That voice deep within Eshonai still screamed. Even when she didn’t attune the old Rhythm of Peace. She kept herself busy to quiet it, walking the perfectly circular plateau just outside of Narak, the one where her soldiers often practiced.
Her people had become something old, yet something new. Something powerful. They stood in lines on this plateau, humming to Fury. She divided them by combat experience. A new form would not a soldier make; many of these had been workers all their lives.
They would have a part to play. They would bring about something grand.
“The Alethi will come,” Venli said, strolling at Eshonai’s side and absently bringing energy to her fingers and letting it play between two of them. Venli smiled often while wearing this new form. Otherwise, it didn’t seem to have changed her at all.
Eshonai knew that she herself had changed. But Venli . . . Venli acted the same.
Something felt wrong about that.
“The agent who sent this report is certain of it,” Venli continued. “Your visit to the Blackthorn seems to have encouraged them to action, and the humans intend to strike toward Narak in force. Of course, this could still turn into a disaster.”
“No,” Eshonai said. “No. It is perfect.”
Venli looked to her, stopping on the rock field. “We need no more training. We should act, right now, to bring a highstorm.”
“We will do it when the humans near,” Eshonai said.
“Why? Let us do it tonight.”
“Foolishness,” Eshonai said. “This is a tool to use in battle. If we produce an unexpected storm now, the Alethi won’t come, and we won’t win this war. We must wait.”
Venli seemed thoughtful. Finally, she smiled, then nodded.
“What do you know that you aren’t telling me?” Eshonai demanded, taking her sister by the shoulder.
Venli smiled more broadly. “I’m simply persuaded. We must wait. The storm will blow the wrong way, after all. Or is it all other storms that have blown the wrong way, and this one will be the first to blow the right way?”
The wrong way? “How do you know? About the direction?”
“The songs.”
The songs. But . . . they said nothing about . . .
Something deep within Eshonai nudged her to move on. “If that is true,” she said, “we’ll have to wait until the humans are practically on top of us to catch them in it.”
“Then that is what we do,” Venli said. “I will set to the teaching. Our weapon will be ready.”
She spoke to the Rhythm of Craving, a rhythm like the old Rhythm of Anticipation, but more violent.
Venli walked away, joined by her once-mate and many of her scholars. They seemed comfortable in these forms. Too comfortable. They couldn’t have held these forms before . . . could they?
Eshonai shoved down the screams and went to prepare another battalion of new soldiers. She had always hated being a general. How ironic, then, that she would be recorded in their songs as the warleader who had finally crushed the Alethi.
Taravangian, king of Kharbranth, awoke to stiff muscles and an ache in his back. He didn’t feel stupid. That was a good sign.
He sat up with a groan. Those aches were perpetual now, and his best healers could only shake their heads and promise him that he was fit for his age. Fit. His joints cracked like logs on the fire and he couldn’t stand quickly, lest he lose his balance and topple to the floor. To age truly was to suffer the ultimate treason, that of one’s body against oneself.
He sat up in his cot. Water lapped quietly against the hull of his cabin, and the air smelled of salt. He heard shouts in the near distance, however. The ship had arrived on schedule. Excellent.
As he settled himself, one servant approached with a table and another with a warm, wet cloth for wiping his eyes and hands. Behind them waited the King’s Testers. How long had it been since Taravangian had been alone, truly alone? Not since before the aches had come upon him.
Maben knocked on the open door, bearing his morning meal on a tray, stewed and spiced grain mush. It was supposed to be good for his constitution. Tasted like dishwater. Bland dishwater. Maben stepped forward to set out the meal, but Mrall—a Thaylen man in a black leather cuirass who wore both his head and eyebrows shaved—stopped her with a hand to the arm.
“Tests first,” Mrall said.
Taravangian looked up, meeting the large man’s gaze. Mrall could loom over a mountain and intimidate the wind itself. Everyone assumed he was Taravangian’s head bodyguard. The truth was more disturbing.
Mrall was the one who got to decide whether Taravangian would spend the day as king or as a prisoner.
“Surely you can let him eat first!” Maben said.
“This is an important day,” Mrall said, voice low. “I would know the result of the testing.”
“But—”
“It is his right to demand this, Maben,” Taravangian said. “Let us be on with it.”
