Rhythm of War (9781429952040)

by Brandon Sanderson

  In the meantime, Navani’s job was to activate the Sibling’s fail-safe. She hurried to collect her scribes, hoping they wouldn’t balk too much at climbing over the corpses.

  * * *

  Kaladin ducked into a room, carrying an armful of blankets. He didn’t recognize the young family inside—father, mother, two toddlers—so they had to be refugees who had fled to Hearthstone.

  The young family had done much to make this small, windowless room their own. Both walls were covered in Herdazian sand paintings, and the floor was painted in a large and intricate glyph.

  Kaladin didn’t like the way they cringed as he entered, the children whimpering. If you don’t want people to cringe when they see you, he thought, act less like a ruffian and more like a surgeon. He never had possessed his father’s gentle grace, that unassuming way that wasn’t weak, but also rarely seemed threatening.

  “Sorry,” Kaladin said, shutting the door behind him. “I know you were expecting my father. You wanted blankets?”

  “Yes,” the wife said, rising and taking them from him. “Thank you. It cold.”

  “I know,” Kaladin said. “Something’s wrong with the tower, so heating fabrials aren’t working.”

  The man said something in Herdazian. Syl, sitting on Kaladin’s shoulder, whispered the interpretation—but the woman translated right afterward anyway.

  “Dark ones in the corridors,” the woman said. “They … are staying?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Kaladin said. “For now, it’s best to remain in your rooms. Here, I brought water and some rations. Soulcast, I’m afraid. We’ll send someone around tomorrow to gather chamber pots, if it comes to that.”

  He slung his pack onto his shoulder after getting out the food and water. Then he slipped back out into the corridor. He had three more rooms to visit before meeting up with his father. “What time is it?” he asked Syl.

  “Late,” she said. “A few hours to dawn.”

  Kaladin had been working to deliver blankets and water for a good hour or so. He knew that fighting was still going on far below, that Navani was holding out. The enemy, however, had quickly secured this floor, leaving guards and pushing downward to press against the Alethi defenders.

  So while the tower wasn’t yet lost, Kaladin’s floor felt quiet. Syl turned around and lifted into the air, shimmering and becoming formless like a cloud. “I keep seeing things, Kaladin. Streaks of red. Voidspren I think, patrolling the halls.”

  “You can see them even if they’re invisible to humans, right?”

  She nodded. “But they can see me too. My cognitive aspect.”

  A part of him wanted to ask further. Why, for instance, could Rock always see her? Was he somehow part spren? Lift seemed to be able to do it too, though she wouldn’t speak about it. So was she part Horneater? The other Edgedancers didn’t have the ability.

  The questions wouldn’t form on his lips. He was distracted, and honestly he was exhausted. He let the thoughts slip away as he moved to the next room on his list. These ones would probably be extra frightened, having not heard anything since—

  “Kaladin,” Syl hissed.

  He stopped immediately, then looked up, noting a stormform Regal walking down the hallway with a sphere lantern in one hand, a sword on his hip. “You there,” he said, speaking with a rhythm, but otherwise no hint of an accent. “Why are you out of your rooms?”

  “I’m a surgeon,” Kaladin said. “I was told by one of the Fused that I could check on our people. I’m delivering food and water.”

  The singer sized him up, then waved for him to open his pack and show what was inside. Kaladin obliged, and didn’t look toward Syl, who was doing her windspren act—flitting about and pretending she didn’t belong with a Radiant—just in case.

  The singer inspected the rations, then studied Kaladin.

  Looking at my arms, my chest, Kaladin thought. Wondering why a surgeon is built like a soldier. At least his brands were covered by his long hair.

  “Return to your rooms,” the man said.

  “The others will be frightened,” Kaladin said. “You could have hysterical people on your hands—chaos that would interfere with your troops.”

  “And how often did you check on the parshmen of your village, when they were frightened?” the singer asked. “When they were forced into dark rooms, locked away and ignored? Did you spare any concern for them, surgeon?”

