabrial’s spren.
You capture spren, the strange person had said to her via spanreed. You imprison them. Hundreds of them. You are a monster. You must stop.
Weeks had passed without a quiver from the spanreed. Was it possible this person knew how to create fabrials the old way, which appeared to use sapient spren, locking them in the Cognitive Realm? Perhaps this method was preferable and more humane. The magnificent spren that controlled the Oathgates didn’t seem to begrudge their attachment to the devices, for example, and were fully capable of interacting.
“For now, study this,” Navani said to Rushu, tapping her knuckles against the majestic gemstone pillar. “See if you can find a way to activate this specific group of garnets. In the past, the tower was protected from the Fused. Old writings agree on this fact. This part of the pillar must be why.”
“Yes…” Rushu said. “A fine theory, and a fine suggestion. If we focus on this one piece of the pillar, which we know is a distinct fabrial, maybe we can activate it.”
“Also try resetting the suppression fabrial we stole. It smothered Kaladin’s abilities, but let the Fused use their powers. There might be a way to reverse the device’s effects.”
Rushu nodded in her absentminded way. Navani continued to stare up at the pillar, which sparkled with the light of a thousand facets. What was she missing? Why couldn’t she activate it?
She handed the schematic to Rushu and began walking from the room. “We haven’t been giving enough thought to the tower’s security,” she said. “Clearly the ancients were worried about incursions by the Fused—and we experienced one already.”
“The Oathgates are under constant guard now,” Rushu said, hurrying to keep up. “And authentication by two different orders of Radiants is required for activation. It seems unlikely the enemy could do what they did before.”
“Yes, but what if they came in another way?” The spren she’d interviewed claimed that the Masked Ones—Fused with Lightweaving powers—couldn’t enter the tower. Its ancient protections had some lingering effects, like the changes in pressure or the warmth. Indeed, this seemed proven, as while Masked Ones sometimes slipped into human camps, they had never come to Urithiru.
At least so far as Navani could tell. Perhaps they’d just been very careful. “The enemy,” Navani said to Rushu, “has abilities we can only guess at—and the powers we do know about are dangerous enough. Masked Ones could be among us and we’d never know it. You or I could be one of them right now.”
“That … is a highly disturbing thought, Brightness,” Rushu said. “What could we possibly do? Other than fixing the tower’s defenses.”
“Gather a team of our best abstract thinkers. Assign them the task of creating protocols to identify hidden Fused.”
“Understood,” Rushu said. “Dali would be perfect for that. Oh, and Sebasinar, and…” She slowed, pulling out her notebook, oblivious to how she was standing in the middle of the corridor, forcing people to step around her.
Navani smiled fondly, but left Rushu to her task
, instead turning right and entering one of the ancient “library” rooms. When first studying the tower, they’d found dozens of gemstones in this room, all encoded with short messages from the ancient Knights Radiant.
Over the months, the room had transformed from a dedicated study of those gemstones into a laboratory where Navani had organized her finest engineers. She had been around enough intelligent people to know they worked best in an encouraging environment where study and discovery were rewarded.
Inside this room, concentrationspren moved like ripples in the sky, and a few logicspren—like little stormclouds—hovered in the air. Engineers worked on dozens of projects: some practical designs, others more fanciful.
As soon as she stepped in, an excited young engineer scrambled up. “Brightness!” he said. “It’s working!”
“That’s wonderful,” she said, struggling to remember his name. Young, bald, barely a beard to speak of. What project had he been on?
He grabbed her by the arm and towed her to the side, ignoring propriety. She didn’t mind. It was a mark of pride to her that so many of the engineers forgot she was anything other than the person who funded their projects.
She spotted Falilar at the worktable, and that jogged her memory. The young ardent was his nephew, Tomor, a darkeyed youth who wanted to follow his uncle’s path of scholarship. She’d assigned the two one of her more serious designs, a set of new lifts that worked on the same principle as the flying platform.
“Brightness,” Falilar said, bowing to her. “The design requires a great deal more tweaking. I fear it’s going to require too much manpower to be efficient.”
“But it’s working?” Navani said.
“Yes!” Tomor said, bringing her a device shaped like a jewelry box, around six inches square, with a handle on one side. The handle—like the one you might use to pull open a drawer—held a trigger for the index finger on the inside. A button on the top was the box’s only other feature, except for a set of straps that she took for a wrist brace.
Navani accepted the box and peeked in through the access panel. There were two separate fabrial constructions inside. One she recognized for a simple conjoining ruby, like those used in spanreeds. The other was more experimental, a practical application of the designs she’d given Tomor and Falilar: a device for redirecting force, and for quickly engaging or disengaging alignment with the conjoined fabrial.
It wasn’t exactly the same method that kept the Fourth Bridge flying. It was more a cousin to that technology.
“We decided to make the prototype an individual device,” Falilar said, “as you wanted something portable.”
“Here!” Tomor said. “Let me get the workers ready!” He scrambled over to a couple of soldiers at the side of the room, assigned to run errands for the engineers. Tomor got them into position holding a rope, like they were about to engage in a tug-of-war—only instead of a rival team on the other end, their rope was attached to a different fabrial box on the floor.
“Go ahead, Brightness!” Tomor said. “Point your box to the side, then conjoin the rubies!”
Navani strapped the device to her wrist, then swung her arm around, pointing it to the side. Right now, the rubies weren’t conjoined, allowing the box to move freely. Once she pressed the button, however, the device snapped into conjoinment with the second box, the one on the floor attached to the rope.
