POV: adolin
Summary
Adolin has run his soldiers through the transfer often enough that no one panics on arrival, but the view of Shadesmar still stops everyone where they stand. The sky overhead is starless midnight even with a too-distant sun lighting the landscape below. Two enormous gateway sentinels — one marble white, one onyx, thirty or forty feet tall — float beside the platform. Adolin thanks them. The marble one answers that the Sibling their parent has died, and so they will obey the Stormfather instead. The other sentinels around the ten Shadesmar platforms keep to the Sibling's old prohibition; only a few have switched allegiance, which is why this trip is possible at all — Shallan alone can slip in and out, but cannot bring anyone with her, and even Jasnah has trouble returning. The tower itself stands above them in Shadesmar as a mountain of mother-of-pearl light, swarmed by emotion spren in beastly shapes — gluts of them, calmed by the surfeit of human feeling pouring out of Urithiru above.
The Radiant spren step in beside their bonded humans. Ua'pam is a glowing-cracked-rock peakspren in fur-lined mountain clothes; Zu leaps up to hug him and calls him a mountain. Godeke's cultivationspren is a slender woman of woven vines with crystal eyes and crystal hands, aloof. The strangest of them is Arshqqam's spren — a body of white mist held in vest and trousers, the face a porcelain mask whose lips do not move when she speaks. She asks Adolin whether he thinks her pretty or a monster; Ua'pam grinds at her to tease less. She replies that she is not teasing — she likes to know how minds think. The introductions end with Maya, who is sitting alone at the top of the ramp in her dull brown rags, the cords of her face pulled tighter than Godeke's cultivationspren, her eyes scratched out as if a knife had erased them. Adolin calls her *Mayalaran*. She regards his offered hand like an alien object, then lets him put hers into his and walks the platform behind him as he names each member of the envoy aloud. The mistspren tells him there is no use talking to a deadeye and asks what about him makes him want to. *She understands,* he answers, and ignores the reply.
He goes to check on Gallant and finds the bad news he half expected: his Shardplate has not made the transfer, like every test suit before it. The shimmering blue lights gathering around the trunks on the other side are his armorers collecting the pieces. He unhooks the empty trunks and redistributes the weight on the Ryshadium. Gallant himself trails a faint afterimage of light when he moves on this side, just visible if Adolin watches for it. The loss of the Plate, and the Radiants' inability to renew their gemstones here, leaves him feeling exposed.
The hike down the long spiraling ramp will take hours, though Shadesmar is vertically compressed and shorter here than it would be in the world — Isasik the mapmaker finds the geometry fascinating for reasons Adolin has had explained three times and still cannot grasp. They start down. Pattern catches up and throws an arm around Adolin and Shallan in a clumsy hug, marveling at his bare feet — he had not realized Cryptics had feet before — and offering himself as a conversation partner since Maya will not be one. Zu runs ahead repeatedly to scout, ignoring her peakspren's warnings, and tells Adolin she fled to the Reshi Isles for a few years to escape people making rules about how she should live. Godeke grins at every gloryspren that drifts past, defends Vorinism against Adolin's prodding — *the Heralds are not God, but His servants; one aspect of the Almighty can die without the Almighty dying* — and praises Dalinar as a holy man whose addition to the church's book he can respect even when he cannot accept its conclusions. Arshqqam tells Adolin through her spren that she used to think her life made sense, that she did not want to leave Tashikk — but if a child could answer the call, what excuse did she have? She speaks of Lift with a grimace and asks that her fondness for the girl not be repeated; the children at the orphanage gave her *Stump* as a term of endearment, the only one she has held since her father.
They walk most of the way to the songs of the peakspren and the slow rolling of the bead sea below, eating field rations as the tower dwindles to a distant bonfire of color above. Adolin notices that some Shadesmar light casts no shadow at all, and others cast shadows in the wrong direction. He thinks of Syl's rare warning the day before — that she suspected the honorspren would not even let the envoy through their gates, that they were not what they had been, that they were afraid and angry, and that he should refuse any attempt to blame him for what the Radiants of the Recreance had done. The thought stays with him as the ocean of beads finally appears below — every object in Roshar rendered into a small glass marble, the world's souls churning into tides.
Ua'pam spots the barge first — a flat hundred-foot vessel docked at the small ring of ground at the pillar's base — and identifies the captain as his cousin. The Kasiden peakspren from the east, who stranded Adolin's previous expedition at Celebrant, are fools and not to be confused with his own people. The cousin welcomes the human prince with cheerful indifference, charges a small bag of glowing spheres, and predicts a two-week passage south to land — the honorspren do not like ships sailing near Lasting Integrity, so the safest route is to caravan along the Tukari coastline from the southern bank. Four big undulating-winged mandras are harnessed at the prow. The barge lifts a little in the beads and pulls away with a quiet clicking — much gentler than the cutting-vessels of Adolin's last trip.
The soldiers build a camp on deck with boxes and tarps. Adolin brushes Gallant with the familiar motions, then notices Maya watching. He hands her the brush and she stares at it as though baffled; then she begins, copying his exact downward stroke, brushing the same patch over and over. He shows her how to vary the strokes and she gets the hang of it. Two of the peakspren sailors stop to watch and one says he has never seen a deadeye trained so well. Adolin tells them she is not trained — she wanted to help, and he showed her how. They exchange a look in a language he does not speak and give her wide berth for the rest of the day. *I'll do my part, Father,* he thinks, watching the pillar shrink behind them. *I'll give them your letters. But I'll do more. I'll find a way to persuade them my way.* The trick, of course, is to figure out what his way is.
On the same deck, Shallan kneels in front of one of her trunks pretending not to panic. She had taken a Memory of the cube when she packed it; the face that had a few faint scratches was up, and now it is to the side. The difference is imperceptible to anyone without her gift. Someone has picked the cube up and turned it. Someone among the envoy is already reporting back to Mraize — the spy is here.