a highstorm was near.
“If the Five give her permission.” They were to discuss it, and make their decision, today.
“That’s great,” Bila said, “but will it help me kill humans?”
Eshonai attuned Mourning. “If stormform is truly one of the ancient powers, Bila, then yes. It will help you kill humans. Many of them.”
“Good enough for me, then,” Bila said. “Why are you so worried?”
“The ancient powers are said to have come from our gods.”
“Who cares? If the gods would help us kill those armies out there, then I’d swear to them right now.”
“Don’t say that, Bila,” Eshonai said to Reprimand. “Never say anything like that.”
The woman quieted, tossing the stone onto the table. She hummed softly to Skepticism. That walked the line of insubordination. Eshonai met Bila’s eyes and found herself softly humming to Resolve.
Thude glanced from Bila to Eshonai. “Food?” he asked.
“Is that your answer to every disagreement?” Eshonai asked, breaking her song.
“It’s hard to argue with your mouth full,” Thude said.
“I’m sure I’ve seen you do just that,” Bila said. “Many times.”
“The arguments end happy, though,” Thude said. “Because everyone is full. So . . . food?”
“Fine,” Bila said, glancing at Eshonai.
The two withdrew. Eshonai sat down at the table, feeling drained. When had she started worrying if her friends were insubordinate? It was this horrid uniform.
She picked up the gemstone, staring into its depths. It was a large one, about a third the size of her fist, though gemstones didn’t have to be large to trap a spren inside.
She hated trapping them. The right way was to go into the highstorm with the proper attitude, singing the proper song to attract the proper spren. You bonded it in the fury of the raging storm and were reborn with a new body. People had been doing this from the arrival of the first winds.
The listeners had learned that capturing spren was possible from the humans, then had figured out the process on their own. A captive spren made the transformation much more reliable. Before, there had always been an element of chance. You could go into the storm wanting to become a soldier, and come out a mate instead.
This is progress, Eshonai thought, staring at the little smoky spren inside the stone. Progress is learning to control your world. Put up walls to stop the storms, choose when to become a mate. Progress was taking nature and putting a box around it.
Eshonai pocketed the gemstone, and checked the time. Her meeting with the rest of the Five wasn’t scheduled until the third movement of the Rhythm of Peace, and she had a good half a movement until then.
It was time to speak with her mother.
Eshonai stepped out into Narak and walked along the path, nodding to those who saluted. She passed mostly soldiers. So much of their population wore warform these days. Their small population. Once, there had been hundreds of thousands of listeners scattered across these plains. Now a fraction remained.
Even then, the listeners had been a united people. Oh, there had been divisions, conflicts, even wars among their factions. But they had been a single people—those who had rejected their gods and sought freedom in obscurity.
Bila no longer cared about their origins. There would be others like her, people who ignored the danger of the gods and focused only on the fight with the humans.
Eshonai passed dwellings—ramshackle things constructed of hardened crem over frames of shell, huddled in the leeward shadow of lumps of stone. Most of those were empty now. They’d lost thousands to war over the years.
We do have to do something, she thought, attuning the Rhythm of Peace in the back of her mind. She sought comfort in its calm, soothing beats, soft and blended. Like a caress.
Then she saw the dullforms.
They looked much like what the humans called “parshmen,” though they were a little taller and not nearly as stupid. Still, dullform was a limiting form, without the capacities and advantages of newer forms. There shouldn’t have been any here. Had these people bonded the wrong spren by mistake? It happened sometimes.
Eshonai strode up to the group of three, two femalen and one malen. They were hauling rockbuds harvested on one of the nearby plateaus, plants which had been encouraged to grow quickly by use of Stormlight-infused gems.
“What is this?” Eshonai asked. “Did you choose this form in error? Or are you new spies?”
They looked at her with insipid eyes. Eshonai attuned Anxiety. She had once tried dullform—she had wanted to know what