She pulled the door all the way open and stepped out.
“Lift!” The nephew scrambled to the door. “They told us to wait here!”
“And?”
“And we should wait here! We don’t want to get Uncle Huqin in trouble!”
“What’s the point of sneaking into a palace if not to get into trouble?” She shook her head. Odd men, these. “This should be an interesting place, what with all of the rich folk hanging around.” There ought to be some really good food in here.
She padded out into the hallway, and Wyndle grew along the floor beside her. Interestingly, the nephew followed. She’d expected him to stay in the room.
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” he said as they passed a door that was open a crack, shuffles sounding from inside. Huqin and his men, robbing the place silly.
“Then stay,” Lift whispered, reaching a large stairwell. Servants whisked back and forth below, even a few parshmen, but she didn’t catch sight of anyone in one of those coats. “Where are the important folk?”
“Reading forms,” the nephew said from beside her.
“Forms?”
“Sure,” he said. “With the Prime dead, the viziers, scribes, and arbiters were all given a chance to fill out the proper paperwork to apply to take his place.”
“You apply to be emperor?” Lift said.
“Sure,” he said. “Lots of paperwork involved in that. And an essay. Your essay has to be really good to get this job.”
“Storms. You people are crazy.”
“Other nations do it better? With bloody succession wars? This way, everyone has a chance. Even the lowest of clerks can submit the paperwork. You can even be discrete and end up on the throne, if you are convincing enough. It happened once.”
“Crazy.”
“Says the girl who talks to herself.”
Lift looked at him sharply.
“Don’t pretend you don’t,” he said. “I’ve seen you doing it. Talking to the air, as if somebody were there.”
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Gawx.”
“Wow. Well then, Gaw. I don’t talk to myself because I’m crazy.”
“No?”
“I do it because I’m awesome.” She started down the steps, waited for a gap between passing servants, then made for a closet across the way. Gawx cursed, then followed.
Lift was tempted to use her awesomeness to slide across the floor quickly, but she didn’t need that yet. Besides, Wyndle kept complaining that she used the awesomeness too often. That she was at risk of malnutrition, whatever that meant.
She slipped up to the closet, using just her normal everyday sneakin’ skills, and moved inside. Gawx scrambled into the closet with her just before she pulled it shut. Dinnerware on a serving cart clinked behind them, and they could barely crowd into the space. Gawx moved, causing more clinks, and she elbowed him. He stilled as two parshmen passed, bearing large wine barrels.
“You should go back upstairs,” Lift whispered to him. “This could be dangerous.”
“Oh, sneaking into the storming royal palace is dangerous? Thanks. I hadn’t realized.”
“I mean it,” Lift said, peeking out of the closet. “Go back up, leave when Huqin returns. He’ll abandon me in a heartbeat. Probably will you, too.”
Besides, she didn’t want to be awesome with Gawx around. That started questions. And rumors. She hated both. For once, she’d like to be able to stay someplace for a while without being forced to run off.
“No,” Gawx said softly. “If you’re going to steal something good, I want a piece of it. Then maybe Huqin will stop making me stay behind, giving me the easy jobs.”
Huh. So he had some spunk to him.
A servant passed carrying a large, plate-filled tray. The food smells wafting from it made Lift’s stomach growl. Rich-person food. So delicious.
Lift watched the woman go, then broke out of the closet, following after. This was going to get difficult with Gawx in tow. He’d been trained well enough by his uncle, but moving unseen through a populated building wasn’t easy.
The serving woman pulled open a door that was hidden in the wall. Servants’ hallways. Lift caught it as it closed, waited a few heartbeats, then eased it open and slipped through. The narrow hallway was poorly lit and smelled of the food that had just passed.
Gawx entered behind Lift, then silently pulled the door closed. The serving woman disappeared around a corner ahead—there were probably lots of hallways like this in the palace. Behind Lift, Wyndle grew around the doorframe, a dark green, funguslike creep of vines that covered the door, then the wall beside her.
