Rhythm of War (The Stormlight Archive, #4)

by Brandon Sanderson

“Squabbles?” the man asked. “So that’s the Alethi word for them. Yes, yes. My mastery of your language, you see, is lacking. I’d been mistakenly referring to your actions as ‘raping and burning my people.’”

Burrnnnnnnn!

Each robe was embroidered with the Double Eye of the Almighty, and Shallan had a fleeting thought, wondering at the seamstress they’d hired to do all this work. What had they told her? “Yes, we want twenty identical, mysterious robes, sewn with ancient arcane symbols. They’re for … parties.”

“Syl used to think human children came out through the nose in a particularly violent sneeze,” Kaladin said. “She is not an authority on this topic.”

When she became Veil, the colors in the room … muted. The colors didn’t change, but her perception shifted. Shallan would have described those strata lines as rust colored, but to Veil they were just red.

He was at once too lofty and too jagged a person for the job. Predatory, where a guardsman should be obedient—yet also refined, when being a guardsman was one of the more lowly jobs for a lighteyes.

“Immortality, in part. He thought he could become like the Heralds. In his quest, he discovered a secret. He had Voidlight before the Everstorm—he carried it from Braize, the place you call Damnation. He was testing the movement of Light between worlds. And one close to him might have answers. At any rate, we couldn’t risk Ialai or the Sons of Honor recovering these secrets.”

For thousands of years, the humans and the singers had fought many rounds of an eternal war. Each new wave of attacks had involved what was called a Return, when the Fused would descend to Roshar. The humans called these Desolations.

There was something special about the way the human Heralds interacted that could lock the Fused on Braize, the land called Damnation by the humans. Only once the Fused broke the Heralds through torture—sending them back to Roshar—could a Return be initiated. This cycle had played out for millennia, until the Last Desolation, where something had changed. Something to do with a single Herald and an unbreakable will.

“That’s because Wit is an asshole,” Zahel said.

He fished in his robe’s pocket and pulled something out—a small stone in the shape of a curling shell. “Ever seen one of these?” “Soulcast?” Kaladin asked, taking the small shell. It was surprisingly heavy. He turned it around, admiring the way it curled. “Similar. That’s a creature that died long, long ago. It settled into the mud, and slowly—over thousands upon thousands of years—minerals infused its body, replacing it axon by axon with stone. Eventually the entire thing was transformed.”

“My soul,” Zahel said, “is like that fossil. Every part of my soul has been replaced with something new, though it happened in a flash for me. The soul I have now resembles the one I was born with, but it’s something else entirely.”

When I died, I was drenched in power. So when my soul escaped, it left a duplicate. A kind of … fossil of a soul.”

The longer one of us exists, the more like a spren we become. Consumed by a singular purpose, our minds bound and chained by our Intent. We’re spren masquerading as men. That’s why she takes our memories. She knows we aren’t the actual people who died, but something else given a corpse to inhabit.…”

The music, the cataclysm of the storm was … strangely peaceful. She often had trouble in a room full of talking people, whether they were humans or spren. She would be intrigued by every conversation, her attention diverted constantly.

“What do you know of my powers?” Dalinar asked her. “Your abilities are what made the original Oathpact,” she said. “And they existed—and were named—long before the Knights Radiant were founded. A Bondsmith Connected the Heralds to Braize, made them immortal, and locked our enemies away. A Bondsmith bound other Surges and brought humans to Roshar, fleeing their dying world. A Bondsmith created—or at least discovered—the Nahel bond: the ability of spren and humans to join together into something better. You Connect things, Dalinar. Realms. Ideas. People.”

The butt of the pole passed between the mandra harness lines to hit the beads beneath.

Shadesmar bead ocean is reminiscent of Tress's spore oceans. Non-liquid behaving like a liquid

and he had enjoyed even the appearances of Veil and Radiant. The latter made an excellent sparring partner, and the former knew a seemingly infinite number of card games. Some of which were good Vorin games, and others … well, they had too much randomness for propriety, but were more fun than Adolin had expected.

He wants me to be this imagined perfect child who was born better than he ever could be.” “And that makes you not a person,” Shallan said, nodding. “It erases your ability to make choices or mistakes. Because you’re perfect. You were born to be perfect. So you can never earn anything on your own.”

Venli walked, disquieted, uncertain which was worse: the feeling of primal terror that had stabbed her when she’d heard the human behind her, or the haunting feeling of watching the light fade from his eyes.

“But in the moment, they are the sprinter who outpaces the steady runner. In the moment, they create wonders. One cannot fault their audacity. Their imagination. Surely you’ve noticed that the Fused have a problem. We think along the same old, familiar pathways. We don’t create because we assume we’ve already created what we need to. We are immortal, and so think nothing can ever surprise us—and that makes us complacent.”

“If there is one thing I can guarantee you about humankind, Last Listener, it is this: Provide them with a sword, and they will find a way to impale themselves upon it.”

Poor Kaladin. There was freedom available for his old friend. Two freedoms, in fact. But he doubted Kaladin would ever accept the same freedom as Vyre, so he offered the other one. The sweet peace of nonexistence.

As Lift hung from the ceiling—dangling precariously from a rope with one hand, reaching out with the other toward the basket—she was forced to acknowledge that stealing food just didn’t give her the same thrill it once had.

Intelligence on one side. Compassion on the other. When smart, he assumed the compassion was the curse. But was it really? Or was the curse that he could never have both at once?

Soulcasters didn’t hold spren because they were spren. Manifesting in the Physical Realm like Shardblades.

