Words of Radiance

  The strands of Thude’s beard were tied with bits of raw gemstone that shook and twinkled as he rubbed his chin. He held the large cut gemstone up to Bila, who took it and tapped it with her finger.

  They were a warpair of Eshonai’s own personal division. They dressed in simple garments that were tailored around the chitinous armor plates on their arms, legs, and chests. Thude also wore a long coat, but he wouldn’t take that to battle.

  Eshonai, by contrast, wore her uniform—tight red cloth that stretched over her natural armor—and a cap on her skullplate. She never spoke of how that uniform imprisoned her, felt like manacles that tied her in place.

  “A stormspren,” Bila said to the Rhythm of Skepticism as she turned the stone over in her fingers. “Will it help me kill humans? Otherwise, I don’t see why I should care.”

  “This could change the world, Bila,” Eshonai said. “If Venli is right, and she can bond with this spren and come out with anything other than dullform . . . well, at the very least we will have an entirely new form to choose. At the greatest we will have power to control the storms and tap their energy.”

  “So she will try this personally?” Thude asked to the Rhythm of Winds, the rhythm that they used to judge when a highstorm was near.

  “If the Five give her permission.” They were to discuss it, and make their decision, today.

  “That’s great,” Bila said, “but will it help me kill humans?”

  Eshonai attuned Mourning. “If stormform is truly one of the ancient powers, Bila, then yes. It will help you kill humans. Many of them.”

  “Good enough for me, then,” Bila said. “Why are you so worried?”

  “The ancient powers are said to have come from our gods.”

  “Who cares? If the gods would help us kill those armies out there, then I’d swear to them right now.”

  “Don’t say that, Bila,” Eshonai said to Reprimand. “Never say anything like that.”

  The woman quieted, tossing the stone onto the table. She hummed softly to Skepticism. That walked the line of insubordination. Eshonai met Bila’s eyes and found herself softly humming to Resolve.

  Thude glanced from Bila to Eshonai. “Food?” he asked.

  “Is that your answer to every disagreement?” Eshonai asked, breaking her song.

  “It’s hard to argue with your mouth full,” Thude said.

  “I’m sure I’ve seen you do just that,” Bila said. “Many times.”

  “The arguments end happy, though,” Thude said. “Because everyone is full. So . . . food?”

  “Fine,” Bila said, glancing at Eshonai.

  The two withdrew. Eshonai sat down at the table, feeling drained. When had she started worrying if her friends were insubordinate? It was this horrid uniform.

  She picked up the gemstone, staring into its depths. It was a large one, about a third the size of her fist, though gemstones didn’t have to be large to trap a spren inside.

  She hated trapping them. The right way was to go into the highstorm with the proper attitude, singing the proper song to attract the proper spren. You bonded it in the fury of the raging storm and were reborn with a new body. People had been doing this from the arrival of the first winds.

  The listeners had learned that capturing spren was possible from the humans, then had figured out the process on their own. A captive spren made the transformation much more reliable. Before, there had always been an element of chance. You could go into the storm wanting to become a soldier, and come out a mate instead.

  This is progress, Eshonai thought, staring at the little smoky spren inside the stone. Progress is learning to control your world. Put up walls to stop the storms, choose when to become a mate. Progress was taking nature and putting a box around it.

  Eshonai pocketed the gemstone, and checked the time. Her meeting with the rest of the Five wasn’t scheduled until the third movement of the Rhythm of Peace, and she had a good half a movement until then.

  It was time to speak with her mother.

  Eshonai stepped out into Narak and walked along the path, nodding to those who saluted. She passed mostly soldiers. So much of their population wore warform these days. Their small population. Once, there had been hundreds of thousands of listeners scattered across these plains. Now a fraction remained.

  Even then, the listeners had been a united people. Oh, there had been divisions, conflicts, even wars among their factions. But they had been a single people—those who had rejected their gods and sought freedom in obscurity.

  Bila no longer cared about their origins. There would be others like her, people who ignored the danger of the gods and focused only on the fight with the humans.

