POV: lift
Summary
Three hours into the imperial bluff, Lift is sitting cross-legged in the centre of Ghenna's desk wearing the spindly scribe's hat and eating her way through her fourth variety of pancake. A swarm of lesser scribes work the floor around her, pulling reports out of piles of ledgers like fragments out of broken shells. Ghenna has finally pulled her face wrap down — she turns out to be young and pretty — and stands beside the desk reading out Gawx's end of their spanreed conversation, with the title *Your Pancakefulness* applied through clenched teeth.
Gawx's lines are full of bad news. Reports are coming in now from the west: Shinovar, Iri, Alm, and Steen have all seen the new storm — a slow eastbound storm of red lightning, blowing the wrong direction. The Alethi warlord said it would happen and it is happening. *Voidbringers,* Wyndle whispers from the desk. *The Desolations have returned.* The storm is slower than a highstorm, by the reports, but is projected to reach Azir and Tashikk within hours. Gawx presses her on what the Alethi seem to know about it. Lift makes Ghenna write back that the pancakes here are good, particularly the one with a sugar centre, and then — when Gawx tries to get serious about Voidbringers in the storm — tells him she's *workin' on that part.*
She turns on the room. *Whatcha found?* The scribes look at her helplessly: nobody has told them what they're looking for. *Strange stuff*, she says. The spindly scribe pushes back: every report in this building is strange, and they have plenty more on offer if she wants the man whose pig was born with two heads, or the woman who premonition'd her sister falling, or the lichen patch shaped like Yaezir. *That's normal strange*, she says, and then — having no better explanation — flares her *awesomeness*. She glows like an unshielded sphere. The seeds on top of her uneaten pancake sprout and twist into vines. *Somethin' like this,* she says, awespren flickering around the scribes, and they go back to work with renewed conviction and absolutely no better leads.
The spanreed writes again. *Lift, are you going to come back? We miss you here.* Even Fat Lips, she asks. *Vizier Noura misses you too. This is your home now. You don't need to live on the streets anymore.* Then what is she supposed to *do* there? *Anything you want,* Gawx writes. That, she thinks, is exactly the problem. She tells the desk she doesn't know yet. Ghenna gives her a look that says little Reshi girls do not refuse what the emperor of Azir wants for them.
The captain returns with a report from a colleague in the quarter watch. They have been keeping a quiet eye on Tashi's Light Orphanage. The Stump, it turns out, is running a money-laundering scheme: criminal donations come in; she trades spheres for ones of lesser value to scramble them; she routes cleaned spheres on to other groups after taking a cut. The children, the report says flatly, are a front. Lift snatches the paper, suggests the watch arrest the woman and spend all her money on soup, and offers to take half of it for tip-off services. Hauka ignores the suggestions of bribery, coercion, extortion, and state embezzlement, and assures her the colleagues with proper jurisdiction will be moving on it soon.
A few more hours go by. Lift cajoles, threatens, dances, bribes, and finally goes perfectly silent and lets the scribes read in peace. The reports keep producing nothing: men who survived too-tall falls, strange noises outside one woman's window, spren that gather around another woman's house unless she leaves out sugar water. Single-witness oddities, every one. If she chases the wrong tip she'll spend the day finding nothing, and if all of them are real then half of Yeddaw is a Surgebinder. Wyndle eventually tells her, gently, that they might have to pick one at random and hope.
Lift, staring at the papers she cannot read, finds she cannot pick either. She has built her life around going where the winds blow her, and a decision — committing — is a thing she does not know how to do. She is also, quietly, discovering that she hates Darkness — really hates him, with a startling, seething intensity. She thinks she has never properly hated anyone before.
The door bursts open. A runner she doesn't recognise: Status Five emergency diktat from the prince, state of emergency declared, storm projected to hit within two hours, all citizens to bunkers, parshmen to be imprisoned or exiled into the storm, slot-alleys to be cleared, government officials to assigned stations. The scribes start packing books before the runner has moved on. Ghenna tells Lift she has been overruled — the imperial favour will keep, the local prince will not — and explains that the Tashikki will always *listen very well* to the emperor of Azir; they just will not always obey. The viziers warned her about this: Azir is an empire by the polite consent of its neighbours, and only as long as the Prime's demands stay reasonable.
In moments the scribes have packed her off into the corridor with a sub-scribe barely older than herself, a fistful of useless reports, and instructions to be taken to a storm bunker. Lift ditches the sub-scribe at the first junction, strips off her stolen Azish robes, and slips into the unlit back corridors of the Indicium — wooden floors, drawered walls of paper, every fifth sphere-lantern infused, the rest *starvin'* for Stormlight. She gives up briefly trying to chew a lantern open, then stops in a quiet stretch of corridor to think — which is mostly to avoid thinking.
She drops the wads of paper. Wyndle forms beside her, apologising for the failed plan. She shrugs it off — he'd rather be gardening, after all. He admits he'd been planning a really lovely gallery of boots, but agrees that arranging gardens while the world ends might be the wrong choice, and that if he'd ended up with that nice Iriali instead of her, the Radiant they're trying to save would be dead before nightfall. So: new plan. *Somebody* in this city already knows where to go. Darkness's apprentice with the long braid had spoken about an investigation of her own — confident, well-resourced. *You don't suppose,* Wyndle ventures, *that her investigation involved a bunch of scribes searching records, do you?* It would be the smart thing to do. Even *we* came up with it. Lift grins and runs back the way she came.