“This is too large a project to spring on us without warning!” the fat scribe complained. “Mistress, this is the sort of research we normally have months to work on. Give us three weeks, and we can prepare a detailed report!”
“We ain’t got three weeks. We barely got three hours.”
It didn’t matter. Over the next few hours, she tried cajoling, threatening, dancing, bribing, and—as a last-ditch, crazy option—remaining perfectly quiet and letting them read. As the time slipped away, they found nothing and everything at the same time. There were tons of vague oddities in the guard reports: stories of a man surviving a fall from too high, a complaint of strange noises outside a woman’s window, spren acting odd every morning outside a woman’s house unless she left out a bowl of sugar water. Yet none of them had more than one witness, and in each case the guard had found nothing specifically strange other than hearsay.
Each time a weirdness came up, Lift itched to scramble out the door, squeeze through a window, and go running to find the person involved. Each time, Wyndle cautioned patience. If all these reports were true, then basically every person in the city would have been a Surgebinder. What if she ran off chasing one of the hundred reports that were due to ordinary superstition? She’d spend hours and find nothing.
Which was exactly what she felt like she was doing. She was annoyed, impatient, and out of pancakes.
“I’m sorry, mistress,” Wyndle said as they rejected a report about a Veden woman who claimed her baby had been “blessed by Tashi Himself to have lighter skin than his father, to make him more comfortable interacting with foreigners.”
“I don’t think any of these is more likely a sign than the one before. I’m beginning to feel we just need to pick one and hope we get lucky.”
Lift hated luck, these days. She was having trouble convincing herself that she hadn’t hit an unlucky age of her life, so she’d given up on luck. She’d even traded her lucky sphere for a piece of hog’s cheese.
The more she thought of it, the more that luck seemed the opposite of being awesome. One was something you did; the other was something that happened to you no matter what you did.
Course, that didn’t mean luck didn’t exist. You either believed in that, or you believed in what those Vorin priests were always saying—that poor people was chosen to be poor, on account of them being too dumb to ask the Almighty to make them born with heaps of spheres.
“So what do we do?” Lift said.
“Pick one of these accounts, I guess,” Wyndle said. “Any of them. Except maybe that one about the baby. I suspect that the mother might not be honest.”
“Ya think?”
Lift looked over the papers spread before her—papers she couldn’t read, each detailing a report of some vague curiosity. Storms. Pick the right one and she could save a life, maybe find someone else who could do what she did.
Pick the wrong one, and Darkness or his servants would execute an innocent. Quietly, with nobody to witness their passing or to remember them.
Darkness. She hated him, suddenly. With a seething ferocity that startled even her with its intensity. She didn’t think she’d ever actually hated anyone before. Him though … those cold eyes that seemed to refuse all emotion. She hated him more for the fact that it seemed like he did what he did without a shred of guilt.
“Mistress?” Wyndle asked. “What do you choose?”
“I can’t choose,” she whispered. “I don’t know how.”
“Just pick one.”
“I can’t. I don’t make choices, Wyndle.”
“Nonsense! You do it every day.”
“No. I just…” She went where the winds blew. Once you made a decision, you were committed. You were saying you thought this was right.
The door to their chamber was flung open. A guard there, one Lift didn’t recognize, was sweating and puffing. “Status Five emergency diktat from the prince, to be disseminated through the nation immediately. State of emergency in the city. Storm blowing from the wrong direction, projected to hit within two hours.
“All people are to get off the streets and go to storm bunkers, and parshmen are to be imprisoned or exiled into the storm. He wants the alleys of Yeddaw and slot cities evacuated, and orders government officials to report to their assigned bunkers to do head counts, draft reports, and mediate confusion or evacuation disputes. Find a draft of these orders posted at each muster station, with copies being distributed now.”
The scribes in the room looked up from their work, then immediately began packing away books and ledgers.
“Wait!” Lift said as the runner moved on. “What are you doing?”