Mrall stepped back, and the testers approached, a group of three stormwardens in deliberately esoteric robes and caps. They presented a series of pages covered in figures and glyphs. They were today’s variation on a sequence of increasingly challenging mathematical problems devised by Taravangian himself on one of his better days.
He picked up his pen with hesitant fingers. He did not feel stupid, but he rarely did. Only on the worst of days did he immediately recognize the difference. On those days, his mind was thick as tar, and he felt like a prisoner in his own mind, aware that something was profoundly wrong.
Today wasn’t one of those, fortunately. He wasn’t a complete idiot. At worst, he’d just be very stupid.
He set to his task, solving what mathematical problems he could. It took the better part of an hour, but during the process, he was able to gauge his capacity. As he had suspected, he was not terribly smart—but he was not stupid, either. Today . . . he was average.
That would do.
He turned over the problems to the stormwardens, who consulted in low voices. They turned to Mrall. “He is fit to serve,” one proclaimed. “He may not offer binding commentary on the Diagram, but he may interact outside of supervision. He may change government policy so long as there is a three-day delay before the changes take effect, and he may also freely pass judgment in trials.”
Mrall nodded, looking to Taravangian. “Do you accept this assessment and these restrictions, Your Majesty?”
“I do.”
Mrall nodded, then stepped back, allowing Maben to set out Taravangian’s morning meal.
The trio of stormwardens tucked away the papers he’d filled out, then they retreated to their own cabins. The testing was an extravagant procedure, and consumed valuable time each morning. Still, it was the best way he had found to deal with his condition.
Life could be tricky for a man who awoke each morning with a different level of intelligence. Particularly when the entire world might depend upon his genius, or might come crashing down upon his idiocy.
“How is it out there?” Taravangian asked softly, picking at his meal, which had gone cold during the testing.
“Horrible,” Mrall said with a grin. “Just as we wanted it.”
“Do not take pleasure in suffering,” Taravangian replied. “Even when it is a work of our hands.” He took a bite of the mush. “Particularly when it is a work of our hands.”
“As you wish. I will do so no more.”
“Can you really change that easily?” Taravangian asked. “Turn off your emotions on a whim?”
“Of course,” Mrall said.
Something about that tickled at Taravangian, some thread of interest. If he had been in one of his more brilliant states, he might have seized upon it—but today, he sensed thought seeping away like water between fingers. Once, he had fretted about these missed opportunities, but he had eventually made his peace. Days of brilliance—he had come to learn—brought their own problems.
“Let me see the Diagram,” he said. Anything to distract from this slop they insisted on feeding him.
Mrall stepped aside, allowing Adrotagia—head of Taravangian’s scholars—to approach, bearing a thick, leatherbound volume. She set it onto the table before Taravangian, then bowed.
Taravangian rested his fingers upon the leatherbound cover, feeling a moment of . . . reverence? Was that right? Did he revere anything anymore? God was dead, after all, and Vorinism therefore a sham.
This book, though, was holy. He opened it to one of the pages marked with a reed. Inside were scribbles.
Frenetic, bombastic, majestic scribbles that had been painstakingly copied from the walls of his former bedroom. Sketches laid atop one another, lists of numbers that seemed to make no sense, lines upon lines upon lines of script written in a cramped hand.
Madness. And genius.
Here and there, Taravangian could find hints that this writing was his own. The way he wiggled a line, the way he wrote along the edge of a wall, much like how he would write along the side of a page when he was running out of room. He didn’t remember any of this. It was the product of twenty hours of lucid insanity, the most brilliant he had ever been.
“Does it strike you as odd, Adro,” Taravangian asked the scholar, “that genius and idiocy are so similar?”
“Similar?” Adrotagia asked. “Vargo, I do not see them as similar at all.” He and Adrotagia had grown up together, and she still used Taravangian’s boyhood nickname. He liked that. It reminded him of days before all of this.
“On both my most stupid days and my most incredible,” Taravangian said, “I am unable to interact with those around me in a meaningful way. It is like . . . like I become a gear that cannot fit those turning beside it. Too small or too large, it does not matter. The clock will not work.”
“I had not considered that,” Adrotagia said.
