Work Text:
Vyre was in Northgrip when he heard the news, and at first he didn’t believe it. It came from a Singer fishwife filleting a bass, absentmindedly: “I can’t believe they really managed to kill Stormblessed.” And agreement from her client. Vyre stopped in the middle of the street and wanted, with everything in him, to strike her down where she stood for the audacity—
—but Retribution had to be just. If it wasn’t, then Vyre had damned them all. Instead he turned on his heel, very slowly, and said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, ma’am. Did you just say that Kaladin Stormblessed is dead?”
The fishwife and her client, a human darkeyes, turned to look at him. The human blanched to take in his face, but most of the Singers had heard of Vyre by now, and knew he did not trouble civilians. “That’s what I’ve heard,” the fishwife said after a moment. “They say he died in Shinovar.”
Some of the younger Parshendi were eschewing all honorifics, a habit that was sending the Fused into a very satisfying tizzy. Vyre had to try with everything in him not to glare at the poor woman lest he discourage her commendable lack of respect. “They won’t have found a body, though,” he tried.
The fishwife was looking entirely sympathetic now, which made no sense. “The Alethi did. They buried him and everything.” And then, when Vyre didn’t say anything: “Do you… did you know him?”
He had to speak. Even the human had a pitying expression on her face over the fear. “No,” he said. His hands were tingling. “No, not in the end.”
Vyre turned on his heel and left.
He traveled by himself, mostly. Retribution was busy planning for the inevitable invasion of Roshar, and for the first time in three years, Vyre was alone in his own head. There was no one berating him but himself, no one to blame but himself for the spiteful and uncharitable things he thought about his fellow people, and only he could decide what to do with his time.
Parshendi politics were as messy and complicated as human ones, now that the war had come to a pause. Vyre tried to pitch in where he could to support everyday Singers. But now they needed the pen rather than the sword.
Vyre was definitely a sword.
So now he had a list, and name by name, he was crossing it off. It wasn't even a comprehensive list: no one but the undeniable worst of the worst, human and Parshendi both. As he travelled, he added new names every so often. After all, he had nothing but time.
At first he hadn't bothered to disguise their deaths. A little well-earned fear went a long way. But after the first Parshendi he killed, El had tracked him down to a dirty town somewhere on the Herdazian border and had a long conversation about all the horrible things the Fused knew how to do to someone who couldn't die. Not, El had stressed, that this meant Vyre should stop. It just meant he needed to get clever, and if that wasn't an option, that he should ask El for advice every so often. El knew lots of useful things. El had contacts in places a seven foot tall Parshendi covered in wrought-metal carapace really shouldn't have flown under the radar. El could be his friend, if he liked. And could El sleep on his floor tonight? All the other rooms were taken.
Generally self-preservation and Vyre weren't even living on the same planet. But it had occurred to him, lying awake in the dark listening to the sound of metal spines scratching into the wooden floor, that El was probably the worst enemy he could make right now. Certainly no one else was lining up to offer him validation on his worldview, which was ridiculous because his worldview was extremely logical and marred only by occasional acts of spiteful but entirely justifiable revenge.
So Vyre worked his way down the list, and got away with it too. It felt sometimes like it fed something within him, some little piece of him that Retribution had put there. And occasionally he would carry out special favors for El, and if those didn't feel good, well, Vyre had had a lot of practice killing people he knew deep down didn't deserve it.
He was supposed to kill a slave trader the night he found out Kaladin was dead. Instead he walked out to the docks and watched the waves lap up and down against the quay. It all looked strange and grayscale through his crystal eyes, but that was alright. He felt strange and grayscale too.
Kaladin had always seemed immortal to him. Had he killed himself, in the end? Surely someone would have told Vyre. Or perhaps not. No one told him anything.
In a horrible pang, he wished the old Odium were still there to quiet his mind. His thoughts felt unbearably heavy. It should have been easy to decide he didn't care whether Kaladin was dead, but all he could do was run scenario after scenario through his mind. Who, how, when? Had he suffered? He probably had. Kaladin loved to suffer.
It wasn't right. Of the two of them, Vyre had always thought deep down that he would die first. He was supposed to lose and Kaladin was supposed to win, because Kaladin always won. But now Kaladin was dead and Vyre was still alive, horribly alive, and feeling something he couldn't put a name to. He was supposed to kill a man tonight. What was the point, if that man wasn't Kaladin?
The point, he reminded himself sternly, was that he was a bad man. He had traded in lives like Kaladin's, like Moash's— that stupid young man Vyre barely recalled. Killing him would honor Kaladin.
With a sigh, Vyre turned away from the ashy sea and set back out into the streets of Northgrip. If only Kal could watch him work tonight.
