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Weeks after the spanreed had snapped on her table, Navani has still made no progress hunting the phantom spren that contacted her — the triangulation has narrowed it to a dim patch on the tower's fourth floor near a monastery, and searches there have turned up nothing. Most of her hours are eaten by running the tower-kingdom anyway; she retreats to the basement labs for the rare free hour. Today Tomor intercepts her at the door, beaming, with the lifting fabrial she had asked him to build — only he has built it as a stiff leather *gauntlet* that conjoins to the weighted-shaft mechanism and pulls the wearer through the air by the hand. Navani tries it under the eyes of the basement staff, hovers four feet off the floor with her fist nearly brushing the ceiling, and is mortified when Tomor produces a stepstool — *I've been using this* — to get her down. She tells him to keep going on the design and gently steers him toward a belt and a hand throttle so users will not stop in midair every time something startles them.

Kristir, the rosy-cheeked head scholar on duty today, whispers that she just won seven clearmarks on whether the queen would try it. Then a shout from the corridor; Navani's guards hold her back until they have checked. The bait has worked. The decoy workstation she has placed in a quiet reading nook across the hall has caught a man planting a new mysterious-spanreed ruby among her things. Chananar, one of the soldiers she had set to watch the nook, hands her the broken half-gem. The captive will not speak — Alethi, wiry, pale-skinned, wild-eyed. *He's with the Radiants,* one soldier murmurs after a second look; he had been serving meals at a Windrunner trial last month. She orders him brought to her audience chamber for a proper interrogation, and tells Isabi to send for Kalami. On her way out Isabi catches an incoming spanreed message — *explosion* and *dead* in the first lines — and she realises this hour is going to be much longer than the one she meant to take.

Far below the tower, the Everstorm arrives the way it always does — not as a slamming wall but as a slow black bloom of cloud across the sky, an extended trance of passion broken only by the red lightning. Venli, in envoyform and weaker than the stormforms around her, runs the last incline behind Raboniel with a strike force of five hundred. The slope ends at a sheer cliff that no natural mountain should have allowed. A Deepest One scout, half-sunk in the rock, gestures Command over to the chosen point of entry. The team examines a patch of stone where the ancient protections — a fall of ralkalest from the tunnel walls — have weakened. *These new Radiants know nothing,* one Deepest One says to Craving; another, a Masked One Venli had mistaken for an ordinary soldier, complains that the tower's spiritual protections are still on enough to suppress his many faces. Raboniel says they will not need the mask. The Deepest Ones drop their robes and slip into the rock like swimmers vanishing into a dark ocean.

Up in the city above, Kaladin sits stacking blocks for his little brother while his father reads from a stack of glyph-charted notes on sanity. *I feel blind,* Lirin tells him; he has had seven textbooks read aloud over the last week and the field is a handful of quotes traced back to a handful of sources. He confesses that he himself used to send the broken to the ardents because that was what surgeons did; Kaladin says, not unkindly, that everyone does — *nobody wants to know,* he tells his father, *because people like me scare them.* They land, for one of the very few times in their lives, on the same side of an argument. A medical revolution. Religious appointment for surgeons so they may read freely. Real trials of treatment for battle shock and melancholia. As he stacks another tower, his own oaths start to look slightly different to him; he thinks of the sanitarium under the monastery Teft showed him and realises, chilled, that he might easily have ended up in one of those dark rooms himself. Distant thunder — the Everstorm has come. Oroden smashes the last tower as the outer door of the clinic opens and Teft marches in: Dabbid has not been at his quarters for three days. Teft rubs his forehead — the firemoss headaches he thought he'd shaken months ago are back — and they go looking.

Back below, the cavern at the head of the route is a quick massacre. Venli finds herself on the floor on top of an Alethi soldier whose knife scrapes her carapace; the Rhythm of Panic drives her to slam his skull against the stone — and again, until he stops. She kneels above him and cannot breathe. Timbre thrums the Rhythm of the Lost inside her, and she cannot accept the comfort. Across the cavern, Raboniel cuts through the patrol almost casually — through one woman's chin with a narrow point-bladed weapon, a black breath that drops the last soldier — and recovers a spanreed from the dead scribe's hand. *Your first kill, child?* she asks to Ridicule. Venli stammers that she had been a scholar. Raboniel tells her not to fight unarmed, and to carry a knife *for Ado's sake.*

The Deepest One scouts return — sliding up out of the floor like spirits — to admit that the patrol had been a follow-on of the entry guards they had cleared. *Sorrow is meaningless,* Raboniel says to their humming Rhythm of Agony. *And bad assumptions are the last failing of many dead.* The force forms up. They have hours yet of climbing tunnel before they reach the basement of the tower itself, and they have to do it before the silence of all these dead is noticed. Venli walks at the back, uncertain which is the worse weight to carry: the animal terror that drove her hands, or the slow draining of the light from a man's eyes under them.