So yes, her work was about helping her people, in part. But deep within her—where the rhythms began—Venli promised herself that she would be the one who obtained the most freedom.
“How goes your work?” Venli asked to Confidence.
Denshil’s rhythm slipped to Anxiety again. Foolish farmer. He’d better not give them away.
“The others believe me,” he said softly, “and they should. I’m not saying anything that’s a lie, really. If we cut these gemhearts like the humans do, they hold more Stormlight. But I don’t mention the extra bits I cut off before delivering the faceted stone to the fields.…”
“How much have you saved?”
“Several hundred gemstones.”
“I need more,” Venli said.
He blatantly attuned Irritation. “More? What crazy rhythm are you listening to?”
“We need one for every listener in the city.”
“I can’t,” he said. “If you—”
“You can,” Venli said to Reprimand. “And you will. Cut the gemstones smaller. Give less to the fields.”
“And if we end up starving because of it? Gemstones break, you know, when you sing to them. We will run out.”
“We won’t live long enough to starve, Denshil. Not if the humans get here. Not if they find your children and take away their songs…”
The malen attuned Longing immediately. The listeners had few children these days. Most had stopped taking mateform years ago, and they had never been as fecund a people as the humans apparently were.
“Think how you could improve,” Venli said. “For them, Denshil. For your daughter.”
“We should bring this to the Five,” he said.
“We will. You can watch me bring the proposal to them. This will be done properly—you and I are simply preparing the way.”
He nodded, and Venli let him rush on ahead to the ancient building where he practiced gem cutting—an art Ulim had taught him.
Say a name on the breeze and it will return, she thought, noting a red light glowing from within an old abandoned building. They’d had to cut the window out to get to the structure inside. She strolled over, and Ulim stepped out onto the windowsill—invisible to everyone but those he chose.
“You’ve learned to lie very well,” he said to Subservience.
“I have,” she said. “Are we ready?”
“Close,” he said. “I feel the storm on the other side. I think it’s nearly here.”
“You think?” Venli demanded.
“I can’t see into Shadesmar,” he snapped to Derision.
She didn’t quite understand his explanations of what was happening. But she knew a storm was mounting in Shadesmar. In fact, the storm had been building for generations—growing in fury, intensity. It barred the way to Damnation.
That storm was where Ulim had originally come from. There were also thousands of another kind of spren in the storm: stormspren. Mindless things like windspren or flamespren.
Venli had to find a way to pull those stormspren across and capture them. To that end, a large portion of the roiling storm had been broken off by the god of gods, the ancient one called Odium. This storm was his strength, his essence. Over painful months, he’d moved the storm across the landscape—unseen—until it arrived here. Kind of. Almost.
“What will happen,” Venli asked to Curiosity, “when my storm comes to this world?”
“Your storm?”
“I am the one who summons it, spren,” she said. “It is mine.”
“Sure, sure,” he said. A little too quickly, and with too many hand gestures. He had grown obsequious over the last few years—and liked to pretend that his betrayal of her in the Kholinar palace had never happened.
“When this storm comes, you will serve me,” Venli said.
“I serve you now.”
“Barely. Promise it. You’ll serve me.”
“I will serve,” he said. “I promise it, Venli. But we have to bring the stormspren to this side first. And persuade the listeners to take the forms.”
“The second will not be a problem.”
“You’re too certain about that,” he said. “Remember, they killed the Alethi king to prevent this from happening. Traitors.”
He got hung up on that idea. Though he’d been the one to whisper about the location of the slave with the Honorblade—and he’d agreed to help start a war to make her people desperate—he could not get over the reasoning her people had used. Ulim hadn’t found out about Eshonai’s experience with King Gavilar until weeks later, and he’d been livid. How dare the listeners do exactly what he wanted, but for the wrong reason!
Foolish little spren. Venli attuned Skepticism—and almost felt something different, something more. A better rhythm. Right outside her reach.
“Focus less on that,” Venli said. “And more on your duties.”
“Yes, Venli,” he said, voice cooing as he spoke to Subservience. “You’re going to be amazed by the power you get from stormform. And the massive storm you’ll bring through? It will be unlike anything the world has ever seen. Odium’s raw power, blowing across the world in the wrong direction. It will devastate the humans, leave them broken and easily conquered. Ripe for your domination, Venli.”
“Enough,” she said. “Don’t sell it so hard, Ulim. I’m not the child you found when you first arrived here. Do your job, and get the storm into position. I’ll capture the stormspren.”
“How, though?”
How. “They are the spren of storms, right?”
“Well, a storm,” Ulim said. “In the past, they mostly spent their time inside gemhearts. Odium would directly bless the singer, making them a kind of royalty. They didn’t really wander about much.”
Royalty? She liked the sound of that. She smiled, imagining how Eshonai would act toward her then.
“My scholars are confident,” Venli said. “From what you’ve told them, and the experiments we’ve done with other kinds of spren, we think if we can gather a small collection of stormspren in gemstones, others will get pulled through more easily.”
“But we need that initial seed!” Ulim said. “How?”
She nodded to the sky, where her imaginings had brought forth a gloryspren. An enormous brilliant sphere, with wings along the sides. “Those pop in when we think the proper thoughts. Feel the right things. So, what brings stormspren?”
“A storm…” Ulim said. “It might work. Worth trying.”
They’d have to experiment. Even with his help, it had taken several tries to figure out nimbleform—and that was a relatively easy form. Still, she was pleased with their progress. Yes, it had taken far, far longer than she’d anticipated. But over those many years, she’d become the person she was now. Confident, like her younger self had never been.
She turned to make her way toward where her scholars studied the songs, written in the script she’d devised. Unfortunately, she soon spotted a tall, armored figure heading her direction. Venli immediately turned down a side road, but Eshonai called to her. Venli attuned Irritation. Eshonai would follow her if she hurried on, so she slowed and turned.