  Kaladin bit off a response. This wasn’t the kind of taunt where the speaker wanted an answer. Instead he looked down.

  The singer, in turn, stepped forward and snapped his hand at Kaladin to strike him. Kaladin moved without thinking, raising his hand to catch the singer’s wrist before it connected. He felt a small jolt of something when he touched the carapace-backed hand.

  The singer grinned. “A surgeon, you say?”

  “You’ve never heard of a battlefield medic?” Kaladin said. “I’ve trained with the men, so I can handle myself. But you can ask anyone in this town if I’m the surgeon’s son, and they’ll confirm it.”

  The singer shoved at Kaladin’s hand, trying to throw him off balance, but Kaladin’s stance was solid. He met the red eyes, and saw the smile in them. The eagerness. This creature wanted a fight. Likely he was angry he’d been posted to something as boring as patrolling halls on what was to have been a daring and dangerous mission. He’d love nothing more than to have an excuse for a little excitement.

  Kaladin’s grip tightened on the man’s hand. His heartbeat sped up, and he found himself reaching for the Stormlight at his belt. Draw in a breath, suck it in, end this farce. Enemies were invading the tower, and he was delivering blankets?

  He held those red eyes with his own. He heard his heart thundering. Then he forced himself to look away and let the singer shove him into the wall, then trip him with a sweep to his legs. The creature loomed over him, and Kaladin kept his eyes down. You learned to do that, when you were a slave.

  The creature snorted and stomped away without another word, leaving Kaladin. He felt tense, alert, like he often did before a battle—his fatigue washed away. He wanted to act.

  Instead he continued on his way, delivering comfort to the people of Hearthstone.

  In truth, it would be a combination of a Vessel’s craftiness and the power’s Intent that we should fear most.

  Navani and her timid attendants soon left the broad hallway scattered with corpses and entered a series of corridors with darkened lanterns on the walls. The broken latches bespoke thieves with crowbars getting at the spheres inside. For some people, no nightmare was terrible enough—no war bloody enough—to discourage some creative personal enrichment.

  The sounds of screams and echoes of thunder faded. Navani felt as if she were entering the mythical centerbeat—the heart of a highstorm spoken of by some poor wanderers trapped within its winds. A moment when for reasons inexplicable, the wind stopped and all became still.

  She eventually reached the place where the Sibling had told her to go—a specific intersection among these twisting corridors. Though no part of the first level went completely unused, this area was among the least trafficked. The corridors here made a maze of frustrating design, and they used the small rooms for various storage dumps.

  “Now what?” asked Elthebar, the stormwarden. Navani wasn’t particularly happy to have the tall man along; he looked silly with his pointed beard and his mysterious robes. But he’d been in the map room with them, and forbidding him hadn’t seemed right when she needed every mind she could get.

  “Search this area,” Navani said to the others. “See if you can find a vein of garnet on the walls. It might be small and hidden among the changing colors of the strata.”

  They did as she requested. Dabbid, the mute bridgeman, started searching the floor instead of the walls—working with his sphere enclosed entirely in his hand so it gave almost no light.

  “Cover up your spheres and lanterns,” Navani said to the others. The command drew express
ions that ranged between confused and horrified, but Navani led the way, closing the shield on her lantern.

  The others obeyed one at a time, plunging the room into darkness. Light from a distant corridor flashed red in a sequence—only with no thunder. A few people’s hands glowed softly from the spheres inside, backlighting veins and bones.

  “There,” Navani said, picking out a faint twinkling on the floor near one of the walls. They clustered around it, investigating the spark of garnet light in a hidden vein of crystal.

  “What is it?” Isabi asked. “What kind of spren?”

  The light started moving through the vein, across the floor, then down the corridor. Navani ignored the questions, following the spark until it moved up a wall. Here it followed the curving strata into a specific room, rounding the stone and slipping through the gap between door and doorway.

  Venan had keys, fortunately. Inside, they had to step over rolled rugs to find the spark of light at the rear. Navani brushed her fingers against it and found a small bulge in the wall.