He formed a face in the vines and spots of crystal, then shook his head.
“Too narrow?” Lift asked.
He nodded.
“It’s dark in here. Hard to see us.”
“Vibrations on the floor, mistress. Someone coming this direction.”
She looked longingly after the servant with the food, then shoved past Gawx and pushed open the door, entering the main hallways again.
Gawx cursed. “Do you even know what you’re doing?”
“No,” she said, then scuttled around a corner into a large hallway lined with alternating green and yellow gemstone lamps. Unfortunately, a servant in a stiff, black and white uniform was coming right at her.
Gawx let out a “meep” of worry, ducking back around the corner. Lift stood up straight, clasped her hands behind her back, and strolled forward.
She passed the man. His uniform marked him as someone important, for a servant.
“You, there!” the man snapped. “What is this?”
“Mistress wants some cake,” Lift said, jutting out her chin.
“Oh, for Yaezir’s sake. Food is served in the gardens! There is cake there!”
“Wrong type,” Lift said. “Mistress wants berry cake.”
The man threw his hands into the air. “Kitchens are back the other way,” he said. “Try and persuade the cook, though she’ll probably chop your hands off before she takes another special request. Storming country scribes! Special dietary needs are supposed to be sent ahead of time, with the proper forms!” He stalked off, leaving Lift with hands behind her back, watching him.
Gawk slunk around the corner. “I thought we were dead for sure.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Lift said, hurrying down the hallway. “This ain’t the dangerous part yet.”
At the other end, this hallway intersected another one—with the same wide rug down the center, bronze walls, and glowing metal lamps. Across the way was a door with no light shining under it. Lift checked in both directions, then dashed to the door, cracked it, peeked in, then waved for Gawx to join her inside.
“We should go right down that hallway outside,” Gawx whispered as she shut the door all but a crack. “Down that way, we’ll find the vizier quarters. They’re probably empty, because everyone will be in the Prime’s wing deliberating.”
“You know the palace layout?” she asked, crouching in near darkness beside the door. They were in a small sitting room of some sort, with a couple of shadowed chairs and a small table.
“Yeah,” Gawx said. “I memorized the palace maps before we came. You didn’t?”
She shrugged.
“I’ve been in here once before,” Gawx said. “I watched the Prime sleeping.”
“You what?”
“He’s public,” Gawx said, “belongs to everyone. You can enter a lottery to come look at him sleeping. They rotate people through every hour.”
“What? On a special day or something?”
“No, every day. You can watch him eat too, or watch him perform his daily rituals. If he loses a hair or cuts off a nail, you might be able to keep it as a relic.”
“Sounds creepy.”
“A little.”
“Which way to his rooms?” Lift asked.
“That way,” Gawx said, pointing left down the hallway outside—the opposite direction
from the vizier chambers. “You don’t want to go there, Lift. That’s where the viziers and everyone important will be reviewing applications. In the Prime’s presence.”
“But he’s dead.”
“The new Prime.”
“He ain’t been chosen yet!”
“Well, it’s kind of strange,” Gawx said. By the dim light of the cracked door, she could see him blushing, as if he knew how starvin’ odd this all was. “There’s never not a Prime. We just don’t know who he is yet. I mean, he’s alive, and he’s already Prime—right now. We’re just catching up. So, those are his quarters, and the scions and viziers want to be in his presence while they decide who he is. Even if the person they decide upon isn’t in the room.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Of course it makes sense,” Gawx said. “It’s government. This is all very well detailed in the codes and…” He trailed off as Lift yawned. Azish could be real boring. At least he could take a hint, though.
“Anyway,” Gawx continued, “everyone outside in the gardens is hoping to be called in for a personal interview. It might not come to that, though. The scions can’t be Prime, as they’re too busy visiting and blessing villages around the kingdom—but a vizier can, and they tend to have the best applications. Usually, one of their number is chosen.”
