POV: navani
Summary
Raboniel keeps her promise and leaves Navani alone with her own work. Without Navani's accidental input the Fused's study of the shield over the Sibling slows badly; sometimes, walking past the door, Navani catches Raboniel sitting on the floor beside the blue shield, holding up the Warlight sphere and staring at it.
Navani finds her own situation a strange gift. Locked out of administering the tower and forbidden to meet her own scholars, she has nothing left to do but research. After Gavilar's death she had been too busy guiding Elhokar and then Aesudan to dedicate herself to scholarship; after that there had been a Blackthorn to court and a kingdom to forge. For all she has complained about politics, she has always slid back into the middle of it. Now there is no middle, only the desk in front of her — and the lure of secrets Raboniel does not have. Navani has seen the sphere Gavilar had that warped the air around it; she has seen what it does to Voidlight. What Raboniel wants to make is possible — so why not actually try to make it?
She decides to behave the way she has always encouraged her scholars to behave: order the supplies, fill the room with experiments, work on adjacent problems until the right connections start to come unbidden. Crates of fabrial parts and corrupted-spren gemstones are delivered without complaint, all the way from Kholinar if she asks for them. As a warm-up she builds traps that don't look like traps — a painrial hidden inside an innocuous fabrial, alarms cobbled from gemstone tech the old Radiants had left in the tower, spring-traps that use conjoined rubies to release spikes. She powers them with Voidlight spheres and arms them with a hidden magnet so they will not trigger until she lays the magnet against the right face of each box. The boxes go out into the hallway among other half-completed experiments, indistinguishable from her neighbours'.
She gets Raboniel to make her more Warlight for experiments — Navani cannot create it alone, but neither, it seems, can the Fused without her. She is improving at the humming that draws it out, and finds the work fascinating. Underneath every project lies the same question. How would one make the opposite of Voidlight? What had been in Gavilar's strange sphere? In Vorinism, pure things are symmetrical and everything has an opposite — and darkness, Raboniel's first guess, is not an opposite of light but only its absence. Navani needs a measurable, paired form of energy in nature she can model against. Magnets, she says aloud, and asks the door guard to fetch the strongest ones the storerooms have, plus a sample of whatever metal the Fused use to draw Stormlight out of Radiants in combat.
The guard, a stormform Regal who had once been a parshman slave in Aesudan's palace at Kholinar, grumbles off to ask Raboniel for approval; outside her door, Raboniel's daughter sits against the wall holding her sword across her lap, humming what Navani is startled to recognise as a human tavern tune.
While she waits, Navani sets up another experiment — two halves of a corrupted-flamespren-bearing ruby cracked apart, watched through a magnifying lens — to test whether tuning forks can pull the divided halves of one spren back together into a larger stone (a small gift, perhaps, to the Sibling, who still will not speak to her). The flamespren is moving toward the sound, but pressing against a wall it cannot pass.
Raboniel arrives in person instead of the magnets. She places on the desk an ornate dagger with a wooden handle and a large ruby pommel — its centre running with the same pale metal Navani had asked for. *We use these for collecting the souls of Heralds*, Raboniel says. *Or that was the plan.* They have taken a single Herald so far, with complications; she had hoped to harvest the two at the tower, but they left with Adolin's expedition. The metal — raysium — has been used for several Returns to drain Stormlight from Radiants in combat; only since the fall of Ba-Ado-Mishram have the Fused realised the same trick would imprison a Herald. The bound souls would be put away safely, Raboniel tells her, the way Nergaoul has been put away. The particular dagger she has just handed Navani is not large enough to take a Herald — it cannot hurt Raboniel should Navani try.
Navani turns it over, cold. So it had been true after all: Shalash had told them that Jezerezeh'Elin had fallen, and now Navani sees how. She catalogues the question silently: could the imprisoned Herald be recovered? Out loud, she keeps her face on her work. The raysium tip touches one half of the divided ruby and nothing happens — *you need to stab someone*, Raboniel reminds her. Navani resets the magnifier on the moving spren and tests the tip against it again, just to learn. She concedes to herself that the tower's defence has collapsed: she cannot reach Kaladin, cannot hear the Sibling, cannot plan with her scholars. Only one node left. The hope she has left is the one she can run from a desk: imitate a scholar well enough to build a weapon that can kill a god.
She taps a jeweler's hammer to the half-ruby and lets the spren out; the dagger snatches it instantly, Light running down the blade, the pommel ruby glowing as the half-spren goes inside. Curious, she reaches for the other half-ruby to crack and gather as well — and the dagger skids across the table as she moves the gemstone. The two halves of the spren are still paired. Each motion she makes with the smaller gemstone pulls the dagger — but the dagger only moves a fraction of the distance the smaller ruby flies. The smaller ruby is hovering several feet in the air, three times further than she has moved the dagger.
Raboniel hums, startled. They run the logic together: the two halves of the spren are conjoined as ever, but the receiving gemstone is now much larger than the cracked one — and all the conjoined-fabrial work Navani knows had been done with equal halves. Force multiplication, Raboniel says — a large gemstone moved a little, a small gemstone hurled a long way. Energy will be conserved if their understanding of fabrial laws is right, Navani answers, so the cost will fall on the larger stone — but the implications…
Raboniel tells her, urgently, to write everything down; she will do the same. *Why?* Navani asks. *The Rhythm of War, Navani*, Raboniel says, as if that were an explanation. And keep experimenting. Navani says she still needs a way to measure Stormlight in a gemstone; Raboniel tells her there is a kind of sand, naturally black, that turns white in the presence of Stormlight — its rate of change a measure of investiture nearby — and she will get some. *I don't think I've known a scholar so capable*, she says, *not in many Returns.* Navani starts to demur and stops, and says *thank you* instead.