Rhythm of War (The Stormlight Archive #4) - Brandon Sanderson Page 0,254

spheres inside. For some people, no nightmare was terrible enough—no war bloody enough—to discourage some creative personal enrichment.

The sounds of screams and echoes of thunder faded. Navani felt as if she were entering the mythical centerbeat—the heart of a highstorm spoken of by some poor wanderers trapped within its winds. A moment when for reasons inexplicable, the wind stopped and all became still.

She eventually reached the place where the Sibling had told her to go—a specific intersection among these twisting corridors. Though no part of the first level went completely unused, this area was among the least trafficked. The corridors here made a maze of frustrating design, and they used the small rooms for various storage dumps.

“Now what?” asked Elthebar, the stormwarden. Navani wasn’t particularly happy to have the tall man along; he looked silly with his pointed beard and his mysterious robes. But he’d been in the map room with them, and forbidding him hadn’t seemed right when she needed every mind she could get.

“Search this area,” Navani said to the others. “See if you can find a vein of garnet on the walls. It might be small and hidden among the changing colors of the strata.”

They did as she requested. Dabbid, the mute bridgeman, started searching the floor instead of the walls—working with his sphere enclosed entirely in his hand so it gave almost no light.

“Cover up your spheres and lanterns,” Navani said to the others. The command drew expressions that ranged between confused and horrified, but Navani led the way, closing the shield on her lantern.

The others obeyed one at a time, plunging the room into darkness. Light from a distant corridor flashed red in a sequence—only with no thunder. A few people’s hands glowed softly from the spheres inside, backlighting veins and bones.

“There,” Navani said, picking out a faint twinkling on the floor near one of the walls. They clustered around it, investigating the spark of garnet light in a hidden vein of crystal.

“What is it?” Isabi asked. “What kind of spren?”

The light started moving through the vein, across the floor, then down the corridor. Navani ignored the questions, following the spark until it moved up a wall. Here it followed the curving strata into a specific room, rounding the stone and slipping through the gap between door and doorway.

Venan had keys, fortunately. Inside, they had to step over rolled rugs to find the spark of light at the rear. Navani brushed her fingers against it and found a small bulge in the wall.

A gemstone, she realized. Connected to the line of crystal. It’s embedded in here so deeply, it’s difficult to see. Seemed to be a topaz. Hadn’t there been a similar gemstone embedded into the wall of that room where they’d found the model of the tower?

Infuse the topaz, the Sibling’s voice said in her mind. You can do this without Radiants? I have seen you perform such marvels.

“I need several small topazes,” Navani said to her scholars. “No larger than three kivs each.”

Her team scrambled; they kept gemstones of all sizes on hand for their experiments, and one soon brought forth a small case of infused topazes. Navani instructed her and several others to take the gemstones in tweezers and present them to the topaz set into the wall.

An infused gemstone touched to an uninfused one could be made to lend some of its Stormlight—assuming they were the same variety, and the uninfused gemstone was much larger than the infused ones. It worked a little like a pressure differential. A large empty vessel would take Stormlight from small full vessels.

It was a slow process, especially when the gemstone you wanted to infuse was relatively small—limiting the potential size differential. She moved up next to Ulvlk and Vrandl, the two Thaylen scholars. Both were artifabrians of a very secretive guild.

“Almighty send we can make this work in time,” Navani said as thunder echoed behind them.

“So that is why you brought us,” Vrandl said. She was a short woman who preferred havahs to traditional Thaylen dress. She wore her eyebrows in tight curls. “The tower is invaded, your men are dying, and you see an opportunity to pry trade secrets from our fingers?”

“The world is ending,” Navani countered, “and our greatest advantage—this tower, with its ability to instantly move troops from one end of Roshar to the other—is threatened. Is this really the time to hoard trade secrets, Brightness?”

The two women didn’t reply.

“You’d watch it burn?” Navani said, feeling exhausted—and snappish. “You’d actually let Urithiru