POV: navani
Summary
Navani sits down with her engineering team in a guard post near Urithiru's perimeter, the mysterious anti-fabrial spanreed cradled on Falilar's most precise scale and threaded through with string-tension instruments. The old white-bearded engineer has not been this animated in years: spanreed pens grow imperceptibly heavier with distance, and if he can measure that decay finely enough, he can guess how far away the other pen sits. Kalami stands at her shoulder, lean and grey-streaked, openly worried that the unknown correspondent will learn more about them than they about it.
Navani turns the ruby and the pen starts moving on its own. *Why have you ignored my instructions?* The correspondent — who weeks ago had demanded she cease all fabrial experiments — accuses her of compounding heresies: capturing spren in pits, chaining them to the blowing of the storms, perhaps building a weapon. Kalami notes the theological framing aloud; Navani points to the line about *humans* in the phrasing — the correspondent speaks like a singer, or wants them to think so. Falilar cuts in to whisper that the decay is almost nonexistent. Whoever this is, they are close.
Navani writes back questioning the heresy charge — the church sees no problem with fabrials, no more than with a chull hitched to a cart. The correspondent comes back furious: a chull is not confined to a tiny space, spren are meant to be free, you cage nature itself, your religion is incomplete. Each moment of delay is pain to the spren you dominate. *I will not suffer it for much longer.*
Navani asks for a few minutes to speak with her theological advisor — and uses the gap to relocate. The team disjoins the pen, scoops up the equipment and runs through the tower out onto the plateau, Navani in a palanquin hefted by six men, Falilar's apprentice Isabi holding her breath. They set up among the coldspren, Navani kneels and reengages the device, and the pen at once demands to know why they moved. Navani writes that her ardents agree their knowledge must be flawed and presses the correspondent to explain how *it* knows what they do not. The reply: the truth is evident. Because humans cannot be trusted. *You do not know how to keep promises, and promises are what make the world function. We make the world function. You must release your captive spren. You must you must.*
Kalami breathes: *Ash's mask… it's a spren, isn't it?* Yes. Falilar reports the second measurement has it pinned: the other pen is inside the tower. He notes drily that Navani does not look surprised; she admits she had her suspicions — one ancient spren had already been found hiding here, why not a second. Not, she thinks, another of the Unmade. A spren who wants to free its kind. *A liberationspren?* No one has heard of such a thing. The reed shuts off.
The plan that buds in her head she will not speak aloud where the spren might be listening. Walking back across the plateau, she stumbles, makes it look as accidental as possible, and kicks the spanreed cleanly off the cliff. Falilar cries out in dismay; she sympathises loudly with the loss and tells him to send a team to look for it. The team will have discreet orders to break the ruby as if from the fall, and to speak loudly of the tragedy among her scholars in the tower. She wants this spren, and any agent of it among her people, to hear that the link is severed. *Let's see what you do now,* she thinks, and walks back into the tower.