POV: dalinar
Summary
Dalinar makes his first flight as Kaladin's passenger from Urithiru down to his old warcamp on the Shattered Plains, holding Navani's hand throughout. He likens it to being on a ship in an open sea — exhilarating, but at the mercy of forces a man does not control. Kaladin is the only one flying with any finesse, zipping back and forth to right his charges whenever their bodies catch the wind wrong, and is using the trip as practice for the eventual flight to Kholinar. He intends to ferry Elhokar's strike team at the leading edge of a highstorm, so that his Stormlight will continually be renewed by the storm itself. The Stormfather rumbles in Dalinar's head: men are not of the waves. *And the sky?* *Some are,* he says, grudgingly. They cross the ten old warcamps, *cupped fingers from underneath*, and land on a plateau outside Dalinar's old Kholin camp.
A tall brightness named Jasalai — left in charge of the camp during the relocation to Urithiru — walks them through. The bunkers held up well against the Everstorm in the lee of the western rim. The place is at once entirely familiar and no longer his. Dalinar frets about logistics: the warcamps are too far from Narak and the Oathgate to defend without thinning his forces further still, and yet Shallan's assessment is that they have hunted chasmfiends near to extinction and the plateaus can no longer feed Urithiru alone. Navani thinks they should found a kingdom here. Over the meal in his old bunker, she sketches with the ardent Rushu — some kind of ship with the sail on the bottom — while Rushu burbles about how they have just flown faster than any human since the Recreance. Then her spanreed blinks. Fen, who had asked at the morning's storm to be sent alone into the Aharietiam vision, finally answers: a single word. *Yes.* She will receive a Radiant and come to Urithiru.
Dalinar slips out of the bunker by its back door, no guards posted, to pursue his real reason for coming. He goes to the warcamp monastery — the one he had so rarely visited during his five years here, leaving the ardents to pray and burn glyphwards on his behalf — and gets quietly lost among the identical buildings, before stumbling upon Kadash in an office, packing ledgers out of his wall safe. The two skirt their old argument: Dalinar did not come for him. He wants to find the man who lived here — the madman who claimed to be one of the Heralds, who had had a Shardblade — because every other patient at the monastery has been accounted for at Urithiru and he alone is missing. Kadash checks the records and tells him: Shash building, room thirty-seven. An ardent named Insah ran the asylum and almost certainly left her paperwork behind.
Before Dalinar goes, Kadash glances at a still-writing spanreed on his desk and admits the rest: five other reeds on a shelf are blinking red — the heads of Vorinism in Jah Keved, Herdaz, Kharbranth, Thaylenah, and New Natanan held a meeting today about Dalinar and the Everstorm, and now they all want to question him. He has been waiting on the sixth reed — a Dawnchant translation passage from the Palanaeum — before he answers them. Dalinar reads it for what it is: Kadash has been demanding proof, and the proof has arrived. He long ago accepted that Dalinar was not mad; what he is now sorting through is who might be influencing him. Dalinar tells him the truth he came for: in his painful experience, the truth may be simple, but it is rarely easy.
He crosses to the next building and counts down the rooms. Number thirty-seven is bolted shut from the outside. He rattles the door, throws his shoulder against it, absentmindedly tries to summon his Blade before remembering he gave it up. The Stormfather demands to know what he is doing. He asks instead whether his Bondsmith powers will help. The Stormfather is curt: *Binding things? How would that open a door? You bring things together; you do not divide them.* The other Surge, then — the one a Radiant used in the vision to make stone warp and ripple? *You are not ready. Besides, that Surge is different for you than it is for a Stoneward.* He walks the outside of the building instead. Someone else has already cut a hole in the cell wall, with the unmistakable clean slices of a Shardblade — cut from the outside in. Whoever it was, took the Herald with them. The ardents must have seen the hole during evacuation and walked past it.
On the floor beside the bed Dalinar finds a single object: a green dart wrapped with yellow twine. Out in the courtyard, Kaladin is calling for him; he hands the dart over. Kaladin sniffs the tip and raises his eyebrows. *That's poison on the tip. Blackbane derived.* Dalinar pockets it, recovers what he can from Insah's safe — with Kaladin's Blade — and joins the others to fly back. As Kaladin reaches for him last, he holds the captain by the arm and gives the order: take someone with you and go to Thaylen City in the next highstorm to bring Fen home. *The world has been turning before our very noses, Captain. Gods and Heralds have been warring, and we were too focused on our petty problems to even notice.* Kaladin agrees, and sends him into the sky.