The Way of Kings

Dalinar shook his head, baffled.

“It sounds a lot like what father was saying,” Renarin said. “When he was in the vision.”

“Not ‘a lot like’ Renarin,” Navani said, looking smug. “It’s exactly the same phrase. That is the last thing you said before coming out of your trance. I wrote down everything – as best I could – that you babbled today.”

“For what purpose?” Dalinar asked.

“Because,” Navani said “I thought it might be helpful. And it was. The same phrase is in the Analectics, almost exactly.”

“What?” Dalinar asked, incredulous. “How?”

“It’s a line from a song,” Navani said. “A chant by the Vanrial, an order of artists who live on the slopes of the Silent Mount in Jah Keved. Year after year, century after century, they’ve sung these same words – songs they claim were written in the Dawnchant by the Heralds themselves. They have the words of those songs, written in an ancient script. But the meanings have been lost. They’re just sounds, now. Some scholars believe that the script – and the songs themselves – may indeed be in the Dawnchant.”

“And I…” Dalinar said.

“You just spoke a line from one of them,” Navani said. “Beyond that, if the phrase you just gave me is correct, you translated it. This could prove the Vanrial Hypothesis! One sentence isn’t much, but it could give us the key to translating the entire script. It has been itching at me for a while, listening to these visions. I thought the things you were saying had too much order to be gibberish.” She looked at Dalinar, smiling deeply. “Dalinar, you might just have cracked one of the most perplexing – and ancient – mysteries of all time.”

“Wait,” Adolin said. “What are you saying?”

“What I’m saying, nephew,” Navani said, looking directly at him, “is that we have your proof.”

“But,” Adolin said. “I mean, he could have heard that one phrase…”

“And extrapolated an entire language from it?” Navani said, holding up a sheet full of writings. “This is not gibberish, but it’s no language that people now speak. I suspect it is what it seems, the Dawnchant. So unless you can think of another way your father learned to speak a dead language, Adolin, the visions are most certainly real.”

The room fell silent. Navani herself looked stunned by what she had said. She shook it off quickly. “Now, Dalinar,” she said, “I want you to describe this vision as accurately as possible. I need the exact words you spoke, if you can recall them. Every bit we gather will help my scholars sort through this…”

61 Right for Wrong

“In the storm I awaken, falling, spinning, grieving.”

– Dated Kakanev, 1173, 13 seconds pre-death. Subject was a city guardsman.

“How can you be so sure it was him, Dalinar?” Navani asked softly.

Dalinar shook his head. “I just am. That was Nohadon.”

It had been several hours since the end of the vision. Navani had left her writing table to sit in a more comfortable chair near Dalinar. Renarin sat across from him, accompanying them for propriety’s sake. Adolin had left to get the highstorm damage report. The lad had seemed very disturbed by the discovery that the visions were real.

“But the man you saw never spoke his name,” Navani said.

“It was him, Navani.” Dalinar stared toward the wall over Renarin’s head, looking at the smooth brown Soulcast rock. “There was an aura of command about him, the weight of great responsibilities. A regality.”

“It could have been some other king,” she said. “After all, he discarded your suggestion that he write a book.”

“It just wasn’t the time for him to write it yet. So much death… He was cast down by some great loss. Stormfather! Nine out of ten people dead in war. Can you imagine such a thing?”

“The Desolations,” Navani said.

Unite the people… The True Desolation comes…

“Do you know of any references to the Desolations?” Dalinar asked. “Not the tales ardents tell. Historical references?”

Navani held a cup of warmed violet wine in her hand, beads of condensation on the rim of the glass. “Yes, but I am the wrong one to ask. Jasnah is the historian.”

“I think I saw the aftermath of one. I… I may have seen corpses of Voidbringers. Could that give us more proof?”

“Nothing nearly as good as the linguistics.” Navani took a sip of her wine. “The Desolations are matters of ancient lore. It could be argued that you imagined what you expected to see. But those words – if we can translate them, nobody will be able to dispute that you are seeing something real.” Her writing board lay on the low table between them, reed and ink set carefully across the paper.

“You intend to tell others?” Dalinar asked. “Of my visions?”

“How else will we explain what is happening to you?”