Words of Radiance

“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?”