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Shallan sits on the edge of one of Urithiru's ten Oathgate platforms with her back against cold stone and her toes going numb, attacking her sketch pad with savage strokes of charcoal. She is meant to be drawing the tower — Jasnah came here hoping to find books and records of ancient date and so far they have found nothing of the sort, and Shallan has been trying instead to lock the place down in lines on a page. She cannot. Her angles keep failing her; she keeps falling back on surrealism. Earlier in the day she had run the Oathgate once, summoning the Blade she killed her mother with to do it, and that truth — spoken as an Ideal of her order, no longer something she could push to the back of her head — is the real thing she cannot draw. Pattern hums against her skirt and tries again to tell her he understands why she should hate him. She tells him quietly that she does not hate him — she hates the sword, and the sword is what she and her father and the whole twisted thing of their family became.

A darkeyed scout — long Alethi hair, white and blue, runner's skirt over trousers — climbs the ramp to fetch her. The highprince wants her. The woman flips through the sketches on the way down, wide-eyed at the impossible perspective of them, asking what they are called: *surrealism, an old movement nobody bothers with anymore.* On the plateau the drilling soldiers stop and watch her pass — *Brightness Radiant,* now, no longer a girl from a backwater. Half the Alethi still think the orders betrayed humankind once and might do so again; she keeps her chin up because Jasnah always told her that power is a perception, and a knight you can be talked into being is no knight at all.

The corridors of the tower coil instead of running straight, like castle fortifications meant to confuse invaders; Shallan reads the strata for direction the way the others cannot. The scout brings her to Dalinar's new audience chamber outside his private rooms — rugs and warmed wine pitcher and plush chairs sitting unhappily in cold rock. Adolin and Renarin and Navani are already there with Dalinar at a map on the wall, arguing which of the western kingdoms to approach now that the new storm has come as warned. Tukar and Emul are at war; Tukar is held by a warlord called Tezim who claims to be an aspect of the Almighty; the new emperor of Azir makes the Azish unpredictable. Dalinar turns and asks Shallan her view of the Makabaki question. She admits, leaning back in her chair, that her knowledge of any of those kingdoms is academic at best — she had never even spoken to an Alethi before leaving her own homeland, and they were neighbours. Pattern, asked for his counsel, hums on her skirt that he is afraid of the highprince.

Dalinar crosses the room to fetch a cup of warmed wine, and as he passes her Shallan feels something pull inside her — as if part of her is being drawn along with him. She follows. She breathes in the spheres in her satchel until Stormlight is rising from her skin, then lays her freehand on the wall map, and the Light pours off her between them and forms above the table into a vast living illusion of Roshar: mountains rising like wrinkles in cloth, stormward hillsides bare and leeward sides full of life, the cities tiny but real. She did not draw it; she does not have the knowledge. Dalinar understands at once that this is what the Stormfather sees each time a storm crosses Roshar — that it was not her alone and not him alone but the two of them together that pulled it through. The illusion has cost every chip in her satchel; Navani promises to get her more.

Dalinar walks into his own map and stops over the tower. *Ten cities. Ten kingdoms. Ten Oathgates from long ago.* This is how they fight it. They protect those ten cities; they make them strongpoints of order in a world that is otherwise in pieces. He counts them off as he walks: Azimir in the west, then a gate hidden in Shinovar, one in the capital of Babatharnam, one in far-off Rall Elorim. Navani adds one in Rira — though Jasnah had thought it in Kurth — and notes that the sixth was lost when Aimia was destroyed. East are Vedenar, Thaylen City, the Plains they already hold — and the last, Kholinar, from which no spanreed has answered. They start small, Dalinar says: Azir for organisation, Thaylenah for shipping, Jah Keved for manpower. He asks Shallan what she can offer of her own homeland after its civil war. He warns the room that the enemy will field a champion against him — a creature in black armour with red eyes, perhaps a parshman, that in his vision had cast nine shadows behind it. Nobody but Renarin notices Renarin go pale.

A knock at the door. The scout — Lyn, Dalinar calls her — is back, looking sick. *Brightlord,* she says, *there's been another murder.*