“You’ve just gotten overruled, little one,” Ghenna said. “Your research will have to be put on hold.”
“How long!”
“Until the prince decides to step down our state of emergency,” she said, quickly gathering the spanreeds from her shelf and packing them in a padded case.
“But, the emperor!” Lift said, grabbing a note from Gawx and wagging it. “He said to help me!”
“We’ll gladly help you to a storm bunker,” the guard captain said.
“I need help with this problem! He ordered you to obey!”
“We, of course, listen to the emperor,” Ghenna said. “We will listen very well.”
But not necessarily obey. The viziers had explained this. Azir might claim to be an empire, and most of the other countries in the region played along. Just like you might play along with the kid who says he’s team captain during a game of rings. As soon as his demands grew too extravagant though, he might find himself talking to an empty alleyway.
The scribes were remarkably efficient. It wasn’t too long before they’d ushered Lift into the hallway, burdened her with a handful of reports she couldn’t read, then split to run to their various duties. They left her with one junior sub-scribe who couldn’t be much older than Lift; her job was to show Lift to a storm bunker.
Lift ditched the girl at the first junction she could, scuttling down a side path as the girl explained the emergency to a bleary-eyed old scholar in a brown shiqua. Lift stripped off her nice Azish clothing and dumped it in a corner, leaving her in trousers, shirt, and unbuttoned overshirt. From there she set off into a less-populated section of the building. In the large corridors, scribes gathered and shouted at one another. She wouldn’t have expected such a ruckus from a bunch of dried-up old men and women with ink for blood.
It was dark in here, and Lift found reason to wish she hadn’t traded away her lucky sphere. The hallways were marked by rugs with Azish patterns to differentiate them, but that was about it. Periodic sphere lanterns lined the walls, but only every fifth one had an infused sphere in it. Everyone was still starvin’ for Stormlight. She spent a good minute holding to one, chewing on its latch and trying to get it undone, but they were locked up tight.
She continued down the hallway, passing room after room, each stuffed with paper—though there weren’t as many bookshelves as Lift had expected to find. It wasn’t like a library. Instead there were walls full of drawers that you could pull open to find stacks of pages.
The longer she walked the quieter it became, until it was like she was walking through a mausoleum—for trees. She crinkled up the papers in her hand and shoved them in her pocket. There were so many, she couldn’t properly get her hand in as well.
“Mistress?” Wyndle said from the floor beside her. “We don’t have much time.”
“I’m thinkin’,” Lift said. Which was a lie. She was trying to avoid thinkin’.
“I’m sorry the plan didn’t work,” Wyndle said.
Lift shrugged. “You don’t want to be here anyway. You want to be off gardening.”
“Yes, I had the most lovely gallery of boots planned,” Wyndle said. “But I suppose … I suppose we can’t sit around preparing gardens while the world ends, can we? And if I’d been placed with that nice Iriali, I wouldn’t be here, would I? And that Radiant you’re tryin
g to save, they’d be as good as dead.”
“Probably as good as dead anyway.”
“But still … still worth trying, right?”
Stupid cheerful Voidbringer. She glanced at him, then pulled out the wads of paper. “These are useless. We gotta start over with a new plan.”
“And with much less time. Sunset is coming, along with that storm. What do we do?”
Lift dropped the papers. “Somebody knows where to go. That woman who was talkin’ to Darkness, his apprentice, she said she had an investigation going. Sounded confident.”
“Huh,” Wyndle said. “You don’t suppose her investigation involved … a bunch of scribes searching records, do you?”
Lift cocked her head.
“That would be the smart thing to do,” Wyndle said. “I mean, even we came up with it.”
Lift grinned, then ran back in the direction she’d come from.
15
“Yes,” the fat scribe said, flustered after looking through a book. “It was Bidlel’s team, room two-three-two. The woman you describe hired them two weeks ago for an undisclosed project. We take the secrecy of our clients very seriously.” She sighed, closing the book. “Barring imperial mandate.”