  A gemstone, she realized. Connected to the line of crystal. It’s embedded in here so deeply, it’s difficult to see. Seemed to be a topaz. Hadn’t there been a similar gemstone embedded into the wall of that room where they’d found the model of the tower?

  Infuse the topaz, the Sibling’s voice said in her mind. You can do this without Radiants? I have seen you perform such marvels.

  “I need several small topazes,” Navani said to her scholars. “No larger than three kivs each.”

  Her team scrambled; they kept gemstones of all sizes on hand for their experiments, and one soon brought forth a small case of infused topazes. Navani instructed her and several others to take the gemstones in tweezers and present them to the topaz set into the wall.

  An infused gemstone touched to an uninfused one could be made to lend some of its Stormlight—assuming they were the same variety, and the uninfused gemstone was much larger than the infused ones. It worked a little like a pressure differential. A large empty vessel would take Stormlight from small full vessels.

  It was a slow process, especially when the gemstone you wanted to infuse was relatively small—limiting the potential size differential. She moved up next to Ulvlk and Vrandl, the two Thaylen scholars. Both were artifabrians of a very secretive guild.

  “Almighty send we can make this work in time,” Navani said as thunder echoed behind them.

  “So that is why you brought us,” Vrandl said. She was a short woman who preferred havahs to traditional Thaylen dress. She wore her eyebrows in tight curls. “The tower is invaded, your men are dying, and you see an opportunity to pry trade secrets from our fingers?”

  “The world is ending,” Navani countered, “and our greatest advantage—this tower, with its ability to instantly move troops from one end of Roshar to the other—is threatened. Is this really the time to hoard trade secrets, Brightness?”

  The two women didn’t reply.

  “You’d watch it burn?” Navani said, feeling exhausted—and snappish. “You’d actually let Urithiru fall rather than share what you know? If we lose the Oathgates permanently, that’s it for the war. That’s it for your homeland.”

  Again they remained silent.

  “Fine,” Navani said. “I hope when you die—knowing your homeland is doomed, your families enslaved, your queen executed—you feel satisfied knowing that at least you maintained a slight market advantage.”

  Navani pushed to the front of the group, where her scholars were coaxing Stormlight into the wall gem bit by bit. Often a fabrial needed to fill a certain percentage before it activated—but the more this one drew in Stormlight, the slower the drain would occur.

  Footsteps scraped the stone behind her, and Navani turned to see Ulvlk—junior of the two Thaylen scholars—standing behind her. “We use sound,” she whispered. “If you can make the gemstone vibrate at a certain frequency, it will draw in Stormlight regardless of the size of gems placed next to it.”

  “Frequency…” Navani said. “How did you discover this?”

  “Traditions,” she whispered. “Passed down for centuries.”

  “Create a vibration…” Navani said. “You use drilled holes? No … that would require Stormlight to be already infused. Tuning forks?”

  “Yes,” Ulvlk explained. “We touch the tuning fork against the full gemstone, making it vibrate, then can lead a line of Stormlight out to the empty one. After that, it will siphon, like liquid.”

  “Do you have the equipment here, now?” Navani asked.

  “I…”

  “Of course you do,” Navani said. “When I sent runners to fetch you, you thought I was going to evacuate you. You’d have grabbed anything of value in your rooms.”

  The young Thaylen woman fished in her pocket, pulling out a metal tuning fork.

  “You will be expelled from the guild!” Vrandl snapped from behind, angerspren pooling beneath her. “This is a ploy!”

  “It’s no ploy,” Navani assured the nervous young woman. “Honestly, we were close to a breakthrough using the weapons the Fused have—which are able to drain Stormlight out of a person. All you’ve done here is potentially save this tower from invaders.”

  Navani tried the method, hitting the tuning fork, then touching one of the infused gemstones. Indeed, as she pulled it away from the stone and toward the gemstone on the wall, it trailed a small stream of Stormlight. Like how Light behaved when a Radiant was sucking it in.

