POV: kaladin
Summary
Kaladin lands on a third-floor balcony of Urithiru and follows Syl in pursuit of the singer scouts he saw earlier with a working spanreed. He has failed to spy on the Oathgates tonight, but if he can put one of those Voidlight-fuelled spanreeds in Navani's hands she will at least learn something useful from the night. He keeps his light inside a sphere so he does not glow and drifts down corridors of public laundry basins.
They lose the scouts; Syl returns to report that the women dropped their reed at a guarded room ahead — a spanreed hub, where dozens of reeds are watched by two senior femalens for incoming messages. That changes the job. The reeds will not go home with anyone — they live in the hub and are checked out as needed. Hiding from a laundry detail in a side room, he Lashes a broom across the door to seal it, and as the singers outside rattle the handle his mind goes briefly black with old screams of bridgemen dying. He comes back to himself sweating, fingers cramped around his scalpel.
Down the corridor a fresh kind of Voidspren — a ripple of red lightning — passes through the air, leaving a visible trail the guards track with their eyes. *That spren shouldn't be visible at all,* Syl says. The tower is fouling the invisibility of Voidspren now, too — which means at least Kaladin will see anyone watching him from the spren side. He decides it is worth pressing on.
A four-guard post blocks the way: too many to outfight, too alert to lure with a simple distraction, and the ventilation grates here are too small to crawl through. So he Lashes a glowing length of rope to the wall as a *disturbance*, and asks Syl whether her colour-shifting has improved. It has. She wraps herself in phantom red cloth and a mask, marches down to the post imitating an irritated Ancient One, and orders all four of them to come look at this *right now*. The bluff holds — they follow her — and Kaladin slips past.
Inside a smaller hallway near the hub he finds what he needs: a wide ventilation cleft high in the wall. He boosts himself up with two of his cut-down brushes and squeezes into the shaft, which opens into a window over the hub itself, the wall here thick enough to hide him on top. Below, two femalens in rich dresses move spanreeds between writing boards and inactive stacks. As they swing to handle a flurry of important blinking reeds, Kaladin lowers a brush on a length of rope and Reverse-Lashes it to attract only a particular leather case. The case lifts off the table, sticks to the brush, and rides quietly up into the shaft — full of pairs of newly delivered Voidlight spanreeds still bound in twine. He pockets the pouch, considers stealing some of the intercepts the hub is reading, and decides he has risked enough for one night. Below, a guard comes in to report that a sign of a Radiant has been spotted — something the Pursuer has told everyone to watch for. Kaladin needs to be gone.
As Syl gets ready to imitate her Voidspren again to draw the guards a second time, Kaladin spots a different kind of light farther down the corridor — a blinking garnet point set into the wall. Curious, he presses his hand to it. A middling-pitched voice — not Navani, not quite male and not quite female — pleads with him. *I need you, Radiant. They've found me. One of the nodes that protect me. They've sent for her. The Lady of Pains. She'll take my mind. Please, Radiant. Protect me.* It can lead him there: second level, near the central atrium. The tower's spren has reached for him at last, and at exactly the wrong moment to be tired. He lowers his hand. *We're going to need to find me a better weapon,* he tells her. *Quickly.*