Rhythm of War (The Stormlight Archive 4)

“The people are ready,” Mazish said. “Eager. We think we can survive in the cold up here for months.”

“We’ll need those supplies,” Venli said, “but we might not have to survive in the mountains. Look.” She showed them the writ of authority Raboniel had given her. “With this, we can get through the Oathgates, no questions asked.”

“Maybe,” Dul said to Appreciation. “So we go to Kholinar, but then what? We’re back where we began.”

“We take the supplies, and we use this writ to leave the city,” Venli explained. “We hike out to the east and disappear into the wilderness to the east of Alethkar, like my ancestors did so many generations ago.”

Then we make our way to the Shattered Plains, she thought. But … that would take too long. Could Venli find a way to scout ahead, using the aid of the Heavenly Ones? Perhaps get dropped off nearer the Unclaimed Hills, without revealing what she was truly seeking?

It seemed a lot to demand of this one writ. Plus, Raboniel knew about the listeners who had survived. Surely she’d eventually tell the other Fused.

For the moment, Venli didn’t care. “Gather the others,” she whispered. “The humans are going to attempt to rescue the Radiants here soon. The chaos should cover our escape. I want us to leave in the next day or two.”

The other two attuned Resolve; they trusted her. More than she trusted herself. Venli doubted she would find redemption among the listeners who had escaped the Fused. In fact, she expected accusation, condemnation.

But … Venli had to try to reach them. For when they’d escaped, they’d taken her mother with them. Jaxlim might be dead—and if not, her mind would still be lost to age.

But she was also the last person—the only person—who might still love Venli, despite it all.

As one who has suffered for so many centuries … as one whom it broke … please find Mishram and release her. Not just for her own good. For the good of all spren.

For I believe that in confining her, we have caused a greater wound to Roshar than any ever realized.

Navani entered a feverish kind of study—a frantic near madness—as the work consumed her. Before, she had organized. Now she merely fed the beast. She barely slept.

The answer was here. The answer meant something. She couldn’t explain why, but she needed this secret.

Food became a distraction. Time stopped mattering. She put her clocks away so they wouldn’t remind her of human constructs like minutes and hours. She was searching for something deeper. More important.

These actions horrified a part of her. She was still herself, the type of woman who put her socks in the drawer so they all faced the same direction. She loved patterns, she loved order. But in this quest for meaning, she found she could appreciate something else entirely. The raw, disorganized chaos of a brain making connections paired with the single-minded order of a quest for one all-consuming answer.

Could she find the opposite to Voidlight?

Stormlight and Voidlight had their own kind of polarity. They were attracted to tones like iron shavings to a magnet. Therefore, she needed a tone that would push light away. She needed an opposite sound.

She wanted fluid tones, so she had a slide whistle delivered, along with a brass horn with a movable tube. However, she liked the sound of the plates best. They were difficult to increment, but she could order new ones cut and crafted quickly.

Her study morphed from music theory—where some philosophers said that the true opposite of sound was silence—to mathematics. Mathematics taught that there were numbers associated with tones—frequencies, wavelengths.

Music, at its most fundamental level, was math.

She played the tone that represented the sound of Voidlight again and again, embedding it into her mind. She dreamed it when she slept. She played it first thing when she arose, watching the patterns of sand it made on a metal plate. Dancing grains, bouncing up and down, settling into peaks and troughs.

The opposite of most numbers was a negative number. Could a tone be negative? Could there be a negative wavelength? Many such ideas couldn’t exist in the real world, like negative numbers were an artificial construct. But those peaks and troughs … could she make a tone that produced the opposite pattern? Peaks where there were troughs, troughs where there were peaks?

During her feverish study into sound theory, she discovered the answer to this. A wave could be negated, its opposite created and presented in a way that nullified the original. Canceling it out. They called it destructive interference. Strangely, the theories said that a sound and its opposite sounded exactly the same.

This stumped her. She played the plates she’d created, indulging in their resonant tones. She put Voidlight spheres into her arm sheath and listened until she could hum that tone. She was delighted when—after hours of concerted practice—she could draw Voidlight out with a touch, like the Fused could do.

Humans could sing the correct tones. Humans could hear the music of Roshar. Her ancestors might have been aliens to this world, but she was its child.

That didn’t solve the question though. If a tone and its destructive interference sounded the same, how could she sing one and not the other?

She played the tone on a plate, humming along. She next played a tuning fork, listened to the tones of the gemstones, then came back to the plate. It was wrong. Barely off. Even though the tones matched.

She asked for, and was given, a file. She tried to measure the notes the plate made, but eventually had to rely on her own ear. She worked on the plate, filing off small sections of the metal and then pulling the bow across it, getting the plate closer and closer.

She could hear the tone she wanted, she thought. Or was it madness? This desire to create an anti-sound?

It took hours. Maybe days. When it finally happened, she knelt bleary-eyed on the stone floor at some unholy hour. Holding a bow, testing her newest version of the plate. When she played this particular tone—bow on steel—something happened. Voidlight was shoved out of the sphere attached to the plate. It was pushed away from the source of the sound.

She tested it again, then a third time to be sure. Though she should have wanted to shout for joy, she simply sat there staring. She ran her hand through her hair, which she hadn’t put up today. Then she laughed.

It worked.

* * *

The next day—washed and feeling slightly less insane—Navani incremented. She tested how loud the tone needed to be to produce the desired effect. She measured the tone on different sizes of gemstones and on a stream of Voidlight leaving a sphere to flow toward a tuning fork.

She did all of this in a way that—best she could—hid what she was doing from her watching guard. Hunched over her workspace, she was relatively certain the Regal there wouldn’t be able to tell she’d made a breakthrough. The one last night hadn’t watched keenly; he’d been dozing through much of it.

Confident that her tone worked, she began training herself to hum the tone the plate made. It did sound the same, but somehow it wasn’t the same. As when measuring spren—which reacted to your thoughts about them—this tone needed Intent to be created. You had to know what you were trying to do.

Incredibly, it mattered that she wanted to hum the opposite tone to Odium’s song. It sounded crazy, but it worked. It was repeatable and quantifiable. Inside the madness of these last few days, science still worked.