POV: venli
Summary
Venli stands as Voice to Raboniel at the foot of the stairwell leading up to the crystal pillar, translating the day's reports from Regal commanders — many of them former Azish parshmen whose Alethi is poor. Raboniel hears each one from a throne set at the mouth of the murals hallway. Venli cannot stop herself noticing the freshly built section of steps that replaces the part broken during the last desperate human push for the pillar, and the smell of the dead clings to her memory of it. She forces the rhythms of Odium to mark her words — they coat her mouth like oil now — and tells a returning relayform scout that the Windrunner she is hunting is in fact alive, and to redouble her search.
When the reports are done, Raboniel rises and walks back along the hallway to her workstation at the dead end against the shield, which has darkened from its old bright blue to a violet bruise. Venli follows uninvited. She has come to think of Raboniel as two people: the commander-general of the singer occupation, and a scholar who does not seem to care for the war at all. The scholar is the truer one.
Raboniel calls her *Last Listener*, then corrects herself — last no more. The listeners, she says, were the only group of singers who ever successfully rejected Fused rule and built their own kingdom; there were other attempts, and they failed. Singers are not, and have never been, of one mind; the lie that they are mere drones of Odium is a human comfort, the same kind of comfort that let humans take the minds of the people they once enslaved.
She sits at her desk and asks, to a rhythm of Spite, whether Venli regrets what she personally did. Timbre pulses; Venli should lie, and instead answers yes. Raboniel says that is well — those who live forever pay long for their choices. She had assumed Venli was like the other ambitious ones who crave becoming Fused; she is pleased to have been wrong. Venli admits she *was* that femalen once, and slips into the Lost in saying so — an old rhythm a Regal should not be able to attune. Raboniel notices, narrows her eyes, and asks what she is now. *Confused*, Venli says. *Ashamed.* Her sister, her once-mate, her mother — all gone, because of her. She kneels beside the table and asks the real question to Craving. Why fight at all? If they cannot enjoy what they win, because everyone they love will be dead by then, why?
Raboniel answers as if she has held the answer a very long time. They do not fight for themselves; they fight for those who come after. They sing the rhythms of pain so that others may one day know rhythms of peace. Venli asks whether he will ever let them sing to Peace. Raboniel does not answer.
What she does instead is praise Venli's service — a little distractedly, she allows; she has noticed where Venli's real allegiance is and that it interferes with her duties — and forgives her for it. Venli is loyal to Leshwi, and Raboniel respects Leshwi: among the Fused she is one of the very few who still remembers why they fight and can *feel* it, even if she is too soft-hearted for the cruelties the war now requires. Raboniel says her own time in the tower runs short — she means to finish unmaking the Sibling and then move on — and is therefore dismissing Venli from her service. If Venli lives through what is coming, she says, she may yet find some peace of her own.
Venli protests that her confusion makes her a poor servant. Raboniel says she likes confusion. It is the rhythm of a scholar who knows the limits of her knowing, and it is the door to truths and better passions; great minds have always passed through it. She hands Venli a folded paper — payment, she says — and tells her to be off.
The front is a writ of authority, the standard grant of privileges a Fused gives a favoured servant. The back is a hastily sketched map. Raboniel explains: Navani had the tower's good maps burned and the rest hidden, so Raboniel has had to work from human scouting reports; this one comes from a human flyer along the eastern rim of the Shattered Plains. A group of a few thousand they had taken for Natan migrants are, the report says, Parshendi — and there are many children among them. *Did some of your kind leave*, Raboniel asks idly, *before the Everstorm?* They did. Rebels — those who did not want the new forms, the children, the elderly — fled into the chasms before the storms met and the floodwaters came. They should have been destroyed. *Should have*, Raboniel says, is a hateful phrase. Perhaps in this case it has been kind.
Venli runs from the room without farewell, the paper clutched in her hand.