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Still raw from the loss of Deti, Sigzil throws himself into the next phase of the Narak plan. Around the map table the older generals — Winn foremost — assume Odium will lunge for Narak Two and the Oathgate next; it is the conventional move. Sigzil makes himself contradict them: with only three days left, the enemy cannot afford the time it would take to cut off the human retreat — what he *needs* is a quick demoralising win at Narak Three, the only other plateau the defenders can afford to lose. *Like how you pretend weakness in a sword fight,* Ka says from the writing station, *and make the enemy strike there.*

They build the trap. Stargyle is called in to Lightweave a fake gemstone-cache inside the largest building of Narak Three, the one the Deepest Ones have been prowling, and to arrange a *glimpse* during the next assault. The trap relies on a half-truth they leave unspoken: their Stormlight really is running out. Vienta later, alone with Sigzil on the wall above the bastion, admits she does not believe they can last three days at the current draw.

Leyten is already on the wall, watching the red lightning. Brought against his will to the army by the death of a lighteyes whose armour he had been blamed for, he tells Sigzil he never asked to be glowing in the sky, that he has lost two squires, and that he does not feel he belongs. Sigzil tries a small gambit: *blame Kaladin. Kal put us in charge. He could have been here. He isn't.* Leyten rises in defence of his captain — *he led us well, he did everything he could, then more* — and Sigzil turns the trap. *Then you have to trust he was correct to leave us in charge. If you blame yourself for your squires dying, you have to blame Kal for Maps's death, or Teft's. Can't have it both ways.* Leyten stands taller. *I'm just as proud to serve under you.*

The words land on Sigzil too. Under red lightning, with engineers and generals taking his ideas seriously, he discovers something he could not have predicted: he was *meant* for this. Training with Master Hoid and learning under Kaladin had never made him feel like himself in this way. Beneath storm and chasm he is, at last, the man he always wanted to be.

Deep in the chasms of the Shattered Plains, Venli is leading her twenty listeners and Leshwi's Heavenly Ones inward toward that strange tone. She loves it down here. She loves the dance of green lifespren among red rotspren in the eye-holes of old skulls, the splashing of chasmfiends braced between the walls behind her, the sense of life having conquered the depths. She lets Timbre thrum theories at her — that the first highstorm-Everstorm convergence was uniquely violent because of *where* it met. Bila mutters that the water reminds her of the start of a highstorm.

They reach a log-dam crusted with mossy footholds and old bones, and Venli attunes the Terrors at the thought of climbing it. Thundercloud solves it. The great chasmfiend reaches down with the long jointed mandibles flanking his mouth, picks her up under the chin, and crawls over the dam wall to wall, his fellow chasmfiends ferrying the others. Set down upstream in waist-high water, Venli watches Leshwi arrive and hum to Agony: *I was a demigod for millennia. Now I stand in wet clothing.* Venli tells her firmly that turning was the hard part. *We'll find a new place for you with the listeners. Not a god — something better. Free.* *Can I ever be free,* Leshwi asks, *if I cannot soar?*

Then Thundercloud lifts Venli again to inspect another obstruction overhead — an old human bridge wedged twenty feet up the chasm, grown over with haspers and shalebark and rockbud, listener-arrow-nicks still in the wood. Held under her arms, she touches it and projects in her mind to the chasmfiend what it would have looked like new; they think the beasts like to be told. They walk on inward, the discordant tone they follow growing clearer.

Far away, in a small room beside the war chamber in Thaylen City, Jasnah reads a spanreed write from a Windrunner team led by Red — the one Lightweaver-covered swim beneath the Odium fleet has confirmed her theory. The holds are full of stone. The crews on deck appear to be warform laborers playing soldier. There is no invading army. *We don't think the enemy spotted us; a Lightweaver on hand was useful, though I don't think Red enjoyed the swimming portion that much.*

Fen takes the page badly. Stripping Thaylen City of its Radiants in the three-day window before the contest deadline, on the strength of a *should-be safe,* will feel — whether or not it is right — like throwing the city away. Jasnah is implacable: a brilliant general knows when to walk away; Odium has read Thaylen as unassailable in the time he has, and made a feint. Fen worries that the empty holds are themselves the ruse; Jasnah names the fallacy — that an enemy has thought of every move — and reminds her to act on the information she has rather than the information she fears she does not. *My moral philosophy,* she says, *is to do the most good I can in any situation.* Fen withdraws her hand and her trust at the same time, leaves to consult her Central Council, and Jasnah begins drafting the orders for the relief.