  Eshonai passed dwellings—ramshackle things constructed of hardened crem over frames of shell, huddled in the leeward shadow of lumps of stone. Most of those were empty now. They’d lost thousands to war over the years.

  We do have to do something, she thought, attuning the Rhythm of Peace in the back of her mind. She sought comfort in its calm, soothing beats, soft and blended. Like a caress.

  Then she saw the dullforms.

  They looked much like what the humans called “parshmen,” though they were a little taller and not nearly as stupid. Still, dullform was a limiting form, without the capacities and advantages of newer forms. There shouldn’t have been any here. Had these people bonded the wrong spren by mistake? It happened sometimes.

  Eshonai strode up to the group of three, two femalen and one malen. They were hauling rockbuds harvested on one of the nearby plateaus, plants which had been encouraged to grow quickly by use of Stormlight-infused gems.

  “What is this?” Eshonai asked. “Did you choose this form in error? Or are you new spies?”

  They looked at her with insipid eyes. Eshonai attuned Anxiety. She had once tried dullform—she had wanted to know what their spies would suffer. Trying to force concepts through her brain had been like trying to think rationally while in a dream.

  “Did someone ask you to adopt this form?” Eshonai said, speaking slowly and clearly.

  “Nobody asked it,” the malen said to no rhythm at all. His voice sounded dead. “We did it.”

  “Why?” Eshonai said. “Why would you do this?”

  “Humans won’t kill us when they come,” the malen said, hefting his rockbud and continuing on his way. The others joined him without a word.

  Eshonai gaped, the Rhythm of Anxiety strong in her mind. A few fearspren, like long purple worms, dove in and out of the rock nearby, collecting toward her until they crawled up out of the ground around her.

  Forms could not be commanded; every person was free to choose for themselves. Transformations could be cajoled and requested, but they could not be forced. Their gods had not allowed this freedom, so the listeners would have it, no matter what. These people could choose dullform if they wished. Eshonai could do nothing about it. Not directly.

  She hastened her pace. Her leg still ached from her wound, but was healing quickly. One of the benefits of warform. She could almost ignore the damage at this point.

  A city full of empty buildings, and Eshonai’s mother chose a shack on the very edge of the city, almost fully exposed to the storms. Mother worked her shalebark rows outside, humming softly to herself to the Rhythm of Peace. She wore workform; she’d always preferred it. Even after nimbleform had been discovered, Mother had not changed. She had said she didn’t want to encourage people to see one form as more valuable than another, that such stratification could destroy them.

  Wise words. The type Eshonai hadn’t heard out of her mother in years.

  “Child!” Mother said as Eshonai approached. Solid despite her years, Mother had a neat round face and wore her hairstrands in a braid, tied with a ribbon. Eshonai had brought her that ribbon from a meeting with the Alethi years ago. “Child, have you seen your sister? It is her day of first transformation! We need to prepare her.”

  “It is attended to, Mother,” Eshonai said to the Rhythm of Peace
, kneeling down beside the woman. “How goes the pruning?”

  “I should be finishing soon,” Mother said. “I need to leave before the people who own this house return.”

  “You own it, Mother.”

  “No, no. It belongs to two others. They were in the house last night, and told me I needed to leave. I’ll just finish with this shalebark before I go.” She got out her file, smoothing one side of a ridge, then painting it with sap to encourage growth in that direction.

  Eshonai sat back, attuning Mourning, and Peace left her. Perhaps she should have chosen the Rhythm of the Lost instead. It changed in her head.

  She forced it back. No. No, her mother was not dead.

  She wasn’t fully alive, either.

  “Here, take this,” Mother said to Peace, handing Eshonai a file. At least Mother recognized her today. “Work on that outcropping there. I don’t want it to keep growing downward. We need to send it up, up toward the light.”

  “The storms are too strong on this side of the city.”

  “Storms? Nonsense. No storms here.” Mother paused. “I wonder where we’ll be taking your sister. She’ll need a storm for her transformation.”

