POV: lift
Summary
Lift follows Wyndle's vines up the side of an alleyway and hauls herself out into the open farmland that surrounds Yeddaw above the trench-tops. Farmers are out in their shiquas — pulled down to the waist for work — spreading seed-paste in the cracks of the stone, anxious. This is supposed to be the Weeping, the one slow stretch of the year they don't have to plant. Yet there has been no rain for days, and the seasons have gone wrong. They are planting lavis, tallew, and clema in case the proper rains never return. Fearspren boil up around the mounds where they work; the city's cisterns are still full from the early weeks of Weeping, but no one believes they will last. Behind her, lifespren break off from the polyps to trail her like glowing green dust.
Ahead, the Grand Indicium rises bald and squat in the middle of the carved-down city, the streets curling toward it like spokes. Up close she can see it more clearly: a deep ring of bare stone has been cut around the bunker, sloped ramp-paths wind up to its doors, and a steady stream of Tashikki flows in and out below. Wyndle approves of the engineering — they had to make the high point a fortress to keep the storms off — and she settles down on the field-edge with her feet swinging over the drop, considering the building.
She admits, charitably, that it looks faintly ridiculous — a stubby thing made important by exaggeration. *Crass,* Wyndle sighs. Not crass, she corrects him: Ol' Whitehair taught her it isn't crude as long as you call it art, which is why palaces hang pictures of naked ladies. Wyndle reminds her, drily, that this was the same man who eventually had himself swallowed by a Marabethian greatshell. She concedes it. She prefers to pretend the greatshell didn't actually finish the job. He winked at her as he jumped into its mouth, and she misses him.
Wyndle forms his vines into a face — crystal eyes, a tiny mouth — and asks the obvious question: *what is our plan?* She has none, which is the plan. He offers a real suggestion. The bunker is an archive: thousands upon thousands of reports and ledgers. How exactly is she going to find the one entry that matters? Easy, she tells him: he is going to read them. *All* of them. Wyndle, appalled, explains that there is more text in there than he can possibly skim and that no — once and for all — he does not eat souls and is not open to barter, even if she could offer him a tax collector or, failing that, three of them stacked together. She bounces her heels against the stone and lets him sputter himself out.
The farmers behind them have started asking whose daughter she is, and why she isn't fetching them water. She wrinkles her face up, thinking. Waiting until dark won't work — Darkness has set sunset as his deadline, and the scribes inside there probably don't sleep anyway. But the Tashikki *sell* their knowledge: the viziers back in Azimir were always writing to them for it. She stands up. Wyndle was right: they have to be clever about this — *devious,* she says, like a Voidbringer. She is going to start by stealing some important-looking clothes.