The girl slid across the wooden floor as if it were covered in oil, passing right under the table where several scribes and two of Hauka’s guards were eating. The girl then stood up and knocked the entire thing on its side, startling everyone backward and dumping food to the floor.
“Sorry!” the girl called from the mess. “Didn’t mean to do that.” Her head popped up from beside the overturned table, and she had a pancake sticking half out of her mouth. “These aren’t bad.”
Hauka’s men leaped to their feet. Hauka lunged past them, trying to reach around the table to grab the refugee. Her fingers brushed the arm of the girl, who wiggled away again. The child pushed against the floor and slid right between Rez’s legs.
Hauka lunged again, cornering the girl on the side of the guard chamber.
The girl, in turn, reached up and wiggled through the room’s single slotlike window. Hauka gaped. Surely that wasn’t big enough for a person, even a small one, to get through so easily. She pressed herself against the wall, looking out the window. She didn’t see anything at first; then the girl’s head poked down from above—she’d gotten onto the roof somehow.
The girl’s dark hair blew in the breeze. “Hey,” she said. “What kind of pancake was that, anyway? I’ve gotta eat all ten.”
“Get back in here,” Hauka said, reaching through to try to grab the girl. “You haven’t been processed for immigration.”
The girl’s head popped back upward, and her footsteps sounded on the roof. Hauka cursed and scrambled out the front, trailed by her two guards. They searched the roof of the small guard post, but saw nothing.
“She’s back in here!” one of the scribes called from inside.
A moment later, the girl skidded out along the ground, a pancake in each hand and another in her mouth. She passed the guards and scrambled toward the cart with the smuggler, who had climbed down and was ranting about his grain getting soiled.
Hauka leaped to grab the child—and this time managed to get hold of her leg. Unfortunately, her two guards reached for the girl too, and they tripped, falling in a jumbled mess right on top of Hauka.
She hung on though. Puffing from the weight on her back, Hauka clung tightly to the little girl’s leg. She looked up, holding in a groan.
The refugee girl sat on the stone in front of her, head cocked. She stuffed one of the pancakes into her mouth, then reached behind herself, her hand darting toward the hitch where the cart was hooked to its chull. The hitch came undone, the hook popping out as the girl tapped it on the bottom. It didn’t resist a bit.
Oh, storms no.
“Off me!” Hauka screamed, letting go of the girl and pushing free of the men. The stupid smuggler backed away, confused.
The cart rolled toward the ledge behind, and she doubted the wooden fence would keep it from falling. Hauka leaped for the cart in a burst of energy, seizing it by its side. It dragged her along with it, and she had terrible visions of it plummeting down over the ledge into the city, right on top of the refugees of the immigrant quarter.
The cart, however, slowly lurched to a halt. Puffing, Hauka looked up from where she stood, feet pressed against the stones, holding onto the cart. She didn’t dare let go.
The girl was there, on top of the grain again, eating the last pancake. “They really are good.”
“Tuk-cake,” Hauka said, feeling exhausted. “You eat them for prosperity in the year to come.”
“People should eat them all the time then, you know?”
“Maybe.”
The girl nodded, then stood to the side and kicked open the tailgate of the cart. In a rush, the grain slid out of the cart.
It was the strangest thing she’d ever seen. The pile of grain became like liquid, flowing out of the cart even though the incline was shallow. It … well, it glowed softly as it flowed out and rained down into the city.
The girl smiled at Hauka.
Then she jumped off after it.
Hauka gaped as the girl fell after the grain. The two other guards finally woke up enough to come help, and grabbed hold of the cart. The smuggler was screaming, angerspren boiling up around him like pools of blood on the ground.
Below, the grain billowed in the air, sending up dust as it poured into the immigrant quarter. It was rather far down, but Hauka was pretty sure she heard shouts of delight and praise as the food blanketed the people there.
Cart secure, Hauka stepped up to the ledge. The girl was nowhere to be seen. Storms. Had she been some kind of spren? Hauka searched again but saw nothing, though there was this strange black dust at her feet. It blew away in the wind.
“Captain?” Rez asked.
“Take over immigration for the next hour, Rez. I need a break.”
Storms. How on Roshar was she ever going to explain this in a report?
4
LIFT wasn’t supposed to be able to touch Wyndle. The Voidbringer kept saying things like “I don’t have enough presence in this Realm, even with our bond” and “you must be stuck partially in the Cognitive.” Gibberish, basically.
Because she could touch him. That was very useful at times. Times like when you’d just jumped off a short cliff, and needed something to hold on to. Wyndle yelped in surprise as she leaped, then he immediately shot down the side of the wall, moving faster than she fell. He was finally learning to pay attention.
Lift grabbed ahold of him like a rope, one that she halfway held to as she fell, the vine sliding between her fingers. It wasn’t much, but it did help slow her descent. She hit harder than would have been safe for most people. Fortunately, she was awesome.
She extinguished the glow of her awesomeness, then dashed to a small alleyway. People crowded around behind her, praising various Heralds and gods for the gift of the grain. Well, they could speak like that if they wanted, but they all seemed to know the grain hadn’t come from a god—not directly—because it was snatched up quicker than a pretty whore in Bavland.