Vyre didn't like killing, not really. But Kaladin had trained him to be the best of the best, and if you were the best at something then it was your responsibility to do it. Besides, the world needed cleaning up.
He explained all this to Kav Inatar as the man stood on trembling calves, barely reaching the box placed under his noose. Generally Vyre wasn't a talker, not if it wasn't personal. But tonight was personal. Kaladin was dead, most of Bridge Four was dead, and Vyre had to carry the torch.
And whose fault is it that Bridge Four is dead?
Vyre carefully ignored this thought. Sometimes he thought very stupid things, like maybe letting Odium into your head was a bad idea, and the only thing to do was stab someone about it. He couldn't stab Kav Inatar, unfortunately, so he settled for giving him a strong kick to the back of one calf.
Inatar gave an aborted gurgle as he lost his balance and the noose took his weight, but he managed to keep his other toe on the box. After a moment of undignified flailing and some truly pathetic noises of strangulation, he regained his footing.
“I'm sorry— I'm sorry your friend died—” he managed to babble as Vyre watched on apathetically. “But you don't have to do this— he wouldn't have wanted….”
“I know,” snapped Vyre. “He made it excruciatingly clear he didn't think anyone deserved to die except the poor innocent bastards he came across on the battlefield. And he's not my friend. And also I don't care that he's dead.”
“Then why are you telling—”
Vyre kicked the box over.
Half an hour later, after arranging the office to look like the stage of a suicide, he let himself out the servants’ door and slipped out into the bustling night of Northgrip. The city felt like it was squeezing him. Beggars called after him, noticing his fine clothes, and a human nightwalker tried to waylay him before she caught sight of his face and fled into the darkness of an alley.
It was all too much. He needed out of this humid, windy port city. He needed to tell someone Kal was dead, someone who would understand that Vyre didn't actually care. He needed someone helpful.
Unfortunately, Vyre only had one friend.
“Look,” El said, lounging on a chair in an inn two cities south with his feet propped up on the desk, “you’ve got to make up your mind. Either you hated his guts the whole time and you don’t care that he’s dead, or he really was your friend and you do care even after he betrayed you. You can’t claim you despised him and then flop there like a kicked axehound.”
“I’m not flopping,” said Vyre, “I’m meditating.”
“Why are you meditating in my room?”
“I had to update you on important strategic intel.”
“About your dead best friend that you tried to get to kill himself? That’s strategic, is it?”
Presumably El thought he looked very stylish posed like that. Vyre thought he looked like he was elevating a bad ankle. “He’s dangerous. You don’t understand.”
“Of course I understand! I’m not a fool! He was apparently so charismatic that he convinced an entire regiment of darkeyes to side with their own worst interests! Not that you ever fell for it in the slightest, of course.”
“It’s more complicated than that, and I didn’t fall for it,” said Vyre, even though it wasn’t, and he had.
El watched him for a very long moment. “I forget sometimes,” he said, choosing his words with care, “that you have had so much less time than I have to accept that the thing you love hates you.”
“What? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing worth reacting like that over,” said El mildly. How had Vyre reacted, anyway? Had he shown something on his face? Had his fingers twitched? Inside, he felt as unmoored and anesthetized as he had since he heard the news. “Only that I’ve enjoyed the myriads of human cultures I’ve seen rise and fall over the years far more than my own, while humans regard me as— ha! I shouldn’t generalize, should I? After all, the world is changing… human culture, perhaps, was the problem all along…”
“Humans,” said Vyre wearily, “are definitely the problem.”
“...and you loved Kaladin Stormblessed, didn’t you?”
Vyre tried to think about it. So much about those years was a blur. “He was a good leader,” he admitted. His head hurt. “Once upon a time.”
“I suspect he stayed a good leader. The problem is that he wasn’t a good man, yes?”
Vyre squeezed his eyes shut. The horrible thing about El was that he was pretentious and annoying and, unfortunately, quite intelligent underneath all of that. Every so often, something he said cut through the fumes that had filled Vyre’s brain ever since— he couldn’t remember. It had been worse, once, he knew that. He remembered endless gray days when he had joined the construction crews and hauled stone until he could barely stand. Anything to be able to turn his mind off and fall asleep, even for only an hour or two. Then Retribution had come, and the years with Odium went fuzzy and vague. Probably Retribution felt the same when it looked back on being Odium; El said the two of them were Connected, like Vyre was a sapling grown from a slice off a willow tree.
Had Kaladin been a good man? It hadn’t mattered, had it? Until it had.
“He was so young, El,” Vyre remembered suddenly. “He was five years younger than me and it showed. Don’t laugh, I know that’s nothing for you.”
