to assault the first floors of the tower city, Venli stayed with Raboniel in the basement. The Lady of Wishes didn’t seem terribly nervous about the invasion. She strolled along the wide hallway here, inspecting its murals. Venli stayed at her side as directed, and realized the reason she’d been brought along. Raboniel wanted a servant at hand.
“Does this strike you as a particularly human form of decoration, Last Listener?” Raboniel asked her, speaking to Craving as she stood with her hands before her, fingertips touching the large mural, this portion of which depicted Cultivation in the shape of a tree.
“I … I don’t know humans well enough to say, Ancient One.”
Sounds echoed from the stairwell at the opposite end of this hallway from the pillar room. Screams. Calls of horror. Clashes of weapon against weapon. By now the shanay-im would have arrived by air, delivering some of the most terrible and capable Fused to the sixth floor.
“To me it seems obvious,” Raboniel said. “Humans never use what is around them to its fullest. They always impose their will far too strongly. Though the shells of beasts and the colors of stone would offer striking variety for creating complex murals, the humans ignored natural materials. Instead they painted each square, then affixed it to this wall.
“One of the singers of old, creating a similar work of art, would have divided the bits of shell into a spectrum of colors. They would have asked themself what kind of mural would naturally be suggested by the pieces they had obtained. Their mural would have used no paint, and would have lasted millennia longer than this one. See how the colors here fade.”
A hulking form darkened the other end of the hallway, near the stairwell. The Pursuer looked like a dark scar of black and red upon the light stone. As he moved forward, Venli found herself trembling. Surely this was the most dangerous Fused in all the army.
“I have your leave,” the Pursuer said to Raboniel, “to find this Windrunner and kill him?”
“Him alone,” Raboniel said. “If he is here. There’s a good chance one of his skill went with the others to Azir.”
“If he is not here, he will return to try to liberate the tower,” the Pursuer said. “It is in his nature.” He turned, looking upward through the stone. “The Radiants we capture are dangerous. They have skill beyond what we anticipated, considering the newness of their bonds. We should behead them, each and every one.”
“No,” Raboniel said. “I will need them. Your orders are the same as what I told the others: Kill only those who resist. Gather the fallen Radiants for me. On my orders, you are to show … restraint.”
The Pursuer hummed—loudly and forcefully—to Craving. “You, who were once banished for recklessly endangering our kind in your attempts to exterminate humankind? You, Lady of Wishes, ask for restraint?”
Raboniel smiled and hummed softly another rhythm that Venli had never heard. Something brand new. Something incredible. Dark, dangerous, predatory, and beautiful. It implied destruction, but a quiet and deadly destruction.
Odium had granted this femalen her own rhythms.
No, Venli thought, the Pursuer is not the most dangerous of them.
“I care not for a single battle,” Raboniel said. “We will end this war, Pursuer. Forever. We have spent far, far too long in an endless cycle. I will break it—and once I am finished in this tower, there will be no turning back, ever. You will help in this, and you will start by collecting the fallen Radiants and delivering them to me.”
“I may kill the one, when I find him?” he repeated. “You relieve the Nine’s prohibition upon me?”
“Yes,” Raboniel said. “You may claim your prize and keep your custom, Pursuer. I take responsibility for this order.”
He hummed to Destruction and stalked off.
“If Stormblessed is here in the tower, he’ll be helpless when you find him, Pursuer!” Venli called. “You would murder an enemy who cannot resist you?”
“Tradition is more important than honor, foolish one,” the Pursuer called back to Derision. “I must kill those who have killed me. I have always killed those who have killed me.”
He transformed into a ribbon of red light, leaving behind a lifeless husk, and shot out into the stairwell so he could fly to the upper levels.
Timbre pulsed uncertainly in Venli’s chest. Yes … she was right. The Pursuer did have a madness to him. It wasn’t as obvious as in the other Fused—the ones who would grin and refuse to speak,