“The Prime’s quarters,” Lift said. “That’s the direction the food went.”
“What is it with you and food?”
“I’m going to eat their dinner,” she said, soft but intense.
Gawx blinked, startled. “You’re … what?”
“I’m gonna eat their food,” she said. “Rich folk have the best food.”
“But … there might be spheres in the vizier quarters.…”
“Eh,” she said. “I’d just spend ’em on food.”
Stealing regular stuff was no fun. She wanted a real challenge. Over the last two years, she’d picked the most difficult places to enter. Then she’d snuck in.
And eaten their dinners.
“Come on,” she said, moving out of the doorway, then turned left toward the Prime’s chambers.
“You really are crazy,” Gawx whispered.
“Nah. Just bored.”
He looked the other way. “I’m going for the vizier quarters.”
“Suit yourself,” she said. “I’d go back upstairs instead, if I were you. You aren’t practiced enough for this kind of thing. You leave me, you’re probably going to get into trouble.”
He fidgeted, then slipped off in the direction of the vizier quarters. Lift rolled her eyes.
“Why did you even come with them?” Wyndle asked, creeping out of the room. “Why not just sneak in on your own?”
“Tigzikk found out about this whole election thing,” she said. “He told me tonight was a good night for sneaking. I owed it to him. Besides, I wanted to be here in case he got into trouble. I might need to help.”
“Why bother?”
Why indeed? “Someone has to care,” she said, starting down the hallway. “Too few people care, these days.”
“You say this while coming in to rob people.”
“Sure. Ain’t gonna hurt them.”
“You have an odd sense of morality, mistress.”
“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “Every sense of morality is odd.”
“I suppose.”
“Particularly to a Voidbringer.”
“I’m not—”
She grinned and hurried her pace toward the Prime’s quarters. She knew she’d found those when she glanced down a side hallway and spotted guards at the end. Yup. That door was so nice, it had to belong to an emperor. Only super-rich folk built fancy doors. You needed money coming out your ears before you spent it on a door.
Guards were a problem. Lift knelt down, peeking around the corner. The hallway leading to the emperor’s rooms was narrow, like an alleyway. Smart. Hard to sneak down something like that. And those two guards, they weren’t the bored type. They were the “we gotta stand here and look real angry” type. They stood so straight, you’d have thought someone had shoved brooms up their backsides.
She glanced upward. The hallway was tall; rich folk liked tall stuff. If they’d been poor, they’d have built another floor up there for their aunts and cousins to live in. Rich people wasted space instead. Proved they had so much money, they could waste it.
Seemed perfectly rational to steal from them.
“There,” Lift whispered, pointing to a small ornamented ledge that ran along the wall up above. It wouldn’t be wide enough to walk on, unless you were Lift. Which, fortunately, she was. It was dim up there too. The chandeliers were the dangly kind, and they hung low, with mirrors reflecting their spherelight downward.
“Up we go,” she said.
Wyndle sighed.
“You gotta do what I say or I’ll prune you.”
“You’ll … prune me.”
“Sure.” That sounded threatening, right?
Wyndle grew up the wall, giving her handholds. Already, the vines he’d trailed through the hallway behind them were vanishing, becoming crystal and disintegrating into dust.
“Why don’t they notice you?” Lift whispered. She’d never asked him, despite their months together. “Is it ’cuz only the pure in heart can see you?”
“You’re not serious.”
“Sure. That’d fit into legends and stories and stuff.”
“Oh, the theory itself isn’t ridiculous,” Wyndle said, speaking out of a bit of vine near her, the various cords of green moving like lips. “Merely the idea that you consider yourself to be pure in heart.”
“I’m pure,” Lift whispered, grunting as she climbed. “I’m a child and stuff. I’m so storming pure I practically belch rainbows.”
