Page 50 of The Sunlit Man

Ideally he’d eventually clear itallaway, severing his lingering Connection to the Dawnshard. So long as he retained that Connection, he was a link to whoever held it now. And so long as he could locate one of the most powerful weapons in all the cosmere, people would hunt him.

That was too big a problem to deal with at the moment. For now, he’d settle for any kind of therapy that suppressed his symptoms. He’d love to be able to fight back the next time a Charred tried to kill him.

He brought out the drained sunheart again, turned it over in his fingers. “These people,” he said, “can transfer Investiture to one another through touch. And their highly Invested souls become these power sources when bombarded long enough by the sun. I’m hoping that I can find a way to siphon a little of my soul into this drained sunheart, taking some of the scar tissue with it. Follow?”

Vaguely, yes. It will be like lancing a boil.

“Yes, but not so gross.”

Everything about mortals is gross. But siphoning off your soul…won’t that, I don’t know, hurt?

“Not if it’s a very small amount,” he said. “Plus, it will regrow, as will the scar. Human souls are resilient things, Aux. Like our bodies, they self-repair.”

It was different for beings like Auxiliary. His essence had been burned away during the tragedy, leaving only this last, limited remnant.

So…you’re going to use that rock to try to siphon off whatever soul sickness is making Elegy act so angry. If it works, you’re going to try it on yourself, hoping you can cure your own soul sickness. Is that about the short of it?

“Indeed.”

Rebeke probably wouldn’t appreciate you experimenting on her sister like that.

“Probably not.”

That might be why she is hiding outside your door, eh? Listening in?

He paused. “She is?”

Ah! Didn’t you notice? I mean, someone is making small noises out there. I’ll admit, I’m only guessing it is her. Powerful though I am, clairvoyance isn’t on my list of abilities. But it does seem like it would be her, considering how the person keeps pressing against the door—as if trying to hear.

Yeah, Auxiliary was probably right.

I really thought you’d noticed, the knight says loftily, otherwise I’d have said something.

“Don’t lie,” he said with a smile. “You like showing off.”

I love showing off, the knight exclaims. It feels so good. Why do mortals have taboos against it?

“We have taboos against everything that is fun,” he said, still toying with the drained sunheart. If he was right, then everyone on this world had this same strange Connection to one another, allowing the ability to transfer parts of themselves. And this empty power source had held a distilled version of someone’s soul, so it should work too, right?

However, when he tried touching the object to Elegy, nothing happened. Even when he braced himself, reached in, and touched it to her ember. She railed at him, and he heard a thump at the door as Rebeke shifted.

He pulled back, making a note in his book. He hadn’t actually expected it to be that easy.

Investiture responded to human thought. It wasn’t technically energy or matter—but it couldbecomeeither. Investiture, energy, and matter were all one, as per Khriss’s Second Law. It couldn’t be created or destroyed; it could only change from one state to another.

However, Investiture responded differently from energy or matter. You could Command it. More precisely, the mindset you reached by speaking those Commands enabled you to enforce your will upon it. That was common across many of the flavors and varieties of power around the cosmere. Commands, oaths, incantations…any way to focus your will, your Intent, and project it to the Investiture.

Like the Command he’d tried with Contemplation earlier, which came from the planet Nalthis to make Investiture flow between bodies.

Today he tried almost all the ones he knew, in a variety of styles,as he pressed the sunheart against Elegy’s exposed arm and ordered it to drain her heat. Nothing happened, and each failure was frustrating, suggesting that he didn’t really know what he was doing.

He slumped down in his seat, tapping his head against the backrest. Therewaspower locked away inside of Elegy, power that made her stronger, faster, more resilient. How to get at it? After some thought, he decided he probably didn’t know the right Commands. There were methods using tones and vibrations that might work, but he didn’t have that equipment—and he knew that heat, at least, transferred naturally between people here. That gave him his best clue to the mechanism of moving Investiture on this planet.

If this theory was even viable—which he couldn’t say for certain—success would depend on using the local ways that people here invoked or evoked their power. So he’d need something familiar to this people, their particular way of organizing thoughts and will. But what would the local variety of that be? Not oaths, but…

The moment it occurred to him, it seemed obvious. “Rebeke!” he shouted in their tongue. “Would you come in here a moment? I need to ask you something.”

The soft sounds at the door stopped. Then a sheepish Rebeke opened the door and stepped in.

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