POV: lift
Summary
Lift tails the three Skybreakers through the emptying belly of the Grand Indicium — corridors gone strangely quiet, side passages branching in every direction, almost no spheres left on the walls to see by. It is way harder than she expected. She manages it anyway, keeping just out of sight as the apprentices and the assassin in white make for the doors that open onto the city. When they step out, she slips through a window near the doors and tumbles into the plants beside the landing's wide stair.
Outside, the air bites cold. Clouds have rolled over the sun, putting the whole city in shadow. The ramps and steps of the Indicium, thick with people only an hour ago, are bare now — a handful of stragglers ducking through doorways, hunting shelter. *The storm is coming,* the assassin says aloud, looking west. *All the more reason to be quick,* the braided apprentice answers, and pulls a sphere from her pocket. She draws the light into herself, starts to glow with it, and steps off the landing into the storming air.
The other apprentice rises after her. Lift, crouched in the shrubbery, gapes. *They can fly?* she thinks. *Why in Damnation can't I fly?* The woman calls down to the assassin to follow. *I've danced that storm once before,* he answers softly, *on the day I died. No.* The two apprentices eye him, shrug at one another, and shoot off across the city above the trenches, taking the straight line instead of the long way through the slots. They could storming fly.
The assassin turns and asks the plants behind him whether she is the one the Herald is hunting. Lift stands up and peeks over the lip of the landing. *I ain't nobody,* she tries. *He kills nobodies,* he replies. *And you don't?* *I kill kings.* *Which is totally better,* she shoots back, which earns her a strange, narrowed look. He squats down with his sword across his shoulders, hands hanging forward, and tells her that the kings he has killed never leave him. Their screams claw at him out of every shadow. He suspects he is already mad and that she should not trust the voice answering her. *Ooookay,* she says — *but you didn't attack me.* *No. The sword likes you.* *Great,* she says brightly. *I like the sword too.*
She asks where the other two are going. He tells her: a Tashikki survey has flagged a man in Yeddaw who keeps being seen vanishing — turning down an empty alley and then simply not being there, his face seeming to slide into other faces when watchers swore they had him. The apprentices read him as a Lightweaver and so a target. When she asks if it is even legal, he tells her the Herald has procured an injunction from the prince forbidding any Surgebinding in the country save the kind he himself authorises. He suspects the trouble she gave the Herald in Azir is precisely what taught him to walk the law in at the top rather than fight local authorities for permission.
Lift traces the direction the other two flew; the sky in that quarter is darker still. She asks him, since he seems honest about it, whether the one who calls himself a Herald is wrong about the Voidbringers. He concedes the new storm says so — but who is he, he says, to judge anything? He is mad, and he thinks the Herald is too, which is exactly why he wants something greater than the whims of any one man to follow. *And then,* he says quietly, *what good is a greater law when that law can be the whim of a man either stupid or ruthless?*
She pushes past the philosophy. *Where are they?* He smiles without it reaching his eyes and tells her: the man they are hunting is an old philosopher who sits and talks to anyone who will listen in a small amphitheatre, near… *the Tashi's Light Orphanage,* she finishes. *Storms. I shoulda guessed.* He asks, almost gently, whether she really means to fight two journeyman Skybreakers alone with a Herald waiting in the wings. She glances at Wyndle. *I don't know,* she says. *But I have to go anyway, don't I?*