Rhythm of War (The Stormlight Archive #4) - Brandon Sanderson Page 0,297

will.

Eshonai, Klade, and a few others joined a few human scholars, trying to decipher one another’s tongues. Preserved in the songs, fortunately, were human phrases. Perhaps her past with the songs was what helped Eshonai learn faster than the others. Or maybe it was her stubbornness. She spent evenings sitting with the humans, making them repeat sounds over and over late into the night by the light of their brilliant glowing gemstones.

That was another thing. Human gemstones glowed far more brightly than listener ones. It had to do with the way the gemstones were cut and shaped. Each day with the humans taught her something new.

Once the language barrier began to fall, the humans asked if they could be taken out onto the Shattered Plains. So it was that Eshonai led the way, though she kept them far from the ten ancient cities and the other listener families, for now.

Using one of Eshonai’s maps, they approached from the north and walked along the chasms until they reached an ancient listener bridge. The rift in the stone smelled of wet rotting plants. Pungent, but not unpleasant. Where plants rotted, others often soon grew, and the scent of death was the same as the scent of life.

The humans followed gingerly across the bridge of wood and rope, the guards going first—wearing their buffed metal carapace breastplates and caps. They seemed to expect the bridge to collapse at any moment.

Once across, Eshonai stepped up onto a boulder and took a deep breath, feeling the winds. Overhead, a few windspren swirled in the sky. Once the guards had crossed, some of the others started over as well. Everyone had wanted to come see the Plains where the monsters of the chasms lived.

One of the attendants was a curious woman who was the surgeon’s assistant. She climbed up onto the rock beside Eshonai, though her clothing—which enveloped her from neck to ankles and covered up her left hand for some reason—wasn’t particularly good for exploring. It was nice to see that there were some things that the listeners had figured out that the humans hadn’t.

“What do you see?” she asked Eshonai in the human tongue. “When you look at the spren?”

Eshonai hummed to Consideration. What did she mean? “I see spren,” Eshonai said, speaking slowly and deliberately, as her accent was sometimes bad.

“Yes, what do they look like?”

“Long white lines,” Eshonai said, pointing at the windspren. “Holes. Small holes? Is there a word?”

“Pinpricks, perhaps.”

“Pinpricks in sky,” Eshonai said. “And tails, long, very long.”

“Curious,” the woman said. She wore a lot of rings on her right hand, though Eshonai couldn’t tell why. It seemed like they would get caught on things. “It is different.”

“Different?” Eshonai said. “We see different?”

“Yes,” the woman said. “You seem to see the reality of the spren, or closer to it. Tell me. We have stories, among the humans, of windspren that act like people. Taking different shapes, playing tricks. Have you ever seen one like that?”

Eshonai went over the words in her mind. She thought she understood some of it. “Spren like people? Act like people?”

“Yes.”

“I have seen this,” she said.

“Excellent. And windspren that talk? That call you by name? Have you met any like this?”

“What?” Eshonai said, attuning Amusement. “Spren talking? No. It seems … not real? Fake, but a story?”

“‘Fanciful’ is perhaps the word you want.”

“Fanciful,” Eshonai said, examining the sounds in her mind. Yes, there was more than one way to explore.

The king and his brother finally crossed onto the plateau. “King” was not a new word to her, as it was mentioned in the songs. There had been debate among the listeners whether they should have a monarch. It seemed to Eshonai that until they managed to stop squabbling and became a single unified people, the discussion was silly.

The king’s brother was a brutish man who seemed like a slightly different breed from everyone else. He was the first she’d met, along with a group of human scouts, back in the forest. This human wasn’t simply larger than most of the others, he walked with a different step. His face was harder. If a human could ever be said to have a form, this man was warform.

The king himself though … he was proof that humans didn’t have forms. He was so erratic. Sometimes loud and angry, other times quiet and dismissive. Listeners had different emotions too, of course. It was just that this man seemed to defy explanation. Perhaps the fact that the humans spoke with