“‘And what about the stories of something worse?’” he wrote back. “‘The Alethi are warning about parshmen, and I’m doing what I can on such short notice. But what of the Voidbringers they say are in the storms?’”
Lift looked at the room packed with scribes. “I’m workin’ on that part,” she said. As Ghenna wrote it, Lift stood up, wiping her hands on her fancy robes. “Hey, all you smart people. Whatcha found?”
The scribes looked up at her. “Mistress,” one said, “we don’t have any idea what we’re even looking for.”
“Strange stuff!”
“What kind of ‘strange stuff’?” asked the scribe in yellow, the spindly fellow who looked silly and balding without a hat. “Unusual things happen every day in the city! Do you want the report of the man who claims his pig was born with two heads? What about the man who says he saw the shape of Yaezir in the lichen on his wall? The woman who had a premonition her sister would fall, and then she fell?”
“Nah,” Lift said. “That’s normal strange.”
“What’s abnormal strange, then?” he asked, exasperated.
Lift started glowing. She called upon her awesomeness, so much that it started radiating out of her skin, like she was a starvin’ sphere.
Beside her, the seeds on top of her uneaten pancake sprouted, growing long, twisting vines that curled around one another and spat out leaves.
“Somethin’ like this,” Lift said, then glanced to the side. Great. She’d ruined the pancake.
The scribes stared at her in awe, so she clapped loudly, sending them back to their work. Wyndle sighed, and she knew what he must be thinking. Three hours, and nothing relevant so far. He’d been right—yeah, they wrote stuff down in this city. That was the problem. They wrote it all down.
“There’s another message from the emperor for you,” Ghenna said. “Um, Your Pancake … Storms that sounds stupid.”
Lift grinned, then looked over at the paper. The words were written in a flowing, elegant hand. Probably Fat Lips.
“‘Lift,’” Ghenna read. “‘Are you going to come back? We miss you here.’”
“Even Fat Lips?” Lift asked.
“‘Vizier Noura misses you too. Lift, this is your home now. You don’t need to live on the streets anymore.’”
“What am I supposed to do there, if I do come back?”
“‘Anything you want,’” Gawx wrote. “‘I promise.’”
That was the problem.
“I don’t know what I’m gonna do yet,” she said, feeling strangely … isolated, despite the roomful of people. “We’ll see.”
Ghenna eyed her at that. She apparently thought that what the emperor of Azir wanted, he should get—and little Reshi girls shouldn’t make a habit of denying him.
The door cracked open, and the guard captain from the city watch peeked in. Lift leaped off the desk, running over to her, then hopping up to see what she was holding. A report. Great. More words.
“What did you find?” Lift said eagerly.
“You are right,” the captain said. “One of my colleagues in the quarter’s watch has been watching the Tashi’s Light Orphanage. The woman who runs it—”
“The Stump,” Lift said. “Meanest thing. Eats the bones of children for afternoon snack. Once had a staring contest with a painting and won.”
“—is being investigated. She’s running some kind of money-laundering scheme, though the details are confusing. She’s been seen trading spheres for ones of lesser value, a practice that would end with her bankrupt, if she didn’t have another income scheme. The report says she takes money from criminal enterprises as donations, then secretly transfers them to other groups, after taking a cut, to help confuse the trail of spheres. There’s more too. In any case, the children are a front to keep attention away from her practices.”
“I told you,” Lift said, snatching the paper. “You should arrest her and spend all her money on soup. Give me half, for tellin’ you where to look, and I won’t tell nobody.”
The guard raised her eyebrows.
“We can write down that we did it, if you want,” Lift said. “That’ll make it official.”
“I’ll ignore the suggestions of bribery, coercion, extortion, and state embezzlement,” the captain said. “As for the orphanage, I don’t have jurisdiction over it, but I assure you my colleagues will be moving against this … Stump soon.”
“Good enough,” Lift said, climbing back up on the desk before her legion of scribes. “So what have you found? Anybody glowing, like they’re some stormin’ benevolent force for good or some such crem?”
“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.