Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive #3)

He arranged the cut-out pages, and found numerous new connections simply by how the sheets were placed next to each other—indeed, this page here actually connected to this page here … yes. Taravangian cut them both down the middle, dividing sentences. When he put the halves of separate pages beside one another, they made a more complete whole. Ideas he’d missed before seemed to rise from the pages like spren.

Taravangian did not believe in any religion, for they were unwieldy things, designed to fill gaps in human understanding with nonsensical explanations, allowing people to sleep well at night, granting them a false sense of comfort and control and preventing them from stretching further for true understanding, yet there was something strangely holy about the Diagram, the power of raw intelligence, the only thing man should worship, and oh how little most understood it—oh, how little they deserved it—in handling purity while corrupting it with flawed understanding and silly superstitions. Was there a way he could prevent any but the most intelligent from learning to read? That would accomplish so much good; it seemed insane that nobody had implemented such a ban, for while Vorinism forbade men to read, that merely prevented an arbitrary half of the population from handling information, when it was the stupid who should be barred.

He paced in the room, then noted a scrap of paper under the door; it contained the answer to his question about the size of the farming platform. He looked over the calculations, listening with half an ear to voices outside, almost overwhelmed by the singing children.

“Uscritic,” Adrotagia said, “seems to refer to Uscri, a figure from a tragic poem written seventeen hundred years ago. She drowned herself after hearing her lover had died, though the truth was that he’d not died at all, and she misunderstood the report about him.”

“All right…” Mrall said.

“She was used in following centuries as an example of acting without information, though the term eventually came to simply mean ‘stupid.’ The salt seems to refer to the fact that she drowned herself in the sea.”

“So it was an insult?” Mrall asked.

“Using an obscure literary reference. Yes.” He could almost hear Adrotagia’s sigh. Best to interrupt her before she thought on this further.

Taravangian flung open the door. “Gum paste for sticking paper to this wall. Fetch it for me, Adrotagia.”

They’d put paper in a stack by the door without being asked, which surprised him, as they usually had to be ordered to do everything. He closed the door, then knelt and did some calculations relating to the size of the tower city. Hmmmm …

It provided a fine distraction, but he was soon drawn back to the true work, interrupted only by the arrival of his gum paste, which he used to begin sticking fragments of the Diagram to his walls.

This, he thought, arranging pages with numbers interspersing the text, pages they’d never been able to make sense of. It’s a list of what? Not code, like the other numbers. Unless … could this be shorthand for words?

Yes … yes, he’d been too impatient to write the actual words. He’d numbered them in his head—alphabetically perhaps—so he could write quickly. Where was the key?

This is reinforcement, he thought as he worked, of the Dalinar paradigm! His hands shook with excitement as he wrote out possible interpretations. Yes … Kill Dalinar, or he will resist your attempts to take over Alethkar. So Taravangian had sent the Assassin in White, which—incredibly—had failed.

Fortunately, there were contingencies. Here, Taravangian thought, bringing up another scrap from the Diagram and gluing it to the wall beside the others. The initial explanation of the Dalinar paradigm, from the catechism of the headboard, back side, third quadrant. It had been written in meter, as a poem, and presaged that Dalinar would attempt to unite the world.

So if he looked to the second contingency …

Taravangian wrote furiously, seeing words instead of numbers, and—full of energy—for a time he forgot his age, his aches, the way his fingers trembled—sometimes—even when he wasn’t so excited.

The Diagram hadn’t seen the effect the second son, Renarin, would have—he was a completely wild element. Taravangian finished his notations, proud, and wandered toward the door, which he opened without looking up.

“Get me a copy of the surgeon’s words upon my birth,” he said to those outside. “Oh, and kill those children.”

The music trailed off as the children heard what he’d said. Musicspren flitted away.

“You mean, quiet them from singing,” Mrall said.

“Whatever. I’m perturbed by the Vorin hymns as a reminder of historic religious oppression of ideas and thought.”

Taravangian returned to his work, but a short time later a knock came at the door. He flung it open. “I was not to be—”

“Interrupted,” Adrotagia said, proffering him a sheet of paper. “The surgeon’s words you requested. We keep them handy now, considering how often you ask for them.”

“Fine.”

“We need to talk, Vargo.”

“No we—”

She walked in anyway, then stopped, inspecting the cut-up pieces of the Diagram. Her eyes widened as she turned about. “Are you…”

“No,” he said. “I haven’t become him again. But I am me, for the first time in weeks.”

“This isn’t you. This is the monster you sometimes become.”

“I am not smart enough to be in the dangerous zone.” The zone where, annoyingly, they claimed he was too smart to be allowed to make decisions. As if intelligence were somehow a liability!

She unfolded a piece of paper from the pocket of her skirt. “Yes, your daily test. You stopped on this page, claiming you couldn’t answer the next question.”

Damnation. She’d seen it.

“If you’d answered,” she said, “it would have proved you were intelligent enough to be dangerous. Instead, you decided you couldn’t manage. A loophole we should have considered. You knew that if you finished the question, we’d restrict your decision-making for the day.”

“Do you know about Stormlight growth?” he said, brushing past her and taking one of the pages he’d written earlier.

“Vargo…”

“Calculating the total surface area for farming at Urithiru,” he said, “and comparing it to the projected number of rooms that could be occupied, I have determined that even if food grew here naturally—as it would at the temperatures of your average fecund plain—it could not provide enough to sustain the entire tower.”

“Trade,” she said.

“I have trouble believing the Knights Radiant, always threatened with war, would build a fortress like this to be anything but self-sufficient. Have you read Golombi?”

“Of course I have, and you know it,” she said. “You think they enhanced the growth by use of Stormlight-infused gemstones, providing light to darkened places?”

“Nothing else makes sense, does it?”

“The tests are inconclusive,” she said. “Yes, spherelight inspires growth in a dark room, when candlelight cannot, but Golombi says that the results may have been compromised, and the efficiency is … Oh, bah! That’s a distraction, Vargo. We were discussing what you’ve done to circumvent the rules you yourself set out!”

“When I was stupid.”