POV: venli
Summary
Down in the basement of the tower, while soldiers and Regals fight up the steps overhead, Raboniel strolls the wide hallway in front of the mural room as if she has all the time in the world. Venli follows at her shoulder as the servant the *Lady of Wishes* clearly wanted with her, and is given a lecture on art: the humans, Raboniel says, painted their squares and pinned them to a wall; a singer of old would have asked what the shells of beasts and the colors of stone wanted to become. *They impose their will far too strongly.* The thunder of the Radiant assault echoes faintly from above; Raboniel does not even glance up.
A dark figure marbles the far end of the hallway. The Pursuer has come for leave to hunt the Windrunner he is owed, and to argue against Raboniel's order to leave the fallen Radiants alive. Raboniel refuses to be argued with. She hums something brand new — dark, predatory, beautiful — a rhythm Venli has never heard from any Fused or singer, and Venli understands: Odium has given this femalen her own rhythms. *No,* she thinks, *the Pursuer is not the most dangerous of them.* Raboniel tells the Pursuer she does not care for a single battle; she will end this war forever, and to start he will gather the fallen Radiants for her. He demands again, and finally is given the prize he is owed: the prohibition lifted, the one named killing allowed. *Tradition is more important than honor, foolish one,* he calls back at Venli when she protests, and then dissolves into a ribbon of red light and shoots up the stairwell, leaving his body behind as a husk. Timbre pulses uncertainly in Venli's chest. He has a madness, she agrees; perhaps lived so long his traditions have eaten his reason.
Raboniel strolls on into the library rooms, past huddled scholars and monks, and inspects a captured human fabrial a Deepest One has brought. She hums to *Subservience.* She is impressed. The Oathgate has already been activated, she says, with Vyre doing the work above. Venli reads it. *You don't care about the conquest. You're here because of these things. The fabrials humans are creating.* Raboniel admits as much. The Fused think in old grooves, she says — immortality has made them complacent; humans, by contrast, are sprinters who reach for what they are not ready to hold and yet build wonders in the moment. To end this eternal war will take a partnership of the two. *Provide them with a sword,* she finishes, *and they will find a way to impale themselves upon it.*
Up on the ground floor, the stench of burned bodies hits Navani as she leads her scholars, ardents and engineers into the foyer at the foot of the grand staircase. Red lightning flashes in the corridors. They have given Battalionlord Teofil his hour to gather the assault force, and during it Navani has hoarded Stormlight and quietly sent for two specific Thaylen artifabrians of Queen Fen's court visiting the tower. Teofil has staged a fake rout in a wide hall off the staircase — a trickle, then a flood of soldiers running for their lives, the slowest selling the ruse with their bodies — to draw a packed mass of stormform Regals inside. Two wheeled metal pillars on the floor draw the lightning like tall trees in an open field; Teofil waits longer than Navani would, then drops his red cloth and crossbows cut the stormforms down in waves. He hoists the rods, orders the survivors away from the spilled blood, and runs the reversed-rout downstairs with a salute — under orders to break the garnet construction suppressing Radiants if Navani cannot reach him.
On the sixth floor, Kaladin is running blankets and Soulcast rations to terrified families in Hearthstone's newly-resettled corridor — too refugees for him to recognise, a Herdazian family whose toddlers whimper at the sight of him. *If you don't want people to cringe when they see you, act less like a ruffian and more like a surgeon.* Syl flits as a windspren to keep her Radiant aspect off his shoulder, then warns him of a stormform Regal in the hall. The Regal patrols him, pokes through his pack, then makes a fight of it — angry to be posted to corridor duty, looking for a body built like a soldier's. *Why does a surgeon have arms like that?* Kaladin reaches for the Stormlight at his belt, hears his own heart, and instead makes himself look down and let the singer shove him into the wall and trip him. He stays on the floor with his eyes lowered. *You learned to do that, when you were a slave.* The creature snorts and stomps away. Kaladin gets up tense and alert, the way he used to feel before a fight, and goes on delivering blankets.