“I wasn’t laughing,” said El. “I haven’t held onto my wits by making light of mortality.”
“You would have hated him,” decided Vyre. “He was so— so sanctimonious, so convinced he was right and everyone else was wrong, and so stubborn. He wouldn’t listen to anyone else about anything.”
“Yes,” said El, “he sounds awful.”
“And he was ridiculously Alethi. Sigzil kept going to him for advice on cramps, and Kal thought he had a— some kind of deficiency, I don’t remember. He didn’t know the first thing about how they did things in Azir. But damn if that tea he would whip up didn’t take the edge off Sig’s pain every month.” Now El was laughing, but with an edge to his marbled face that was almost affectionate. “I remember the first time I beat him in a duel, he lay there in the dust and gave me this huge beaming grin. I mean, Kal never smiled. But he was so happy because it meant he had helped me, that I could look after myself. All he ever wanted was for people to feel a little better and for life to treat them alright. Why did he side with the Kholins?”
“Probably because the alternative was an immortal god of hate. It's a tough pill to swallow.”
“Dalinar Kholin,” said Vyre dourly, “is practically a god of hate on his own.”
El shrugged. “So you both made deals with the devil. I happen to think you threw in with the better devil, but what do I know. I'm a horrible Voidbringer intent on bringing about the fall of humanity.”
Despite himself, Vyre felt a flicker of humor. Not that he let it show on his face, of course. It would only go to El's head. “How's that going for you?”
“Great. I'm on a chair, and you're on the floor. This is a symbol of my glorious victory. Are you sure you weren't in love with Kaladin?”
Vyre's head snapped towards him. “What? In love with Kaladin? As in—”
“As in, romantic poetry, long walks holding hands, desire for marriage…”
“I wrote no poetry, we never held hands for longer than a few seconds, and Kaladin had no desire to marry me, if such a thing could even happen under Alethi law,” managed Vyre after a moment, in a tone he thought was impressively cool. He risked a glance at El to find his face skeptical. “Why are you— I mean—”
“It's hardly uncommon,” said El mildly. “We don't have any taboo against it among the Parshendi. And I wouldn't have taken you for a bigot.”
“I'm not a bigot! I haven't said the first thing against it!”
“You just denied it.”
Violence against El never ended well. Vyre had tried it before. “Just because I don't look at men like that doesn't mean I think it's wrong—”
“Yes, it does,” said El. “You're being quite small-minded.”
“What, so a man who isn't attracted to women is opposed to the entire sex?”
“You're prevaricating unnecessarily. Which is, I would note, another piece of evidence in favor of—”
Vyre opted for violence in spite of all common sense. The chair lost its legs to his Honorblade, and he had half a second to feel smug at the sight of El falling on his ass before the man had him flat on his back with an antilight blade to his throat. It was never a fair fight; El had a several thousand year head start and, unlike his fellow Fused, was ostensibly sane. “I’ve told you to stop doing that,” El said amiably, as Vyre thrashed beneath him. “If you try to stab me often enough, at some point you’re going to succeed, and then I’ll have to steal another poor Singer’s body. That wouldn’t be ideal for me, since I rather like this one, and I assume the Singer would have some concerns about the process as well. You should have more consideration for the plight of the common Parshendi, Vyre.”
“I have— a lot of concern—” El caught sight of his right hand snaking towards the dagger at his side and frowned before pinning his wrist to the floor. “Why the storming hell do you think I’m here?”
“I don’t know. Bad breakup, one assumes.”
“I just told you that's not what was happening!”
“I know. But you wanted it to be happening, yes? Just consider it.”
Vyre paused in his thrashing and considered it. “Absolutely not,” he said, and considered it some more. “I hated the bastard, and I'm glad he's dead.”
“Oh, well, if that's the case….” El got off of him, although not before kicking the Honorblade out of his reach, and stood. “Let's go drinking. We can celebrate.”
There was nothing but innocent merriment in his hellish red eyes. Vyre scowled, dismissed his Honorblade, and pushed himself off the floor. “Kaladin was a terrible drinking partner,” he recalled, pulling on his coat. It had started out a smooth, well-made black, and was now a shabby dark gray. “He got morose every time, and Teft and I would have to talk him off the ledge. As it were.”
“Which one is Teft, again?”
Vyre was silent.
“Ah,” concluded El, “the one you hunted down and killed for sport.”
The more Retribution made its home in his soul, the less he could recall why he had done so many things under the banner of Odium. Rather than admit this, Vyre said, “He was a traitor too. They were all traitors, and they're all dead now.”
“Thank the stars,” said El, “that Bridge Four lives on in you.”
Better in him than in no one, Vyre thought. It wasn't right for something like Kaladin Stormblessed to die entirely.