(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Veil prowls the Breakaway market in her white coat and hat, hat pulled low — restored shipments through Taravangian's Jah Keved have set the market bustling, drink flowing from royal-sealed casks, and only she can hear the predator under the noise. Four nights of Dalinar's loud patrols have flushed the dimmer taverns into the bright ones. She has set her own twelve men in plain clothes among them. Three nights ago, a card game in the market turned ugly — one player smashed a bottle into another's head; the killer (one of Ruthar's soldiers) was hanged the next day in the square. The bottle-blow itself is exactly the seed Veil has been waiting for; she has sketches of the dead man, has briefed her men to watch for short fellows with drooping mustaches in tents nearby, and is sure the copy attack will come tonight.

She ducks into a tavern to check on Gaz and Red, who are nursing drinks beside crates. Red makes a pass at her. She turns him down — *most men who've made a pass at me end up missing a finger or two* — and laughs at his comeback before warning them both to stay alert. She drifts back to the policing dais by the well, knife spinning between her fingers, and thinks about herself: she shares Shallan's love of crowds; Radiant could take crowds or leave them; the three of them share efficiency.

Screams. Vathah comes shoving through and reports: it wasn't the bottle blow. The thing imitated the *execution* — dropped the body off the top of a tall stone outcropping in the market and left it hanged. Glurv is tailing the killer, a man in black who ran for the eastern tunnels. Veil sprints. Vathah cannot keep up with a Stormlight-burning Lightweaver; she breaks into the corridor alone, follows pointed hands, runs through emptying halls, and hits an intersection where the trail dies. Pattern in her coat tells her to look right — *the shadows are off, the wrong pattern* — and a coal-black, half-human shape splits out of the dimness and bolts on all fours, squeezing into a two-foot air-duct hole at floor level.

Radiant cuts the wall apart with her Patternblade and shoulders through into a small round chamber dominated by a stone-step pit corkscrewing down into darkness with no railing — exactly the spiral she has been drawing in her sketchbook without remembering. The wall she broke through has rusted hinge-remnants: a hidden door. She sends Pattern to fetch Adolin with soldiers and promises not to descend alone. Then strips off Veil's hat and coat, hides them in the rubble, and weaves Shallan's havah back over her clothes — Shallan again, innocent and lively, the persona insisting *that's the real you. Isn't it?*

Adolin arrives in Kholin blue Plate with the entire Bridge Four in tow — Teft in charge, Renarin in slate Plate, Lopen, Skar, Eth, Drehy, and Lyn the scout still mistaken for one of them — because Pattern crashed into the training rooms screaming. Renarin leans out over the pit. *There's something down there. Something ancient. You've felt it, haven't you?* Pattern only knows it is *of the enemy.* Bridge Four forms a rearguard and they start single file down the spiral.

The bottom opens into a passage built differently from the rest of the tower: an archway of separately placed stones, mosaic-tiled corridor beyond — the Heralds in circular panels overhead; on the walls a robed figure hovering before a blue disc, the Almighty depicted as a bursting cloud, a tree-woman with branching arms, ten distinct kinds of spren. Two metal doors flank the passage. Adolin rams one open with his Blade — the room inside, and its mirror across the hall, are libraries, their books decayed to splinters and dust ringed by decayspren. Jasnah's dreamed-of trove, ruined. Shallan kneels among the rows and feels lost.

Renarin has walked farther down the main corridor. His sphere lights a tarry mass in the distance. *We shouldn't have come here. We can't fight this. Stormfather …* Bridge Four forms a two-rank spear line across the corridor as the darkness pours toward them, sweeping the murals from the walls, climbing the ceiling. Out of it walk humanoid figures — copies of Teft, Lopen, two figures in Shardplate — made of shiny tar, features wrong, mouths sprouting spiny teeth. Renarin names it: *One of the Unmade. Re-Shephir. The Midnight Mother.*

Adolin charges, of course. The bridgemen retreat in measured order behind, holding the line. The midnight figures bleed dark smoke when struck and keep forming. Renarin drops into the formation's center, glowing with Stormlight, healing wounds. Shallan stands behind the formation, alone — there is no copy of *her* — and watches the imitations fail to grasp the people they are imitating. *You try to imitate us, but you fail. You're a spren. You don't quite understand.* She steps up and into the darkness. The midnight men shy away. She draws in Stormlight, goes alight like a beacon, and lets dozens of Lightweavings spill out around the bridgemen — every face from her recent rebuilt collection, including Palona, cobblers, scouts, soldiers, *even a few kings.* A glowing radiant cohort, sentries against the dark. The Midnight Mother's tar withdraws along the walls, opening a path back, but the main mass refuses to leave the corridor's far end.

Adolin asks how she is doing it. *Has someone with a knife — not knowing who you were — ever tried to threaten you?* He says he just summoned his Blade. *A little like that.* They press forward. The corridor opens into a bowl-chamber where the spren coats a pillar that runs floor to ceiling, twenty feet high, mass undulating, faces appearing through the surface trying to escape. The midnight beasts have grown frenzied and inhuman. *Retreat or attack?* Adolin raises his faceplate, smiles, and gives her Highmarshal Halad: *to beat someone, you must first know them.* And: *plan every battle as if you will inevitably retreat, but fight every battle like there is no backing down.*

Shallan summons her Patternblade into a sweating grip — and the Ideal-pain she carries with it. She sends in her illusions; this time they are tested with claws and the midnight men discover they are not real. Adolin cleaves a path to the central mass with Renarin guarding his back; the bridgemen widen and hold the lane. Shallan walks down a corridor of spears, weaves *herself* — Shallans young and old, frightened and confident, soldier and mother and child, some lost self-portraits restored — into a dozen alternative lives around her. The illusions fall and re-form. She lets Veil appear among them. She knows none of them are her; all of them are her.

She walks the last steps to the pillar past her own ghosts. The pulsing mass of the Midnight Mother is right in front of her now, faces stretching against the surface and submerging like drowning men in tar. *This was why she'd come.* She lets the illusion that hides her safehand vanish, peels off the glove, and presses her bare hand to the spren.