(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Szeth of Shinovar flies with the Skybreakers for three days southward. They drop into mountain peaks and remote valleys along the way to recover hidden stockpiles of gemstones and food; many doors must be hacked free of five inches of crem, accumulated over centuries, though Nin speaks of the caches as though he set them down yesterday. Where the food has long since decayed, the gemstones, exposed to the storms, are still bright. The visits bring home to Szeth how ancient the Herald beside him truly is.

On the fourth day they reach Marat and land on a plain of strange brown grass that pulls down into burrows, leaving only the bobs of grain at the top — fed on by flat disclike beasts whose droppings will carry the seeds east to grow into first-stage polyps and then second-stage grain. Szeth has walked most of Roshar during his exile and knows Marat is not truly a nation but a loose tribal confederacy of cities under an *elder brother* highprince — a culturally rich waystop between the Vorin east and the Makabaki west, of almost no political weight. He is therefore curious that Nin chose to end the flight here. Nin confers briefly with Ki and the other masters, who fly with the squires toward a town in the distance, then takes Szeth alone to a smaller town on a coastal hilltop.

The town has been recently sacked: broken doors, breached walls, blood washed away by highstorms, Soulcast bronze doors lying among the rubble. They climb the steps of the cavernous main building. Nin asks Szeth to read the glyphs above the doorway; Szeth does not know the local script. *It says justice,* Nin tells him. *This was a courthouse.* Inside, blood stains the floor, but no bodies remain — only discarded weapons, civilian possessions, the relics of townspeople who took refuge here in their final hour. Nin explains that the singers (what the parshmen call themselves) took the town and marched the survivors off to forced labour at the docks farther along the coast.

He asks Szeth whether what happened here was just. *How could it be?* Szeth returns. *A poor argument,* Nin tells him: under different circumstances — a defaulting lord forcing his people to resist lawful authority — even the killing of ordinary people can be just. But this was an invasion, and that is a different matter. They climb a narrow stair past the courtroom into a records loft strewn with ledgers. The dark whispers in the hollow building thicken; Szeth uncovers a sphere for light. The sword thinks Nin might be evil and suggests he be drawn.

Nin tells Szeth he visited Ishar — *Ishu-son-God* — the wisest of the Heralds, because he had not wanted to believe what was happening. He worked for thousands of years to prevent another Desolation; Ishar had warned him that with Honor dead, new Radiants might undermine certain measures the Heralds had taken and open the way for the enemy. He stops at the loft's window. A Shardblade glistens into his right hand: strikingly straight and unornamented yet still elegant, with two narrow slits running its length — gaps no ordinary sword could carry. It is the long-missing Honorblade that Szeth's own people had care of before it vanished from the eight. He has been carrying it himself.

Through the window, the bay glistens with the masts of many enemy ships and the figures moving around them. Nin says he has failed; justice must still be done, and it will be a difficult justice — even for his Skybreakers. Szeth offers to be as passionless and logical as he is. Nin laughs without mirth. He is not passionless. He is, he admits, *different* than he once was; despite everything, a part of him still wishes to be merciful. He says that mercy is not bad, only chaotic — leniency lets a few changed men go on to serve society and others recidivate into great tragedy, and humans are terrible at telling which is which. *That is the purpose of the law,* he says: so a judge's native sentimentality cannot harm those his judgments will reach.

Szeth must choose his own Third Ideal. Most Skybreakers swear themselves to the law and follow with exactness the law of whatever land they walk; that is a good choice, but not the only one. He is to think wisely. He will be the first of a new order of Skybreakers in a new world, and the others must interpret what they have sworn before. Szeth presses him — he himself does not seem to obey his own precepts; he hunted Surgebinders selectively, with motives beyond the law. Nin concedes it. He has leniencies. He holds out his empty left hand and a second Shardblade appears — distinct from the Honorblade in his right. He is also a Skybreaker of the Fifth Ideal — the Radiant who has become the law, and (he believes) the only Herald ever to have joined his own order. Now, he tells Szeth, he must speak of the decision the Heralds made long ago, on the day that would be remembered as Aharietiam — the day they sacrificed one of their own to end the cycle of pain and death.