Rhythm of War (The Stormlight Archive 4)

Today, he snapped his notebook closed and plastered a smile on his face.

She trusted him, mostly. And he her, mostly. Other aspects of their relationship were more complicated.

“What is it, Wit?” she said.

“My dear, you should rest before—”

“Wit.”

He sighed, then leaned back in his seat. He was immaculate, as always, with his perfectly styled hair and sharp black suit. For all his talk of frivolity, he knew exactly how to present himself. It was something they’d bonded over.

“I have failed you,” he said. “I thought I’d taken all necessary precautions, but I found a pen in my writing case that did not work.”

“So … what? Is this a trick, Wit?”

“One played on me, I’m afraid,” he said. “The pen was not a pen, but a creature designed to appear like a pen. A cremling, you’d call it, cleverly grown to the shape of something innocent.”

She grew cold, and stepped forward, her Plate clinking. “One of the Sleepless?”

He nodded.

“How much do you think it heard?”

“I’m uncertain. I don’t know when it replaced my real pen, and I’m baffled how my protections—which are supposed to warn me of entities like this—were circumvented.”

“Then we have to assume they know everything,” Jasnah said. “All of our secrets.”

“Unfortunately,” Wit said. He sighed, then pushed his notebook toward her. “I’m writing warnings to those I communicated with. The bright side is that I don’t think any of the Sleepless are working with Odium.”

Jasnah had only recently learned that the Sleepless were anything other than a myth. It had taken meeting a friendly one—seeing with her own eyes that an entity could somehow be made up of thousands of cremlings working in concert—for her to accept their existence.

“If it’s not working for the enemy, then who?” she asked.

“Well, I’ve written to my contacts among them, to ask if it is one of theirs keeping a friendly eye on amiable allies. But … Jasnah, I know at least one of them has thrown their lot in with the Ghostbloods.”

“Damnation.”

“I believe it is time,” Wit said, “that I told you about Thaidakar.”

“I know of him,” Jasnah said.

“Oh, you think you do,” he said. “But I’ve met him, several times. On other planets, Jasnah. The Ghostbloods are not a Rosharan organization, and I don’t think you appreciate the danger they present.…”

As we dig further into this project, I am left questioning the very nature of God. How can a God exist in all things, yet have a substance that can be destroyed?

—From Rhythm of War, page 21

Light was far more interesting than Navani had realized.

It constantly surrounded them, flooding in through windows and beaming from gemstones. A second ocean, white and pure, so omnipresent it became invisible.

Navani was able to order texts brought from Kholinar, ones she’d presumed lost to the conquest. She was able to get others from around the tower, and there were even a few with relevant chapters already here in the library room. All were collected at Raboniel’s order and delivered, without question, to Navani for study.

She consumed the words. Locked away as she was, she couldn’t do much else. Each day she wrote mundane instructions to her scholars—and hid ciphered messages within them that equated to nonsense. Rushu would know what she was doing from context, but the Fused? Well, let them waste their time trying to figure out a reason to the figgldygrak she wrote. Their confusion might help her slip through important messages later.

That didn’t take much time, and she spent the rest of her days studying light. Surely there could be no harm in her learning, as Raboniel wanted. And the topic was so fascinating.

What was light? Not just Stormlight, but all light. Some of the ancient scholars claimed you could measure it. They said it had a weight to it. Others disagreed, saying instead that it was the force by which light moved that one could measure.

Both ideas fascinated her. She’d never thought of light as a thing. It simply … was.

Excited, she performed an old experiment from her books: splitting apart light into a rainbow of colors. All you had to do was put a candle in a box, use a hole to focus the light, then direct it through a prism. Then, curious, she extrapolated and—after several attempts—was able to use another prism to recombine the component colors into a beam of pure white light.

Next, she used a diamond infused with Stormlight instead of a candle. It worked the same, splitting into components of light, but with a larger band of blue. Voidlight did the same, though the band of violet was enormous, and the other colors mere blips. That was strange, as her research indicated different colors of light should only make bands brighter or weaker, not increase their size.

The most interesting result happened when she tried the experiment on the Towerlight Raboniel had collected. It wasn’t Stormlight or Lifelight, but a combination of the two. When she tried the prism experiment with this light, two separate rainbows of colors—distinct from one another—split out of the prism.

She couldn’t recombine them. When she tried sending the colors through another prism, she ended up with one beam of white-blue light and a separate beam of white-green light, overlapping but not combined as Towerlight was.

She sat at the table, staring at the two dots of light on the white paper. That green one. Could it be Lifelight? She likely couldn’t have told the difference between it and Stormlight, without the two to compare—it was only next to one another that Stormlight looked faintly blue, and Lifelight faintly green.

She stood up and dug through the trunk of personal articles she’d had Raboniel’s people fetch for her, looking for her journals. The day of Gavilar’s death was still painful to remember, fraught with a dozen different conflicting emotions. She’d recorded her impressions of that day’s events six separate times, in differing emotional states. Sometimes she missed him. At least the man he had once been, when they’d all schemed together as youths, planning to conquer the world.

That was the face he’d continued to show most everyone else after he’d started to change. And so, for the good of the kingdom, Navani had played along. She’d created a grand charade after his death, writing about Gavilar the king, the unifier, the mighty—but just—man. The ideal monarch. She’d given him exactly what he’d wanted, exactly what she’d threatened to withhold. She’d given him a legacy.

Navani closed the journal around her finger to hold her place, then took a few deep breaths. She couldn’t afford to become distracted by that tangled mess of emotions. She reopened the journal and turned to the account she’d made of her encounter with Gavilar in her study on the day of his death.

He had spheres on the table, she had written. Some twenty or thirty of them. He’d been showing them to his uncommon visitors—most of whom have vanished, never to be seen again.

There was something off about those spheres. My eyes were drawn to several distinctive ones: spheres that glowed with a distinctly alien light, almost negative. Both violet and black, somehow shining, yet feeling like they should extinguish illumination instead of promote it.