POV: navani
Summary
Navani paces around the crystalline pillar deep beneath the tower with the ardent Rushu, who reports that weeks of cross-checking known fabrials against the pillar have turned up only one match — the four garnets that mirror the construction of the captured suppression fabrial — and no further leads. Worse, Rushu has now inspected the suppressor in Shadesmar as Navani asked: its spren is real, manifest in the Cognitive Realm, and corrupted in a way distressingly similar to Renarin's spren. It refused to talk, then deliberately closed its eyes — a sentient act of allegiance to the enemy. This sharpens Navani's working theory that the ancient great fabrials — the pillar, the Oathgates, the pumps, Soulcasters — work by trapping sapient spren in the Cognitive Realm. It also reawakens the warning the phantom spanreed left her weeks ago: that she captures spren, imprisons them, is a monster, must stop. She asks Rushu to focus on the garnets, the section of the pillar that must be why the tower was once proof against the Fused, and to test whether the stolen suppressor can be reversed.
Walking out, Navani tells Rushu they are not thinking enough about the tower's security. The Cognitive-Realm spren she interviewed claim that the Masked Ones — Lightweaving Fused — cannot enter the tower at all, which seems borne out by the fact that none ever have. But the warmth and pressure differences are evidence that the tower's ancient defenses are only ghosts of themselves, and there is no way to be sure. *You or I could be one of them right now,* she says. She tells Rushu to put together a team of abstract thinkers to design protocols for detecting hidden Fused.
She drops in on the engineering room she keeps near the old library, where Falilar and his nephew Tomor have a prototype ready — a wrist-strapped box with a trigger and a button that demonstrates the lift principle behind the Fourth Bridge miniaturized to one person. Tomor sets up soldiers with a rope on a second box, Navani points her arm somewhere, presses the button to conjoin the rubies, pulls the trigger, and is skidded across the floor in the direction her arm pointed while the men haul the other end eastward. The new trick is in the aluminum cage Falilar himself worked out after the expedition into Aimia: with the right aluminum framing, conjoined rubies can be made to ignore motion along chosen vectors, which is what lets the Fourth Bridge separate its up-down dummy ship from its lateral one. Falilar worries about the manpower cost; Navani takes him up to the twentieth floor.
There she has been preparing the second half of her answer. A surveyed shaft drops through the tower's basements into a cavern far below. Steel weights — each as heavy as three men — hang on ropes over the hole. Set on the tower's roof in cased aluminum housings are five windmills, each blade fitted with a conjoined gemstone paired to the pulley system; every storm, the wind ratchets the weights up the shaft to be released later. She sketches the plan: lifts pulled by falling weights, the trigger throttling release speed, switching mechanisms between weights so one shaft can serve several rides between recharges. They will use both the personal device and proper lifts; she suggests reshaping Tomor's wrist box into a crossbow-form people will find interesting. They will, she tells him, learn to span the sky.
She arrives at the council of monarchs just in time. The chamber is loud and chatty these days, no longer the wary place it once was. Dalinar is laughing with Queen Fen and Kmakl when Navani turns and finds herself face to face with Taravangian. He has grown his wispy guru's beard back; he asks for her flying-ship schematics; he handles her cold response by stepping close, listing aloud the murders he ordered and the village burnings he was prepared to commit, and telling her with quiet intensity that if humankind survives the new storm it will be because of what he has done. He bows, thanks her, and walks off to his lonely seat — the only monarch who no longer brings attendants. *Dangerous,* she thinks again. And incredible.
Noura, the head Azish vizier, calls the meeting. Dalinar outlines the Emul offensive. The young Prime Aqasix Yanagawn stands and accepts on behalf of the Makabaki union; the exiled Emuli Prime endorses it. Then Taravangian stands and supports the proposal as well — and offers twenty thousand Veden troops to march immediately through the Oathgates to Emul, after a year of insisting he could spare none. Navani is alarmed; the coalition will have to take the troops. Fen is baffled by the unanimity, then jokes about lunch breaks, then agrees on behalf of the Thaylen guilds: a victory in Emul would give them absolute dominance of the Southern Depths and a launching pad to take Alethkar later. She asks where Stormblessed is. Sigzil, newly minted companylord, steps forward in his uncomfortable new role to take questions, and explains that the highmarshal is recovering from a different kind of wound.
Fen points out that the offensive will need more Windrunners than they have. Sigzil surprises Navani by proposing the answer: send an envoy to the honorspren. He explains that to the honorspren, the Recreance is only generations old and they consider their honor offended — that the coalition needs to admit fault, ask for help, and beg. Fen asks if he could lead it; he says emphatically not — the Windrunners are themselves in defiance of honorspren law and would be arrested. He suggests sending other Radiants whose spren's kin approve of them. Jasnah rules out the inkspren-bonded; she and Dalinar gently rule out Renarin. Lift climbs out from beneath the snack table and volunteers; she is gently told no, on the grounds that her Edgedancer healing is too valuable and they want someone with diplomatic practice. The Edgedancer Godeke offers. Then Shallan stands and proposes that she and Adolin lead the envoy — Cryptics aren't beloved by honorspren either, but a highprince and his Radiant wife are still the right face. They will add a Truthwatcher who isn't Renarin and a Stoneward. Sigzil passes on Syl's advice: bring gifts, ask for help, apologize for the Recreance, and if the Stormfather can be persuaded to speak on their behalf it would help. Dalinar will see what he can arrange. The expedition into Shadesmar is set; the Emul offensive is set. Navani is uneasy at how quickly everything has fallen into place — a fair breeze, in her experience, heralds a tempest.
Late that night she finally winds back to her own rooms, where Dalinar has set a heating fabrial glowing red and brewed her unalon tea. She melts into the crook of his arm on the couch. He confesses he is more afraid of Taravangian than he was of Sadeas — that Taravangian outmaneuvered him in early attempts to cut him out of the coalition without him even seeing it happen. He thinks aloud about why Taravangian does what he does: not wealth, not vengeance, not fury. Because he genuinely believes it is necessary, and accepts that the necessary deeds will damn him so that no one else needs to bear the stain — close, Dalinar notes, to how the ancient Radiants saw themselves as the watchers at the rim. He tells her he wants her to stay in the tower when Jasnah and he deploy to Emul — someone in the royal family in reserve to pull the rest of them out if Taravangian's trap closes. She does not object. She asks him for nights to remember him by. Part One ends with them both warm, with three fires already lit and a fourth to come.