  “Don’t worry about that, Mother,” Eshonai said, forcing herself to speak to Peace. “I will care for it.”

  “You are so good, Venli,” Mother said. “So helpful. Staying home, not running off, like your sister. That girl . . . She’s never where she should be.”

  “She is now,” Eshonai whispered. “She’s trying to be.”

  Mother hummed to herself, continuing working. Once, this woman had one of the best memories in the city. She still did, in a way.

  “Mother,” Eshonai said, “I need help. I think something terrible is going to happen. I can’t decide if it is less terrible than what is already happening.”

  Mother filed at a section of shalebark, then blew off the dust.

  “Our people are crumbling,” Eshonai said. “We’re being weathered away. We moved to Narak and chose a war of attrition. That has meant six years with steady losses. People are giving up.”

  “That’s not good,” Mother said.

  “But the alternative? Dabbling in things we shouldn’t, things that might bring the eyes of the Unmade upon us.”

  “You’re not working,” Mother said, pointing. “Don’t be like your sister.”

  Eshonai placed her hands in her lap. This wasn’t helping. Seeing Mother like this . . .

  “Mother,” Eshonai said to Supplication, “why did we leave the dark home?”

  “Ah, now that’s an old song, Eshonai,” Mother said. “A dark song, not for a child like you. Why, it’s not even your day of first transformation.”

  “I’m old enough, Mother. Please?”

  Mother blew on her shalebark. Had she forgotten, finally, this last part of what she had been? Eshonai’s heart sank.

  “Long are the days since we knew the dark home,” Mother sang softly to one of the Rhythms of Remembrance. “The Last Legion, that was our name then. Warriors who had been set to fight in the farthest plains, this place that had once been a nation and was now rubble. Dead was the freedom of most people. The forms, unknown, were forced upon us. Forms of power, yes, but also forms of obedience. The gods commanded, and we did obey, always. Always.”

  “Except for that day,” Eshonai said along with her mother, in rhythm.

  “The day of the storm when the Last Legion fled,” Mother continued in song. “Difficult was the path chosen. Warriors, touched by the gods, our only choice to seek dullness of mind. A crippling that brought freedom.”

  Mother’s calm, sonorous song danced with the wind. As frail as she seemed other times, when she sang the old songs, she seemed herself again. A parent who had at times conflicted with Eshonai, but a parent whom Eshonai had always respected.

  “Daring was the challenge made,” Mother sang, “when the Last Legion abandoned thought and power in exchange for freedom. They risked forgetting all. And so songs they composed, a hundred stories to tell, to remember. I tell them to you, and you will tell them to your children, until the forms are again discovered.”

  From there, Mother launched into one of the early songs, about how the people would make their home in the ruins of an abandoned kingdom. How they would spread out, act as simple tribes and refugees. It was their plan to remain hidden, or at least ignored.

  The songs left out so much. The Last Legion hadn’t known how to transform into anything other than dullform and mateform, at least not without the help of the gods. How had they known the other forms were possible? Had these facts originally been recorded in the songs, and then lost over the years as words changed here and there?

  Eshonai listened, and though her mother’s voice did help her attune Peace again, she found herself deeply troubled anyway. She had come here for answers. Once, that would have worked.

  No longer.

  Eshonai stood to leave her mother singing.

  “I found some of your things,” Mother said, breaking the song, “when cleaning today. You should take them. They clutter the home, and I will be moving out soon.”

  Eshonai hummed Mourning to herself, but went to see just what her mother had “discovered.” Another pile of rocks, in which she saw child’s playthings? Strips of cloth she imagined were clothing?

  Eshonai found a small sack in front of the building. She opened it to find paper.

  Paper made from local plants, not human paper. Rough paper, with varied color, made after the old listener way. Textured and full, not neat and sterile. The ink on it was beginning to fade, but Eshonai recognized the drawings.

  My maps, she thought. From those early days.

