Chapter Fourteen
Storms.
Storms.
Suddenly his experiences upon arrival took on an even more sinister cast. That’s what the Cinder King had been doing. That’s what the strange game of tag had been about: choosing the next people to be sacrificed to the sun. Not in some primitive, pagan way—but in a modern one. Equally horrible, but with more economics.
That’s terrible, the hero exclaims, imbuing his words with sickened disgust.
It wasn’t unprecedented. Nomad hadn’t been to Nalthis—the place sounded nice, and nice places tended to be easy for the Night Brigade to find—but they bought, sold, and traded chunks of people’s souls like they were gemstones. BEUs as a measurement were based on this system—though at least there, the transaction left you alive.
“That’s why there aren’t any ghosts here,” he said softly in Alethi. “Threnodites, they have this phantom echo to their souls. A sort of smoky shadow that lives on after they die. Here, there’s not a chance for that. Their souls are condensed, fused, turned into…”
A power cell. One of which he’d consumed to make his Connection to this planet. Another event that took on a gruesome air in hindsight. He felt at his coat pocket, where he’d hidden the drained core after getting his new clothing.
One soul’s worth, even with a shade attached, wouldn’t be enough for us to absorb over a thousand BEUs of Investiture like we did, Aux said. So there must be some other force filling the stone, like Stormlight on Roshar. The sunlight must be Invested, as we guessed. It’s supercharging the remnants of the soul as the person is killed.
It was the only thing that made sense, as they’d never be able to power entire cities from souls alone. Not without running out of people very quickly. Still, the implications of it left him nauseous.
“Your reaction,” Rebeke said. “It’s genuine, isn’t it? You had no idea what sunhearts were.”
“I didn’t.”
“Then, in truth, there’s hope. Authentic hope. A better life than even Elegy presumed to offer.”
“Your city…still uses such sacrifices?” Nomad said.
“What else are we to do? We can’t outrun the sun without power. Unlike the Cinder King’s lottery, my people have always used volunteers. From among the elderly, the sickly.” She absentmindedly traced the outline of the sunheart’s housing. “Mother was dying. She might have had months left, she might have had days, she might have had years. But we had three spent sunhearts and ships that couldn’t flee. So…” She took a deep breath.
“So you leave people out to die,” he said. “They become these…power sources. How do you find them again?”
“The prospector ships,” she said. “It’s why we have them. Sunhearts float near the top of magma for some reason. You can find them in roughly the same place you left the people, though you often have to pry them from the stone.” Her hand stilled. “My brother installed Mother’s sunheart here, in our quadcycle, so I could have it near me. Now that he’s…he’s gone, and Mother, and even Elegy…”
This storming world, the knight says with a breathless voice. Indicating horror, not arousal, since that word is sometimes used both ways. Just in case you were wondering.
“When they captured me,” Nomad said, “the Cinder King took off his glove and seized me by the face. He expected something to happen. It didn’t.”
That comment shook Rebeke out of her melancholy, prompting her to stare at him again. She looked at his hands. Ungloved. Clearly curious, Rebeke removed her right glove, then hesitated.
“May I?” she asked.
He shrugged. So she reached across and touched his wrist.
“Nothing,” she said, amazed.
“And what is supposed to happen?”
“I should be able to draw out your heat,” she said. “Some of your soul. As I initiated the touch, I should be able to pull it forth from your body, cooling you—it’s what the bracers do. They did work on you, though?”
“Unfortunately,” he said. “What is being drawn from you is something we call Investiture. A different state of energy, and the removal of it cools you in the process. That’s a side effect, though. Because of your heritage, your people have an interesting type of Investiture—as do I, though mine is of a different variety.”
“Why did the bracers work on you,” she said, “but my touch does not?”
It was tough to say. Though he’d once made a study of this sort of thing, it had been decades since he’d given it much thought. And the various nuances of Investiture could be tricky even for an expert.
“Investiture is finicky,” he said. “Usually requires specific things—Intent, Commands, familiarity—to manipulate. It’s likely that the bracers were brutal enough to force through my protections, but your touch isn’t.”
She pulled her hand away from him and blushed, quickly putting her glove back on. “It’s unusual,” she said, “to do that.”
“What?” he asked. “Touch someone?”
She nodded, embarrassed. “Normally it only happens because of accidents.”
“I saw the Cinder King do it intentionally,” he said. “Killing people in the arena, consuming their Investiture.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “He can draw forth heat quickly, powerfully, by force. He can feed upon a human being, leave them a dead husk. He has…fed on thousands of people at this point.”
Wow, Aux said. Thousands? Watch that one, Nomad. If he’s that highly Invested…he could be seriously dangerous.
“Regardless,” Rebeke continued, “any touch can lead to heat being drawn or given—even for a normal person and even if not intended. It is rare for it to be dangerous, though.”
“So, wait,” Nomad said. “If you touch, you start draining Investiture from one another?”
“There are prayers to formalize it,” she said. “But…yes, a prolonged touch can cause it to begin. Accidents. Or…intimacy.”
“You freeze each other during sex?”
