Chapter 123

The best players win two of three games against skilled opponents. In other words, even the finest lose a significant amount. Do not set up unless you are prepared for loss.

— Proverbs for Towers and War, Zenaz, date unknown

A dolin rotated through ranks in the pike block, and never had a chance to draw his longsword. He held a shield and spear. He used a pike. He gulped water. He grunted and he sweated.

Men and women around him died. Shouted. Thrashed on the ground. Got dragged, whimpering, off to the surgeons—when possible. Often you had to keep going while they screamed. If you stopped to help, then the whole city would fall.

So he fought with dying soldiers weeping at his feet, his peg slipping in their blood. Each time one died, the line grew more strained, and the options for filling those gaps more desperate. Fewer soldiers. More untrained townspeople.

The night seemed endless. And Adolin thought, as he moved from station to station—bloodletting with a spear, bloodletting with a pike, lying on the ground and bleeding hope—that he knew what it was like to be dead.

He’d always secretly hated that part of Vorinism, without speaking it aloud—not even to himself. The doctrine that upon death, they all just kept on fighting. Gloriously, the ardents claimed. For eternity.

What an awful existence. He’d tried to picture it as endless duels of honor. Then he had gone to war and he’d seen what fighting was really like. War was being forced to step on another man’s entrails, hearing him wail as you pushed them out farther, because you had to keep fighting. War was knowing that the end was here, and there wasn’t a storming thing you could do.

Knowing that when you died, the best thing you could hope for was to be shoved back into a line so you could spend eternity being split open time and time again.

On one rest rotation, Adolin lay and stared at the second moon, numb to the passage of time, thinking about that afterlife. And he realized part of why he hated his father—because in Dalinar’s book, Oathbringer, he offered something better. A different God than the Almighty, a God that he described only as a sense of warmth. A God he claimed made things right eventually.

How dare Dalinar Kholin—who had butchered all his life—be the one to offer such an uplifting message? How dare the Blackthorn, soaked in blood, claim the high ground?

How dare he judge Adolin for killing Sadeas and protecting their family, when Dalinar had burned Adolin’s mother alive?

Nothing made sense anymore. Adolin felt he was the only one who recognized that the world had gone insane, and when he pointed it out, he was told that he was being spoiled. That he needed to forgive, that he was the problem, and why couldn’t he live up to his father’s wonderful example?

Adolin didn’t want to follow an example. He wanted nothing to do with all of this, and he wanted the good men whose names he memorized to stop storming dying.

That was what he felt. Fatalism. A desire to simply give up. It was as deadly and pernicious as the terrible void inside the dome, filled with enemies.

The call came for him to rotate back to the front line. As he sat up, someone handed him a spear and shield. Hadn’t he just done this? How many rotations had it been? That hadn’t been fifteen minutes to rest, had it? How?

He yearned to lie there. They’d let him. He was a highprince. He could have been a king.

But if he did that …

If he did that, then he failed Kholinar again. He’d told himself he’d have fought for the city—no, for his men—and stood with them until the end. That he hadn’t abandoned his men on purpose. But if he lay here, then he did exactly that, and he became worse than a man who had killed Sadeas. He became a liar and a hypocrite.

So he heaved himself up, found the queue to rotate to the front, and took his spot with shield and spear. Strangely, he found motivation in an unexpected place. Kaladin had survived worse than this as a bridgeman. Adolin had heard Lopen and Rock, Sigzil and Skar, describe it multiple times as they’d gone drinking together.

At least Adolin could fight back. The call came and he filed in, letting those who had been fighting pull the wounded to safety through the center of the pike line. There, Adolin realized he was smiling. Stupid bridgeboy. Where did he get off, being so inspiring?

A moment of brightness. Then back to Damnation.

Jasnah knelt alone in the little temple.

Fen had left. Odium had evaporated.

They’d made their deal. Thaylenah would serve Odium, regardless of what happened at Dalinar’s contest of champions. It … was both the wrong and the right decision. Wrong for Roshar. But perhaps right for Thaylenah. Fen had been able to negotiate her own terms, rather than depending on Dalinar.

