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Kaladin stands in the Wall Guard barrack common room, washing the blood of last night's Fused off his hands at the basin while soft blue spherelight pools on the table he has refused to sit at. The room has been emptied at the highmarshal's order. Noro's squad — Beard, Ved, the rest — has stayed by his request; Azure has called in one of her primary officers, the stocky and bejowled Battalionlord Hadinar; and the only other witness is the fidgety platoon ardent who paints glyphwards for the company. He has earned the meeting and the secret-sharing it implies the only way it could have been earned — by sailing through a Fused on the wall, killing it, and walking back through his own Wall Guard platoon glowing. He gives them his name out loud. *Kaladin.* *A regal name. What's your house?* *They just call me Stormblessed.* If she needs proof of his orders from the king, he tells Azure, it can be arranged.

Azure tells him she'll pretend to believe him, and asks what he wants. He says he needs to know how she is using a Soulcaster without summoning the screamers — and warns her the answer may be essential to saving the city. She rises, goes to the back storage room, unlocks it, slips a hook between two stones and throws a hidden latch, and pulls a stone out of the wall to reveal a handle. The wall opens. Behind it, single file, runs a narrow corridor cut through the inside of the windblade itself — an old, secret passage between guard posts with hidden stairwells up to the top. Hadinar tells them it predates everyone there.

Squeezed up against Kaladin in the passage, Beard sidles toward the question he has been working up to all this time: about the Blackthorn, and the swimming-in-the-Purelake story he has been telling. *I figured you'd never believe the truth,* he admits, glancing back at the rest of the squad. *It was actually the Azish emperor.* Kaladin lets him have it without comment. The strata-cut stone of the passage reminds him of Urithiru. They reach a trapdoor in the floor that Azure opens with another key, then drop down a ladder beside a rope-and-pulley dumbwaiter into a large chamber stacked floor to ceiling with sacks of grain. One wall has been hacked unevenly with chunks gouged out of it in an obviously amateur pattern. Azure says she comes down most nights and cuts blocks free with her own Blade; she has nightmares about the city falling in on top of them, but she cannot see another way to feed the army with enough stone without drawing more notice.

Azure knocks twice on the next locked door and opens it on a smaller chamber with reflective metal plates pinned over every wall — cool to the touch, not steel. Kaladin frowns and rests his fingers against one of them. Inside the lined room kneels an aged ardent in a powerful glowing emerald fabrial — Ithi — vines creeping under her skin around the corners of her eyes and trailing down her face like ivy. She bows to Azure. So Azure herself isn't Soulcasting at all; she has been hiding the real wielders. Soon after the strangeness at the palace started, Azure tells him, a man brought a chull cart of these metal plates up to the barrack: an angular, insulting, somehow-silly-and-straight-at-once fellow she has dealt with before. He warned her to only Soulcast inside a room lined with the metal; so far as anyone can tell, it stops the screamers from sensing them. It also, unfortunately, blocks spanreeds — so they can no longer contact the outside. Kaladin recognises the description of the man at once. Ithi and her sister, Azure adds, work non-stop trading the Soulcaster off in shifts, and have kept the army fed with some to spare — but feeding the whole city is beyond two ardents.

Inspecting the plating, Kaladin runs his fingers along it and realises with quiet disappointment that the metal will not help him do what he came for. The lined room hides Soulcasting, not flight; he cannot draw Stormlight in front of the screamers and still hope to act in the open of the city. Azure tells him she has opened her secrets and now he owes her his: how could a king possibly send a single Shardbearer to save a city under siege? He tells her there is an ancient device inside Kholinar — an Oathgate — that can move whole armies across vast distances in a single step, and that the Kholin armies are waiting on the far end for them to open it. Only a select few people can activate it. Azure perks up where the soldiers around her are simply stunned. *Really?* she asks. *You're serious? Great. Let's get this thing working. Where is it?* Kaladin takes a long breath. *Well,* he tells her, *that happens to be the problem.*