Words of Radiance

“Those will not save us,” Venli said to Amusement. “If we wish to deal with the humans, we will need the ancient powers.”

“Venli,” Eshonai said, grabbing her sister by the arm. “Our gods!”

Venli didn’t flinch. “The humans have Surgebinders.”

“Perhaps not. It could have been an Honorblade.”

“You fought him. Was it an Honorblade that struck you, wounded your leg, sent you limping?”

“I . . .” Her leg ached.

“We don’t know which of the songs are true,” Venli said. Though she said it to Resolve, she sounded tired, and she drew exhaustionspren. They came with a sound like wind, blowing in through the windows and doors like jets of translucent vapor before becoming stronger, more visible, and spinning around her head like swirls of steam.

My poor sister. She works herself as hard as the soldiers do.

“If the Surgebinders have returned,” Venli continued, “we must strive for something meaningful, something that can ensure our freedom. The forms of power, Eshonai . . .” She glanced at Eshonai’s hand, still on her arm. “At least sit and listen. And stop looming like a mountain.”

Eshonai removed her fingers, but did not sit. Her Shardplate’s weight would break a chair. Instead, she leaned forward, inspecting the table full of papers.

Venli had invented the script herself. They’d learned that concept from the humans—memorizing songs was good, but not perfect, even when you had the rhythms to guide you. Information stored on pages was more practical, especially for research.

Eshonai had taught herself the script, but reading was still difficult for her. She did not have much time to practice.

“So . . . stormform?” Eshonai said.

“Enough people of that form,” Venli said, “could control a highstorm, or even summon one.”

“I remember the song that speaks of this form,” Eshonai said. “It was a thing of the gods.”

“Most of the forms are related to them in some way,” Venli said. “Can we really trust the accuracy of words first sung so long ago? When those songs were memorized, our people were mostly dullform.”

It was a form of low intelligence, low capacity. They used it now to spy on the humans. Once, it and mateform had been the only forms her people had known.

Demid shuffled some of the pages, moving a stack. “Venli is right, Eshonai. This is a risk we must take.”

“We could negotiate with the Alethi,” Eshonai said.

“To what end?” Venli said, again to Skepticism, her exhaustionspren finally fading, the spren spinning away to search out more fresh sources of emotion. “Eshonai, you keep saying you want to negotiate. I think it is because you are fascinated by humans. You think they’ll let you go freely among them? A person they see as having the form of a rebellious slave?”

“Centuries ago,” Demid said, “we escaped both our gods and the humans. Our ancestors left behind civilization, power, and might in order to secure freedom. I would not give that up, Eshonai. Stormform. With it, we can destroy the Alethi army.”

“With them gone,” Venli said, “you can return to exploration. No responsibility—you could travel, make your maps, discover places no person has ever seen.”

“What I want for myself is meaningless,” Eshonai said to Reprimand, “so long as we are all in danger of destruction.” She scanned the specks on the page, scribbles of songs. Songs without music, written out as they were. Their souls stripped away.

Could the listeners’ salvation really be in something so terrible? Venli and her team had spent five years recording all of the songs, learning the nuances from the elderly, capturing them in these pages. Through collaboration, research, and deep thought, they had discovered nimbleform.

“It is the only way,” Venli said to Peace. “We will bring this to the Five, Eshonai. I would have you on our side.”

“I . . . I will consider.”

Ym carefully trimmed the wood from the side of the small block. He held it up to the spherelight beside his bench, pinching his spectacles by the rim and holding them closer to his eyes.

Such delightful inventions, spectacles. To live was to be a fragment of the cosmere that was experiencing itself. How could he properly experience if he couldn’t see? The Azish man who had first created these devices was long deceased, and Ym had submitted a proposal that he be considered one of the Honored Dead.

Ym lowered the piece of wood and continued to carve it, carefully whittling off the front to form a curve. Some of his colleagues bought their lasts—the wooden forms around which a cobbler built his shoes—from carpenters, but Ym had been taught to make his own. That was the old way, the way it had been done for centuries. If something had been done one way for such a long time, he figured there was probably a good reason.