In minutes, all that was left of an entire cartload of grain was a few husks blowing in the wind. Lift settled in the alleyway’s mouth, inspecting her surroundings. It was like she’d dropped from noonday straight into dusk. Long shadows everywhere, and things smelled wet.
The buildings were cut right into the stone—doorways, windows, and everything bored out of the rock. They painted the walls these bright colors, often in columns to differentiate one “building” from another. People swarmed all about, chatting and stomping and coughing.
This was the good kind of life. Lift liked being on the move, but she didn’t like being alone. Solitary was different from alone. She stood up and started walking, hands in pockets, trying to look in all directions at once. This place was amazing.
“That was quite generous of you, mistress,” Wyndle said, growing along beside her. “Dumping that grain, after hearing that the man who had it was a thief.”
“That?” Lift said. “I just wanted something soft to land on if you were snoozing.”
The people she passed wore a variety of attire. Mostly Azish patterns or Tashikki shiquas. But some were mercenaries, probably either Tukari or Emuli. Others wore rural clothing with a lighter coloring, probably from Alm or Desh. She liked those places. Few people had tried to kill her in Alm or Desh.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to steal there—unless you liked eating mush, and this strange meat they put in everything. It came from some beast that lived on the mountain slopes, an ugly thing with dirty hair all over it. Lift thought they tasted disgusting, and she’d once tried to eat a roofing tile.
Anyway, on this street there seemed to be far fewer Tashikki than there were foreigners—but what had they called this above? Immigrant quarter? Well, she probably wouldn’t stick out here. She even passed a few Reshi, though most of these were huddled near alleyway shanties, wearing little more than rags.
That was an oddity about this place, for sure. It had shanties. She hadn’t seen those since leaving Zawfix, which had them inside of old mines. M
ost places, if people tried to build homes out of shoddy material … well it would all just get blown away in the first highstorm and leave them sitting on the chamber pot, looking stupid with no walls.
Here, the shanties were confined to smaller roadways, which stuck out like spokes from this larger one, connecting it to the next large road in line. Many of these were so packed with hanging blankets, people, and improvised houses that you couldn’t see the opening on the other side.
Oddly though, it was all up on stilts. Even the most rickety of constructions was up four feet or so in the air. Lift stood at the mouth of one alleyway, hands in pockets, and looked down along the larger slot. As she’d noted earlier, each wall of the city was also a set of shops and homes cut right into the rock, painted to separate them from their neighbors. And for all of them, you had to walk up three or four steps cut into the stone to get in.
“It’s like the Purelake,” she said. “Everything’s up high, like nobody wants to touch the ground ’cuz it’s got some kind of nasty cough.”
“Wise,” Wyndle said. “Protection from the storms.”
“The waters should still wash this place away,” Lift said.
Well, they obviously didn’t, or the place wouldn’t be here. She continued strolling down the road, passing lines of homes cut into the wall, and strings of other homes smushed between them. Those shanties looked inviting—warm, packed, full of life. She even saw the green, bobbing motes of lifespren floating along among them, something you usually only saw when there were lots of plants. Unfortunately, she knew from experience that sometimes no matter how inviting a place looked, it wouldn’t welcome a foreigner urchin.
“So,” Wyndle said, crawling along the wall next to her head, leaving a trail of vines behind him. “You have gotten us here, and—remarkably—avoided incarceration. What now?”
“Food,” Lift said, her stomach grumbling.
“You just ate!”
“Yeah. Used up all the energy getting away from the starvin’ guards though. I’m hungrier than when I started!”
“Oh, Blessed Mother,” he said in exasperation. “Why didn’t you simply wait in line then?”
“Wouldn’t have gotten any food that way.”
“It doesn’t matter, since you burned all the food into Stormlight, then jumped off a wall!”
“But I got to eat pancakes!”
They wove around a group of Tashikki women carrying baskets on their arms, yammering about Liaforan handicrafts. Two unconsciously covered their baskets and gripped the handles tight as Lift passed.
“I can’t believe this,” Wyndle said. “I cannot believe this is my existence. I was a gardener! Respected! Now, everywhere I go, people look at us as if we’re going to pick their pockets.”
“Nothing in their pockets,” Lift said, looking over her shoulder. “I don’t think shiquas even have pockets. Those baskets though…”
“Did you know we were considering bonding this nice cobbler man instead of you? A very kindly man who took care of children. I could have lived quietly, helping him, making shoes. I could have done an entire display of shoes!”
“And the danger that is coming,” Lift said. “From the west? If there really is a war?”
“Shoes are important to war,” Wyndle said, spitting out a splatter of vines on the wall about him—she wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean. “You think the Radiants are going to fight barefoot? We could have made them shoes, that nice old cobbler and me. Wonderful shoes.”
“Sounds boring.”
He groaned. “You are going to slam me into people, aren’t you? I’m going to be a weapon.”
“What nonsense are you talking about, Voidbringer?”
“I suppose I need to get you to say the Words, don’t I? That’s my job? Oh, this is miserable.”
