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Adolin Kholin spends the morning trying to keep Urithiru's lower receiving cavern from collapsing under its own contents. Four warcamps' worth of refugees have come up through the Oathgate from the Shattered Plains and Navani is hunting for places to put them; meanwhile teamsters are unloading beer and wine in the wrong cross-corridors and the young ardent Rushu keeps having to flag the next wagon for him. Adolin redirects them with the calm of a highprince's son and then has to talk a knot of Alethi labourers out of refusing to haul water because their nahn makes the job parshman work. He offers to register them as a water haulers' guild — his father would approve — and tries not to wonder how all these people are to be paid when nobody owns anyone here. His broken wrist throbs inside its wrap and he is grateful for the noise; left alone, he keeps coming back to what he did the day before, and whether he can really have killed Torol Sadeas with his own hand.

Word reaches him at last that something has been discovered on the third floor. He is fairly sure he knows what.

Dalinar reaches the corridor first and steps between two sets of furious soldiers — his own bridgemen in blue against Sadeas's men in green, angerspren welling like pools of blood. A green jacket has been laid across the face of the body on the floor. He shoves Teft back and shouts both sides down, then kneels to lift the jacket: blood on the floor is hours dry. The man has been lying here through the night while Sadeas's own officers wandered the unfamiliar passages looking for him.

The body is moved into a side room and laid on a table. Dalinar, whose acquaintance with corpses is long, sees the wound for what it is — a punctured eye, the killing thrust used through a closed helm on the battlefield, here delivered to an unarmored man in a corridor. Navani calls it assassin's work. The household gathers: Adolin and Renarin with Shallan and the bridgemen, Kalami across the table as senior scribe still working through the loss of her husband at the new storm, and the only two highprinces who answered his march — Sebarial and his mistress Palona. Palona, hands on hips, says aloud what nobody else will: that this is one problem solved. Kalami warns that the soldiers in the corridor will assume the same of Dalinar. The Shardblade is gone — whoever did this took it. Dalinar, voice rough, insists they still needed him; nobody else agrees. He counts the room and knows it.

He leads the household out and down through the tower's twisting corridors to a wide outer balcony with the wind cold on it and the windspren passing like little riders. Highprince Aladar catches them en route with his daughter May beside him; Navani tells them in a low voice what was found. On the balcony Dalinar looks east into the clouds and tells them what the world below cannot yet see: this tower, its armies, and the handful of Radiants they have so far, may soon be the only ordered thing left. Aladar points out how thin that order is — they technically lost their battle, their armies are shattered, and the strongest of the highprinces never even came.

Dalinar turns from the wall and asks Kalami to recite for them what the Vorin tradition teaches about the Desolations and the Voidbringers. She gives them annihilation — populations broken, scholars dead, the Heralds returning between Desolations to find people wielding sticks and stone again. Dalinar uses that to redraw their roles. He names Aladar Highprince of Information over judgment, law, and a new police force in the tower; he gives Sebarial Highprince of Commerce over supply count and markets; he tells Adolin to fold every army present, regardless of which highprince it answered yesterday, into a single training under his own Highprince of War writ, leveraging the Soulcasters and rations as his hold. Aladar pledges himself to him without hedging.

Teft asks where his men fit. Dalinar tells Bridge Four to keep scouting Urithiru with the scribes and to bring word the moment their captain returns. To his younger son and Shallan he gives the last and largest assignment: practice. Other Radiants are coming, he tells them, and the two of them will need to lead. Renarin stumbles trying to refuse; Dalinar sets a hand on his shoulder and tells him he is trusted.

The voice from the vision is still in his head — unite them, be ready for the champion — and he says it aloud as policy. He commits, in front of all of them, to do what the Sunmaker could not: to unify Roshar. He reflects only at the end that it would have been easier with Torol for it. The bridgemen on the wall look down at clouds. Below the tower, the rest of the world has not yet been told.