When Taravangian was at his stupidest, he was not allowed from his room. Those were the days he spent drooling in a corner. When he was merely dull-minded, he was allowed out under supervision. He spent those nights crying for what he had done, knowing that the atrocities he committed were important, but not understanding why.
When he was dull, he could not change policy. Interestingly, he had decided that when he was too brilliant, he was also not allowed to change policy. He’d made this decision after a day of genius where he’d thought to fix all of Kharbranth’s problems with a series of very rational edicts—such as requiring people to take an intelligence test of his own devising before being allowed to breed.
So brilliant on one hand. So stupid on another. Is that your joke here, Nightwatcher? he wondered. Is that the lesson I’m to learn? Do you even care about lessons, or is what you do to us merely for your own amusement?
He turned his attention back to the book, the Diagram. That grand plan he had devised on his singular day of unparalleled brilliance. Then, too, he’d spent the day staring at a wall. He’d written on it. Babbling the whole time, making connections no man had ever before made, he had scribbled all over his walls, floor, even parts of the ceiling he could reach. Most of it had been written in an alien script—a language he himself had devised, for the scripts he had known had been unable to convey ideas precisely enough. Fortunately, he’d thought to carve a key on the top of his bedside table, otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to make sense of his masterpiece.
They could barely make sense of it anyway. He flipped through several pages, copied exactly from his room. Adrotagia and her scholars had made notations here and there, offering theories on what various drawings and lists might mean. They wrote those in the women’s script, which Taravangian had learned years ago.
Adrotagia’s notes on one page indicated that a picture there appeared to be a sketch of the mosaic on the floor of the Veden palace. He paused on that page. It might have relevance to this day’s activities. Unfortunately, he wasn’t smart enough today to make much sense of the book or its secrets. He had to trust that his smarter self was correct in his interpretations of his even smarter self’s genius.
He shut the book and put down his spoon. “Let us be on with it.” He stood up and left the cabin, Mrall on one side of him and Adrotagia on the other. He emerged into sunlight and to the sight of a smoldering coastal city, complete with enormous terraced formations—like plates, or sections of shalebark, the remnants of city covering them and practically spilling over the sides. Once, this sight had been wondrous. Now, it was black, the buildings—even the palace—destroyed.
Vedenar, one of the great cities of the world, was now little more than a heap of rubble and ash.
Taravangian idled by the rail. When his ship had sailed into the harbor the night before, the city had been dotted with the red glow of burning buildings. Those had seemed alive. More alive than this. The wind was blowing in off the ocean, pushing at him from behind. It swept the smoke inland, away from the ship, so that Taravangian could barely smell it. An entire city burned just beyond his fingertips, and yet the stench vanished into the wind.
The Weeping would come soon. Perhaps it would wash away some of this destruction.
“Come, Vargo,” Adrotagia said. “They are waiting.”
He nodded, joining her in climbing into the rowboat for tendering to shore. There had once been grand docks for this city. No more. One faction had destroyed them in an attempt to keep out the others.
“It’s amazing,” Mrall said, settling down into the tender beside him.
“I thought you said you weren’t going to be pleased any longer,” Taravangian said, stomach turning as he saw one of the heaps at the edge of the city. Bodies.
“I am not pleased,” Mrall said, “but in awe. Do you realize that the Eighty’s War between Emul and Tukar has lasted six years, and hasn’t produced nearly this level of desolation? Jah Keved ate itself in a matter of months!”
“Soulcasters,” Adrotagia whispered.
It was more than that. Even in his painfully normal state, Taravangian could see it was so. Yes, with Soulcasters to provide food and water, armies could march at speed—no carts or supply lines to slow them—and commence a slaughter in almost no time at all. But Emul and Tukar had their share of Soulcasters as well.
Sailors started rowing them toward shore.
“There was more,” Mrall said. “Each highprince sought to seize the capital. That made them converge. It was almost like the wars of some Northern savages, with a time and place appointed for the shaking of spears and chanting of threats. Only here, it depopulated a kingdom.”
“Let us hope, Mrall, that you make an overstatement,” Taravangian said. “We will need this kingdom’s people.” He turned away, stifling a moment of emotion as he saw bodies upon the rocks of the shore, men who had died by being shoved over the side of a nearby cliff into the ocean. That ridge normally sheltered the dock from highstorms. In war, it had been used to kill, one army pressing the other back off the drop.