“Thanks,” Lift said, giving the woman a hug. “Thanksthanksthanksthanks.”
“I wish I knew what all this meant. Storms … you’d think I would be the one who got told everything, but half the time I get the sense that even kings are confused by what the world throws at them.” She shook her head and looked to Lift, who was still hugging her. “I am going to my assigned station now. You’d be wise to seek shelter.”
“Surewillgreatbye,” Lift said, letting go and dashing out of the room full of ledgers. She scurried through the hallway, directly away from the steps down to the Indicium’s storm shelter.
Ghenna poked her head out into the hallway. “Bidlel will have already evacuated! The door will be locked.” She paused. “Don’t break anything!”
“Voidbringer,” Lift said, “can you find whatever number she just said?”
“Yes.”
“Good. ’Cuz I don’t got that many toes.”
They hurried through the cavernous Indicium, which was already feeling empty. Only a half hour or so since the diktat—Wyndle was keeping track—and everyone was on their way out. People locked the doors in the advent of a storm, and moved on to safe places. For those with regular homes, those homes would do, but for the poor that meant storm bunkers.
Poor parshmen. There weren’t many in the city, not as many as in Azimir, but by the prince’s orders they were being gathered and turned out. Left for the storm, which Lift considered hugely unfair.
Nobody listened to her complaints about that though. And Wyndle implied … well, they might be turning into Voidbringers. And he would know.
Still didn’t seem fair. She wouldn’t leave him out in a storm. Even if he claimed it probably wouldn’t hurt them.
She followed Wyndle’s vines as he led her up two floors, then started counting off rows. The floor on this level was of painted wood, and it felt weird to walk on it. Wooden floors. Wouldn’t they break and fall through? Wooden buildings always felt so flimsy to her, and she stepped lightly just in case. It—
Lift frowned, then crouched down, looking one way, then the other. What was that?
“Two-Two-One…” Wyndle said. “Two-Two-Two…”
“Voidbringer!” Lift hissed. “Shut up.”
He twisted about, creeping up the wall near her. Lift pressed her back against the wall, then ducked around a corner into a side corridor and pressed her back against that wall instead.
Booted feet thumped on the carpet. “I can’t believe you call that a lead,” a woman’s voice said. Lift recognized it as Darkness’s trainee. “Weren’t you in the guard?”
“Things work differently in Yezier,” a man snapped. The other trainee. “Here, everyone is too coy. They should just say what they mean.”
“You expect a Tashikki street informant to be perfectly clear?”
“Sure. Isn’t that his job?”
The two strode past, and thankfully didn’t glance down the side hall toward Lift. Storms, those uniforms—with the high boots, stiff Eastern jackets, and large-cuffed gloves—were imposing. They looked like generals on the field.
Lift itched to follow and see where they went. She forced herself to wait.
Sure enough, a few seconds later a quieter figure passed in the hallway. The assassin, clothing tattered, head bowed, with that large sword—it had to be some kind of Shardblade—resting on his shoulder.
“I do not know, sword-nimi,” he said softly, “I don’t trust my own mind any longer.” He paused, stopping as if listening to something. “That is not comforting, sword-nimi. No, it is not.…”
He trailed after the other two, leaving a faint afterimage glowing in the air. It was almost imperceptible, less pronounced now that he was moving than it had been in Darkness’s headquarters.
“Oh, mistress,” Wyndle said, curling up to her. “I nearly expired of fright! The way he stopped there in the hallway, I was sure he’d seen me somehow!”
At least the hallways were dark, with those sphere lanterns mostly out. Lift nervously slipped into the hallway and followed the group. They stopped at the right door, and one produced a key. Lift had expected them to ransack the place, but of course they wouldn’t need to do that—they had legal authority.
Actually, so did she. How bizarre.
Darkness’s two apprentices stepped into the room. The Assassin in White remained outside in the hallway. He settled down on the floor across from the doorway, his strange Shardblade across his lap. He sat mostly still, but when he did move, he left that fading afterimage behind.
