Lift shrugged. “What else are you going to do with orphans? Gotta be good for something, right?”
“But profiting off people’s emotions?”
“Pity can be a powerful tool. Anytime you can make someone else feel something, you’ve got power over them.”
“I … guess?”
“Gotta make sure that never happens to me,” Lift said. “It’s how you stay strong, see.”
She found her way back to the place where she’d entered the slots, then from there poked around until she found the ramp up to the entrance of the city. It was long and shallow, for driving wagons down, if you needed to.
She crawled up it a ways, just enough to get a glimpse at the guard post. There was still a line up there, grown longer than when she’d been in it. Many people were actually making camp on the stones. Some enterprising merchants were selling them food, clean water, and even tents.
Good luck, Lift thought. Most of the people in that line looked like they didn’t own much besides their own skins, maybe an exotic disease or two. Lift retreated. She wasn’t awesome enough to risk another encounter with the guards. Instead she settled down in a small cleft in the rock at the bottom of the ramp, where she watched a blanket merchant pass. He was using a strange little horse—it was shaggy and white, and had horns on its head. Looked like those animals that were terrible to eat out west.
“Mistress,” Wyndle said from the stone wall beside her head, “I don’t know much about humans, but I do know a bit about plants. You’re remarkably similar. You need light, water, and nourishment. And plants have roots. To anchor them, you see, during storms. Otherwise they blow away.”
“It’s nice to blow away sometimes.”
“And when the great storm comes?”
Lift’s eyes drifted toward the west. Toward … whatever was building there. A storm that blows the wrong way, the viziers had said. It can’t be possible. What game are the Alethi playing?
A few minutes later, the guard captain walked down the ramp. The woman practically dragged her feet, and as soon as she was out of sight of the guard post, she let her shoulders slump. Looked like it had been a rough day. What could have caused that?
Lift huddled down, but the woman didn’t so much as look at her. Once the captain passed, Lift climbed to her feet and scuttled after.
Tailing someone through this town proved easy. There weren’t nearly as many hidden nooks or branching paths. As Lift had guessed, now that it was getting dark, the streets were clearing. Maybe there would be an upswing in activity once the first moon got high enough, but for now there wasn’t enough light.
“Mistress,” Wyndle said. “What are we doing?”
“Just thought I’d see where that woman lives.”
“But why?”
Unsurprisingly, the captain didn’t live too far from her guard post. A few streets inward, likely far enough to be outside the immigrant quarter but close enough for the place to be cheaper by association. It was a large set of rooms carved into the rock wall, marked by a window for each one. Apartments, rather than one single “building.” It did look pretty strange—a sheer rock face, broken by a bunch of shutters.
The captain entered, but Lift didn’t follow. Instead, she craned her neck upward. Eventually one of the windows near the top shone with spherelight, and the captain pushed open the shutters for some fresh air.
“Hm,” Lift said, squinting in the darkness. “Let’s head up that wall, Voidbringer.”
“Mistress, you could call me by my name.”
“I could call you lotsa stuff,” Lift said. “Be glad I don’t got much of an imagination. Let’s go.”
Wyndle sighed, but curved up the outside of the captain’s tenement. Lift climbed, using his vines as foot- and handholds. This took her up past a number of windows, but only a few of them were lit. One pair of windows on the same side helpfully had a washing line draped between them, and Lift snatched a shiqua. Nice of them to leave it out, up high enough that only she could get to it.
She didn’t stop at the captain’s window, which Wyndle seemed to find surprising. She went all the way up to the top and eventually climbed out onto a field of treb, a grain that grew in bunches inside hard pods on vines. The farmers here grew them in little slits in the stone, just under a foot wide. The vines would bunch up in there, and grow pods that got wedged so they didn’t tumble free in storms.
The farmers were done for the day, leaving piles of weeds to get carried away in the next storm—whenever that came. Lift settled down on the lip of the trench, looking out over the city. It was pinpricked by spheres. Not many, but more than she’d have expected. That made illumination shine up from the slots, like they were cracks in something bright at the center. How must it look when people had more infused spheres? She imagined bright columns of light shining up from the holes.
Below, the captain closed her window and apparently hooded her spheres. Lift yawned. “You don’t need sleep, right, Voidbringer?”
“I do not.”
“Then keep an eye on that building. Wake me up anytime someone goes into it, or if that captain comes out.”
“Could you at least tell me why we’re spying on a captain of the city watch?”
“What else are we going to do?”
“Anything else?”
“Boring,” Lift said, then yawned again. “Wake me up, okay?”
He said something, likely a complaint, but she was already drifting off.
It seemed like only moments before he nudged her awake.
“Mistress?” he said. “Mistress, I find myself in awe of your ingenuity, and your stupidity, both at once.”
She yawned, shifting on her stolen shiqua blanket and swatting at some lifespren that were floating around. She hadn’t dreamed, thankfully. She hated dreams. They either showed her a life she couldn’t have, or a life that terrified her. What was the good of either one?
“Mistress?” Wyndle asked.
She stirred, sitting up. She hadn’t realized that she’d picked a spot surrounded by and overgrown with vines, and they’d gotten stuck in her clothing. What was she doing up here again? She ran her hand through her hair, which was snarled and sticking out in all sorts of directions.
Sunlight was peeking up over the horizon, and farmers were already out working again. In fact, now that she’d sat up out of the nest of vines, a few had turned to regard her with baffled looks. It probably wasn’t often you found a little Reshi girl sleeping by a cliff in your field. She grinned and waved at them.
“Mistress,” Wyndle said. “You told me to warn you if someone went into the building.”
Right. She started, remembering what she’d been doing, the fog leaving her mind. “And?” she asked, urgent.
“And Darkness himself, the man who almost killed you in the royal palace, just entered the building below us.”
Darkness himself. Lift felt a spike of alarm and gripped the edge of the cliff, barely daring to peek over. She’d wondered if he would come.
“You did come to the city chasing him,” Wyndle said.
“Pure coincidence,” she mumbled.
“No it’s not. You showed off your powers to that guard captain, knowing that she’d write a report about what she saw. And you knew that would draw Darkness’s attention.”
“I can’t search a whole city for one man; I needed a way to get him to come to me. Didn’t expect him to find this place so quickly though. Must have some scribe watching reports.”
“But why?” Wyndle said, his voice almost a whine. “Why are you looking for him? He’s dangerous.”