He often said things like this. You probably had to be messed-up in the brain to be a Voidbringer, so she didn’t hold it against him. Instead, she dug in her pocket and brought out a little book. She held it up, flipping through the pages.
“What’s that?” Wyndle asked.
“I pinched it from that guard post,” she said. “Thought I might be able to sell it or something.”
“Let me see that,” Wyndle said. He grew down the side of the wall, then up around her leg, twisted around her body, and finally along her arm onto the book. It tickled, the way his main vine shot out tiny creepers that stuck to her skin to keep it in place.
On the page, he spread out other little vines, completely growing over the book and between its pages. “Hmmm.…”
Lift leaned back against the wall of the slot as he worked. She didn’t feel like she was in a city, she felt like she was in a … tunnel that led to one. Sure, the sky was open and bright overhead, but this street felt so isolated. Usually in a city you could see ripples of buildings, towering off away from you. You could hear shouts from several streets over.
Even clogged with people—more people than seemed reasonable—this street felt isolated. A strange little cremling crawled up the wall beside her. Smaller than most, it was black, with a thin carapace and a strip of fuzzy brown on its back that seemed spongy. Cremlings were strange in Tashikk, and they only got stranger the farther west you went. Closer to the mountains, some of the cremlings could even fly.
“Hmm, yes,” Wyndle said. “Mistress, this book is likely worthless. It’s only a logbook of times the guards have been on duty. The captain, for example, records when she leaves each day—ten on the dot, by the wall clock—replaced by the night watch captain. One visit to the Grand Indicium each week for detailed debriefing of weekly events. She’s fastidious, but I doubt anyone will be interested in buying her logbook.”
“Surely someone will want it. It’s a book!”
“Lift, books have value based on what is in them.”
“I know. Pages.”
“I mean what’s on the pages.”
“Ink?”
“I mean what the ink says.”
She scratched her head.
“You really should have listened to those writing coaches in Azir.”
“So … no trading this for food?” Her stomach growled, attracting more hungerspren.
“Not likely.”
Stupid book—and stupid people. She grumbled and tossed the book over her shoulder.
It hit a woman carrying a basket of yarn, unfortunately. She yelped.
“You!” a voice shouted.
Lift winced. A man in a guard’s uniform was pointing at her through the crowd.
“Did you just assault that woman?” the guard shouted at her.
“Barely!” Lift shouted back.
The guard came stalking toward her.
“Run?” Wyndle asked.
“Run.”
She ducked into an alley, prompting further shouts from the guard, who came barreling in after her.
5
ROUGHLY a half hour later, Lift lay on a stretched-out tarp atop a shanty, puffing from an extended run. That guard had been persistent.
She swung idly on the tarp as a wind blew through the shantied alleyway. Beneath, a family talked about the miracle of an entire cart of grain suddenly being dumped in the slums. A mother, three sons, and a father, all together.
I will remember those who have been forgotten. She’d sworn that oath as she’d saved Gawx’s life. The right Words, important Words. But what did they mean? What about her mother? Nobody remembered her.
There seemed far too many people out there who were being forgotten. Too many for one girl to remember.
“Lift?” Wyndle asked. He’d made a little tower of vines and leaves that blew in the wind. “Why haven’t you ever gone to the Reshi Isles? That’s where you’re from, right?”
“It’s what Mother said.”
“So why not go visit and see? You’ve been halfway across Roshar and back, to hear you talk. But never to your supposed homeland.”
She shrugged, staring up at the late-afternoon sk
y, feeling the wind. It smelled fresh, compared to the stench of being down in the slots. The city wasn’t ripe, but it was thick with contained smells, like animals locked up.
“Do you know why we had to leave Azir?” Lift said softly.
“To chase after that Skybreaker, the one you call Darkness.”
“No. We’re not doing that.”
“Sure.”
“We left because people started to know who I am. If you stay in the same place too long, then people start to recognize you. The shopkeepers learn your name. They smile at you when you enter, and already know what to get for you, because they remember what you need.”
“That’s a bad thing?”
She nodded, still staring at the sky. “It’s worse when they think they’re your friend. Gawx, the viziers. They make assumptions. They think they know you, then start to expect things of you. Then you have to be the person everyone thinks you are, not the person you actually are.”
“And who is the person you actually are, Lift?”
That was the problem, wasn’t it? She’d known that once, hadn’t she? Or was it just that she’d been young enough not to care?
How did people know? The breeze rocked her perch, and she snuggled up, remembering her mother’s arms, her scent, her warm voice.
The pangs of a growling stomach interrupted her, the needs of the now strangling the wants of the past. She sighed and stood up on the tarp. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go find some urchins.”
6
“GOTTA lunks,” the little girl said. She was grimy, with hands that probably hadn’t been washed since she’d gotten old enough to pick her own nose. She was missing a lot of teeth. Too many for her age. “The marm, she gotta lunks good.”
“Gotta lunks for smalls?”
“Gotta lunks for smalls,” the girl said to Lift, nodding. “But gotta snaps too. Biga stone, that one, and eyes is swords. Don’t lika smalls, but gotta lunks for them. Real nogginin, that.”