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Kaladin limps up the Pinnacle switchbacks with the rain hammering him, his crutch under one arm and a spear in the other, sutures splitting under his uniform. He has decided — late, against his own bafflement — to save Elhokar from Moash and Graves. The palace is too dark for the time of day, the doors unguarded; bringing soldiers would have warned the plotters. He pushes himself through corridors he should not be able to walk. Outside the king's chamber, two of Graves's men in stolen Bridge Four uniforms tell him Moash is asleep ahead of an important day; *go back to your barrack and pretend nothing is happening.* He leans in as if to whisper, drops the crutch, and takes them both — spear up between the legs of one, a head against the wall and an elbow into the floor for the other. He half-falls through the door. Elhokar is on the chamber couch, an empty wine bottle on the end table, barely conscious.

On the southern plateau, Adolin is dancing with Navani's fabrials painting the field white. He clashes again with the new-form Parshendi and finds — to his surprise — rope teams thrown at him: loops at neck and arm, ground-lines for the charge. Zahel trained him for this. He cuts himself free in defensive sweeps and falls back when his field commander Perel calls the retreat. Skar and Drehy shadow him out; Drehy cuts the last of the loops off his Shardplate with a side knife. *They keep sending teams to engage and distract me,* he says. *They don't intend to defeat me; they just want to keep me out of the battle.* He looks across the chasm at the singers massed against a great rock outcropping and remembers what Shallan told him about the rock mounds on the inner plateaus. He orders Perel to gather him a thousand heavy infantry, with a full-assault distraction from the rest of the line a half hour after he is gone.

On the centre plateau, the voice from the highstorms speaks to Dalinar again and corrects him when he accuses it of having lied. *I am not the Almighty,* it answers. *I am the sliver of Him that remains. I saw His corpse, saw Him die when Odium murdered Him. And I fled. To continue as I always have. The piece of God left in this world, the winds that men must feel.* Dalinar cannot tell yet whether it is answering him or speaking in monologue. He is interrupted by a galloping messenger: Teleb has fallen, Roion is routed on the northern plateau, his men split into pockets surrounded by red-eyed enemy. Dalinar orders her off the horse and rides for Navani's position along the chasm. He finds her under one of her tarp pavilions — and orders her to execute her plan now, no more testing.

Navani has rigged forty large black tarps along the chasm, each attached at the front corners and centres to weighted rocks at the chasm lip. On her order the engineers shove the rocks into the gap; the falling stones haul the tarps fifty feet into the air; in an instant a line of open-fronted pavilions flanks the chasm, sides like tents, slanted backwards to shed the rain. She brings out a glowing garnet in lacework wire — a new fabrial of her own design, an *attractor*, which she half-fears will draw blood out of those who touch it. It pulls water from the air instead. Roion's lighteyed archers — the best bowmen in the warcamps, useless until now in the rain — string their bows from oiled pockets and begin loosing volleys across the chasm into the Parshendi surrounding Roion's remnant. It is enough; the Parshendi turn from the encirclement. Dalinar kisses her, calls for Gallant — *his* horse, not the wild messenger beast — and rides for the chasm.

Back in the palace, Elhokar sits up under Kaladin's hand and asks if Kaladin has come to gloat. He is barely conscious; the bottle was almost full. Kaladin tells him assassins are coming and gets him under his arm. They stagger to the door — and the cleft-chinned guard, only stunned, lunges with a knife. Kaladin thrusts the spear by instinct into his stomach; but the knife was not for him. It is in Elhokar's side. The blade has glanced off a rib. The wound is heavy but survivable. Kaladin binds it with strips of the king's shirt, presses Elhokar's hand over it, and takes him through the bowels of the palace away from the gates — but his own bloody footprints are leaving a trail.

The king goes down halfway along a corridor. Kaladin kneels over him to rebind the wound and hears Moash's voice behind him. He stands on his good leg and turns. Moash stands at the corridor's end in his blue and red Shardplate, faceplate up, pained. Graves is beside him in Shardplate and helm with Shardblade on shoulder. They have followed his blood. Kaladin realises, looking past them, that the planks over the wall mark the very place he fell from Szeth defending Dalinar. He has come back here to make the same stand from the other side.