POV: shallan
Summary
Radiant kneels over the communication cube on the floor of their guest quarters at Lasting Integrity and shouts down at it. Mraize kept from them that Restares — the honorspren's High Judge — is one of the Heralds: Kalak himself. Mraize is, as ever, infuriatingly calm: she didn't need the information before, asking after a Herald might have warned him, and as far as the Ghostbloods know he still doesn't realise they have his number. The Sons of Honor never knew they served one of the very beings they wanted to bring back; Gavilar might have. Pattern watches the door for Adolin and observes that irony tastes, he imagines, like sausage.
Radiant bleeds into Veil, whose anger is older and harder. *The time has come for us to deal.* She walks Mraize through what she has done — crossed continents, gotten into one of the most remote fortresses on Roshar on the back of Adolin's sacrifice, succeeded where his other agents failed — and demands to know why she is really here, what he wants with Kelek, and why she should take one more step on his road.
Mraize greets Veil like an old friend. Before answering, he tells her to lift the cube and find the face from which his voice is faintest. She does. He has her press her hand there and twist; a panel clicks open and a small ornate dagger drops out, gemstone set in the pommel, the cavity sealing off the cube's other compartment in a way she cannot understand. *So you do want me to kill him*, she says. *One cannot kill a Herald*, Mraize answers. They are immortal — to be thought of as force, not man. He wants her to collect the soul of Kelek and trap his essence in the gemstone, exactly the way spanreed spren are caught. Their master Thaidakar has an affliction like the Heralds' and needs one to study.
Veil is not persuaded. Shallan has told him directly they will not kill Restares; she counts a soul-snatching as the same thing, and the two Heralds at the tower are obviously available for questioning instead. She puts the dagger back. Mraize shifts to fire and brimstone. *Little knife — why did Sadeas need to die?* The Heralds, he says, abandoned Taln in Damnation for thousands of years; the enemy has come back and they are either hiding or actively hastening the world's end; Kelek is now indecisive to the point of madness, worked with Gavilar to escape this world even knowing what that would cost it, and the only way to make him do his duty is to take him by force.
Veil grants that this is the longest speech Mraize has ever made and feels herself almost convinced — but Kelek is set to judge Adolin in the trial, and his vanishing would sink that case. Mraize is ready for her: if only, he says, the same person who took Kelek's soul could put on his face, pass judgment, and command the honorspren to join the war again. If only they had sent the one Lightweaver capable of single-handedly turning the tide.
Veil loses control to Shallan. The plan makes a horrible kind of sense — it would save Adolin, bring the spren to the Windrunners, and end the trial with a verdict the order itself would deliver. They could do it at the last day, to limit the window of impersonation. Mraize notes that what Veil demanded was information, not money or power, and so he revises the deal: do this, and Shallan becomes a full member of his organisation, with the knowledge and the voice in their grand plans that she has been hunting. *Strike at a Herald*, Shallan says, *it sounds wrong, Mraize. Very wrong.* He answers that the weak part of her is right to feel that way, and that another part of her is strong enough to do what needs to be done. *Become the knife.*
On the western plane of the fortress, Adolin approaches Kalak with Blended at his back, walking through the honorspren leaders that part for him on a coloured cobblestone path patterned like a gust of wind. The honorspren glower at the inkspren but let her come. Blended has primed him for awe — this is a Herald, whom many at home think of as the Stormfather himself — but Adolin finds a short, thinning-haired man who would look at home administering a backwater town in Alethkar, and remembers that his other Herald acquaintances at Urithiru — Ash and Taln — have lowered his expectations considerably.
The introduction goes badly. Kalak asks why a son of the Bondsmith has been let in among them, calls Adolin not very bright for offering to stand trial for the Recreance, and pronounces the war against Odium already lost — Tanavast is dead, Honor is dead, the Oathpact is broken, and all that remains is to find a way off the sinking ship. The old elder honorspren Sekeir tries to caution him; Kalak cuts him off. Adolin asks for a trial by witness; Kalak grants it on the spot, schedules it for the day after tomorrow, and — over Blended's whispered objection that he should refuse a public forum — moves it to the great forum so everyone can come watch.
Adolin is left with the sinking sense that the trial has been decided before it begins. He wonders, walking back, how the world ever called these ten people gods — or whether maybe they had always been only ten people, and putting a crown on a man never had made him anything more than what he was. Blended tells him grimly that at least a trial by witness *is*, and that they have one day to ready him for the angerspren's den.