Rhythm of War (The Stormlight Archive #4) - Brandon Sanderson Page 0,564

life in the ceiling.

The ground trembled, as if the entire mountain were shaking. Clanking sounds rang in the hallways, like distant machines, and wind began to blow in the vast chamber—which now was as bright as day. Most amazing, the lightning on the stormforms went out.

Deepest Ones, who had been clawing out of the ground and grabbing at the feet of soldiers, began screaming and going limp, trapped in the stone. The Heavenly Ones who had been helping dropped to the ground suddenly, then collapsed, unconscious.

Groans sounded from behind. The Radiants on the floor at the center of the circle began stirring. They were awake!

“You may turn in your weapons,” Stormblessed said to the enemy. “And return to your kind unharmed, so long as you promise me one thing.” He smiled. “Tell him that I’m particularly going to enjoy hearing what he looked like when he found out what happened here today.”

* * *

A strange, unpleasant stench struck Dalinar as he stepped into Ishar’s pavilion.

The odor was chemically harsh, and he felt a faint burning in his eyes. He blinked in the dim light, finding a large chamber filled with slab tables and sheets shrouding something atop them. Bodies? The Windrunners had gone in first, of course, but they were busy inspecting the recesses of the tent to check for an ambush.

Dalinar walked up to one of the slabs and yanked off the shroud. He simply found a body underneath, an incision in its abdomen made with clean surgical precision. Male, with the clothing cut off and lying beside the body. Very pale skin and stark white hair—in death, the hair and skin seemed almost the same color. That skin had a blue cast to it; probably a Natan person.

So Ishar was a butcher, a mad surgeon as well as a crazed theocrat. For some reason, that relieved Dalinar. It was disgusting, but this was an ordinary kind of evil. He’d expected something worse.

“Sir?” Mela the Windrunner called from across the room. “You should see this.”

Dalinar walked over to Mela, who stood beside one of the other slabs. Szeth remained in the doorway to the pavilion, seated on the ground, holding his sheathed sword across his lap. He seemed not to care about the investigation.

Another corpse—half revealed by a drawn-back sheet—was on the slab in front of Mela, though this one was far stranger. The elongated body had a black shell covering most of it, from neck to feet. That had been cut free to open up the chest. Dalinar couldn’t make sense of the shell. It looked like clothing, kind of, but was hard like singer carapace—and had apparently been attached to the skin.

The head was a soggy mass of black flesh, soft like intestines, with no visible eyes or features.

“What on Roshar…” Dalinar said. “The hands seem human, if too long, but the rest of it…”

“I have no idea,” Mela said. She glanced away and shivered. “It’s not human, sir. I don’t know what it is.”

In the back of Dalinar’s mind, the Stormfather rumbled.

This … the spren said. This is not possible.

What? Dalinar asked.

That is a Cryptic, he said. The Lightweaver spren. Only they don’t have bodies in this realm. They can’t.

“Sir,” Lyn said from a nearby slab. The corpse she’d uncovered was a pile of vines vaguely shaped like a person.

Cultivationspren … the Stormfather said. Return to that first body you saw. NOW.

Dalinar did not object and walked toward the front of the pavilion. What he’d first dismissed as an ordinary body now seemed anything but. The white-blue hair, the pieces of clothing that were—he now recognized—the exact same color as the body. The Stormfather’s thunder grew distant.

I knew him, the Stormfather said. I could not see it at first. I did not want to see it. This is Vespan. Honorspren.

“So they’re not … some kind of attempt at making men into mimicries of spren,” Dalinar said. “These are actual spren corpses?”

Spren don’t have corpses, the Stormfather said. Spren do not die like men. They are power that cannot be destroyed. They … This is IMPOSSIBLE.

Dalinar searched through the chamber, where more and more drawn-back sheets revealed different strange corpses. Several just skeletons, others piles of rock.

This place is evil, the Stormfather said. Beyond evil. What has been done here is an abomination.

Sigzil jogged over, holding some ledgers he’d found in the rear. Dalinar couldn’t make sense of them, but Sigzil pointed at the Azish glyphs, reading them.

“This is a list of experiments, I think,” the companylord