Adrotagia saw his tears, and though she said nothing, she pursed her lips in disapproval. She did not like how emotional he became when he was low of intellect. And yet, he knew for a fact that the old woman still burned a glyphward each morning as a prayer for her deceased husband. A strangely devout action for blasphemers such as they.
“What is the day’s news from home?” Taravangian asked to draw attention from the tears he wiped away.
“Dova reports that the number of Death Rattles we’re finding has dropped even further. She didn’t find a single one yesterday, and only two the day before.”
“Moelach moves, then,” Taravangian said. “It is certain now. The creature must have been drawn by something westward.” What now? Did Taravangian suspend the murders? His heart yearned to—but if they could discover even one more glimmer about the future, one fact that could save hundreds of thousands, would it not be worth the lives of the few now?
“Tell Dova to continue the work,” he said. He had not anticipated that their covenant would attract the loyalty of an ardent, of all things. The Diagram, and its members, knew no boundaries. Dova had discovered their work on her own, and they’d needed to either induct her or assassinate her.
“It will be done,” Adrotagia said.
The boatmen moved them up alongside some smoother rocks at the harbor’s edge, then hopped out into the water. The men were servants of his, and were part of the Diagram. He trusted them, for he needed to trust some people.
“Have you researched that other matter I requested?” Taravangian asked.
“It is a difficult matter to answer,” Adrotagia said. “The exact intelligence of a man is impossible to measure; even your tests only give us an approximation. The speed at which you answer questions and the way you answer them . . . well, it lets us make a judgment, but it is a crude one.”
The boatmen hauled them up onto the stony beach with ropes. Wood scraped stone with an awful sound. At least it covered up the moans in the near distance.
Adrotagia took a sheet from her pocket and unfolded it. Upon it was a graph, with dots plotted in a kind of hump shape, a small trail to the left rising to a mountain in the center, then falling off in a similar curve to the right.
“I took your last five hundred days’ test results and assigned each one a number between zero and ten,” Adrotagia said. “A representation of how intelligent you were that day, though as I said, it is not exact.”
“The hump near the middle?” Taravangian asked, pointing.
“When you were average intelligence,” Adrotagia said. “You spend most of your time near there, as you can see. Days of pure intelligence and days of ultimate stupidity are both rare. I had to extrapolate from what we had, but I think this graph is somewhat accurate.”
Taravangian nodded, then allowed one of the boatmen to help him debark. He had known that he spent more days average than he did otherwise. What he had asked her to figure out, however, was when he could expect another day like the one during which he’d created the Diagram. It had been years now since that day of transcendent mastery.
She climbed out of the boat and Mrall followed. She stepped up to him with her sheet.
“So this is where I was most intelligent,” Taravangian said, pointing at the last point on the chart. It was far to the right, and very close to the bottom. A representation of high intelligence and a low frequency of occurrence. “This was that day, that day of perfection.”
“No,” Adrotagia said.
“What?”
“That was the time you were the most intelligent during the last five hundred days,” Adrotagia explained. “This point represents the day you finished the most complex problems you’d left for yourself, and the day you devised new ones for use in future tests.”
“I remember that day,” he said. “It was when I solved Fabrisan’s Conundrum.”
“Yes,” she said. “The world may thank you for that, someday, if it survives.”
“I was smart on that day,” he said. Smart enough that Mrall had declared he needed to be locked in the palace, lest he reveal his nature. He’d been convinced that if he could just explain his condition to the city, they would all listen to reason and let him control their lives perfectly. He’d drafted a law requiring that all people of less than average intellect be required to commit suicide for the good of the city. It had seemed reasonable. He had considered they might resist, but thought that the brilliance of the argument would sway them.
Yes, he had been smart on that day. But not nearly as smart as the day of the Diagram. He frowned, inspecting the paper.
“This is why I can’t answer your question, Vargo,” Adrotagia said. “That graph, it’s what we call a logarithmic scale. Each step from that center point is not equal—they compound on one another the farther out you get. How smart were you on the day of the Diagram? Ten times smarter than your smartest otherwise?”
“A hundred,” Taravangian said, looking at the graph. “Maybe more. Let me do the calculations. . . .”