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Lift looks down from a hilltop at Yeddaw in Tashikk, a city she has always meant to see and which lives up to its reputation. Where Azir is content to bronze-plate buildings into a giant mirror at itself, this place is carved straight down into the rock: hundreds of trenches two or three storeys deep, all interlocking, spiralling vaguely toward a single moundlike building at the centre that is the only structure protruding above the original plain. People live in those slots; crops grow on the bridges of original ground between them; long empty channels lead out from the city to bleed off highstorm water. Wyndle asks how such a thing was possible, and Lift, who has been listening to Azimir's viziers, can answer: Shardblades. About a century ago, Azir's Imperial Shardblades — used mostly as enormous mining tools rather than for war — cut the city out of the plain. Sesemalex Dar, the place this most resembles, has been a war zone for as long as anyone can remember; this is as close as Lift will ever get.

Hands on her hips above the trenches, she muses aloud that she ought to get herself a Shardblade — Darkness had one, after all. Wyndle groans the special groan of a being that knows something forbidden. He insists he must not tell her about Shardblades; she must discover their nature on her own. She offers, calmly and several times, to bite him until he talks. He calls her bluff. She lets him have it, because it is good to see him grow what passes for a backbone in plants. They join the line on the road down to one of the guard towers ringing the trench-city — Yeddaw has no walls, only towers — and she notes, surprised, that the queue is mostly families in dirty patterned skirts and Azish-cut clothes, not merchants. Refugees, probably. Hungerspren cluster around them like brown winged specks.

On the walk down Wyndle tries to draw out why she has really come here. She blandly insists it is because Yeddaw is the place to eat tuk-cake — the pancakes baked during the Weeping in ten varieties — and she fully intends to steal one of each. He counters that a so-called Skybreaker who recently tried very hard to execute her is rumoured to be in this exact city right now. Lift reminds him that the viziers — whom she persistently calls "the noodles" for the way their wavy arms and blubbering faces flap when they talk — have been quietly tracking Darkness's movements as part of their fascination with the murders of small, quiet people across Roshar (alongside the better-known assassinations of kings by the bald man in white). A spanreed sighting placing him in Yeddaw came in just before they left.

Wyndle adds his own dread: he can feel something building. He passes on the news that Highprince Dalinar Kholin of Alethkar has written to the Prime warning of a new storm that blows the wrong way; the noodles called the letter silly. Lift admits, quietly, that she feels it too — a distant thunder, or the held breath after a dropped pan, before the clatter. Wyndle replies that the wrong-way storm is exactly why this was the wrong time to leave Azimir; they had security there, and they will need it. He also confesses something more personal: his people, the cultivationspren, have no kingdom of their own and only began bonding humans now because the Cryptics and honorspren had started; everyone who knew how to do this died centuries ago, and his bond with her was easier than it should have been — which he suspects is down to whatever she actually is.

The conversation drifts back to the immediate problem: dinner. The Weeping has been doing something strange this year — stopping, starting, stopping again, more like regular weather than the long mild rain it is supposed to be — and the line into the city is moving slowly, with the guards taking their time. Lift's stomach announces itself loudly enough to summon a small swarm of hungerspren of her own. Wyndle points out, reasonably, that she could simply pay; the emperor allotted her spheres. She left them in Azimir on purpose. Can't be robbed for what you don't carry, and only fancy people carry money like that; she is normal folk now. Wyndle suggests, dryly, that *she* is the normal one and everyone else is weird; she takes that as confirmation. Then she ducks under the chull cart in front of her in the queue and starts working her way up to the front.