Page 53 of The Sunlit Man

“I saw his face among them,” Rebeke said.

“We think that maybe,” Zeal said, “people who die without being given to the sun are drawn to join the Chorus. They say that shades will rise from those who die and don’t become sunhearts, but we rarely experience that—instead, sometimes after a death, we see mist gather and move to the Reliquary.”

“It was him,” Rebeke said. She seemed to be trying to convince herself. “Though he spoke like the others, as if he’d been there from the beginning…”

Nomad didn’t have much reason to care either way. “What does this have to do with my engine designs?”

“Show them the schematics,” Zeal said.

“The ghosts,” he said flatly, “are engineers.”

“No,” Zeal said. “They’re… Well, you’ll see.”

Nomad sighed and pressed his designs against the glass. The red eyes gathered around, faces crowding to see, mouths moving as they whispered—but they didn’t say anything intelligible. They inspected all seven pages, one at a time, as he held them up. Then they faded back into the mists.

Zeal waved to the side, where a man stood on watch. A worker? A guard? A clergyman? Some combination of the three? He engaged some machinery and lowered a piece of unrefined metal from storage. The chunk was wide and flat, with dirt still stuck to the bottom. It looked like it had pooled on the surface of the ground when it was liquid, then hardened there.

More such followed. Some copper, he thought, and a variety of other metals—while that first and largest piece had been mostly iron. It all entered the mists from the top, and Nomad realized with discomfort that there was no lid on this enclosure. Inside, the mist churned and grew brighter.

“What are they doing?” he asked Rebeke quietly.

“Building your machinery.”

“How, though?”

“We don’t know. You put in resources. You show them detailed instructions, and you get out the thing you want.”

“When a new settlement is founded,” Zeal said, “we always take some of the smoke. We’re not sure how far we can divide it—but it’s worked so far. You can transport it in special containment devices. We took some of it from Union, along with an older containment unit acquired by absorbing a smaller community.”

“How long will the fabrication take?” Nomad asked. If they were building something, why was the enclosure so silent?

“Depends,” Zeal said. “For something like this, under an hour. They’re faster when it’s something they’ve done before, though.”

Under an hour to fabricate complicated machinery? He wasn’t going to complain—though even if it was true, their deadline was going to be very tight.

I think they’re building it like I build things from myself,Auxiliary said.You’ve seen this before. You use it every day, Nomad.

“You don’t absorb raw materials and spit out permanent devices,” he said.

Yes, but isn’t that actually more reasonable than what we do?

Well…maybe it was. He’d grown so accustomed to Auxiliary that he sometimes didn’t consciously appreciate how extraordinary the spren was, using up only a minimal amount of Investiture from Nomad for each manifestation. That said, thisdidexplain why so few on this planet had acted shocked by what Auxiliary could do. He supposed if your entire society was based on arcane mists materializing objects at your whims, Aux fit right in.

“Would you like something to eat while you wait, Sunlit?” Zeal asked.

“Sure. The spicier the better.”

“Spicy?” Zeal asked, as if the word were unfamiliar.

“Just bring me anything,” Nomad said with a sigh.

Zeal nodded, leaving Nomad and Rebeke standing beside the glass, watching the shifting mists inside. Someone out there in the cosmere would probably befascinatedby this. Threnodite shades who were somewhat self-aware? And who could rearrange the structure of metal as if it were Investiture to be sculpted?Maybe that was why the Scadrians were here, in their secretive research station beneath the ground.

Thinking of that, of course, reminded him of how much he had yet to do. Even if the modified engine worked—which it wouldn’t, not on the first try—he had to find a way to get this people enough power to survive the rotation. And even if they didthat, they needed a way to find the opening to the Scadrian base. How could they manage that? Presumably the only ones who really knew its location were living in it.

No. The Cinder King knows…he thought.So how do we get the information out of him…

“You don’t like it, do you?” Rebeke said from beside him.

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