Wyndle sighed again—he liked to do that—as they reached the ledge. Wyndle grew along the side of it, making it slightly wider, and Lift stepped onto it. She balanced carefully, then nodded to Wyndle. He grew further along the ledge, then doubled back and grew up the wall to a point above her head. From there, he grew horizontally to give her a handhold. With the extra inch of vine on the ledge and the handhold above, she managed to sidle along, stomach to the wall. She took a deep breath, then turned the corner into the hallway with the guards.
She moved along it slowly, Wyndle wrapping back and forth, enhancing both footing and handholds for her. The guards didn’t cry out. She was doing it.
“They can’t see me,” Wyndle said, growing up beside her to create another line of handholds, “because I exist mostly in the Cognitive Realm, even though I’ve moved my consciousness to this Realm. I can make myself visible to anyone, should I desire, though it’s not easy for me. Other spren are more skilled at it, while some have the opposite trouble. Of course, no matter how I manifest, nobody can touch me, as I barely have any substance in this Realm.”
“Nobody but me,” Lift whispered, inching down the hallway.
“You shouldn’t be able to either,” he said, sounding troubled. “What did you ask for, when you visited my mother?”
Lift didn’t have to answer that, not to a storming Voidbringer. She eventually reached the end of the hallway. Beneath her was the door. Unfortunately, that was exactly where the guards stood.
“This does not seem very well thought out, mistress,” Wyndle noted. “Had you considered what you were going to do once you got here?”
She nodded.
“Well?”
“Wait,” she whispered.
They did, Lift with her front pressed to the wall, her heels hanging out above a fifteen-foot drop onto the guards. She didn’t want to fall. She was pretty sure she was awesome enough to survive it, but if they saw her, that would end the game. She’d have to run, and she’d never get any dinner.
Fortunately, she’d guessed right, unfortunately. A guard appeared at the other end of the hallway, looking out of breath and not a little annoyed. The other two guards jogged over to him. He turned, pointing the
other way.
That was her chance. Wyndle grew a vine downward, and Lift grabbed it. She could feel the crystals jutting out between the tendrils, but they were smooth and faceted—not angular and sharp. She dropped, vine smooth between her fingers, pulling herself to a stop just before the floor.
She only had a few seconds.
“… caught a thief trying to ransack the vizier quarters,” said the newer guard. “Might be more. Keep watch. By Yaezir himself! I can’t believe they’d dare. Tonight of all nights!”
Lift cracked open the door to the emperor’s rooms and peeked in. Big room. Men and women at a table. Nobody looking her direction. She slipped through the door.
Then became awesome.
She ducked down, kicked herself forward, and for a moment, the floor—the carpet, the wood beneath—had no purchase on her. She glided as if on ice, making no noise as she slid across the ten-foot gap. Nothing could hold her when she got Slick like this. Fingers would slip off her, and she could glide forever. She didn’t think she’d ever stop unless she turned off the awesomeness. She’d slide all the way to the storming ocean itself.
Tonight, she stopped herself under the table, using her fingers—which weren’t Slick—then removed the Slickness from her legs. Her stomach growled in complaint. She needed food. Real fast, or no more awesomeness for her.
“Somehow, you are partly in the Cognitive Realm,” Wyndle said, coiling beside her and raising a twisting mesh of vines that could make a face. “It is the only answer I can find to why you can touch spren. And you can metabolize food directly into Stormlight.”
She shrugged. He was always saying words like those. Trying to confuse her, starvin’ Voidbringer. Well, she wouldn’t talk back to him, not now. The men and women standing around the table might hear her, even if they couldn’t hear Wyndle.
That food was in here somewhere. She could smell it.
“But why?” Wyndle said. “Why did She give you this incredible talent? Why a child? There are soldiers, grand kings, incredible scholars among humankind. Instead she chose you.”
Food, food, food. Smelled great. Lift crawled along under the long table. The men and women up above were talking in very concerned voices.
“Your application was clearly the best, Dalksi.”