Ulim rolled his head in an exaggerated way, as if perturbed—and bored—by the chastisement. How dare he! He was merely a spren. He was to be her servant.
“Your sister,” Ulim said, “didn’t undergo the transformation properly. She resisted, and we’d have eventually lost her. She was never dedicated to our cause.”
Venli attuned the Rhythm of Fury, speaking in a loud, punctuating sequence. “You will not say such things. You are spren! You are to serve.”
“And I do.”
“Then you must obey me!”
“You?” Ulim laughed. “Child, how long have you been fighting your little war against the humans? Three, four years?”
“Six years, spren,” Demid said. “Six long, bloody years.”
“Well, do you want to guess how long we’ve been fighting this war?” Ulim asked. “Go ahead. Guess. I’m waiting.”
Venli seethed. “It doesn’t matter—”
“Oh, but it does,” Ulim said, his red figure electrifying. “Do you know how to lead armies, Venli? True armies? Supply troops across a battlefront that spans hundreds of miles? Do you have memories and experiences that span eons?”
She glared at him.
“Our leaders,” Ulim said, “know exactly what they’re doing. Them I obey. But I am the one who escaped, the spren of redemption. I don’t have to listen to you.”
“I will be a queen,” Venli said to Spite.
“If you survive? Maybe. But your sister? She and the others sent that assassin to kill the human king specifically to keep us from returning. Your people are traitors—though your personal efforts do you justice, Venli. You may be blessed further, if you are wise. Regardless, get that armor off your sister, shed your tears, and get ready to climb back up. These plateaus are crawling with men who stink of Honor. We must be away and see what your ancestors need us to do.”
“Our ancestors?” Demid said. “What do the dead have to do with this?”
“Everything,” Ulim replied, “seeing as they’re the ones in charge. Armor. Now.” He zipped to the wall as a tiny streak of lightning, then moved off.
Venli attuned Derision at the way she’d been treated, then—defying taboos—helped Demid remove the Shardplate. Ulim returned with the others and ordered them to gather up the armor.
They hiked off, leaving Venli to bring the Blade. She lifted it from the stone, then lingered, regarding her sister’s corpse—which lay there in only padded underclothing.
Venli felt something stir inside her. Again, distantly, she was able to hear the Rhythm of the Lost. Mournful, slow, with separated beats.
“I…” Venli said. “Finally, I don’t have to listen to you call me a fool. I don’t have to worry about you getting in the way. I can do what I want.”
That terrified her.
She turned to go, but paused as she saw something. What was that small spren that had crept out from beneath Eshonai’s corpse? It looked like a small ball of white fire; it gave off little rings of light and trailed a streak behind it. Like a comet.
“What are you?” Venli demanded to Spite. “Shoo.”
She hiked off, leaving her sister’s corpse there at the bottom of the chasm, stripped and alone. Food for either a chasmfiend or a storm.
Dearest Cephandrius,
I received your communication, of course.
Jasnah was alive.
Jasnah Kholin was alive.
Shallan was supposed to be recovering from her ordeal, never mind that the bridgemen had handled the fighting. All she’d done was grope an eldritch spren. Still, she spent the next day holed up in her room sketching and thinking.
Jasnah’s return sparked something in her. Shallan had once been more analytical in her drawing, including notes and explanations with the sketches. Lately she’d only been doing pages and pages of twisted images.
Well, she’d been trained as a scholar, hadn’t she? She shouldn’t just draw; she should analyze, extrapolate, speculate. So, she addressed herself to fully recording her experiences with the Unmade.
Adolin and Palona visited her separately, and even Dalinar came to check on her while Navani clicked her tongue and asked after her health. Shallan endured their company, then eagerly returned to her drawing. There were so many questions. Why exactly had she been able to drive the thing away? What was the meaning of its creations?
Hanging over her research, however, was a single daunting fact. Jasnah was alive.
Storms … Jasnah was alive.
That changed everything.
Eventually, Shallan couldn’t remain locked up any longer. Though Navani mentioned Jasnah was planning to visit her later in the evening, Shallan washed and dressed, then threw her satchel over her shoulder and went searching for the woman. She had to know how Jasnah had survived.
In fact, as Shallan stalked the hallways of Urithiru, she found herself increasingly perturbed. Jasnah claimed to always look at things from a logical perspective, but she had a flair for the dramatic to rival any storyteller. Shallan well remembered that night in Kharbranth when Jasnah had lured thieves in, then dealt with them in stunning—and brutal—fashion.
Jasnah didn’t want to merely prove her points. She wanted to drive them right into your skull, with a flourish and a pithy epigram. Why hadn’t she written via spanreed to let everyone know she had survived? Storms, where had she been all this time?
A few inquiries led Shallan back to the pit with its spiraling stairs. Guards in sharp Kholin blue confirmed that Jasnah was below, so Shallan started trudging down those steps again, and was surprised to find that she felt no anxiety at the descent. In fact … the oppressive feelings she’d felt since they’d arrived at the tower seemed to have evaporated. No more fear, no more formless sense of wrongness. The thing she’d chased away had been its cause. Somehow, its aura had pervaded the entire tower.
At the base of the stairs, she found more soldiers. Dalinar obviously wanted this place well guarded; she certainly couldn’t complain about that. These let her pass without incident, save a bow and a murmur of “Brightness Radiant.”
She strode down the muraled hallway, the sphere lanterns set along the base of the walls making it pleasingly bright. Once she’d passed the empty library rooms to either side, she heard voices drifting toward her from ahead. She stepped up into the room where she’d faced the Midnight Mother, and got her first good look at the place when it wasn’t covered in writhing darkness.
The crystal pillar at the center really was something incredible. It wasn’t a single gemstone, but a myriad of them fused together: emerald, ruby, topaz, sapphire … All ten varieties seemed to have been melted into a single thick pillar, twenty feet tall. Storms … what would it look like if all those gems were somehow infused, rather than dun as they were at the moment?
A large group of guards stood at a barricade near the other side of the room, looking down into the tunnel where the Unmade had vanished. Jasnah rounded the giant pillar, freehand resting on the crystal. The princess wore red, lips painted to match, hair up and run through with swordlike hairspikes with rubies on the pommels.
Storms. She was perfect. A curvaceous figure, tan Alethi skin, light violet eyes, and not a hint of aberrant color to her jet-black hair. Making Jasnah Kholin as beautiful as she was brilliant was one of the most unfair things the Almighty had ever done.