“I would rather a complete victory than something that allows Odium to hedge his bets,” Dalinar said. “Ah, delightful,” Wit replied, holding up his palm and mimicking writing something down. “I’ll just make a note that you’d like to win. Yes, how foolish of me not to realize that, Blackthorn. Total victory. Over a god. Who is currently holding your homeland, and recently gained the allegiance of one of the strongest militaries on the planet. Shall I also have him bake you something sweet as an apology for this whole ‘end of the world’ mess?”

“The baking thing is an actual tradition,” Wit added. “I once visited a place where—if you lose a battle—your mother has to bake the other fellow something tasty. I rather liked those people.” “Pity you didn’t remain with them longer,” Dalinar said. “Ha! Well, I didn’t think it wise to stay around. After all, they were cannibals.”

A king ruling by the gauntlet and sword can easily see it slip away when he weakens. Compare this to the Azish system, where a bad Prime is unable to single-handedly ruin their government.” “And a good one is unable to accomplish much,” Dalinar said,

Wit dropped his bloody handkerchief before Ruthar. “How remarkable,” he said. “If you spend your life knocking people down, you eventually find they won’t stand up for you. There’s poetry in that, don’t you think, you storming personification of a cancerous anal discharge?”

And as we leave this era of barbarism, each and every attendant at court will know that Alethkar’s first queen is a woman unafraid of doing what needs to be done. Herself.”

“I’m a fraud, Timbre,” Venli whispered. “A fake Radiant. I don’t know what I’m doing.” Timbre pulsed. The meaning was clear. I do. It was enough.

It was a tragedy that she hadn’t lived to see Dalinar become the man she’d imagined him to be. A shame that Odium had seen her killed. That was the way Renarin had to present it to himself. Better to turn his pain against the enemy than to lose his father along with his mother.

I can see one particular Regal.

Venli

Today, Kaladin reached the winds. And like everything else today, they tried their best to kill him.

Can’t say for certain, he replied. That stupid Herald is still standing strong all these years later. We have to work around him. “The new storm,” Venli whispered. Yes. It’s been building in Shadesmar for centuries. We need to get our agents close enough to it on this side—a place that is out in the ocean, mind you—so they can use gemstones to pull my brothers and sisters across. Then those stones have to be physically transported here. You have no idea how much of a pain it all is.

You have no idea the power that awaits you, Venli, Ulim said to the Rhythm of Craving. In the old days, forms of power were reserved for the most special. The most valuable. They were strong, capable of amazing feats. “Then how did we ever lose?” she asked. Bah, it was a fluke. We couldn’t break the last Herald, and the humans found some way to pin the whole Oathpact on him. So we got stuck on Braize. Eventually the Unmade decided to start a war without us. That turned out to be exceedingly stupid. In the past, Odium granted forms of power, but Ba-Ado-Mishram thought she could do it. Ended up handing out forms of power as easily as Fused give each other titles, Connected herself to the entire singer species. Became a little god. Too little.

“I … don’t understand.” I’ll bet you don’t. Basically, everyone relied way too much on an oversized spren. Trouble is, spren can get stuck in gemstones, and the humans figured this out. End result: Ba-Ado-Mishram got a really cramped prison, and everyone’s souls got seriously messed up.

“Have your agents influence those at the palace,” Venli said. “Get the Alethi to invite us to visit. Their king spoke of it before he left; he’s considering it already. We must bring our people there, then show them how powerful the humans are. We must overwhelm my people with our own insignificance.” She stood up, then went to comfort her mother. We must make them afraid, Ulim, Venli thought. We must make them sing to the Terrors long into the night. Only then will they listen to our promises. It shall be done, he replied.

“She talked about the way your livestock moaned and cried from their burns. The result of humans Surgebinding without oaths, without checks. Of course, that was before any of us understood the Surges. Before the spren left us for you, before the war started.”

“Navani, you can still defeat me. If it wasn’t possible for humans to outthink the Fused, you’d have fallen during the first few Returns. The first few Desolations, as you call them. “Instead you always pushed us back. You fought with stones, and you beat us. My kind pretends we know so much, but during many Returns, we’d find ourselves struggling to catch up to your kind. That is our terrible secret. We hear the rhythms, we understand Roshar and the spren. But the rhythms don’t change. The spren don’t change.

Gavilar Kholin—king, husband, occasional monster—had been searching for a way to kill a god.

But like all great revelations, it led to a multitude of new questions.

“I know of just one on Roshar,” Wit noted, “and she prefers to hide her true form. This story isn’t about her, however, or any of the dragons I’ve met. In fact, the dragon is barely in the story, and I’d kindly ask you not to complain about that part, because there’s really nothing I can do about it and you’ll only annoy Design.”

She attuned Anxiety. And Awe. Complementary emotions, in her experience.

“The true trial—the one you’ve been engaging in for the last few years: the test for this spren’s loyalty. She was the only judge who ever mattered, and today was her chance to offer judgment.” Blended leaned forward. “You passed.”

“Elithanathile,” Navani said, whispering the tenth name of the Almighty. “You killed her forever, didn’t you?” “No more rebirth,” Raboniel whispered. “No more Returns. Free at last, my baby. Free.”

To Dalinar, the scent of smoke was inexorably tied to that of blood.

Some people charged toward the goal, running for all they had. Others stumbled. But it wasn’t the speed that mattered. It was the direction they were going.

“I am death itself, Defeated One,” Kaladin said. “And I’ve finally caught up to you.”

An incredible soldier, who seemed immortal and impervious, completely in control. And a Fused, who somehow looked small by comparison.