The Greatest Discovery

Unreliable Sources

When a grumpy "wake up, lad" boomed from below, Pattis was glad Jasuio did not come into his room. Otherwise, he could have hurled a pillow at the old man with the same attitude. Rays of sun pouring through the window pierced the floor at a more vertical angle than they usually did when he woke, but it still seemed that his sleep lasted no more than a heartbeat. Pattis entertained the idea of ignoring the summons but his bleary eyes fell on the bags of equipment piled at the door, the ones he had hauled from the east stairway almost in the middle of the night yesterday. Actually, that was today, he corrected himself with a grimace.

Also today, he needed to write a report for Brightness Lilin and read a few books he thought could be useful, and get to the market in time for the lavis distribution. The latter thought did not excite him as much as thinking of food on an empty stomach should. He almost wished there was no lavis left in Dumadari by now. Juliyah's tasted so much sweeter.

A prospect of another day at the east stairway with the soulcaster - and away from the wages distribution duty - brightened his mood significantly. By the time he dressed, washed, and walked down the narrow stairs, he was awake and happy enough to accompany a 'Good morning' directed at Jasuio with a wide grin. The Herdazian man looked him up and down and said, "I take it the experiments went well?"

Pattis shook his head.

"We discarded several of my early theories and tested several alterations of the setup but I am still stuck with the same problem. Most self-healing materials I know of have soft axial connections. They create and break bonds easily. The ionic axial bond in the emeralds, though, is extremely hard to form and the amount of energy required to do so is enormous."

"Isn't that what mini-lightning is for?" Jasuio asked. The older ardent watched Pattis coo over his machine long enough to be familiar with the mechanics.

"It is, but... Jasuio, how can I be sure I am directing the energy right? How do I make it form the bonds instead of breaking them? I have always believed it was the proximity of the soulcaster that made the destructive violence of the Highstorm turn into something capable of healing, but none of what I have done so far confirms that theory. If I am wrong, the city will have to rely on one of those poor souls mastering bi-focus in the next couple of days."

Jasuio listened to the rushed speech, gave the rug at his feet a suspicious look, and shook his head. "Why flashing teeth at me then? Never saw you this chipper in the morning."

"It is a good morning, that's all," Pattis said, not sure if he did as much as convince himself. "I finally get to test ideas I was working on for years and do it outside of this musty room."

Jasuio grunted and ran his slate-colored nail along the edge of a small smokestone, just as gray, before placing it in a velvet pouch.

"Lad, I will eat this pouch, stones included, if a few experiments and a day outdoors are enough to make a man grin like a Herdazian who tried chouta for the first time, with barely three hours of sleep."

Pattis avoided looking at the older man. "I have no idea what you are talking about".

"I already had breakfast today," Jasuio shook the pouch as if to demonstrate it to an invisible crowd.

Pattis signed. "Alright, I know what you are talking about and it is not like that," he said. The pouch shook again and Pattis added, "Really, I barely know her."

Jasuio finally put the jiggling bag on the table.

"Good, and if I were you, I would make sure it stays that way. A soulcaster's love is fleeting."

Pattis frowned at the white-haired ardent. Surely Jasuio couldn't believe in the bedtime stories about soulcasters, the ones mothers use to scare their kids into good behavior. The ones where half-people, half-voidbringers, soulcasters are hunting at night for disobedient children to turn into stones to chew on or some such nonsense. Jasuio was the most cultured, the most erudite person Pattis knew.

"Soulcasters are people doing their job, nothing more," he found himself saying. "And Juliyah," he stumbled slightly at the name, "is an intelligent and helpful colleague. She is helping me with the calculations."

"I am sure she is," Jasuio said. "Just warning you, lad, that's all."

The vertical line on Pattis' forehead only borrowed deeper. How could Jasuio say that? Worse, mean it?

A brief knock on the door muted his unspoken questions. A gray-clad soldier poked his head inside, located Pattis in one sweep of the room, and reported in quick, half-bitten-off words: "Brightness Lilin requests the report on your progress. She will expect it in her quarters in one hour". The soldier turned around and shut the door behind him before Pattis could even curse. A muffled 'damnation' escaped his lips eventually and he hurried to the desk in the corner of the room to write down what he had learned the day before. He hoped he didn't have to be too technical. A summary of the performed tests, conclusions, and plans for future research should suffice.

An hour later, he turned the spanreed ruby, indicating to the receiving side that his report was complete. He put down the pen and rotated his wrist painfully. If the letters he dropped on the page came alive and started pursuing the pen at a deadly run, he couldn't have written faster. He turned around to tell Jasuio as much and continue their conversation but found the room empty. The wages distribution must have started, and the thought carried with it the reminders of his own chores, like dirty boots carrying crem on a carpet.

He got up and ruffled through the stacks of books piled in heaps. The volume he was searching for was at the very bottom and he had to place half of that stack on an already wobbly one nearby. Managing to keep the precarious heap from turning into a paper avalanche, he dug out the 'Advanced Principles of the Axial Interconnection', dropped on the chair nearby, and started reading.

Quickly, he remembered exactly why that book was placed at the bottom of his collection. It was the most incongruous mixture of scientific fact and dreamy fancy. The chapters on the axi and most chemical reactions could answer to the highest scientific standard, but whenever the authors could not explain one phenomenon or another, they labeled it a spren manifestation and moved on. Pattis suspected they took the common saying 'everything has a spren' too close to heart.

For example, according to the 'Advanced Principles,' even the famed shardplate and shardblade - the primary instruments of Alethi warmongering - were, in fact, ancient spren. So were the soulcasters. The book offered no justifications for the bizarre conclusions and treated the statements as facts. The longest paragraph written on the topic was 'the relationship between the soulcaster and the soulcasting spren must be carefully cultivated and is a primary determinant of the skill level of the said soulcaster. The latter must recognize that despite being bound to their purpose, the spren may refuse cooperation if treated poorly or used unwisely since they accept the bondage voluntarily'.

Soulcasting devices that could think? By the same logic, so should the shardblades! Yet, if the soulcasters were an ancient and secretive group, there were enough records and stories written about shardblades to fill a small library. Everyone would know if the weapons were whispering battle advice to their wielders.

Pattis frowned and went over the lines again. He had read the book years before and discarded it immediately as not supported by a single known fact. Today, though... there was something in Juliyah's protectiveness of her device that tickled at the back of his mind. He assumed it came from wariness to lose her position as a soulcaster, her livelihood, but she sniffed dismissively when he voiced the idea. He was missing something here, he was sure of it. Dared he asked her? Would that jeopardize the experiments?

Pattis closed the book, stood up, and carried it upstairs. He would take it with him and if nothing else works tonight, he could perhaps show the paragraph to Juliyah and watch her reaction. Maybe present it as a joke and see if she laughs.

Book safely in one of his bags, he headed back down to get to the market grain distribution and, time permitting, spend some time on more conventional literature after. Spren manifestation... What on Roshar was spren manifestation?