POV: shallan
Summary
Veil crouches in the loading dock of Rockfall — a celebrated Kholinar mansion that the current mistress has spent a decade trying to re-brand as the rather more sober Hadinal Keep — and listens to the building like a body. The stones underfoot have been worn smooth by centuries of footfalls; an ancient, slow heartbeat down in the foundation has not yet realised that something old and parasitic has settled into the palace across the city. People skirt around the queen now, gripe about the murdered ardent, and avoid the larger truth. Vathah waits with the wagon. Red whistles from a second-floor walkway. Ishnah, in the guise of a rug merchant, has already cornered the mistress two rooms in.
The atrium is the showpiece: a four-storey skylit garden ringed by walkways, and the famed fountains — once water, now Soulcast mid-fall into crystal, dark stumpweight wood, polished marble. Veil and Vathah wear borrowed faces — hers a dimpled stranger, his a brute from the market — and slip past the room where Brightness Nananav is bullying Ishnah over a set of irreplaceable Shin-woven rugs. Veil takes a Memory of her, ducks into a library when patrol guards descend the stair, and lets Shallan bleed back through long enough to sketch the mistress from memory. Then she Lightweaves an illusion of pure sound — Nananav's voice calling the guards away — and climbs the stairs in a stacked disguise: Shallan inside Veil inside the dimpled stranger inside Nananav herself.
A master-servant bows insufficiently for the persona and is sent to do penance on the roof for an hour; the persona, Vathah warns, is sliding past *difficult* and into *insane*. Inside the larder — sausages on racks, longroots, grain, oil — Nananav catches herself thinking, with a chill, that she could *move into Rockfall*; take the woman's place; *just deal* with the inferior original. Veil strips that layer off in panic. The role is getting in. They load the dumbwaiter, lower it, roll the stolen food up inside two carpets in the loading bay, and have nearly reached the gate when angerspren start boiling through the ceiling above them. Discovery, on schedule.
The gates slam shut as the chull-cart rumbles out into the inner courtyard. Crossbowmen pour in. Shallan stands up in the wagon, sucks in Stormlight, and *performs*: she lets the disguise melt off into Nananav's own face, then drips it down her own features like running paint, sprouting illusory spren — blood pools the wrong colour, glass rain, anticipationspren — around the wagon. The real Nananav screams and flees. A crossbow bolt buries itself in Shallan's temple, her Stormlight seals her skull around the shaft, her mouth stops working properly, and the guards run. Vathah heaves the gates open. They roll out into the streets. *I wash going to shrow it away regardlesh,* she slurs at Red about the bloodied coat. A few minutes later Vathah pulls the bolt and she blacks out long enough to wake healed.
On the drive back the city looks worse than it had that morning — hungrier mothers, more hungerspren — and the food in the wagon weighs on her. They were taking the lot to buy a place in the Cult of Moments, but Wit has left a message at the inn saying that the cult will not bring her in unless she *does something to get their attention.* Veil sees a way to thread both needles at once and orders Vathah to drive into the Ringington Market.
Her contact there is Grund — the one-handed urchin she has been bribing for information on a copy of the book Mythica, a newer treatise on the Unmade that might explain the spren behind the cult. He has nothing on the book yet. She drops an entire sack of food in front of him instead and asks him for the names of Kholinar's deserving poor — people the grain queues are missing. He rattles off Muri the seamstress (three daughters, no work), the refugee children sleeping in the Moonlight Way park, the cobbler with the broken arm, more. She does not write them down. She drives the wagon from address to address, leaving bags on doorsteps and in laps; by evening the wagon is empty and a crowd of beggars in one corner of the market is shouting for the *Swiftspren*. *Crazy woman in white riding through the market throwing out sacks of food* is, Veil tells Vathah cheerfully, exactly the kind of attention the cult cannot ignore. She tosses him a saved sausage.