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Vivenna paces the sixth in Vasher's long line of one-room hideouts, by the light of the single candle he would have called wasteful. He never stays out an entire night, and she had thought she did not particularly care that he was gone — she knows perfectly well that he can take care of himself, that she is the only one in the city right now who cannot. He had said he was only going on a quick scouting mission, though, and he tends to tell her where he is going because he understands that she needs to be in things. She admits to herself, sitting up, that she never used to wait up for Denth the way she is waiting now. Denth was charming and distant. Vasher wears no false mask. The only other person she has ever known like that is her sister, the girl about to bear the God King's child. *Lord of Colors,* she thinks, *how did this turn into such a mess?*

In the palace, Siri wakes to fighting outside her room. Earlier in the night she heard screams and men dying; now there is fighting again, and closer. She rattles the door — locked — and for a hopeful moment imagines that her father's soldiers have come. She rules that out almost at once: the attackers, from what she has heard, are using Lifeless soldiers, which means it cannot be Idris. A third force is in the palace. She screams toward the sound of fighting in the hope that whoever they are will hear her. The door opens. It is Treledees, with two city guards behind him, telling her she must come quickly, *we're trying to help you.* His lies ring hollow. The corpses in the hall outside her room are men in city guard uniforms, men in nondescript armour, and grey-skinned Lifeless. She screams again as Treledees's soldiers haul her away.

Out on the dark water of the T'Telir bay, Old Chapps is night-fishing — to avoid the daytime licence fee that, technically, he ought also to pay at night. *Lap, lap, lap,* go the waters against the side of his boat. He likes the dark. He sometimes does side-work, when one of the slumlords needs a body weighted in a sack and dropped where the current will carry it, and he thinks fondly of the skeletons dancing on the floor of the bay where he left them. No bodies tonight. Just fish. The sea speaks to him as it sometimes does, telling him to bear a little to the right and drop the net. The net snags on something too heavy. He hauls it up over the side, opens the shielded lantern, and finds tangled in the weighted hem of his net a silvery sword with a black handle — *very nice,* the voice from the sea says, much clearer now, *I hate the water, so wet and icky down there.* He picks it up. It doesn't really know what *evil* means, it says, but it will trust him to decide. He smiles. *Oh, all right,* the sword says. *You can admire me a little bit longer, if you must. After that, though, we really need to get back to shore.*

Vasher wakes hanging by his wrists from a hook in the ceiling of a stone room. He notices the rope first — his own rope, the one he used on the maid, now bleached uniformly grey of all colour; the air around him grey too. He spent the last of his Breath in the fight, Awakening the cloak of a fallen mercenary, and there is nothing left for him to draw on. He has been stripped to his short white underbreeches. The room is the same uniform shade as the rope. There is a lantern in the corner. Denth is beside it.

*And so we both return,* Denth says quietly. He wants to know how Vasher killed Arsteel. *In a duel,* Vasher croaks. *You didn't beat him in a duel, Vasher. I know it.* *Then maybe I snuck up and stabbed him from behind. It's what he deserved.* Denth backhands him across the face; he swings on the hook. *Arsteel was a good man!* *Once,* Vasher says, tasting blood. *Once we were all good men, Denth. Once.*

They argue the long quarrel that has been between them for a very long time. Denth tells him this little quest in T'Telir is not going to undo what he did. *Better than becoming a mercenary,* Vasher answers. *Working for whomever will pay.* Denth tells him *I am what you made me.* Vasher tells him the girl trusted him — that Vivenna did. *She was supposed to,* Denth says. *She liked you,* Vasher presses, *and then you killed her friend.* *Things got a little out of hand.* *They always do, with you.*

Denth gets amused. *When's the last time I started a war? Slaughtered tens of thousands? You're the one who betrayed his closest friend and killed the woman who loved him.* Vasher cannot answer that. What could he say? That Shashara needed to die before Awakened steel like Nightblood could enter the Manywar — undead horrors slaughtering people with thirsty swords? It would not matter to the man whose sister he killed. Besides, Vasher knows he is in no position to lecture about creating monsters; he created plenty of his own for that war.

Denth tells him he was going to let Tonk Fah have him. Tonk Fah likes hurting things; it is a weakness he has been able to restrict, with his direction, to animals. *I've always wondered,* Denth says, holding up a knife, *what he finds so enjoyable about causing pain.*