POV: adolin
Summary
Adolin transfers from Urithiru to Azimir through the Oathgate with Gallant, Colot and the lead officers of his volunteer force, while the overlapping voices of the Oathgate spren announce that the time has come for *their stewardship to end* — when their new allies arrive, the Oathgates will no longer help. He has perhaps an hour before the enemy arrives, and one final transfer in which to bring the rest of his two thousand across before the city is sealed in.
The Azimir Oathgate emerges inside a bronze dome over two hundred yards across, a converted marketplace now stripped of stalls. The transfer point for Shadesmar is a small round control building at the dome's centre with eleven gazebo openings — the only incursion point. A wooden balcony ringing the inside of the dome is already lined with Azish archers; sacks of oil hang from the ceiling, ready to be dropped and burned on attackers below. Adolin walks the killing field with the eye of a man who has spent five and a half years besieging the Shattered Plains, and quietly arrives at the Mink's misgiving: against singers, who fight as heavy cavalry in infantry form, a small ring of defenders crammed around the control building will break on the first charge of Fused and Regals, and the dome will be lost from the inside out.
Maya talks to him as he thinks — more strongly than ever, since Urithiru's awakening refreshed her. She can now look through his eyes into the Physical Realm even when he hasn't summoned her as a Blade, and she ventures whole tactical sentences: he is right that the oil drop sets the dome ablaze and trades the position for one fire's worth of dead singers; he is right that singers need a stout line, not a thin ring; she likes the cape, and tells him so. Adolin tests thought-only replies to her and is pleased they work. *Each sentence still feels laboured*, the narrator notes, *but she pushes through it like a wounded soldier learning to walk again.*
Conferring with Colot confirms his picture: the Imperial Guard's short isri-style bows will be accurate to about a hundred yards, no support reach for troops massed around the control building. What Adolin wants is debris dragged into the dome — furniture, scrap, anything — and pike lines and barricades posted in a wide ring with archers behind. He emerges from the dome's bent stone entry corridor into sunlight where three thousand of the Imperial Guard stand drawn up in bronze and sashed colour, and Commandant Supreme Kushkam rides up on a tasselled white horse to size him up. Missing an eye, the wound bracketed by sun-ray tattoos. The Commandant is brusque, refuses the offered handshake, and tells Adolin he can have his two thousand soldiers but not his command. Either he will run when the fighting is hard, the Commandant warns, or Azimir will end the day indebted to Alethkar.
Adolin resolves not to break with him. *We come to help, not to lead,* he tells Colot firmly. He inspects the perimeter on Gallant — wide cobbled square, organised streets and tall apartments, statues and fountains and bronze-fronted public buildings — and feels how full of *people* the city still is, mostly women and children pressed in from the southern fighting. He cannot help but flash back to another beautiful city full of history, Kholinar, whose wounded soldiers he last heard screaming for him from the Oathgate platform as he vanished to safety. Shamespren bloom around him in red and white petals as he completes his circuit. He gripps the reins and lets his mother's old counsel surface in place of the guilt: *don't just fight — fight for something worthy of your heart.* He cannot save the men he left behind in Kholinar. But here, in this city, he can do better. Across the square the emperor's ornate palanquin has at last begun to set up, and Adolin's two thousand are beginning to spill out of the dome behind him to take their places.