POV: venli
Summary
Venli chivvies a line of Leshwi's servants up the winding wooden staircase that climbs through one of the Fused-built spire-rooms above Kholinar — a rebuilt tower with two open sides, no railing, and a hundred feet of empty sky between the carpet and the streets below. As Leshwi's Voice — a singer Regal in envoyform, scepter in hand — she is the gate one passes to reach her lady, and she has come to mean it.
She thinks through the singer ranks while she climbs: common singers in their workforms and warforms; Regals above them with a Voidspren in the gemheart and a Voidspren in the mind; the Fused above those; and, above the Fused, the unknown souls of the thunderclasts and the Unmade. Hidden in her own gemheart is a friend who keeps her Voidspren from owning her — a small Radiant spren named Timbre who pulses to remind her she has spoken only the First Ideal and has work yet to do.
The shanay-im arrive on the wind. Leshwi descends in white and red trailing thirty feet of cloth, is undressed and refreshed by silent servants, and lets a barber shave her face after the human fashion — this incarnation's body is malen, and she hates whiskers. Venli presents a new recruit, Shumin — femalen, workform, marbled red on black — for the stormsetter Dul's assistant. Leshwi makes the girl walk to the open rim and stand with her toes over a hundred-foot drop. She passes. Venli presents her second item next: an Alethi tailor, Yokska, who once dressed lighteyes. Leshwi refuses — to elevate a human would be to declare her own people inadequate, and others among the brands would seize on it — but does not break her, and assigns her instead to teach a singer in artform.
Before she rises away through the roof to meditate, Leshwi grants Venli one piece of news. The young human she fought in the north — the one who has built a band of Knights Radiant without god or Herald to guide him — is still alive. He killed Lezian, the Pursuer, a newly returned Fused whose tradition is to hunt the man who has slain him to the exclusion of every other duty. She fears she may not get another chance at the Windrunner herself.
Venli dismisses the servants and leads Shumin down to her own guardroom at the foot of the spire — the gate one must cross to reach Leshwi at all. Dul bars the hatch above, Mazish checks the outside and closes the door behind her, and only then does Venli let the dropped girl speak. Shumin swears like a freed parshman, gestures like an Alethi, and asks when they attack the Fused — and Venli, with a Voidlight peek into Shadesmar to make certain no secretspren are watching and that her recruit is not one of the Those Ones of Masks, begins her real work.
The pitch is careful. They are not a rebellion. They are objectors who accept neither human dominion nor Odium's — they are the listeners, and they intend to slip away and find a place where they can keep their own minds, their own forms, and their own rules. The first plan is to persuade a sympathetic Fused of their right to do so; Venli hopes Leshwi is that Fused. The second is to run, the way her ancestors once ran in the chaos of the wars between humans and singers. She hints — but does not yet say — that a spren in Shadesmar speaks for a people willing to back them. Timbre pulses, wanting her to tell the full truth that she is Radiant. Venli does not, not yet.
Shumin is in. Venli draws a little Light to check Shadesmar one more time — and freezes. A dark flame, the soul-mark of a Fused, is moving down the spire toward them. Leshwi. She is already at the hatch by the time Dul and Mazish slam the shutters open. Leshwi glides in — in gold and stark black, dressed in her highest manner — and almost never comes down here. *Gather yourself, Last Listener,* she says to the Rhythm of Agony. *Something is happening. Something dangerous. I fear the war is about to take a distinctly different turn.*