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“Still problematic. You took a break, but for two hours? Besides, I remember you telling me that Jasnah’s training wasn’t so terrible.”
“She’d believe me,” Shallan said. “She thinks she’s far more demanding than she is. Or…well, she is demanding. I just don’t mind as much as she thinks I do.”
“Very well,” he said. “But what were you doing down here, then?”
She bit her lip, causing him to laugh.
“What?” she demanded, blushing.
“You just look so blasted innocent when you do that!”
“I am innocent.”
“Didn’t you just lie to me twice in a row?”
“Innocent, as in the opposite of sophisticated.” She grimaced. “Otherwise, they’d have been more convincing lies. Come. Walk with me while I fetch Tifandor. If we hurry, I won’t have to lie to Jasnah.”
“Fair enough,” he said, joining her and strolling around the perimeter of the Palanaeum. The hollow inverted pyramid rose toward the ceiling far above, the four walls expanding outward at a slant. The topmost levels were brighter and easier to make out, tiny lights bobbing along railings in the hands of ardents or scholars.
“Fifty-seven levels,” Shallan said. “I can’t even imagine how much work it must have been for you to create all this.”
“We didn’t create it,” Kabsal said. “It was here. The main shaft, at least. The Kharbranthians cut out the rooms for the books.”
“This formation is natural?”
“As natural as cities like Kholinar. Or have you forgotten my demonstration?”
“No. But why didn’t you use this place as one of your examples?”
“We haven’t found the right sand pattern yet,” he said. “But we’re sure the Almighty himself made this place, as he did the cities.”
“What about the Dawnsingers?” Shallan asked.
“What about them?”
“Could they have created it?”
He chuckled as they arrived at the lift. “That isn’t the kind of thing the Dawnsingers did. They were healers, kindly spren sent by the Almighty to care for humans once we were forced out of the Tranquiline Halls.”
“Kind of like the opposite of the Voidbringers.”
“I suppose you could say that.
“Take us down two levels,” she told the parshman lift porters. They began lowering the platform, the pulleys squeaking and wood shaking beneath her feet.
“If you think to distract me with this conversation,” Kabsal noted, folding his arms and leaning back against the railing, “you won’t be successful. I sat up there with your disapproving mistress for well over an hour, and let me say that it was not a pleasant experience. I think she knows I still intend to try and convert her.”
“Of course she does. She’s Jasnah. She knows practically everything.”
“Except whatever it is she came here to study.”
“The Voidbringers,” Shallan said. “That’s what she’s studying.”
He frowned. A few moments later, the lift came to a rest on the appropriate floor. “The Voidbringers?” he said, sounding curious. She’d have expected him to be scornful or amused. No, she thought. He’s an ardent. He believes in them.
“What were they?” she asked, walking out. Not far below, the massive cavern came to a point. There was a large infused diamond there, marking the nadir.
“We don’t like to talk about it,” Kabsal said as he joined her.
“Why not? You’re an ardent. This is part of your religion.”
“An unpopular part. People prefer to hear about the Ten Divine Attributes or the Ten Human Failings. We accommodate them because we, also, prefer that to the deep past.”
“Because…” she prodded.
“Because,” he said with a sigh, “of our failure. Shallan, the devotaries—at their core—are still classical Vorinism. That means the Hierocracy and the fall of the Lost Radiants are our shame.” He held up his deep blue lantern. Shallan strolled at his side, curious, letting him just talk.
“We believe that the Voidbringers were real, Shallan. A scourge and a plague. A hundred times they came upon mankind. First casting us from the Tranquiline Halls, then trying to destroy us here on Roshar. They weren’t just spren that hid under rocks, then came out to steal someone’s laundry. They were creatures of terrible destructive power, forged in Damnation, created from hate.”
“By whom?” Shallan asked.
“What?”
“Who made them? I mean, the Almighty wasn’t likely to have ‘created something from hate.’ So what made them?”
“Everything has its opposite, Shallan. The Almighty is a force of good. To balance his goodness, the cosmere needed the Voidbringers as his opposite.”
“So the more good that the Almighty did, the more evil he created as a by-product? What’s the point of doing any good at all if it just creates more evil?”
“I see Jasnah has continued your training in philosophy.”
“That’s not philosophy,” Shallan said. “That’s simple logic.”
He sighed. “I don’t think you want to get into the deep theology of this. Suffice it to say that the Almighty’s pure goodness created the Voidbringers, but men may choose good without creating evil because as mortals they have a dual nature. Thus the only way for good to increase in the cosmere is for men to create it—in that way, good may come to outweigh evil.”
“All right,” she said. “But I don’t buy the explanation about the Voidbringers.”
“I thought you were a believer.”
“I am. But just because I honor the Almighty doesn’t mean I’m going to accept any explanation, Kabsal. It might be religion, but it still has to make sense.”
“Didn’t you once tell me that you didn’t understand your own self?”
“Well, yes.”
“And yet you expect to be able to understand the exact workings of the Almighty?”
She drew her lips into a line. “All right, fine. But I still want to know more about the Voidbringers.”
He shrugged as she guided him into an archive room, filled with shelves of books. “I told you the basics, Shallan. The Voidbringers were an embodiment of evil. We fought them off ninety and nine times, led by the Heralds and their chosen knights, the ten orders we call the Knights Radiant. Finally, Aharietiam came, the Last Desolation. The Voidbringers were cast back into the Tranquiline Halls. The Heralds followed to force them out of heaven as well, and Roshar’s Heraldic Epochs ended. Mankind entered the Era of Solitude. The modern era.”
“But why is everything from before so fragmented?”
“This was thousands and thousands of years ago, Shallan,” Kabsal said. “Before history, before men even knew how to forge steel. We had to be given Shardblades, otherwise we would have had to fight the Voidbringers with clubs.”
“And yet we had the Silver Kingdoms and the Knights Radiant.”
“Formed and led by the Heralds.”
Shallan frowned, counting off rows of shelves. She stopped at the correct one, handed her lantern to Kabsal, then walked down the aisle and plucked the biography off the shelf. Kabsal followed her, holding up the lanterns.
