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Dalinar leaves the horse behind — horses are too slow over broken country for the kind of running he needs — and races south from Rathalas at the head of a hundred elites in light kit, hunting the caravan and the Shardbearer his scouts swear they saw. Mist blows up off the lake the way it had the morning he, Gavilar, and Sadeas had first attacked the Rift years ago. He turns the problem over as he runs. *Sadeas a traitor?* It cannot be. Sadeas has supported Gavilar all along. *And yet — I thought myself trustworthy. And I almost turned on Gavilar myself.* Two fires burn inside him as he runs: the energy of the Plate, and the Thrill, which soaks into his tiring muscles and saturates into a power of its own, so that he crests the last hill *more* energetic than when he set out.

Below them, at the mouth of a canyon, a frantic camp is breaking. The caravan's scouts had spotted his approach. The soldiers wear forest green and white — Sadeas's colours. Dalinar roars, summons Oathbringer, and pounds down the slope behind them, sweeping stragglers as he goes, eyes burning. They flee up the steep south wall of the ravine on a wide path. *Wait. Something is wrong.* Why would a secret envoy advertise its master's colours? Halfway up, fifty feet from the canyon floor, he stops in place. His soldiers swarm around him. The enemy gathers above. Those uniforms — that is wrong.

Then a sound like thunder; then a noise of rock against rock; then the ground gives, and the ravine wall pours down on his men.

He wakes face-down in blackness, head pounding, warm blood running off his chin. His cheek is against a stone, his helm is shattered, his left gauntlet and forearm plate are broken. His right-hand armour still works, and faint Stormlight leaks from his cracked breastplate, lighting the rock around his face. Above him he can hear Rifters picking through the debris. The man whose voice he had taken for honest is feeding him out of this tomb for a Shardbearer's harvest. He could lie still and slip away — it sounds so easy that he nearly does — and then a fire ignites inside him. *You have been betrayed. They will find you. Get up.* The Thrill crescendos. They tug at his cape, the Kholin glyphs of khokh and linil stark on the blue cloth. The stones around his head shift. *Go.*

He shoves clear with his armoured shoulder and his good hand. The Rifters scramble back as the Blackthorn climbs out of his grave with Oathbringer. He sees only red. He partially comes back to himself crouched over a man's body, pounding the corpse's head into the rocks with his hands, a wall of burning-eyed dead heaped around the hole where he had stood. Oathbringer is jammed in stone several paces off; the gemstone on its pommel is cracked, and he cannot dismiss it. He cannot remember half of the fight. He has a fresh stab wound in his chest he does not recall taking. The sun is low. The canyon is silent.

He binds the worst wounds, hauls Oathbringer onto his shoulder, and starts walking. His broken Plate grows too heavy and he discards pieces one at a time; by night-fall he has thrown off everything but the neck-brace, which the smiths can regrow the rest of a set from if they have to. *Momentum.* In the dark a separate army marches at the edges of his vision — red mist soldiers crashing and re-forming like surf, eyeless horses, animals locked in struggle — keeping him moving where he should have collapsed. He navigates by the moons and arrives at his own camp from an unexpected angle. Sadeas's actual reinforcements have arrived ahead of schedule; a few more hours and the trap might not have caught anything at all.

He drags Oathbringer behind him, the Blade scoring a soft line in the stone, and walks into the firelight past gaping young sentries who stumble and call on the Almighty and Kelek. Voices behind him cry of visions of the dead and of Voidbringers. The command-tent flaps burst open: Sadeas stumbles aside, gaping, and holds the canvas back. Inside, Teleb and the generals are over a battle map; Evi is weeping in Kalami's arms; Ialai studies the table.

*How?* Teleb asks; the scouts had reported all his men lost in the ambush. Dalinar slams Oathbringer point-first into the tent floor and asks the question that does the real work. *You sent the same scouts who first told us a Shardbearer was leading the caravan?* Yes. *They are working with Tanalan,* he says. The entire ploy had been set in motion before he ever rode out to parley with the man. Tanalan had bought turncoats inside the army to feed him false reports, used Sadeas's name to invent a Shardbearer in the caravan, and lured Dalinar south to drop a hillside on him.

The map already has siege markings on it. *We thought the king would want time to come,* Teleb explains, *to avenge you.* *Too slow.* Sadeas cuts in: they used his name to set the bait, and they will keep doing this until the kingdom fears the cost. They must be made an example. Dalinar nods. *They must bleed,* he whispers. *Men, women, children. They must know the punishment for broken oaths. Immediately.* Evi stands. *Husband.* Then he turns toward her — face crusted in blackened blood, hair matted with it, eyes wild, padded uniform in tatters, like a thing crawled out of an Alethi nightmare — and her words fail. She backs away. Fearspren grow from the ground around her.

He sees himself reflected in a sphere lantern's polished base and is unmoved. The Soulcaster his brother sent, he asks, can make two things — what? *Grain and oil.* *Good. Set her to oil. As much as we have gemstones for.* *More food supplies?* *No. Oil.* Someone is told to take his wife to her tent so she may recover from her unwarranted grief; everyone else, gather round. In the morning, he tells them, they will make Rathalas an example so total that for ten generations none will dare build there, for fear of the spirits left behind. He had promised Tanalan widows. *That is too merciful for what they have done to me. There shall be no weeping for the passing of this city, for none will remain to weep.*