POV: kaladin
Summary
Kaladin steps out of the obsidian trees onto the white marble Oathgate bridge in Shadesmar, alone with a harpoon, and looks across to the sea of souls that marks Thaylen City — many of the ranked lights now burning red. Six Fused turn to regard him. He draws in all his Stormlight at once, takes to the sky, and pulls four of them away from the bridge so Shallan and Adolin can move on the platform.
In the city, Dalinar makes his way down through the Ancient Ward into the Low Ward with no Plate or Blade — just his Thaylen copy of *The Way of Kings* under one arm. The Thrill returns to him like the attention of an old, dear lover; for a moment he can almost let the Blackthorn in to save the city by himself. He refuses. A thunderclast punches through the city wall and rips the roof off the Gemstone Reserve so a knot of Fused can slip down inside; but the enemy ignores the spilled wealth of Thaylenah and instead snatches one specific ruby — the King's Drop — from an overturned palanquin. Through the hole in the wall Dalinar sees the troops massing outside — and they wear Sadeas uniforms, eyes glowing red.
In a Thaylen temple, Jasnah catches up with Renarin kneeling alone. The red snowflake-shaped spren rising from him panics into him with a puff. Ivory names it: a corrupted spren of Odium, bonded somehow to a human. Jasnah keeps moving.
On the Shadesmar shore, Shallan weaves an illusion of soldiers and spren bound to Adolin to draw off two remaining Fused, then slips under the bridge on a single bead-platform to reach the Oathgate island. Two enormous gatekeeper spren tower over the platform — one mother-of-pearl, one oily black — and refuse her passage in overlapping voices: they are bound by Honor himself, who locked the gate against Shadesmar travel in his last days. The parent is dead; the order stands. The dead spren who marched through earlier did not need the portal at all — the enemy simply called their souls along old paths to waiting hosts.
Down on the dockside Venli watches as Odium, scepter in hand, names two of his Fused for tasks: Yushah is to stay outside the city to guard "the prison," and Kai-garnis — the thunderclast that broke the wall — is to climb back to the Oathgate and, failing capture, smash it for its gemstones. The real prize, he says, is greater than the city itself: the conduit of his freedom, the bane of Roshar. He tells Venli to follow him to the gap in the wall and speak for him.
Above the battlefield, Szeth hovers beside Nin and accepts the Herald's logic: the parshmen are the original owners of the land, so the Skybreakers will swear to their law. The sword disagrees, points out that Szeth has just spent seven years obeying a rock, and tells him to go fight.
Kaladin duels the four flying Fused above the Shadesmar mountains. He fakes one out of its lance, dives through a crack between obsidian peaks, then carves between trees back toward the bridge. Shallan's signal from the platform tells him she needs more time. He turns out over the bead sea, comes back to disarm the harpoon-bearing Fused of a sword, and accepts a single-combat challenge from the swirled-red-faced one — just as his Stormlight runs out.
Aboard the Azish flagship sheltering in Vtlar Cove, Yanagawn argues with Vizier Noura and Scion Unoqua that the fleet should go back; Lift thinks so, and Lift is the kind of smart that knows when betraying a friend is wrong. A guard arrives sheepish and bloody — Lift kicked him in the spheres and stuffed him under a bed before slipping ashore. Then a scribe runs in with word that the Alethi have turned against the Thaylens. The viziers congratulate themselves on having narrowly escaped a trap; Yanagawn sits alone, certain that he and Lift were both wrong.
On the broken wall, Navani shoulders rubble off a doorway and finds Fen and Kmakl alive but bruised. Through the gap she sees red lightning, two stone skeletons, the boiling red mist coiling along the north coast — and a parshwoman walking through the front ranks with Amaram in shining Plate on a white stallion at her side, eyes glowing red. And then she sees one more thing her mind tries to refuse: in the gap in the wall, Dalinar alone, his book under one arm, walking out to face it.