Rhythm of War (The Stormlight Archive #4) - Brandon Sanderson Page 0,457

let it be. You don’t want to have to persuade the audience as well as the judge.”

“Great one,” Adolin said, “I had hoped this to be an intimate, personal discussion of—”

“Tough,” Kelek said. “You should have thought of that before coming in here to create a storm. Everyone knows how this trial will end, so we might as well make a good time of it for them.”

Adolin felt a sinking sensation as Kelek led the group of honorspren around him. Though few lighteyed judges were ever truly impartial, there was an expectation that they’d try to act with honor before the eyes of the Almighty. But this Herald basically told him the trial would be a sham. The man had made his judgment before hearing any arguments.

How on Roshar was that ever considered a deity? Adolin thought, in a daze. The Heralds had fallen so far.

Either that, or … perhaps these ten people had always been only that. People. After all, crowning a man a king or highprince didn’t necessarily make him anything grander than he’d been. Adolin knew that firsthand.

“That could have gone better,” Blended said, “but at least a trial by witness is. Come. I have one day, it seems, to prepare you to be thrown into the angerspren’s den.…”

I remember so few of those centuries. I am a blur. A smear on the page. A gaunt stretch of ink, made all the more insubstantial with each passing day.

Venli knelt on the floor of a secluded hallway on the fifteenth floor of Urithiru. The stones whispered to her that the place had once been called Ur. The word meant “original” in the Dawnchant. An ancient place, with ancient stones.

There was a spren that lived here. Not dead, as Raboniel had once proclaimed. This spren was the veins of the tower, its inner metal and crystal running through walls, ceilings, floors.

The stones had not been created by that spren, though a grand project had reshaped them. Reshaped Ur, the original mountain that had been here before. The stones remembered being that mountain. They remembered so many things, which they expressed to Venli. Not with words. Rather as impressions, like those a hand left in crem before it dried.

Or the impression Venli’s hands left in the floor as they sank into the eager stone. Remember, the stones whispered. Remember what you have forgotten.

She remembered sitting at her mother’s feet as a child, listening to the songs. The music had flowed like water, etching patterns in her brain—memories—like the passage of time etched canals in stone.

Listeners were not like humans, who grew slow as trees. Listeners grew like vines, quick and eager. By age three, she’d been singing with her mother. By age ten, she’d been considered an adult. Venli remembered those years—looking up to Eshonai, who seemed so big, although just a year older than Venli. She had vague memories of holding her father’s finger as he sang with her mother.

She remembered love. Family. Grandparents, cousins. How had she forgotten? As a child, ambition and love had been like two sides of her face, each with its own vibrant pattern. To the sound of Odium’s rhythms, one side had shone, while the other withered. She had become a person who wanted only to achieve her goals—not because those goals would help others, but because of the goals themselves.

It was in that moment that Venli saw for herself the depth of his lies. He claimed to be of all Passions, and yet where was the love she’d once felt? The love for her mother? Her sister? Her friends? For a while, she’d even forgotten her love for Demid, though it had helped to awaken her.

It felt wrong to be using his Light to practice her Surgebinding, but the stones whispered that it was well. Odium and his tone had become part of Roshar, as Cultivation and Honor—who had not been created alongside the planet—had become part of it. His power was natural, and no more wrong or right than any other part of nature.

Venli searched for something else. The tone of Cultivation. Odium’s song could suffuse her, fueling her powers and enflaming her emotions, but that tone … that tone had belonged to her people long before he’d arrived. While she searched for it, she listened to her mother’s songs in her mind. Like chains, spiked into the stone so they’d remain strong during storms, they reached backward through time. Through generations.

To her people, leaving the battlefield. Walking away rather than