POV: lift
Summary
Lift walks the slot-streets of Yeddaw with Wyndle curling alongside her, ignoring his patient attempt to explain that there are *Words* — Ideals, living ideas she must let into her soul — and that the Skybreakers they overheard in the safehouse were chasing exactly the same next step in their training, the one that ends in a Shardblade. She brushes the lesson off. There is only one thing she knows how to do, she tells him, and that is steal Darkness's lunch. *His food?* Wyndle asks. No: his *lunch* — the person he is here to execute. They are going to take that person away from him.
She wanders into a public garden — a stone bowl with four streets opening off it — and lets her fingers play in a knot of lifespren. Wyndle tuts at the Tashikki groundskeeping, decides the brittels and fruit vines aren't *quite* a disgrace, and follows her over to a bench. The garden is busy: beggars working a careful set of rules she has not bothered to learn, scribes and idlers coming and going. Lift stops with her hands on her hips and thinks aloud about the country she's standing in. Everyone in Azir and Tashikk writes everything down. They trade information the way other places trade spheres. And — as Wyndle indignantly confirms when she suggests they might throw it all out — they would no sooner discard a record than burn their own house. The whole place, she decides, is a city of Wyndles: notes, rules, ledgers, opinions, all hoarded against the day someone wants to buy them back.
Which, she realises, gives her a way in. Darkness told his hunters to find someone doing strange things. *Awesome* things. And in a city where everyone writes down what every child had for breakfast, somebody, somewhere, will already have written down anything strange that has been seen.
She picks a likely target on the bench beside her — an older woman in a brown shiqua with the head wraps pulled back from a made-up middle-aged face — and ignores the woman's attempts to shoo her off. The woman wrinkles her nose at her, which seems unfair: Lift took a bath only a week or so ago in Azir, with soap and everything. She doesn't want money, Lift explains. She's trading: she'll give the woman *nothing* in exchange for an answer to one question. She hunches in place, scratches herself unhelpfully on the behind to keep the conversation captive, and waits the woman out. The woman, fussing about beggar regulations, finally gives in: yes, there is a place in Yeddaw where people stuff away all the things they've written, to keep them safe. She points along one of the radial streets toward a moundlike bunker that peeks above the lips of the trenches. *You mean the Grand Indicium?* she asks, and seizes the chance to flee across the garden.
Lift sits with her head cocked. *Has that always been there?* she asks. Wyndle assures her of course it has. She scratches her head, accepts it, and turns her attention to the squat round fortress at the centre of Yeddaw — the place where, somewhere in the paper, Darkness's next target is already waiting to be found.