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Hooded and led by Ulina's conspirators, Radiant is dragged out of the chasm into a stormcellar through a tunnel cut clean by Shardblade — the old Sadeas princedom's secret escape, never used until now. The cultists pull a clumsy double-loop through the warcamp streets to disguise where they are taking her; Shallan's near-supernatural sense of direction maps the route anyway and puts her near the eastern lumberyards where Kaladin first assembled Bridge Four from broken men. They sit her in the antechamber of a stone fortress and Veil at last gets to remove her own hood. Through the door she hears the surviving cultists arguing — frightened, repeating that *it is all falling apart* — and reads the bones of what Ialai Sadeas's "kingdom" actually is: Sadeas was no blowhard but a craftsman; Highprince Thanadal was knifed by a "prostitute" weeks after coming here to deal; Highprince Vamah fled in the night believing Dalinar had marked him. The Three weigh the assignment they have given themselves — get a confession, get the name of Ialai's spy near Dalinar — and Veil quietly admits to herself she has come not for evidence and not even for the Ghostbloods, but to finish what Adolin started in the duelling arena. Today she means to kill Ialai Sadeas.

A continent away over Hearthstone, Kaladin forces himself to do the hardest thing a commander can do — nothing — as Leshwi grinds Sigzil down in a one-on-one duel. Sigzil is competent with a spear and brilliant with numbers; he is not a duellist of Leshwi's class, and her spear punches straight through his chest, the gem at its head humming as it siphons his Stormlight out of him. The deaths flash through Kaladin's mind — Tien, Nalma, Elhokar in the Kholinar palace with Moash's spear through him — and he Lashes himself in to intervene, breaking the Heavenly One protocol that has been keeping his knights alive. Leshwi meets his eye. She withdraws her spear just as Sigzil's Light runs out, and Kaladin orders Sigzil to drop his weapon and bow to her; she returns the nod. Leshwi glances at the Fused he spared earlier — they each know rebirth makes the gesture nearly meaningless, and yet a new Radiant cannot simply be raised from a dead one's spren the way a singer body can host a returning Fused. She lifts her spear to him next, and he is glad.

Below, on the refugee-transport deck of the airship, Navani sorts boarding families with Ardent Falilar — who frets at his beard about weight estimates, fans, and gemstone strain — and ticks off names while Renarin bounces a small blue light between his hands to settle the children. The blue light unsettles her: it should be red, she thinks, to reveal the Voidspren inside her son. Rushu, who has been left to catalogue food supplies and is instead watching the sky, points out — correctly — that too many Windrunners are idling and that Leshwi let a man go after stabbing him. Navani climbs to the top deck to be there when Dalinar reopens the perpendicularity; the Bondsmith gathers a fistful of unseen fabric, gloryspren spiral, light bursts, and for a moment she glimpses again the bead-sea and the strange sun of Shadesmar and hears a faint tone. Rushu feels — not sees — a pulse like falling into eternity, and Navani tells her to write it down. The two of them speak past each other about the dream Navani cannot shake: that beyond Shadesmar is whatever place once powered Urithiru and now powers Dalinar, and that if she can find it she can build fleets of Fourth Bridges instead of one.

Rushu then points to a man on a hilltop in Bridge Four cut — a uniform she would once have known by sight — and Navani sees what Rushu does not: the cloth is black, the shoulder bears no patch, the narrow face is the face of the man who killed her son. Moash meets her eye across the distance, bursts alight with Stormlight, and drops out of view. Navani grabs a Windrunner squire and sends him to warn the others.

Kaladin chases Leshwi back over the battlefield. The Heavenly Ones are mostly disengaging — they have got the look at the airship they came for — and Leshwi is now sparring for sport, weaving him past every other duel to test his reorientation. He flies an arc he would have called impossible a year ago, dropping and renewing Lashings in a continuous loop, shaping his path against the rush of air. The fight takes them out over the hills he and Tien played on. Kaladin uses what he remembers — leeward door of an old equipment cavern crusted with lurg cocoons — to lure her in close to the ground, where her long lance handles poorly; the lurgs wake to his sprayed water, she swings to face them, and he gets her in the shoulder. They wound each other almost identically before he Lashes free.

Then he hears screaming. The citylord's manor is on fire and a hulking Fused in red and black carapace — long dried-blood hair, the same creature that could turn into a red ribbon of light — has gathered the soldiers Kaladin sent away earlier and is throwing townsfolk to the ground. Leshwi hums an angry tone beside him, nods toward the manor, and is plain about it: go, stop him. Kaladin holds up his spear, drops it, and Leshwi points her own tip down — a draw — before he Lashes toward the terrified people.