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Vivenna dresses in Vasher's spare clothes — wrinkled overshirt, leggings, tassels at the cuffs, the cloak cut roughly in the shape of a man — and Awakens each of them in turn from a handful of bright handkerchiefs, *protect me*, *upon call become my fingers and grip*, *strengthen my legs*. She belts on the dueling sword he gave her, which she still does not know how to use but which feels right to bring, and she goes out. Failure, she has decided sitting in the dark, is the price of trying; she has been so afraid of failing again since reaching T'Telir that doing nothing has begun to feel safer than doing the wrong thing. She refuses to keep paying it.

She finds Tuft on his morning corner. He drops his line that she had been a plant all the time she was on the streets and accepts a handkerchief he can sell in lieu of coin. She tells him she wasn't — she came to the streets because she could not actually know what it was to live like him until she tried. He grunts. Then he points her at the Third Dock slums, the buildings near the wharf. *Look around there. Maybe you'll find what you're looking for.*

Vasher is still hanging by his wrists in the stone room when the morning light comes through the window. He knows torture — knows how to scream, how to give the torturer what is wanted, how not to spend strength uselessly resisting — and he knows none of it will help him over a long week of it. Blood drips down his chest; a dozen lemon-burned cuts itch at his skin. Denth has his back to him, knives bloodied on the floor. *There's still a good man in there,* Vasher thinks. *Even after all these years.* *Torturing me won't bring her back,* he says. Denth turns, dark-eyed, agrees that no, it will not — and picks up the next knife.

Inside the palace the priests are hauling Siri through the dark black corridors. They pass corpses in places, and she can still hear fighting. For a moment she lets herself hope it is her father's soldiers come for her, then rules it out — the men opposing the priests are using Lifeless, which Idris does not have. A third force is in the palace and they want her free of the priests. The white cuffs of her dress begin to colour as she nears the God King, who is being held in a room with priests and soldiers; the soldier holding his arm pulls him back when he tries to come to her. *They're touching him,* she thinks. *All semblance of respect is gone. No need to pretend now.*

Vivenna reaches the dock slums and finds the crowd already there in the morning hour, ringed around a tenement and whispering of ghosts and Kalad's Phantoms. Then, faintly, from inside the building: *Vivenna. Come get me.* She shoves through the crowd, climbs the stairs, and almost passes the door with black smoke creeping out from under it. She pushes it open and steps into a poorly-kept room with four corpses on the floor; the sword is buried in the chest of the last, an old man with a leathery face who lies on his side with his dead eyes wide. *Vivenna! You found me. I'm so excited!* the sword tells her happily. He tried to get the old man to take him to the Court of Gods — it didn't turn out well. *VaraTreledees* threw him into the ocean, but he got out. He's quite satisfied. He tells her Vasher is hurt; he went to the God King's palace to rescue her sister. *VaraTreledees* — the sword's word for Denth — stopped them. *He's Shashara's brother,* the sword adds, helpfully. *I wonder if she's here too.* She wraps the sword in a dirty blanket, manages to lift it without retching, and heads for the court.

Lightsong sits cross-legged in a cage in a carved stone dungeon under the palace, thigh aching from his sword wound, Llarimar in the next cage with his head bowed and Blushweaver in the cage opposite him in a beautiful, dirtied nightgown. She is crying. She confesses that she has been working with the priests — the false ones, the men in God King's priesthood robes — from the start, that the whole campaign to gather the four Lifeless Command phrases into her hands was as much theirs as hers, and that they turned on her because (they claim) she withheld her part of the bargain. Lightsong crawls to the bars between him and Llarimar and asks what one picks a lock with — maybe he'll discover he knows how, the way he didn't know how to swordfight. Llarimar stares at him, and finally snaps. *What is wrong with you!* he bellows. *You were a scribe, Lightsong. A Colors-cursed scribe! Not a soldier. Not a detective. Not a thief. You were an accountant for a local moneylender!* Every time the man fails to think before acting, the priest says, Llarimar ends up in prison with him.

Then Lightsong, shaken, looks at the priests across the room and notices what has been wrong about them all along — the colour of their faces, deviation just slightly off the Hallandren hue, a pattern obvious to a man at his Heightenings once he knows what to look for. These men are not Hallandren priests. Before he can act on the realisation, the lead priest comes over and asks for the Command phrases. He demurs; he hopes they remember his reputation for being weak-minded. The priest sighs, waves to the others, and they take Blushweaver out of her cage. Lightsong watches, in horror, as one of them slits her throat in front of him. She fights them and loses; her BioChroma dims, bonfire to candle, and goes out. *We are serious,* the lead priest says. *You now know that we will kill.* He moves Llarimar's cage next. *Red panther!* Lightsong sobs. *That's the Command phrase. Please. Leave him be.* They put Llarimar back. The priests leave Blushweaver's body face-down in the blood and depart.

Alone with Llarimar afterward, Lightsong is numb. He whispers: *What good is godhood?* They are not gods at all, he says — gods do not die from a slit not even as wide as a palm — and he is just a fool. A scribe who was allowed to play god for a few years. A coward who could not save her. Llarimar answers quietly, looking at the lantern: in life he was a scribe named *Stennimar*, an accountant for a moneylender — and Llarimar's own brother. He died rescuing Llarimar's daughter. The girl in his visions is Llarimar's favourite niece. Llarimar had been a priest in Kindwinds the Honest's palace and had been losing his faith, watching his god lie in political games. He had been kneeling over his brother's dead body, weeping and ready to resign, when the Colors began to glow on it and Stennimar Returned in front of him. *You are a god,* Llarimar says quietly. *To me, at least. It doesn't matter how easily you can be killed, how much Breath you have, or how you look. It has to do with who you are and what you mean.*