Behind him stood the shadowed cubbies of a cobbler’s shop, the toes of dozens of shoes peeking out like the noses of eels in their holes. These were test shoes, used to judge size, choose materials, and decide styles so he could construct the perfect shoe to fit the foot and character of the individual. A fitting could take quite a while, assuming you did it properly.

Something moved in the dimness to his right. Ym glanced in that direction, but didn’t change his posture. The spren had been coming more often lately—specks of light, like those from a piece of crystal suspended in a sunbeam. He did not know its type, as he had never seen one like it before.

It moved across the surface of the workbench, slinking closer. When it stopped, light crept upward from it, like small plants growing or climbing from their burrows. When it moved again, those withdrew.

Ym returned to his sculpting. “It will be for making a shoe.”

The evening shop was quiet save for the scraping of his knife on wood.

“Sh-shoe . . . ?” a voice asked. Like that of a young woman, soft, with a kind of chiming musicality to it.

“Yes, my friend,” he said. “A shoe for young children. I find myself in need of those more and more these days.”

“Shoe,” the spren said. “For ch-children. Little people.”

Ym brushed wooden scraps off the bench for later sweeping, then set the last on the bench near the spren. It shied away, like a reflection off a mirror—translucent, really just a shimmer of light.

He withdrew his hand and waited. The spren inched forward—tentative, like a cremling creeping out of its crack after a storm. It stopped, and light grew upward from it in the shape of tiny sprouts. Such an odd sight.

“You are an interesting experience, my friend,” Ym said as the shimmer of light moved onto the last itself. “One in which I am honored to participate.”

“I . . .” the spren said. “I . . .” The spren’s form shook suddenly, then grew more intense, like light being focused. “He comes.”

Ym stood up, suddenly anxious. Something moved on the street outside. Was it that one? That watcher, in the military coat?

But no, it was just a child, peering in through the open door. Ym smiled, opening his drawer of spheres and letting more light into the room. The child shied back, just as the spren had.

The spren had vanished somewhere. It did that when others drew near.

“No need to fear,” Ym said, settling back down on his stool. “Come in. Let me get a look at you.”

The dirty young urchin peered back in. He wore only a ragged pair of trousers, no shirt, though that was common here in Iri, where both days and nights were usually warm.

The poor child’s feet were dirty and scraped.

“Now,” Ym said, “that won’t do. Come, young one, settle down. Let’s get something on those feet.” He moved out one of his smaller stools.

“They say you don’t charge nothin’,” the boy said, not moving.

“They are quite wrong,” Ym said. “But I think you will find my cost bearable.”

“Don’t have no spheres.”

“No spheres are needed. Your payment will be your story. Your experiences. I would hear them.”

“They said you was strange,” the boy said, finally walking into the shop.

“They were right,” Ym said, patting the stool.

The urchin stepped timidly up to the stool, walking with a limp he tried to hide. He was Iriali, though the grime darkened his skin and hair, both of which were golden. The skin less so—you needed the light to see it right—but the hair certainly. It was the mark of their people.

Ym motioned for the child to raise his good foot, then got out a washcloth, wetted it, and cleaned away the grime. He wasn’t about to do a fitting on feet so dirty. Noticeably, the boy tucked back the foot he’d limped on, as if trying to hide that it had a rag wrapped around it.

“So,” Ym said, “your story?”

“You’re old,” the boy said. “Older than anyone I know. Grandpa old. You must know everythin’ already. Why do you want to hear from me?”

“It is one of my quirks,” Ym said. “Come now. Let’s hear it.”

The boy huffed, but talked. Briefly. That wasn’t uncommon. He wanted to hold his story to himself. Slowly, with careful questions, Ym pried the story free. The boy was the son of a whore, and had been kicked out as soon as he could fend for himself. That had been three years ago, the boy thought. He was probably eight now.