POV: kaladin
Summary
Kaladin, off-duty between patrols, slips through a thick stumpweight door of a Kholinar for-pay stormshelter minutes before the Everstorm arrives — Syl sitting on the hinges, having stuck the doorman's shoes to the stone long enough to let him in. The winehouse is one of those places only the rich still spend coin on: large common room, no windows, a bartender and a few booths around the perimeter. He finds Shallan in her own face and Adolin under a Lightwoven version of a tall bald Khal cousin, and slides into their booth. He watches Shallan giggle and poke Adolin with her safehand, then catches one of those other glances she sometimes shoots him — different smile, almost wicked — and tells himself he is imagining things.
He gives his report. The Wall Guard is producing food from somewhere — he has tracked it to a probable Soulcaster — and has seized the city's emerald stores. Azure herself is hard to read: gives nothing away in barracks, never speaks about her past, and carries a gemstoneless Shardblade that cuts stone — likely, he thinks, an Honorblade of the same kind the Assassin in White used. He has dinner with her tonight after evening patrol. Adolin asks to see Kaladin's side sword, runs through a few stances, declares the highmarshal has good taste in steel.
Shallan thumps a heavy book onto the table — Hessi's Mythica, a newer treatise her contacts have finally tracked down. It claims the Unmade number nine (matching one of Dalinar's visions), each with a distinct personality, and that not all of them were destroyed at Aharietiam. Shallan is now sure that two of them haunt Kholinar: Sja-anat, the Taker of Secrets, whose corruption they can see in the off-coloured spren; and Ashertmarn, the Heart of the Revel, who incites excess and is what Wit confirmed at the Oathgate platform. The book has nothing useful on how to fight them. While she talks she absent-mindedly carves a corrupted gloryspren into the bar top with a small knife. They walk through contingencies: if Shallan cannot open the Oathgate, they retreat to Urithiru — but Elhokar will not abandon his family, so Kaladin, Drehy and Skar would have to fly the queen and the young prince out before a highstorm and let the city fall. None of them like the math. Five thousand Wall Guard, even properly fortified, will not hold a wall against Fused who can fly and tens of thousands of parshmen already at the gates. They need Radiants and Shardbearers, and they do not have nearly enough.
Kaladin flicks an odd many-legged cremling with a tan back-pattern off the bench. *Even with the city falling apart, the proprietor could keep this place clean.*
Once the storm passes, Shallan walks Adolin back through the wreckage toward the tailor's, his arm around her shoulders the way he was raised to do it. She admits to herself, privately, that she does not really care for him — too clean, too oblivious, too expected — but she likes the warmth of holding his arm. He bullies her into letting him page through her sketchbook, lingers on the refugee portraits and on a sketch of himself in one of his new suits, and tells her she is getting better. She tells him the Radiants used to be artists too, per Words of Radiance; he tells her his father is wrong to ask what the use of Shardblades was — the Radiants did not just build weapons, they built art — and his enthusiasm becomes briefly intoxicating. She catches herself wondering whether Radiant could be made into the perfect bride for him: composed, lighteyed, of an order he could be proud of. The thought goes cold in her chest. At the corner she peels off, kisses him on the cheek, and steps away to let Veil come up.
On the street corner — wearing nothing but a shift under a Lightwoven havah that *looks* fully clothed — she lets herself stand for a long moment shifting through every face from Adolin's sketchbook, feeling the wind on Shallan's actual skin while passers-by duck into doorways from a spren they cannot see. *Just another spren,* she thinks. *Emotion made carnal.* Pattern unweaves from her discarded dress and asks if she is Shallan. *Maybe.* Then she shakes herself, dresses, and lets Veil take her over for the meeting with Vathah.
Vathah is waiting in the back room of the inn Wit once stayed in, maps of the Tenet manor — locally called the Mausoleum for its grand hall of Soulcast servant-statues — laid out under spheres. Veil approves the plan: have Red stage a distraction, then use Pattern as a Blade to cut a hole straight through to the larder. No riches; just food, to pay the cult tonight. The innkeeper bustles in with drinks neither of them ordered and Vathah yelps — and his face is suddenly not his own but the face of the thick-knuckled man sweeping his pallet, lifted whole from Shallan's sketchbook, except with the back of the head unrendered because the drawing was three-quarter-view. Veil shows him in the hand mirror. She tells him he is probably a squire — most orders had them — and pulls him off infiltration as of tomorrow to practise with Stormlight instead. He almost cries. Then he goes to help her steal from the rich and give to the crazy.