POV: adolin
Summary
Adolin shoves down the sight of Elhokar's body and pulls Kaladin out along the Sunwalk while Skar and Drehy cover the retreat, urging the last of the Wall Guard to run or limp to safety. *Grieve later,* he repeats to himself — one of his father's earliest battlefield lessons, the kind of discipline you reach for when the only other option is to stop functioning. Kaladin stumbles alongside him, unwounded as far as Adolin can see, but with a glazed-over stare that says he has taken the kind of injury bandages do not fix.
They pour out onto the Oathgate platform where Azure's soldiers have already set up a perimeter and her surgeons are running to the wounded coming off the Sunwalk. Skar and Drehy drop down beside the platform's gate to guard the entrance against the Queen's Guard and parshmen who might follow. Adolin stumbles to a stop and lets himself, for one breath only, look out and admit it. *Stormfather.* Tens of thousands of parshmen pouring in through the broken gates or over nearby sections of wall. Figures glowing with dark light wheeling through the sky and beginning to gather in formations he recognises as a build-up to an assault on the platform. *His city was lost.* The thought has the dull, ordinary weight of a battlefield fact — neither shocking nor permissible to feel. The same lessoned voice that gave him *grieve later* gives him this.
*All forces, hold the platform,* he hears himself saying. *Pass the word. I am taking us to Urithiru.* A soldier reports civilians crowding the base of the steps. *Let them.* He raises his voice. *Get as many people up here as you can. Hold against any enemy who tries to reach the platform top, but do not engage them if they don't press. We're abandoning the city. Anyone not on the platform in ten minutes will be left behind.* He turns away from the city and hurries toward the control building. Kaladin follows, dazed. *After what he's been through,* Adolin thinks, *I wouldn't have expected anything could faze him. Not even Elhokar's…* He shoves it down again. Grieve later.
Azure is standing in the doorway of the control building with the pack of Urithiru emeralds, hopefully enough sphered light to move everyone they have to safety. *Brightness Davar told me to clear everyone else out,* she says. *Something's wrong with the device.* Adolin curses under his breath and steps in. Shallan is on her knees on the floor in front of one of the full-length wall mirrors, looking at herself, talking to herself in pieces of sentences that do not seem to need a listener. Kaladin steps in behind him, slides down the wall to sit, and puts his back to it as if his bones cannot hold him. He does not look at anyone in the room.
*Shallan,* Adolin says. *We need to go. Now.* *But—* *The city has fallen. Transfer the entire platform, not just the control building. We need to get as many people as we can to safety.* Azure is still half-arguing about her men on the wall. *They're dead or routed,* he tells her, gritting his teeth. *I don't like it any more than you do.* *The king—* *The king is dead. The queen has joined the enemy. I am ordering our retreat, Azure.* He locks eyes with her. *We gain nothing by dying here.* She draws her lips to a line and does not argue further.
Shallan whispers what she has worked out. The heart was a trick. She did not chase it off; it left on purpose. The Voidbringers intentionally left Kaladin and his men alone after a brief fight. They were let through to the Oathgate because the Oathgate is the trap. *How do you know?* Adolin asks. Shallan cocks her head at the mirror, where to her — and to no one else in the room — a figure is leaning hands and face against the glass from the other side. *I'm speaking to her.* *Her?* *Sja-anat. The Taker of Secrets. She says that if we engage the device, we'll be caught in a disaster.*
Adolin takes a long breath. *Do it anyway.* The words settle in Shallan the way she knew they would. How could they possibly trust an ancient spren of Odium? Perhaps she really had driven the dark heart away and Sja-anat is panicking now to stop the humans from escaping — or perhaps the warning is real. She has already confirmed with Azure that no one else sees the figure in the mirror at all. She turns her face away from Sja-anat's pleading and asks the only other voice in the room she might still be able to weigh. *Pattern? What do you think?* *Mmmm…* he hums quietly. *Lies. So many lies. I don't know, Shallan. I cannot tell you.*
Kaladin slumps against the wall behind her, sightless. She cannot recall seeing him like this — not at the chasms, not at the wall. The man whose body has been her standing wall is hollowed out. *Get ready,* she says, and stands up, summoning Pattern as a Blade. *Trust is not mine,* the figure tells her from the mirror. *You will not give my children a home. Not yet.* She presses Pattern into the keyhole; he melds at once to match its shape. *I will show you,* Sja-anat tells her. *I will try. My promise is not strong, for I cannot know. But I will try.* *Try what?* Shallan asks. *Try not to kill you.* With those words still in her head, Shallan engages the Oathgate.