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A flashback set seven and a half years earlier, the night the listeners sign their treaty with Gavilar at the Kholinar palace. Venli, already attuned to the new rhythms her spren Ulim has taught her, has crept into the forbidden floors of the palace on Ulim's instruction. She hides from patrols and tells herself she only needs to last a few more hours; the famous part — being the listener who reintroduced warform — she enjoys; this skulking she doesn't. Without Ulim in her gemheart she feels old and dull; she craves his new rhythms the way she would crave a drug.

The errand is to collect a bag of gemstones (more spren like Ulim) that his contact has left in a dead-drop. Ulim leads her past more guards, up a stairwell, to a top-floor privy room where chamber pots sit over a waste shaft. In one of the pots, instead of stones, there is a paper cipher. Ulim reads it and pulses with fury, carapace barbs breaking and retracting through his skin: his contact Axindweth has been compromised by another off-world operative — *another of her kind in the palace, an agent for someone else* — and has fled Roshar entirely, perhaps days ago. The spren they were promising to bring across are now uncrossable. Ulim, snarling, abandons Venli in the privy to look for answers elsewhere.

Venli tries to slip back the way she came and is caught crossing the first hallway by a guard with a halberd-like spear. He marches her to a guard station run by a bearded older soldier who lets her give a thin story (she got lost; she found the privy eventually). Not wanting to provoke an incident on treaty night, the man parks her in a chair for the duration of the feast — *we'll see how this goes; if nothing breaks, you walk* — and has his scribes spanreed every other post in the palace asking after wandering listeners. Venli, for the first time in months, sits alone with herself. It is, to her surprise, almost pleasant; she thinks about going to the Five and even — humiliatingly — about asking Eshonai for help untangling what she has begun.

Ulim reappears in a panic. There are Heralds in the palace tonight. He has seen Shalash, then Kalak, then Nale — and Nale saw him back. A man fills the doorway: dark brown skin, a pale mark on his cheek almost like a listener pattern, the uniform of no army Venli knows. He overrides the guard with a sealed writ of legal jurisdiction, takes custody of *the thinking parshman* before the bearded sergeant can finish protesting, and walks her into the hallway, ignoring her as completely as he ignores Ulim's stammered attempts at small talk. *We are not friends, Ulim. You persist only because I cannot destroy spren.*

Nale interrogates her in the empty hall. How many Voidspren like Ulim have returned? Only this one, she says. He is half-talking to himself by now: *Ishar said only a Connection between the worlds could open a bridge; Taln has not given in;* he is sure he has been vigilant; he cannot understand how this is happening. Venli, improvising on his anxiety, gambles: *We didn't return them. You did.* He sneers — *Gavilar's plan is working. The fool* — and abruptly turns the conversation. He has read the treaty, and a clause in it lets one party legally break the agreement if it can prove the other is conspiring against them. He swears as a Herald of the Almighty that Gavilar is preparing to assault her people; the treaty therefore licenses her to strike first. He cannot move against the king himself — he has *grounds, but it will take months of planning to achieve the proper legality* — but there is a Shin slave for sale in the Kholinar market that night who carries an artifact belonging to a friend of his, an artifact Nale himself is forbidden by oath to touch. The slave is expertly trained in its use; the gemstones the listeners wear as ornaments will buy him. He invokes provision eighty-seven of Alethi law to pardon her on the grounds that her task serves the greater good, and walks off. *The artifact,* he tells Ulim in passing, *is Jezrien's Blade.*

Ulim is shaken into respect by both Venli's handling of Nale and what Nale has just offered them. He is also delighted: *Old Jezrien's Blade is here, is it? Curious…* He proposes a plan. Use Nale's seed differently — not to act on the Herald's advice, but to inherit it. Have the listeners go to war with the humans. The retaliation will be catastrophic; the listeners will face annihilation; only then will the Five consent to take the new forms his spren can give them. Venli objects: thousands will die on both sides. Ulim answers that her people will end up rulers of the entire continent, and asks whether the price now is too much to pay for never again being weak.

She thinks of the smallness she has felt all night — the privy, the guard, sitting in a chair without Ulim to hum to her — and attunes Destruction. Yes, she says. What do we do?