POV: rysn
Summary
The chapter intercuts between the beach and the vault chamber. On the beach, Lopen flies in to pluck Huio out of the mouth of a building-tall grub-shaped greatshell that has reared up nearly vertical and is using its dozen carapace-spindly limbs as spears against the cowering sailors. The mandibles snap shut behind them on a broken spear. Lopen tows his cousin clear and the two hover in the air over the beach. The thing swarms with arrowhead luckspren, tall as a building and armoured like a chasmfiend. The sailors huddle inside the great greatshell skulls that line the shore, using the carapace as cover, and throw spears that bounce off.
Huio groans that he is never going to hear the end of this. Lopen cheerfully agrees and starts narrating his own heroism aloud — the time he saved Huio from being eaten, on the very tongue, then was very humble about it afterwards. Huio sighs that the humility line ruins the lie. He breathes a little Stormlight off Lopen's spheres to refill himself, then warns him to watch out: there are also cremlings around here that *steal* Stormlight. Not the kind the boss-lady has — smaller, a different breed, the size of a fist, flying in a small swarm. He has not got a clean look.
Lopen turns to Rua, who is currently mimicking the monster in miniature, a little crustacean shape bouncing around growling, and suggests that *now* would be an excellent moment for his honorspren to manifest as a Shardblade. Rua wags a single carapace finger: *you know you have to earn that*. Lopen tries the words anyway, with feeling — *I will protect even those I hate, see, easy* — and Rua shrugs them off. Lopen complains: he doesn't actually hate anyone, and nobody hates The Lopen either, so the rule is rigged. He blames Phendorana and her lectures and tells Rua he should stop listening to her. It is not the time for the conversation; he has a monster to distract from the sailors. He goes back in with his spear.
Down in the small mural chamber under the island, Rysn is making herself ready. She drags the small ancient bench she had been propped against around in front of her to stand in for a deal table — too tall and too thin for a proper Thaylen merchant's setting, but the closest thing to hand. She manages to get her legs crossed beneath her with her back to the wall under the great inlaid mural to help prop herself up, and lays her hands palm down on the bench in the formal dealing posture, trying to remember her lessons. The mural still presses on the back of her mind: a heat, a pressure, a Command without a name.
They come in along the walls and ceiling the way they did on the deck — heaps of fist-sized cremlings clasping together into roughly human shapes, with the distressing little bulges of small bodies shifting under the surface. Soon Nikli is standing in front of her. Two others remain behind him: one a rough male silhouette, the other a rougher female, the difference barely readable. Rysn keeps her trembling under control, ignores the fearspren coiling around her bench, and turns her hands palm-up — the Thaylen sign that opens a trade negotiation. She is not sure how much of Thaylen culture he picked up during his time imitating one. He picked up enough, he says — though he is young among his kind, he has lived quite a long time. He sailed with Longbrow, and liked him, for all his boasting.
Storms. Longbrow has been dead for four centuries. Rysn keeps her face still and her hands where they belong on the bench, and remembers, in passing, that she is swimming in water far over her head. Nikli picks up a robe draped across the spears in the pile of ancient armour and pulls it on before he steps closer to the bench. She gestures across the table from her — *sit, let us negotiate*. There is nothing to negotiate, he tells her gently; he is sorry, but he has a duty to the entire cosmere.
Rysn answers the way Vstim taught her, sweat running down the sides of her face. Everyone wants something. Everyone has needs. Her job is to fit the two together. *What is it you assume I need?* Nikli asks. She meets the thing's gaze and tells him, finally: *you need someone to keep your secrets.*