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Kaladin lets the outer Stormlight burn off and tells Dalinar to seek shelter — a big storm is coming from the west, he has flown over it. *We're in the process of withdrawing,* the highprince answers, and then, eye to eye, the line they have both been waiting for: *You are what I've been looking for.* *Yes. Finally.* Kaladin walks toward the assassin through Bridge Four, who throw down their last gem-lit blue lanterns at his feet at Teft's order so he can drink the Light in passing. Among them lie Pedin and Mart, burned-out, Eth sobbing over his brother. *No more,* Kaladin thinks. He asks Syl if she is ready. *I'm not the one we've been waiting on.* Then he launches at the assassin Blade against Blade, and the duel hurtles up into the dark.

Inside the muraled chamber, Shallan turns away from a sobbing Renarin and looks again at the room — circular wall, a keyhole that flows to fit any Shardblade, knights on the floor pointing at a tower in the eleventh band of the mosaic that is Urithiru, and *ten lamps. With gems in them. Latticework of metal enclosing each one.* The shock lands. *It's a fabrial.* She drains every lantern the ardents have, glows openly with Stormlight, and runs lamp to lamp infusing the gems while scholars scratch glyphward prayers in chalk and murmur *Lost Radiant* — too late to hide what she is. Two lamps short, she dashes outside for more gemstones and finds Adolin in the front of the soldiers, beaten bloody. He buries his face in her hair, feels her draw Stormlight from a sphere in his pocket, and looks at her with the new understanding of a man whose betrothed has just become something different. *Can you fly like he does?* *Fly?* Thunder.

Dalinar hauls himself across the plateau in broken-rib agony, helps a broken-wristed Adolin up, and gives him the army to move two plateaus over. Gallant has not fled in the thunder. Riding eastward through the rain, he finds something more than welcome: Roion's leaderless army already crossing the chasm in orderly ranks. The cause is Sebarial and Palona, sitting under a canopy with liberated wine and dried sellafruit while Palona reads a novel; Sebarial got the dead man's soldiers moving *because they were making a racket.* He raises his cup to Dalinar and asks who he will make fun of now that Roion is gone. On the next plateau over Aladar is glowing with the news of victory — half the Parshendi dead on the plateaus, the rest fled, the Vengeance Pact *fulfilled* — and Dalinar cannot find the breath to deflate him. *Shouldn't it feel different?* *This is what victory feels like, Aladar. Now we have to survive with our victory.* He orders every body packed onto the round plateau and rides for the centre.

Above the storm-tops, in sunlight, Kaladin hangs across from the assassin who insists he has stolen Honorblades — *it is the only explanation* — and screams futilely into the sky when Syl reshapes from sword to spear in his hand. Beneath them, the two storms close: highstorm from the east, Everstorm red-lit from the west. Syl tells him what only she can: her father — the Stormfather — rushed the highstorm in deliberately, out of season, because *he is broken*. He wants to wash everyone away and hide from the future. The Stormfather wants them dead. The duel tears across the cloud-tops; Syl becomes spear, halberd, sword, shield, hammer, knife in Kaladin's hands; an entire plateau hurled upward from the chaos beneath crests through the cloud and they fight along its tumbling surface. Kaladin opens a shoulder wound on the assassin that does not heal — and then the assassin breaks off and dives down into the storm toward the plateau where Dalinar went, screaming *the Knights Radiant cannot have returned, the Voidbringers cannot, I AM TRUTHLESS.* As Zahel warned weeks ago, the assassin does not have to defeat Kaladin to win. He only has to reach what Kaladin protects.

Shallan infuses the last lamp as the storms crash together. The mosaic floor begins to glow like stained glass. Adolin rams his Shardblade into the keyhole. The slot flows to fit it. Nothing happens. *Only one answer.* Shallan yanks the screaming Blade out, tosses it aside, summons Pattern — *there is something wrong with your Blade, and with all Blades; all but mine* — and rams him into the slot. He hums. Something deep in the plateau unlocks. Together she and Adolin push Pattern like the spoke on a mill, dragging the inner wall halfway around from Natanatan to Urithiru. The ten lamps fade like closing eyes. The storm outside vanishes. Adolin cuts a new doorway through hardened crem; sunlight spills in. They step out onto the same plateau they have been on all along — only now it is sunlit and calm in a ring of ten columnar plateaus before an enormous ribbed tower like stacked cups rising out of unfamiliar peaks. *The plateau hadn't contained the portal. The plateau was the portal.* Dalinar and Navani stand a short walk away beside Gallant.

The assassin crashes down onto the empty column of plateaus where the army was — and there is no army. He stops, baffled, then screams *I have seen this column before, they went to the city, didn't they* and flees westward along the front of the racing highstorm itself. Kaladin is pulled around helpless by the winds — until a dozen windspren spin up around him, laughing, and the wind suddenly serves him. He bursts out of the stormwall in front of his quarry on a halo of ribboning light, runs the assassin down along the storm's face, and presses Syl face-to-face against the assassin's Blade. *You are new at this,* the assassin tells him. *No,* Kaladin answers. *The wind is mine. The sky is mine. You are the trespasser here.* They break apart. Kaladin stops thinking. He lets himself be. The assassin meets his eyes. *It is actually true. Then I was right all along. I was never Truthless. I could have stopped the murders at any time.* *Excuses,* Kaladin tells him. *If that was why you murdered, then you're not the evil man I assumed. You're a coward instead.* Szeth nods. He pushes Kaladin back, moves to swing — and does not parry the counterstrike, closing his eyes instead. Kaladin drives Syl through his chest below the neck, severing the spine. Smoke burns out from beneath the assassin's eyelids. The body falls back into the stormwall. Szeth's silvery sword slips from his fingers and *does not vanish.* Syl shouts to grab it. Kaladin dives, catches it, climbs above the storm, and meets Syl in her woman's-shape under the cleansed sun. *That was very nicely done. Perhaps I'll keep you around this time.*