Well, that’s new, the hero says to his overly blunt valet. Certainly didn’t have that on the list of cultural features I was expecting to find on this world.
Rebeke’s face grew redder. “In truth, we pass heat back and forth. It’s…not something I should have to explain to you.”
“Fair enough,” he said, thinking. These people had a natural, biological ability to leech Investiture from one another. Almost everything had some Invested component, but the extremities of experience—specifically the strange things he could do and the strange things that had been done to him—were deeply related to the nature of Investiture.
That included his Torment. There was a physical component. A mental component. But the real shackles were spiritual—Investiture. So maybe…
A plan began to form in his mind. A way to potentially escape his affliction. Or at the very least lessen the symptoms of it.
Nomad, the knight interjects—likely interrupting musings about his incredible nature—I see something. Ship twenty degrees to your right. Very distant.
Nomad focused on the direction Auxiliary had indicated. While Aux didn’t have a physical shape unless Nomad called him as an object, the spren could use Nomad’s body to experience the world. Aux had been keeping watch, even if Nomad hadn’t.
Nomad spotted it: a small ship approaching in the distance. “Scout,” he said to Rebeke. “I think it’s observing us. You should warn the others.”
Rebeke followed his gaze, then cursed softly. She flipped a switch on the side of her seat, and the fuselage to Nomad’s left split open. Rebeke’s seat and the metal around it unlocked from the main body of the cycle. Sections at the front and sides folded out simultaneously, forming into her own one-person hovercycle, sleek, efficient.
As he’d guessed, this quadcycle could eject the four portions with seats. The vessel wasn’t so much one large hovercycle as it was a carrier of four smaller ones.
“Impressive,” he said. “Can everything on this planet break apart into smaller, functional pieces? If we crash this thing, is it going to disintegrate into a hundred even smaller cycles?”
“Call in what you saw to warn the others,” she said to him, then leaned down, ready to go after the scout.
“Don’t go right for it!” Nomad shouted. “It’s observing. See how it’s descending to the terrain to be harder to spot? It’s probably reporting in via radio. I’d bet that scout thinks they’ve caught us planting seeds. If you go screaming toward it, the scout will know it’s been spotted.”
She paused, seeing the wisdom in that. “It can’t be reporting in,” she said. “We have our entire city here, including our radio jammers. That will disrupt their signals.”
Nomad wondered again at their varied technologies. Then again, maybe they weren’t using actual radio waves, and his mind interpreted the word that way for convenience. Might be some kind of Connection-based communication, if it was powered by these sunhearts.
“Then it’s even more important not to alert the scout they’ve been seen,” he said. “Here. Let me show you.”
He turned and looked down by his leg, in the same location where she’d reached to unlock her cycle. There, he found a handle, almost flush with the side of the craft. At her nod, he turned it, and his own cycle disconnected from the central fuselage.
The resulting single seater was more like the hovercycles he’d flown on other worlds. He pulled it out beside hers.
“This is as small as they get,” she noted. “These don’t even have their own sunhearts; they have a battery that will last you about an hour before needing to reattach to the main vehicle to recharge.”
“Great,” he said. “Follow me.” He turned his cycle vaguely toward the distant scout ship. He made a wide loop, as if he were going to check on the prospectors.
She followed, and as they passed the point closest to the still-distant scout, she pulled up beside Nomad. “Now?” she asked, eager.
“No,” he said. “We’ll do one more loop. Make it seem like this is a normal part of our routine. This time, we’ll swing out wider, though.”
She nodded, watching the scout intently.
“Didn’t you just recently get into trouble for exceeding your orders?” he asked. “They’re going to yell at you again.”
“If it pleases you to know, it is ever my lot,” she said. “Should I care?”
He smiled. “I don’t see why you should.”
She suddenly seemed uncertain. “I…I offer the concern that the scout might be a Charred. What would we do then?”
“Then we’ll ask if they want some tea,” Nomad said. “What do you think we’ll do? We’ll kill the bastard before they kill us.” He leaned in, watching her. She was eager. Maybe it was the recklessness of someone who had nothing left to live for. Maybe it was a thirst for vengeance. Most likely it was just wanting to do something—anything—to keep her mind off her loss. He’d been there. Too many times.
There is something odd about the way these people act, the knight muses to himself. I assume you’ve noticed.
“Yes,” he said in Alethi. “There’s a kind of strange timidity to them. Even the sharpshooters don’t really feel like soldiers—I wouldn’t be surprised to find they are repurposed hunters.” After all, they used the term “killer” like it was a dividing line. As if some people were capable of it, and some people weren’t.
Either way, he sensed a hunger in Rebeke. A desire to act, to fight back. He led her in another wide loop, getting closer to the scout’s location. The hovercycle controls were surprisingly intuitive. He supposed that made sense; if your entire society relied on constant flight, then you’d want your ships to be simple to fly.
The scout had taken cover beside a rock formation, like a large wave of magma that had been frozen in place. They were much closer now, but a distance still separated them—perhaps equal to what they’d already covered. Getting closer would be suspicious.
“All right,” Nomad said to Rebeke. “Now!”