(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Szeth paces a slow circuit around the pool of skylight in Moss's Lightweaver monastery. The thirty illusions of Shush stand identical at a glance, but on close inspection each carries small differences — hair parts, eye colour, the shape of a sash bow, the cant of a head. Sweat slides down his face. He cannot tell which face is the *perfect* one and which are not, and so he resolves to strike at random and trust to fate. He summons his Blade knowing he will fail.

*Hmmm,* a familiar voice says in his ear. He looks; nothing is there. Syl has come into the monastery anyway. *Nale said Kaladin couldn't help. He didn't say anything about me. I'm a god, aren't I? Piece of one?* She makes him ask her to help — *do you not pray to gods for help?* — and stays invisible at his ear with one rule: do not touch the figures.

Together they work the puzzle. They count: sixteen violet eyes to fourteen green; sixteen left parts to fourteen right; sixteen elaborate bows to fourteen simple. The deliberate sixteen-fourteen split is a clue. They reason that perfection should be the rarer trait and through patient elimination find the one Shush with all rare attributes — the third from the left in the back row. Szeth readies his sword, then hesitates. *Does this feel too easy to you?* Syl asks. It does. He knows Moss — *too smart and too sure of his cleverness, like most Lightweavers* — and the obvious answer is exactly the trap. They discard surface readings: tiny moles, slightly cocked heads, sashes out of step. Each candidate feels flimsy. Syl lands on it at last: *Moss is the kind who builds a puzzle he can't lose, whatever you pick.* And the riddle still has to be solvable, or it would not be a riddle at all. *Fly up,* she says. *Let me see them from above.*

Szeth Lashes himself into the air beneath the skylight, casting a shadow on the rows of thirty. Then he sees it. The other Shin monasteries each have a floor mural of their patron Herald; this one is no exception. There, set in stone tiles at the centre of the pool of light, is the face of Shush — set in stone, which is to say, *that which is perfect*. Syl gasps. *The floor.* Szeth needs no more proof; he drops and stabs the mosaic straight through the eye.

Around him, the thirty figures break and resolve into a circle of exhausted, bleary-eyed Lightweaver acolytes — real people who had been wearing the Herald's face. Had Szeth struck one of them he would have killed her. *That was particularly brutal of him,* he thinks. He cuts open the floor where the mosaic was and lifts the Lightweaver Honorblade from a hollow beneath, beside the clothes Moss had been wearing — the man himself evaporated to smoke when the strike landed. Syl complains, gently, that he might at least have talked it through. Szeth hefts the new Blade and tells her that sometimes you simply have to make a decision. Approaching Nale and Kaladin at the doorway, he finds the words truer than he meant them.

Far away in Thaylen City, Jasnah takes her notebooks to an unlikely sanctuary: the restored Temple of Talenelat, rebuilt by Dalinar with his Bondsmith powers and reserved now for Radiants. The circular chamber is quiet and beautiful, lined with murals and glyphward reliefs and a relief of Taln the *Bearer of Agonies*. She sets her notebooks on the surgical table the Edgedancers use for healings and paces. She does not sit. The problem buzzes through her like the caged-lightning experiment she watched in her youth.

Odium cannot break Thaylen City except at extreme cost, and even then probably not. The city is barely worth taking. So why is he committing this many ships on so tight a schedule? She walks the methods of her formal training in order. Emotional Core Theory — has the loss a year ago rankled enough to bring him back for vengeance? Possible, but this is a *new* Vessel and she will not assume he is making mistakes. Formalist theory — premises and chains of next moves — feels too like what the council has already done; the admirals can outshoot her there. Economic theory — *follow the incentives* — opens a door: perhaps the attack is a diversion to lock up coalition resources that would otherwise reinforce Azimir or the Shattered Plains. But the diversion answer keeps tangling: why divert your own troops to do it? Could the troops not have sailed through Shadesmar to Azimir instead?

She begins to hit a wall. *Ivory,* she says, *distract me.* Ivory, at full size by the door, observes mildly that a temple is an odd place for an atheist to come and think. She tells him she does not deny anyone's faith, only oppose its assumptions: *you cannot wrestle with something that does not exist.* It is the word *assumptions* that does it. She has forgotten the first move of any logical dissection — *examine your premises.* She lists hers. Premise one: Odium genuinely wants the city. Premise two: the city is well defended. Premise three — and here it lands like thunder — *that there are actually troops on those ships.*

She sees the mistake all at once. Ships sailing toward Thaylen City are not, by themselves, an army. Even scouts watching the decks pile up with figures cannot, from a distance, prove there are men in the holds. Fen herself had been shocked that the enemy raised any army at all to threaten her city; perhaps he had not. Perhaps the fleet is the Vedenar navy and stolen Thaylen hulls, crewed thinly and dressed up to look full. A slow approach. Defenders dug in. Resources committed to repel an attack that was never going to come. She stands abruptly. *You have it,* Ivory says. *The hypothesis,* she corrects — and tells him she needs Windrunner scouts willing to fly in dangerously close to those ships.