Lift pulled into the side corridor again, back pressed to the wall. People shouted somewhere distant in the Grand Indecision, calls for people to be orderly.
“I have to get into that room,” Lift said. “Somehow.”
Wyndle huddled down on the ground, vines tightening around him.
Lift shook her head. “That means getting past the starvin’ assassin himself. Storms.”
“I’ll do it,” Wyndle whispered.
“Maybe,” Lift said, barely paying attention, “I can make some sorta distraction. Send him off chasin’ it? But then that would alert the two in the room.”
“I’ll do it,” Wyndle repeated.
Lift cocked her head, registering what he’d said. She glanced down at him. “The distraction?”
“No.” Wyndle’s vines twisted about one another, tightening into knots. “I’ll do it, mistress. I can sneak into the room. I … I don’t believe their spren will be able to see me.”
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
His vines scrunched as they tightened against one another. “You think?”
“Yeah, totally,” Lift said, then peeked around the corner. “Something’s wrong about that guy in white. Can you get killed, Voidbringer?”
“Destroyed,” Wyndle said. “Yes. It’s not the same as for a human, but I have … seen spren who…” He whimpered softly. “Maybe it is too dangerous for me.”
“Maybe.”
Wyndle settled down, coiled about himself.
“I’m going anyway,” he whispered.
She nodded. “Just listen, memorize what those two in there say, and get back here quick. If something happens, scream loud as you can.”
“Right. Listen and scream. I can listen and scream. I’m good at these things.” He made a sound like taking a deep breath, though so far as she knew he didn’t need to breathe. Then he shot out into the corridor, a vine laced with crystal that grew along the corner where wall met floor. Little offshoots of green crept off his sides, covering the carpeting.
The assassin didn’t look up. Wyndle reached the doorway into the room with the two Skybreaker apprentices. Lift couldn’t hear a word of what was being said
inside.
Storms, she hated waiting. She’d built her life around not having to wait for anyone or anything. She did what she wanted, when she wanted. That was the best, right? Everyone should be able to do what they wanted.
Of course if they did that, who would grow food? If the world was full of people like Lift, wouldn’t they just leave halfway through planting to go catch lurgs? Nobody would protect the streets, or sit around in meetings. Nobody would learn to write things down, or make kingdoms run. Everyone would scurry about eating each other’s food, until it was all gone and the whole heap of them fell over and died.
You knew that, a part of her said, standing up inside, hands on hips with a defiant attitude. You knew the truth of the world even when you went and asked not to get older.
Being young was an excuse. A plausible justification.
She waited, feeling itchy because she couldn’t do anything. What were they saying in there? Had they spotted Wyndle? Were they torturing him? Threatening to … cut down his gardens or something?
Listen, a part of her whispered.
But of course she couldn’t hear anything.
She wanted to just rush in there, make faces at them all, then drag them on a chase through the starvin’ building. That would be better than sitting here with her thoughts, worrying and condemning herself at the same time.
When you were always busy, you didn’t have to think about stuff. Like how most people didn’t run off and leave when the whim struck them. Like how your mother had been so warm, and kindly, so ready to take care of everyone. It was incredible that anyone on Roshar should be as good to people as she’d been.
She shouldn’t have had to die. Least, she should have had someone half as wonderful as she was to take care of her as she wasted away.
Someone other than Lift, who was selfish, stupid.
And lonely.
She tensed up, then prepared to bolt around the corner. Wyndle, however, finally zipped out into the hallway. He grew along the floor at a frantic pace, then rejoined her—leaving a trail of dust by the wall as his discarded vines crumbled.
Darkness’s two apprentices left the room a moment later, and Lift pulled back into the side corridor with Wyndle. In the shadows here, she crouched down against the floor, to avoid standing out against the distant light. The woman and man in uniforms strode past a moment later, and didn’t even glance down the hallway. Lift relaxed, fingertips brushing Wyndle’s vines.