She didn’t seem to be corrupting it. Indeed, she had brought out a large diamond and was holding it up to the sapphire—drawing light from it. Stormlight, it seemed, although it was tinged faintly the wrong color.
Kaladin scooped a piece of broken rubble from the floor. The sides of the rubble were smoothly cut. The work of a Shardblade.
Kaladin leaped forward and shoved the Fused back, trying to knock her off the cliff. That caused her to exclaim and fall out of her trance, though she grabbed a protruding rock and prevented herself from falling.
Before she could stop him, Kaladin slammed his rubble into the gemstone, cracking it. That was enough—cracked gemstones couldn’t hold Stormlight—but he slammed it a few more times to be certain, breaking the sapphire free of its housing and sending it tumbling into the void outside.
It vanished into darkness, plummeting hundreds upon hundreds of feet down the sheer cliff toward the rocks far below. Kaladin felt something when it broke free. A faint sense that the darkness in the tower had grown stronger—or perhaps Kaladin was only now recognizing the results of the Fused’s recent attempt at corrupting the tower.
He puffed out, the deed done, and backed away. In that moment though—his Stormlight running low, his energy deflating, the darkness growing stronger—he flagged. He reached out for the wall as his vision wavered, and the fatigue seemed to be almost too much.
A shadow moved in front of him, and he forced himself alert—but not before the Fused in the topknot managed to ram a knife into his chest. He felt an immediate spike of pain and pulled out his scalpel, but the Fused jumped back before he could strike.
Painspren wriggled up from the stone as Kaladin stumbled, bleeding. He drew in the last of his Stormlight and pressed his hand to the wound. Storms. His mind … was fuzzy. And the darkness seemed so strong.
The Fused, however, didn’t seem interested in striking again. She tucked away her knife and laced her fingers before herself, watching him. Oddly, he noticed that the glass sphere that had been in the little stone alcove was gone. Where had the Fused put it?
“You continue to heal,” she noted. “And I saw the use of Adhesion earlier. I assume from the way you move, confined to the ground, that Gravitation has abandoned you. Does your hybrid power work? The one your kind often uses to direct arrows in flight?”
Kaladin didn’t respond. He gripped his scalpel, waiting to heal. The pain lingered. Was healing slower than usual? “What did you to do me?” he demanded, hoarse. “Was that blade poisoned?”
“No,” she said. “I merely wanted to inspect your healing. It seems to be lethargic, does it not? Hmmm…”
He didn’t like how she looked at him, so discerning and interested—like a surgeon inspecting a corpse before a dissection. She didn’t seem to care that he had destroyed her chance at corrupting the tower—perhaps because Kaladin’s attack had furthered her eventual goal of reaching the crystal pillar.
He raised his scalpel, waiting for his storming wound to heal. It continued to do so. Languidly.
“If you kill me,” the Fused noted, “I will simply be reborn. I will choose the most innocent among the singers of the tower. A mother perhaps, with a child precisely old enough to understand the pain of loss—but not old enough to understand why her mother now rejects her.”
Kaladin growled despite himself, stepping forward.
“Yes,” the femalen said. “A true Windrunner, all the way to your gemheart. Fascinating. You had no continuity of spren or traditions from the old ones, I’m led to believe. Yet the same attitudes, the same structures, arise naturally—like the lattice of a growing crystal.”
Kaladin growled again, sliding to the side toward his discarded spear and shoes.
“You should go,” the Fused said. “If you’ve killed the Pursuer again, it will make for quite the stir among my kind. I don’t believe that’s ever been accomplished. Regardless, I have Fused and Regals on their way to join us and finish his work. You might escape them, if you leave now.”
Kaladin hesitated, uncertain. His instincts said he should do the opposite of whatever this femalen said, out of principle. But he thought better of it and fled into the corridors—his side aching—trusting in the tower spren and Syl to guide him out of danger and to a safe hiding place.
Who is this person? You used no title, so I assume they are not a Fused. Who, then, is El?
—From Rhythm of War, page 10 undertext
Venli felt all rhythms freeze when she saw Rlain in the cell. Like the silence following a crescendo.
In that silence, Venli finally believed what Mazish had told her. In that silence, all of Roshar changed. Venli was no longer the last. And in that silence, Venli thought she could hear something distant beyond the rhythms. A pure tone.
Rlain looked up through the bars, then sneered at her.
The moment of peace vanished. He’d picked up some human expressions, it seemed. Did he recognize her in this form? Her skin patterns were the same, but she and Rlain had never been close. He likely saw only an unfamiliar Regal.
Venli retreated down the hallway, passing several empty cells with bars on the doors. It was the day after the incident with Stormblessed and the destruction of the node. Venli had been on her way to visit Rlain when the event had occurred, drawing her away to attend her master.
Curiously, though Venli had assumed that Raboniel would be furious, instead she’d taken it in stride. She’d almost seemed amused at what had occurred. She was hiding something about her motivations. She seemed to not want the corruption to happen too quickly.
At any rate, dealing with the aftermath of the incident had involved Venli interpreting late into the night for various Fused. It hadn’t been until this morning that she’d been able to break away and come check on what Mazish had told her.
Rlain. Alive.
Near the door, Venli met with the head jailer: a direform Regal with a crest of spikes beginning on his head and running down his neck.
“I didn’t realize we had a prison,” she said to him—softly, and to Indifference.
“The humans built it,” he replied, also to Indifference. “I interviewed several of the workers here. They claim they were keeping the assassin in here.”
“The assassin?”
“Indeed. He vanished right before we arrived.”
“He should have fallen unconscious.”
“Well, he didn’t, and nobody has seen anything of him.”
“You should have told me of this earlier,” Venli said. “The Lady thinks that certain Radiants might still be able to function in the tower. It’s possible this one is out there somewhere, preparing to kill.”
The direform hummed to Abashment. “Well, we’ve been prepping this place in case we need to lock up a Regal with proper comforts. We’ve got a larger brig for human prisoners. Figured this would be a good place for your friend there, until official word arrived.”
Venli glanced along the hall of empty cells, lit by topaz lanterns hanging from the ceiling. They gave the chamber a soft brown warmth, the color of cremstone.
“Why did you lock him away?” she asked.
“He’s an essai,” the direform said to Derision, using an ancient word they’d picked up from the Fused. It meant something along the lines of “human lover,” though her form told her it technically meant “hairy.”