  That did the trick, infusing the wall gemstone in seconds. The Sibling had explained what was coming, but Navani still jumped when—upon being infused—the fabrial made the entire wall shake.

  It parted at the center; it had been a hidden door all along—locked by a fabrial that in the old days probably only a Radiant could have activated. They quickly uncovered their lanterns and spheres, revealing a small circular chamber with a pedestal in the center. Set into that was a large sapphire, uninfused.

  “Quickly,” Navani said to the others, “let’s get to work.”

  * * *

  Kaladin slung his pack over his shoulder, then slipped out of the room of another frightened family. This one, like those before, had asked him for news, for information, for promises. Was it going to be all right? Would the other Radiants rise as he had? When would the Bondsmith return?

  He wished he had answers. He felt so blind. He’d grown accustomed to being in the thick of everything important—privy to not only the plans of important people, but their worries and their fears as well.

  He followed Syl, who darted into the hallway. The hour was late, and Kaladin had to fight off a bout of grogginess, despite the shakes and thumps in the stone. Distant explosions from far below, so powerful they had to be the acts of Regals or Fused. Somewhere in the tower, men fought. But up here on the sixth floor, they cowered. The place dripped with the silence of a thousand frightened people.

  He reached an intersection, fighting off his fatigue. He was supposed to get back to the clinic and meet up with his father, but Syl was flitting around another way—she clearly wanted his attention. They had decided to keep her distant from him in case a Voidspren noticed her.

  He followed her down the left fork, through a doorway that led out onto the large, patio-like balcony near his quarters. Though many of these balconies were being used as community spots, this one was empty tonight—save for one figure standing near the edge. The carapace jutting out through holes in the uniform made Rlain distinctive, even in silhouette.

  “Hey,” Kaladin said, stepping up to him. Syl settled on the banister, glowing softly. Kaladin found it eerie to stare out in the darkness of night, overlooking an endless landscape of mountains and clouds—shimmering green from the final moon.

  “More troops,” Rlain said, nodding toward the plateau below—where another formation of singers was moving toward the tower’s front gates. “They march like human armies, not like listener warpairs.”

  “I thought you were going to stay
hidden in the clinic.”

  “This will be an occupation, Kal,” Rlain said, voice tinged by a mournful rhythm. “We won’t be recovering Urithiru tonight—or anytime soon. So where does that leave me?”

  “You’re not one of them.”

  “Am I one of you?”

  “You’ll always be a member of Bridge Four.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Rlain turned toward him, green moonlight shining against his carapace and skin. “If I try to hide among the humans, I will be courting disaster. Assuming I could somehow stay out of sight, someone is going to reveal me to the Fused. Someone will think I’m a spy for the enemy, and after that … well, it’s going to be very difficult to explain why I didn’t walk out and embrace their occupation.”

  Kaladin wanted to object. But storms, he was worried about a similar thing happening to him. One mention that he’d been a Radiant—that the surgeon’s son was Kaladin Stormblessed, Windrunner—and … well, who knew what would happen?

  “So what do you do?” Syl asked from the railing.

  “Go to them,” Rlain said. “Pretend I’m not a listener, just an ordinary parshman who never managed to escape—and didn’t know what I should do. It might work. Either that, or maybe I can hide among them, pretend I’ve always been with them. Merely another face in their forces.”

  “And if they take you out into the Everstorm?” Kaladin asked. “Demand you take a Regal form—or worse, give yourself up to the soul of a Fused?”

  “Then I’ll have to find a way to escape, won’t I?” Rlain said. “This has been coming, Kal. I think I’ve always known I would have to face them. I could make a home here if I wanted. I know that, and I’ll always be grateful to you and the others for making a place for me.

  “At the same time, I can’t ignore what was done to my people at the hands of human empires. I won’t be fully comfortable here. Not while I wonder if there are other listeners out there who survived the Everstorm. Not while I wonder if there’s more I could be doing to stop the disaster.”