POV: shallan
Summary
Shallan follows the rush down through the tower's coiling corridors in a string of guards and lamp-bearers, listening to Lyn's low report to Dalinar as they go. The dead man is a lighteyed officer of Sebarial's — a Vedekar Perel she has never met — found by one of the Bridge Four scouting parties in a remote part of the second level. She has burned out the Stormlight she had pulled into the living map of Roshar and cannot keep pace with Dalinar and his guards on storming Alethi legs. Adolin hesitates ahead of her, then turns back and falls into step beside her with his lantern. He tries an awkward little joke about how the corpse cannot get any more dead, but something is wrong with him; the strata of the chamber's stratified walls twist around her like the threads of a screw, and she takes a Memory of the pattern to sketch later as she walks.
The chamber the bridgemen are guarding turns out to be an old bathing room: a deep square basin cut into the floor, stone spouts shaped like horses' heads opening from the upper walls, the strata of the corridor ballooning across the room before resuming. The body lies at the bottom of the basin on its back, stabbed through the eye, clothing disordered from a struggle. Dalinar and Navani stand on the ledge above; Peet for Bridge Four is already telling Dalinar it looks the same as what happened to Sadeas. Navani takes her skirts down into the basin and kneels beside the corpse — the positioning, the eye-thrust, all of it identical — and tells the room the same hand did both. Nobody seems to think a king's mother kneeling over a murdered officer is unseemly; Shallan is still adjusting to how casual the Alethi are about bringing women into the bloody parts of war.
She turns to read Adolin's face for the political angle and finds him aghast — open mouth, wide eyes — muttering that it is impossible. He admits he did not know the man; he had only assumed that Sadeas's death was an isolated thing, the sort of trouble Sadeas earned for himself. This second one is something else. Dalinar walks down into the basin to join Navani, with Peet, Lopen, and — to a few hostile glances from soldiers who position themselves around him — the one Parshendi in Bridge Four uniform, Rlain. Dalinar turns to the lighteyed officer holding the perimeter — Colot of the Fifth Battalion's archers — and learns that Colot volunteered his company to scout the tower with the Windrunners because Tallan, his friend who ran the battalion's policing company, had not survived the Plains. Dalinar thanks him and asks for the room.
Once they have it, Dalinar tells his son to take the investigation. Most of the soldiers he would have given it to — Niter, Malan, the King's Guard — are dead, and the bridgemen are good for many things but not this. Aladar is now Highprince of Information; Adolin is to bring this to one of Aladar's policing teams and work with them as his father's liaison. The Kholin name on the case will signal to the court that they take it seriously — even if some will read it instead as putting the murderer in charge of finding himself. Dalinar mutters that he misses Jasnah, who would have known how to spin it. Adolin swallows and says he understands. Shallan glances at Renarin — who is still up on the walkway, watching his brother with unblinking sapphire eyes — and finds Pattern humming quietly against her skirt.
Dalinar and Navani go to break the news to Sebarial in person. The moment they are out the door Shallan catches Adolin by the arm and presses him — *you knew that man, didn't you? do you know who killed him?* — and finds his blue eyes steady on hers. *I have no idea who did this, Shallan. But I am going to find out.* He is as good a liar as a newborn, she thinks; whatever this is, he does not know the answer. He stalks off, and Shallan follows him out, glancing over her shoulder to see Renarin still looking down the hall after them until she has rounded enough of the tower's curves to lose him.