POV: kalak
Summary
Kalak locks himself into his secure house in Lasting Integrity, checks the bolts three times, and tries to remember the warrior he was thousands of years ago. The image will not hold. What comes to him is panic, indecision, and the cold pressure that has lived in him since Ishar stopped sheltering his mind — the darkness that has been crowding closer every year, like something patient that knows he cannot outlast it. The Radiants who freed the fortress are gone. They got out of the honorspren city, by some miracle of timing, and went south. He stayed. He stays everywhere. The price of a frighteningly long life is finally coming due, he thinks. He still does not want to die.
Should he have gone with them? *No*, he tells himself, breath shuddering. He should have gone with them. He should hide somewhere else. Thaidakar — that Herald from another world, resourceful and brutal — wants him, and might already have sent someone new. Yes. He will gather his things. He will go. He rushes into his study, opening the door —
— and the drapes seize him. They have been cut into strange shapes; they uncoil from the window beside the door like two grasping arms and bind him, gag him with their own cloth, slam him against the wall and hold him there. *Some Stoneward art*, he thinks, panicking. Then the man at his desk speaks. Short, pale-skinned, long mustaches, a floppy hat set aside — a face Kalak half-recognises from the recent caravan or from Adolin's guard. A small dagger with a gemstone in its crossguard lies beside the hat. The foreigner tells him not to focus on it; they may not need it tonight.
Then the man opens the box Shallan left in Kalak's keeping — the prison of the timid, dim-lit communication spren that had hidden inside it whenever anyone but him was in the room — and raps on its side. The ball of light pops out bright, confident, smug. Felt addresses her as Ala. She complains about the marital squabbles she has had to listen to inside the box: one more lovers' spat between Shallan and Adolin, she says, and she would have grown herself a stomach so she could vomit. Kalak understands the trick at last. The Ghostblood spy in Lasting Integrity was never Shallan at all. It was the seon in the box, hearing every council. He of all people, he thinks, should have remembered that spren can be turned.
Ala reports she has already relayed Mishram's location to Iyatil — and, grudgingly, to *Lord Kelsier* as well, the masked witch Felt privately refuses to serve. They debate whether to use the gemstone dagger on Kalak. Felt declines; he does not trust a gift from Iyatil, and Kelsier told him to be careful with it. They will hold the Herald in place instead, in case Mraize or Iyatil reach out for further instructions or fresh explanations of the plan.
Ala declares herself ready to be done with this world. Felt tells her to be patient. Once you accept, he says, that everyone around you is a foot taller than you are, Roshar is not so bad. And only a fool assumes he already knows everything a captive might still be useful for. Kalak squeezes his eyes shut against the cloth gag, trembling. Beneath the fear, oddly, is relief. Whatever happens next, the choices are no longer his to make.