Raboniel has used on you. If she can corrupt you through a node, could we not perhaps cleanse you through one? I think it’s worth trying, because my efforts to create Towerlight are stalled.”
She waited, gripping her pad tightly. Her other ideas were sketchier than those. She wouldn’t use them unless these arguments didn’t work.
So good with words. Humans are like persuasionspren. I can’t speak with one of you without being changed.
Navani continued to wait. Silence was best now.
Fine, the Sibling said. One of the two remaining nodes is in the well at the center of the place you call the Breakaway market. It is near other fabrials there. One hidden among many.
“On the first floor?” Navani asked. “That’s such a populated area!”
All of the nodes are down low. There was talk of installing others farther away, but my Bondsmith did not have the resources—my falling-out with the humans was driving them away. The project wasn’t completed. Only the four on the first few floors were completed.
Navani frowned—though the well was a clever place to hide a fabrial. Many of the workings of the tower remained mysterious to modern scholars, so a cluster of gemstones working as pumps might indeed camouflage another fabrial. In fact, Navani had studied drawings of those pumps herself. Had this mechanism been there, unnoticed, all along?
This is a good node for your agent to visit, the Sibling said. Because it can be reached from the back ways. Have your Windrunner visit it through the aquifers, and we will see if—by infusing it with Stormlight—he can counteract the corruption. It might not work, as I am not simply of Honor or of Cultivation. But … it could help.
“And the final node?” Navani asked.
Is mine alone, the Sibling replied. Show me that your work on this one helps, human, and then we can speak further.
“A fair compromise,” Navani said. “I am willing to listen, Sibling.”
She left the wall and grabbed some books to read, to cover what she’d been doing. And she did need to study more, after all. She’d have loved to have more books on music theory, but this archive didn’t have anything more specific on the topic. She did have Kalami’s notes about the gemstones they’d discovered that used certain buzzing vibrations as substitutes for letters. Perhaps those would help.
She was browsing through those notes, walking idly among the stacks, when she saw the Sibling’s light flashing. She hurried over, nervous about how bright the light was. She glanced at the guard, hoping he hadn’t seen, and put her hand to the wall.
“You need to—”
They’ve found the node in the well. We’re too late.
“What? Already?”
I am as good as dead.
“Contact Kaladin.”
They already have the node, and he’s too far away. We—
“Contact Kaladin,” Navani said. “Now. I’ll find a way to distract Raboniel.”
Opposites. Opposites of sounds. Sound has no opposite. It’s merely overlapped vibration, the same sound, but sound has meaning. This sound does, at least. These sounds. The voices of gods.
—From Rhythm of War, final page
Kaladin awoke to something dark attacking him.
He screamed, struggling against the clinging shadows. They’d been assaulting him for an eternity, wrapping around him, constricting him. Voices that never relented, fingers of shadow that drilled into his brain.
He was in a dark place full of red light, and the shadows laughed and danced around him. They tormented him, flayed him, stabbed him again and again and wouldn’t let him die. He fought back the hands that gripped, then he crawled across the floor, pulling up against the wall and breathing shallowly. The rushing sounds of his own blood in his ears drowned out the laughter.
One shadow continued watching him. One terrible shadow. It stared at him, then turned and took something from beside the wall before vanishing. Vanishing … out the door.
Kaladin blinked, and the shadows melted from his mind. The terrible laughter, the phantom pain, the whispers. His mind always interpreted those as Moash’s voice.
A nightmare. Another nightmare.
“Kaladin?” Syl asked. She sat on the floor in front of him. He blinked, glancing sharply one way, then the other. The room seemed to settle into place. Teft sleeping on the stone bench. A few chips set out for light. Fearspren, like globs of goo, undulating in the corners.
“I…” He swallowed, his mouth dry. “I had a nightmare.”
“I know.”
He carefully relaxed his posture, embarrassed at how he must appear huddled up by the wall. Like a child frightened of the dark. He couldn’t afford to be a child. Too much depended