Yet Jasnah felt revolted. She cradled her stomach, sick. After she had failed so dramatically, the presence of sculpted depictions of Talenelat seemed a deliberate mockery. She’d spent her life spurning the existence of deity—and had now been bested by one.

Storms. She pulled herself to the wall and sat against it, trying to organize her mind. The scholar’s duty, to analyze what had gone wrong. It came down to two points. First, she herself had been flawed. She’d grown so engaged by the argument she’d forgotten the context. She’d wanted to defeat Taravangian with words, but in so doing, had actually proven his point to Fen. Jasnah had shown both that he was wrong for Roshar and that it was right for Thaylenah to make a deal with him. The prisoner’s dilemma indeed.

The second problem with her arguments was more daunting. The Philosophy of Aspiration, the very philosophy she’d relied on for so many years, had failed her completely. Losing that, realizing that she might have built the bedrock of her life upon a flawed philosophy that even she didn’t truly believe, shook her to her core.

The greater good at any cost. If she wouldn’t pay any cost, then she gave only lip service to the philosophy. If she would pay any cost, how was she any better than Taravangian? How many of her actions were truly in service of this idea? The greatest good … but how could she claim to know what was right, when she could not see the scope of the cosmere?

Instead, she tried clinging to histories—but she knew they could be incredibly biased. She’d spent her life struggling to sort the fiction from the fact, with varying success. However, all of them had warned of the dangers of dealing with Voidbringers—and thus, in going up against Odium and expecting to win, she had refused to learn from the past. In this, the histories condemned her.

She tried, last of all, to cling to her own mind. She thought. She reasoned. She had to be able to trust her conclusions. Except, huddled here at a midnight desk, she remembered a day when her mind itself had betrayed her—and her family had locked her away. It could do so again.

The room grew darker somehow, despite the night, then a light brightened in the center of the room. She looked up, having crouched by the wall unconsciously remembering those days locked away as a child. She’d cried in a barren corner until her mother had returned—at long last—from her trip and restored the sunlight.

No sunlight shone on her today. This was its mocking doppelganger: the golden glow of Taravangian’s vestments.

Jasnah forced herself to stand. She would not stay huddled and broken before him, trapped in memories. She had sworn to herself, with the other Veristitalians, that she would not become so enamored with the past that it dominated her life.

“I thought,” she said to Taravangian, wiping her eyes, “that you went with Fen.”

“I can do both,” he said. “I am God.”

“There is no God.”

“Even still, you insist?” Taravangian asked, his tone lightly amused. He settled down, and a chair formed from black smoke for him. He put his hand to the side, and his slender golden scepter appeared, letting him balance his hand atop it like a cane. “After what you’ve seen? After being so resoundingly outmatched?”

“If you were God,” she said, “you would be all powerful, and would not need to outmatch a woman like me. If you were God, then you would know everything, and could speak exactly to me the number I am thinking in my head.” She met his gaze.

Negative one point eight seven three nine, she thought.

He merely nodded. As she’d ascertained, he could not read her mind.

“There may not be a God, but there are gods,” Jasnah said, “as Wit has defined them: creatures of immense power, immortal and terrible. I accept you are one of those, Taravangian. It is no shame for me to be bested by one who has such capacity.”

“Ah, but was it my power that bested you, Jasnah?”

She looked away. Echoes of her failure were too recent. She could not hold his confident, conniving gaze.

“We,” he said softly, “ are the same.”

“You caught me in a lie,” she said. “So if we are the same, you are a liar too? You never were able to take this city, were you?”

“Ah … well, I did lie. But not about that, Jasnah.” He waved a hand. Nearby, a dozen dark figures rose from the stone ground, like the souls of the dead. Deepest Ones, with eyes that were too large, bodies too spindly, almost no carapace except where their genitals should have been, the only adornment on their nude bodies save for their long, knifelike fingernails.

“They were poised to kill the members of the Thaylen Council,” Taravangian said, “should my negotiation with Fen fail.”