Next, she pulled the trigger with her index finger. This made the ruby flash brightly for the soldiers, who began pulling their rope. They moved their box along the floor, and the force was transferred across the space to Navani. And she was yanked—by the box and handle strapped to her wrist—steadily across the room.
It was a common application of conjoined fabrials. The big difference here was not in the fact that force was being transferred, but the direction of the transfer. The men were pulling the box backward along the wall, moving steadily eastward. Navani was being pulled forward along the axis where she’d pointed her arm—a random direction south by southwest.
She flashed the light to warn the soldiers, then disjoined the fabrials, so she stopped skidding. The men were ready for this, and prepared as she pointed her hand in a different direction. When she conjoined again and flashed the ruby for the men, they began pulling—and she moved that way instead.
“It’s working wonderfully,” Navani said, skidding on her heels. “The ability to redirect the force in any direction—on the fly—is going to have huge practical applications.”
“Yes, Brightness,” Falilar said, walking beside her, “I agree—but the manpower issue is a serious one. It already requires the work of hundreds to keep the Fourth Bridge in the air and moving. How many more can we spare?”
Fortunately, that was the exact problem Navani had been trying to solve. This is working, she thought with excitement, turning off the fabrial, then having the men pull her in a third direction. Making the Fourth Bridge rise into the air had not been terribly difficult—the truly hard part had been getting it to move laterally after raising it into the air.
The secret to making the Fourth Bridge fly—and to making this handheld device work—involved a rare metal called aluminum. It was what the Fused used for weapons that could block Shardblades, but the metal didn’t just interfere with Shardblades—it interfered with all kinds of Stormlight mechanics. Interactions with it during the expedition into Aimia earlier in the year had led Navani to order experiments, and Falilar himself had made the breakthrough.
The trick was to use a specific fabrial cage, made from aluminum, around the conjoined rubies. The details were complicated, but with the proper caging, an artifabrian could make a conjoined ruby ignore motion made by the other along specific vectors or planes. So, in application, the Fourth Bridge could use two different dummy ships to move. One to go up and down, the other to go laterally.
The complexities of that excited Navani and her engineers, and had led to the new device she now wore. She could move her arm in any direction she wanted, conjoin the fabrial, then direct force through it in a specific direction.
Momentum and energy were conserved per natural conjoined fabrial mechanics. Her scientists had tested this a hundred different ways, and some applications quickly drained the fabrial—but they’d known about those from ancient experiments. Still, there were thoughts whirring in her head. There were ways they could use this to directly translate Stormlight energy into mechanical energy.
And she’d been thinking of other ways to replace the manpower needs.…
“Brightness?” Falilar said. “You seem concerned. I’m sorry if the device has more problems than you expected. It’s an early iteration.”
“Falilar, you worry too much,” Navani said. “The device is amazing.”
“But … the manpower problem…”
Navani smiled. “Come with me.”
* * *
A short time later, Navani led Falilar into a section of the twentieth floor of the tower. Here she had another team working—though this one was made up of more laborers and fewer engineers. They’d located a strange shaft, one of many odd features of the tower. This one plummeted through the tower past its basements, eventually connecting to a cavern deep beneath.
Though the original purpose of it baffled their surveyors and scientists, Navani had a plan for the shaft. It had involved setting up several steel weights here, each as heavy as three men, suspended on ropes.
She nodded to the workers as they bowed, several holding up sphere lanterns for her and the ardents as they stepped up to the deep hole, which was a good six feet across. Navani peered over the side, and Falilar joined her, gripping the railing with nervous fingers.
“How far down does it go?” he asked.
“Far past the basement,” Navani said, holding up the box he had constructed. “Let’s say that, instead of men pulling a rope, we bolted the other half of this fabrial to one of these weights. Then we could connect the device’s trigger to these pulleys at the top—so that th
e trigger dropped the weight.”
“You’d get your arm pulled off!” Falilar said. “You’d be yanked hard in whatever direction you’ve pointed the device.”
“Resistance on the pulley line could modulate the initial force,” Navani said. “Maybe we could make it so the strength of the trigger pull determines how fast the line is let out—and how fast you are propelled.”
“A clever application,” Falilar said, wiping his brow as he glanced at the dark shaft. “It doesn’t do anything about the manpower issue though. Someone has to get those weights back up here.”
“Captain?” Navani asked the soldier leading the crew on this floor.
“The windmills have been set up as requested,” the man said—he was missing an arm, the right sleeve of his uniform sewn up. Dalinar was always on the lookout for ways to keep his wounded officers involved in the important work of the war effort. “I’m told they’re rated for storms, though of course no device can be perfectly protected in a highstorm.”
“What’s this?” Falilar asked.
“Windmills inside steel casings,” Navani said, “with gemstones on the blades—each one conjoined with a ruby on the pulley system up above. The storm blows, and these five weights are ratcheted to the top, potential energy stored for later use.”
“Ah…” Falilar said. “Brightness, I see.…”
“Every few days,” Navani said, “the storms gift us an enormous outpouring of kinetic strength. Winds that level forests; lightning as bright as the sun.” She patted one of the ropes with the weights. “We simply need to find a way to store that energy. This could power a fleet of ships. Enough pulleys, weights, and windmills … and we could fly an air force around the world, all using the harnessed energy of the highstorms.”
“How…” Falilar said, his eyes alight. “How do we make this happen, Brightness? What can I do?”
“Testing,” she said, “and iterations. We need systems that can withstand the strain of repeated use. We need more flexibility, more streamlining. Your device here. Can you install a switching mechanism so we can move between fabrials on these five weights? A lift that could go up five times before needing to be recharged is far more useful than one that can go up only once.”
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