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 trying 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.”