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Adolin is in the tailor's-shop lavatory, splashing his face after a sleepless night spent worrying about Shallan's failure to return, listening to the assault preparations going on below. Something is bothering him. He checks his knife, the bandages in his pocket, the *determination* glyphward Shallan painted around his forearm — then realises what it is and summons his Shardblade. He looks at his reflection in the rippling metal of the eel-shaped Blade and tells it that he no longer has his mother's necklace or the rituals he used to use, that he has only ever needed it. He thanks it. He acknowledges what the Radiants say — that it used to be alive, that the others can hear it screaming when they touch it, that it is dead and still in pain — and promises to use it for good things from now on. Dismissing the Blade he feels better. He still has his thin belt knife, the one that went so satisfyingly through Sadeas's eye. He pulls a Kholin uniform back on instead of the tailored silks, despite a quiet fear that he does not deserve his father's glyphs any more.

In the main shop Elhokar is in council with Highmarshal Azure: her scouts have been driven back, but the Voidbringer army is here in strength and will attack today or tomorrow. He tells her he can hardly hang her as a usurper given the circumstances, and thanks her for taking the Guard. Shallan, Kaladin, Skar and Drehy are bent over a palace map, memorising routes. Shallan has stayed in Veil's white outfit because it is more useful than skirts for storming a building. The lighteyed loyalists Elhokar and Adolin revealed themselves to the night before have brought roughly a hundred armsmen between them — fewer than Kaladin dragged in from the Wall Guard but enough to matter. Elhokar reviews the plan: storm the palace, take the Sunwalk, hold the Oathgate platform while Shallan tries to drive away the Unmade as she did at Urithiru, then activate the gate and bring the Kholin army through. Shallan warns that she does not really know what worked against the Midnight Mother and can only promise to try. Elhokar charges Kaladin with extracting Aesudan and the heir if at all possible.

Drums begin sounding on the wall. *Worse than another raid,* Kaladin tells them: the city is under attack. They march out the front of the shop into a city already going under. Adolin tells Yokska and her husband that if Kholinar falls the Voidbringers are reportedly there to occupy rather than slaughter — but advises them to flee for the Shattered Plains anyway. Elhokar presses a spanreed into the timid ardent who has been painting glyphwards for the troops, with orders to warn Urithiru half an hour after the march starts so the Kholin army will be staged to transfer through. A clean-shaven Wall Guard soldier with hairy arms tells his squad about the lance he saw aimed at his heart on the wall and the glowing figure who shot from the tower window and changed his fate. *We're entering an era of gods,* Adolin thinks.

They march for the palace, past worried refugees and shuttered houses. Up at the city wall a massive stone monstrosity — wedge-faced, red glints for eyes — pulls itself up over the parapet and starts knocking guard towers apart, Fused buzzing around it. It tosses a horse-sized boulder at the marching column. Kaladin rises on a streak of light, hits the boulder, rolls with it twisting in the air, and Lashes it almost away from him entirely — sending it back over the wall and barely missing the creature that threw it. He renews his Stormlight from the pack of Urithiru emeralds he is carrying. Drehy rises beside him; Skar follows with Shallan Lashed up under his arm. They peel off to distract the Fused and seize the Sunwalk while Adolin's force fights through the palace below. *Meet you in the eastern gallery.*

At the palace doors the Palace Guard withdraws inside and slams them shut. Adolin, Azure and Elhokar each take a door at the top of the steps. Adolin designates the lighteyed men in red as the King's Guard, instructs them to cover his cuts so the king isn't speared as his door falls, then sinks his Blade up the seam and slices both hinges and the bar inside; the door crashes in. He cuts two improvised doorways alongside in the wall as well, and the Wall Guard swarms in. Through his door he watches Elhokar sweep one-handed with his narrow Blade, shield in the other, opening a pocket of dead men inside the entry. Azure's Blade is shorter than the others; she leads a more conservative fight, slicing off the heads of spears as they come at her men. As Adolin watches her stab one Palace Guard through, the man's eyes do not burn out — instead his skin turns ash-grey as he dies. *Blood of my fathers,* Adolin thinks. *What's wrong with her Blade?*

The fight in the entry stalls in shield-wall rings. Adolin takes a four-man flank squad, charges his centre breach into the marble hall, hooks a low two-handed sweep that takes a rank at the knees and follows with overhead cuts in Stonestance and then sweeping Windstance until the defensive line breaks. The Palace Guard falls back into the narrower hallway leading to the eastern gallery. Cut bandaged, Adolin joins the council studying the hallway: the enemy have built a clean shield wall there, crossbows in the second rank. *That's going to be crimson to break,* Azure says. Outside, the crashing at the gate finally falls silent — the monster has broken in, and a flood of parshmen is right behind it. Elhokar hands Azure command of the hallway assault. The corridor becomes a meat grinder for crossbow bolts as her men advance.