“Impossible,” Jasnah said. “That room is lined in aluminum and hidden, including from me. We have fabrials to tell if Fused are nearby, and they were deployed to—”

“No such fabrials exist,” Taravangian said. “The artifabrians who claimed to have created them serve me, and that was the lie. The fabrials were invented to set you all at ease and allow my Fused to draw near. As for your hidden council? It’s in the Loft Ward, behind a wineshop’s false wall. At thirty-two Market Street.”

Storms. She tried not to be intimidated by the fact that he knew that, but …

“I have agents on the Thaylen Council too,” Taravangian noted. “Connections that go back to my mortal days, when several of them were part of the Diagram. You and your uncle consistently ignored the council and focused on Fen alone, though she is not an absolute power in this city. Even you, Jasnah, who speak of equality and a representative government, ignored the elected officials today, arguing with me on Fen’s behalf only. Yet that council is what you claim to want for your people.”

“They’re an oligarchy,” she said. “Not what I want for Alethkar at all.”

“So you focus on the dictator instead?” Taravangian shook his head. “It was an oversight. Admit it. You should have invited them to this meeting.”

“It was a mistake,” Jasnah whispered, backing up to the wall, watching the Deepest Ones and preparing her Stormlight.

“You needn’t worry,” Taravangian said, waving for the Fused to vanish into the stones. “My point is, I did have a plan for conquering this city. My friends on the council had removed the aluminum paneling in one section. During a recess they would have left, and would have returned to find—as planned—their colleagues murdered. Four would have survived, all loyal to me, and the minimum number required to manage the government.”

“Fen could have—”

“Fen would have been arrested,” Taravangian snapped. “She has been ignoring the council too much—and there are legitimate worries that she was overstepping her authority. My four would have immediately instigated a tribunal against her, temporarily relieving Fen of power. She’d likely have won the resulting trial, but in the meantime this city would have turned to me.”

Taravangian stood, and suddenly seemed enormous. Filling the room. Beyond. The walls fading, all other sights vanishing. As if Jasnah was on an endless dark plain, with only the god Taravangian—his face suddenly more skeletal, his eyes recessed, golden light rising around him—standing before her.

“I always had this city in hand,” he said. “However, they will be ruled better if they join me willingly. I have them now. More, I have you, Jasnah. Finally admitting the truth.”

“What truth?” she asked, her voice hoarse.

“That you have always been my servant. Everything you’ve done, from freeing my granddaughter, to your murders on the streets of Kharbranth, to arguing with Dalinar each time he tried to pretend he had a pedestal to stand upon. Each time you hired assassins, or you moved people into position who would do what needed to be done, you served me. ”

He was suddenly closer. So close to her, all she could see was his terrible face. “I will need someone to rule this planet,” he said softly, “as my attention shifts toward the greater cosmere. When you are ready, come to me.”

“You can’t leave,” she snarled. “You are locked here.”

“Which is perfect,” he whispered. “The other gods will think me contained, and I will have a chance to build up my resources and my infrastructure. There are three habitable planets in this system. If you knew the things I could do with them … but that will have to wait. If you wish to see what happens when I launch my full armies in a few centuries, come to me. I will make you Fused, and therefore immortal.”

“Never,” she hissed.

“Never?” he said. “Still lying, I see. You really think there is no chance you will see the value of entering my service?” He somehow loomed even closer. “What is the greater good, Jasnah? Dying in obscurity, or becoming immortal and working for centuries to influence me to treat people better?”

She worked her mouth, but she could not say the words. Could not refute him, because one of her cardinal values was that she would not lie to herself. She hated that she had to consider the offer, but she did. To reject it out of hand would be foolish, and she was …

Well, she’d assumed she was not a fool.

And so, for the second time in one day, Taravangian left her broken and defeated.

Within the hour, news reached her: the nation had voted—by near-unanimous action of the Thaylen Central Council—to accept Odium’s offer, becoming a vassal state directly beneath the god. The motion had been ratified by Queen Fen.

They gave Jasnah a copy of the contract, sealed and signed, as a memento of her failure.