  Without meaning to, she attuned Remembrance. Days spent hiking across the wilderness of what the humans called Natanatan, passing through forests and jungles, drawing her own maps and expanding the world. She’d started alone, but her discoveries had excited an entire people. Soon, though still in her teenage years, she’d been leading entire expeditions to find new rivers, new ruins, new spren, new plants.

  And humans. In a way, this was all her fault.

  Her mother started singing again.

  Looking through her old maps, Eshonai found a powerful longing within her. Once, she’d seen the world as something fresh and exciting. New, like a blossoming forest after a storm. She was dying slowly, as surely as her people were.

  She packed up the maps and left her mother’s house, walking toward the center of town. Her mother’s song, still beautiful, echoed behind her. Eshonai attuned Peace. That let her know that she was nearly late for the meeting with the rest of the Five.

  She did not hasten her pace. She let the steady, sweeping beats of the Rhythm of Peace carry her forward. Unless you concentrated on attuning a certain rhythm, your body would naturally choose the one that fit your mood. Therefore, it was always a conscious decision to listen to a rhythm that did not match how you felt. She did this now with Peace.

  The listeners had made a decision centuries ago, a decision that set them back to primitive levels. Choosing to murder Gavilar Kholin had been an act to affirm that decision of their ancestors. Eshonai had not then been one of their leaders, but they had listened to her counsel and given her the right to vote among them.

  The choice, horrible though it seemed, had been one of courage. They’d hoped that a long war would bore the Alethi.

  Eshonai and the others had underestimated Alethi greed. The gemhearts had changed everything.

  In the center of town, near the pool, was a tall tower that remained proudly erect in defiance of centuries’ worth of storms. Once, there had been steps within, but crem leaking in windows had filled the building up with rock. So workers had carved steps running around its outside.

  Eshonai started up the steps, holding to the chain for safety. It was a long but familiar climb. Though her leg ached, warform had great endurance—though it required more food than any other form to keep it strong. She made it to the t
op with ease.

  She found the other members of the Five waiting for her, one member wearing each known form. Eshonai for warform, Davim for workform, Abronai for mateform, Chivi for nimbleform, and the quiet Zuln for dullform. Venli waited as well, with her once-mate, though he was flushed from the difficult climb. Nimbleform, though good for many delicate activities, did not have great endurance.

  Eshonai stepped up onto the flat top of the once-tower, wind blowing against her from the east. There were no chairs up here, and the Five sat on the bare rock itself.

  Davim hummed to Annoyance. With the rhythms in one’s head, it was difficult to be late by accident. They rightly suspected that Eshonai had dallied.

  She sat on the rock and took the spren-filled gemstone from her pocket, setting it on the ground in front of her. The violet stone glowed with Stormlight.

  “I am worried about this test,” Eshonai said. “I do not think we should allow it to proceed.”

  “What?” Venli said to Anxiety. “Sister, don’t be ridiculous. Our people need this.”

  Davim leaned forward, arms on his knees. He was broad faced, his workform skin marbled mostly of black with tiny swirls of red here and there. “If this works, it will be an amazing advance. The first of the forms of ancient power, rediscovered.”

  “Those forms are tied to the gods,” Eshonai said. “What if, in choosing this form, we invite them to return?”

  Venli hummed Irritation. “In the old day, all forms came from the gods. We have found that nimbleform does not harm us. Why would stormform?”

  “It is different,” Eshonai said. “Sing the song; hum it to yourself. ‘Its coming brings the gods their night.’ The ancient powers are dangerous.”

  “Men have them,” Abronai said. He wore mateform, lush and plump, though he controlled its passions. Eshonai had never envied him the position; she knew, from private conversations, that he would have preferred to have another form. Unfortunately, others who held mateform either did so transiently—or did not possess the proper solemnity to join the Five.

  “You yourself brought us the report, Eshonai,” Abronai continued. “You saw a warrior among the Alethi using ancient powers, and many others confirmed it to us. Surgebindings have returned to men. The spren again betray us.”