An officer pulls Adolin aside: a door to the palace garrison has been barred shut from the *outside*, and the wood is splintered from inside. They lift the bar. Inside are a clutch of dirty, bearded men in Palace Guard uniforms, who fall to their knees praising the Almighty when they see him. Adolin recognises their captain: *Sidin? Storms, man, I barely recognise you through that beard.* Sidin tells him something is wrong with the queen — she killed an ardent for trying to refound the Hierocracy, then executed Brightlord Kaves, then culled the Guard and locked the dissenters in here and *forgot about them*. They have eaten three times, Sidin guesses — *a few days* — and is shaken when Adolin tells him it has been weeks. Adolin sends them to the surgeons, then quietly arms the ones strong enough to hold a spear as reserves. Crossing back through the entry he passes a Palace Guard prisoner on a surgeon's table — silent, glazed, whispering to himself — and recognises another old face from his childhood named *Dod*.

Reporting to the king, Adolin becomes aware of a quiet voice cutting through the fighting and into his soul. *Passion. Sweet passion.* The Palace Guard finally gives up the hallway, retreating through two sets of double doors at the far end. Before Adolin and Elhokar can cut them down, they shake on their own. They open, and Kaladin is there, shining — eyes blue beacons, Stormlight steaming from his lips, a long silver Sylspear in his hands. Behind him Skar and Drehy glow too. The eastern gallery is taken, Kaladin reports; the soldiers who fell back are up the steps; the flying ones left the moment three illusory bridgemen-corpses convinced them they had finished their job. Adolin ducks into the gallery and sees the trick laid out beneath the Sunwalk: real Palace Guard dead, and three obvious bodies in blue — Kaladin, Skar, Drehy — laid out as the bait. Kaladin adds that there is another Palace Guard force fled into the monastery proper.

Elhokar decides he will lead a force up to the royal chambers to find Aesudan and whatever is left of the city. Kaladin gives Adolin the pack of emeralds, picks out two bright ones for himself, and says he will go with the king while Adolin takes Skar and Drehy and gets Shallan to the Unmade. Adolin sends some of the Wall Guard, a handful of highlord armsmen, and — after a beat — Sidin and half a platoon of the men who refused Aesudan and were locked in the garrison, since they resisted whatever is in this place and know the palace better. Adolin gives Kaladin the Bridge Four salute — *good luck, bridgeboy.* Kaladin returns it and is gone.

Adolin and Shallan cross the Sunwalk past dead Palace Guard and a single dead Fused pinned in a rock cleft by what looks like its own lance — Shallan lingers, but he pulls her along — and enter the monastery plateau. Azure's soldiers carve a path inward, taking buildings and engaging Palace Guard at the centre. From the platform's edge Adolin looks down at his home and sees it falling: a broken gate spilling parshmen toward the palace, more parshmen scaling on ladders elsewhere, the stone monster swatting along the inside of the wall, the Cult of Moments surging down Talan Way as the enemy floods that section in behind them. He decides his side still has dozens of Shardbearers, Bridge Four and other Surgebinders, and the Kholin army on the far end of the Oathgate — they can save this city if he can just get them here.

Azure reports the path inward secured but a knot of the enemy still holding the centre; her men have scoured the monastery buildings and report that the people seen reveling outside the night before are slumbering inside, unresponsive even to prodding. Adolin takes the lead toward the Oathgate control building. He breaks the central knot of the enemy himself with a Shardblade sweep, takes a stray strike that Skar catches on his shield before driving his spear through the soldier — *how many do I owe you now?* — and they chase the routed line past the King's Chapel to the structure Adolin has always known as the Circle of Memories. As Shallan warned, it has been overgrown by a dark, pulsing mass like a black heart — veins like roots spreading from it, throbbing in time. *All right,* Shallan says, and walks toward it. *Guard this area. I'll see what I can do.*