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Navani and her scared attendants pick their way through corridors with broken lantern latches — even now, someone has been crow­barring the spheres out of the wall lights — and reach the intersection the Sibling told her to find. *Cover up your spheres,* she orders, and one by one the lanterns close until in the half-dark they can pick out a faint twinkle of garnet on the floor. It moves; they follow it down a corridor, up a wall, around the curve of the strata, and through the seam of a closed door. Inside, behind rolled rugs, it leads them to a topaz embedded so deep in the stone it is almost invisible — and the Sibling's voice in her mind tells her to infuse it. Tiny topazes drained one by one into the wall gem barely move the needle.

The senior of two visiting Thaylen artifabrians, Vrandl, refuses to break her guild's secrecy even as the tower falls. The junior, Ulvlk, steps out of line and whispers it: they use sound. Striking a small metal tuning fork against a full gem makes it vibrate at a frequency that draws Stormlight out regardless of vessel size — a frequency that, once started, will siphon Light across like liquid. Vrandl hisses *ploy*, but Navani takes the fork. Seconds later the wall splits down its middle in silence and opens onto a small round chamber with a pedestal and a great uninfused sapphire at its centre.

Up on a green-moonlit balcony, Rlain tells Kaladin he must stop hiding in the clinic. He cannot live among humans through an occupation — sooner or later someone will out him as a spy or a singer — so he will go down, pretend to be an ordinary parshman who never escaped, and spy from inside the occupiers. He refuses to take a Fused soul if forced into the Everstorm; if it comes to that he will run. The two embrace awkwardly — Rlain still uneasy with the human gesture — and *Bridge Four*, *life before death*, and then he is gone. Syl sits on the rail, uncharacteristically solemn, and tells Kaladin that everyone is going to leave — *Moash, Rock, now Rlain* — and that her old knight did not want to leave either, but he was mortal and everyone dies, except her. Then she catches herself, gets perky, and zips off.

Back at the hidden chamber, Navani's team pour Stormlight in faster with the second tuning fork, and still the sapphire is drinking too much in — pushing Light not just into itself but into the wider network of veins. *The Lady of Pains has the Surge of Transformation,* the Sibling warns her, and *she will infuse my entire heart — the pillar — in the proper order.* The Voidlight will corrupt them into one of the Unmade. The construction will also block Teofil from reaching the garnet pillar, but at this point he is doomed — fresh enemy troops have arrived because *they brought a human with one of the Honorblades.* Moash. The Lady of Pains has stopped. *Wait. Something has happened.*

In the basement, Venli watches the last push from the foot of the cylindrical stairwell as the human soldiers wind down its rim under a locked canopy of shields — a great-shelled chasmfiend, *amazing*, Raboniel whispers, *all armor and teeth.* They reduce themselves from hundreds to fifty stepping over their own dead, water dropped to ground the stormforms below, Heavenly Ones stymied in the close quarters, Deepest Ones adapted to. Timbre exults to the Rhythm of Hope in Venli's chest. Then the Pursuer drops in among them, leaves a husk for them to stab repeatedly, reappears in another segment, and the dried-off stormforms unleash a collective bolt that destroys a wide gap in the stairs just below the lead men. The leader and the men closest to him fall with the rubble. The rest break and die. Raboniel changes her rhythm to one of Relief and strides back to her pillar; Venli scurries after her, unwilling to watch.

*It is done,* the Sibling whispers in Navani's mind. The men on the steps are gone. The great sapphire flares, then drains, then the Sibling speaks the name *Melishi* and blesses them; the shield holds. They are safe, for now. Navani orders the sapphire shattered and the maps in the map room and the information vault burned, and goes to deliver a formal surrender so her people will live.

In the corridor outside her own pillar, Raboniel presses a second set of gemstones and feels Stormlight in the system that should not be there. A wave of blue Light swells out of the pillar, expands into the corridor, and solidifies as a wall, blocking her off. She taps it with her knife. *Remarkable, truly remarkable.* Their plans are completely ruined, she tells Venli, and she is delighted — *this is going to be so interesting to crack open.* Ulim arrives, performs his flowery bow, and reports that the Blackthorn's wife has been captured by a Deepest One near a now-destroyed strange fabrial; *don't be wasteful*, Raboniel tells him, *the Blackthorn's wife will make a very useful pawn.*

Marched down through her soldiers' blood, Navani is escorted past the murals and over the body of Teofil himself to a library room where Raboniel in light armour is reading her sealed airship sketches. *I am ready to discuss terms of surrender.* Raboniel takes her Radiants, disarms her soldiers, levels her lighteyes to darkeyes status under singer law, and threatens to kill the unconscious if Navani resists. Navani agrees and gives them the signal — *a white flag bearing a circle painted black.* Then Raboniel surprises both her own interpreter and Navani by speaking in heavily-accented Alethi and asking whether human queens of this era are commonly engineers, calling the drawings remarkable, and offering Navani employment — *I would like to hire you* — to work on fabrials at her side, with the open argument that proximity will let Navani spy and learn more than she gives away. Navani makes herself remember that the Fused across the table is thousands of years old, and says she will consider the offer. And, marched off again, *just like that, she had lost another throne.*