Storms, what am I doing?

Not being timid. That was what she was doing. Shallan glanced at the brutish guard and raised an eyebrow, forcing her voice to sound calm. “You really went all-out on the decor. How long did you have to look to find a den in the Shattered Plains that had a creepy staircase in it?”

The guard actually smiled. It didn’t make him look any less intimidating.

“The stairs aren’t going to collapse under me, are they?” Shallan asked.

“Is fine,” the guard said. His voice was surprisingly high pitched. “He did not collapse for me, and I had two breakfasts today.” He patted his stomach. “Go. They wait for you.”

She got out a sphere for light and started down the stairwell. The stone walls here had been cut. Who would go to the trouble to burrow out a basement for a rotting tenement building? The answer came as she noticed several extended crem dribbles on the wall. A little like wax melting down the side of a candle, these had hardened to stone long ago.

This hole was here before the Alethi came, she thought. When settling this warcamp, Sebarial had built this building above an already-existent basement. The warcamp craters must have once held people. There was no other explanation. Who had they been? The Natan people of long ago?

The steps led down into a small, empty room. How odd to find a basement in such a ramshackle building; normally, you found them only in wealthy homes, as the precautions one needed to take to prevent flooding were extensive. Shallan folded her arms, confused, until one corner of the floor opened, bathing the room in light. Shallan stepped back, breath catching. A part of the rock floor was false, hiding a trapdoor.

The basement had a basement. She stepped up to the edge of the hole and saw a ladder heading down toward red carpet and light that seemed almost blinding following the dimness she’d been in. This place must flood something fierce after a storm.

She swung onto the ladder and made her way down, glad for the trousers. The trapdoor closed above—it appeared to have some sort of pulley mechanism.

She hopped off onto the carpet and turned, finding a room that was incongruously palatial. A long dining table ran down the center, and it sparkled with glass goblets that had gemstones set in their sides; their glow sprayed the room with light. Cozy shelves lined the walls, each laden with books and ornaments. Many were in small glass cases. Trophies of some sort?

Of the half-dozen or so people in the room, one drew her attention most. Straight-backed, with jet-black hair, he wore white clothing and stood in front of the room’s crackling hearth. He reminded her of someone, a man from her childhood. The messenger with the smiling eyes, the enigma who knew so much. Two blind men waited at the end of an era, contemplating beauty. . . .

The man turned around, revealing light violet eyes and a face scarred by old wounds, including a cut that ran down his cheek and deformed his upper lip. Though he looked refined—holding a goblet of wine in his left hand and dressed in the finest of suits—his face and hands told another story. Of battles, of killing, and of strife.

This was not the messenger from Shallan’s past. The man raised his right hand, in which he held some kind of long reed. He placed this to his lips. He held it like a weapon, pointed right at Shallan.

She froze in place, unable to move, staring down that weapon across the room. Finally, she glanced over her shoulder. A target hung on the wall in the form of a tapestry with various creatures on it. Shallan yelped and jumped to the side just before the man blew on his weapon, shooting a small dart through the air. It passed within inches of her before embedding itself in one of the figures on the wall hanging.

Shallan raised her safehand to her breast and took a deep breath. Steady, she thought at herself. Steady.

“Tyn,” the man said, lowering the blowgun, “is unwell?” The quiet way he spoke made Shallan shiver. She could not place his accent.

“Yes,” Shallan said, finding her voice.

The man set his goblet on the mantel beside him, then slipped another dart from his shirt pocket. He tucked this carefully into the end of the blowgun. “She does not seem the type to let something so trivial keep her from an important meeting.”

He looked up at Shallan, blowgun loaded. Those violet eyes seemed like glass, his scarred face expressionless. The room seemed to hold its breath.

He’d seen through her lie. Shallan felt a cold sweat.

“You are right,” Shallan said. “Tyn is well. However, the plan did not go as she promised. Jasnah Kholin is dead, but the implementation of the assassination was sloppy. Tyn felt it prudent to work through an intermediary for now.”

The man narrowed his eyes, then finally raised his reed and blew sharply. Shallan jumped, but the dart did not strike her, instead flying to hit the wall hanging.

“She reveals herself as a coward,” he said. “You came here willingly, knowing that I might just kill you for her mistakes?”

“Every woman starts somewhere, Brightlord,” Shallan said, voice trembling rebelliously. “I can’t claw my way upward without taking a few chances. If you don’t kill me, then I have had a chance to meet people that Tyn probably would never have introduced me to.”

“Bold,” the man said. He gestured with two fingers, and one of the people sitting beside the hearth—a spindly lighteyed man with teeth so large, he might have had some rat in his heritage somewhere—scrambled forward and plunked something down on the long table near Shallan.

A sack of spheres. Inside it must be broams; the sack, though dark brown, glowed brightly.

“Tell me where she is, and you may have that money,” said the scarred man, loading another dart. “You have ambition. I like that. I will not only pay you for her location, but will attempt to find you a position in my organization.”

“Pardon, Brightlord,” Shallan said. “But you know I won’t sell her out to you.” Surely he could see her fear, sweat dampening the lining of her hat, trickling down her temples. Indeed, fearspren wiggled up through the ground beside her, though his view of them might be blocked by the table. “If I were willing to betray Tyn for a price, then of what worth would I ever be to you? You’d know that I’d do the same to you, if offered a big enough bounty.”

“Honor?” the man asked, expression still blank, dart pinched between two fingers. “From a thief?”

“Pardon again, Brightlord,” Shallan said. “But I am no mere thief.”

“And if I were to torture you? I could get the information that way, I assure you.”

“I don’t doubt that you could, Brightlord,” Shallan said. “But do you really think Tyn would send me with knowledge of her location? What would be the point of torturing me?”

“Well,” the man said, looking down and tucking the dart into place, “for one thing, it would be fun.”

Breathe, Shallan told herself. Slowly. Normally. It was hard to manage. “I don’t think you’ll do that, Brightlord.”

He raised the reed and blew with a swift motion. The dart thumped as it stuck into the wall. “And why not?”

“Because you don’t seem the type to throw away something useful.” She nodded toward the relics in glass boxes.

“You presume to be of use to me?”

Shallan raised her head, meeting his gaze. “Yes.”

He held her eyes. The hearth crackled.

“Very well,” he finally said, turning toward his fireplace and picking up his cup again. He continued to hold the reed in one hand, but drank with the other, his back to her.

Shallan felt like a puppet whose strings had been cut. She exhaled in relief, legs wobbling, and sat down on one of the chairs beside the dining table. Fingers trembling, she got out a handkerchief and wiped her brow and temples, pushing back the hat.

When she stopped to put the handkerchief away, she realized that someone had taken the seat beside her. Shallan hadn’t even seen him move, and his presence gave her a start. The short, tan-skinned person had some kind of carapace mask tied to his face, pulled tight. In fact, it looked like . . . like the skin had started to grow around the edges of the mask somehow.

The arrangement of red-orange carapace pieces was like a mosaic, giving a hint of eyebrows, of anger and rage. Behind that mask, a pair of dark eyes regarded her, unblinking, and an impassive mouth and chin were also left exposed. The man . . . no, the woman—Shallan noticed the hint of breasts and shape of the torso. The exposed safehand had thrown her.

Shallan stifled a blush. The woman wore dark brown clothing, simple, tied at the waist with an intricate belt, studded with more carapace. Four other people wearing more traditional Alethi clothing chatted softly beside the fire. The tall man who had questioned her did not speak again.

“Um, Brightlord?” Shallan said, looking toward him.

“I am considering,” the man said. “I had been expecting to kill you and hunt down Tyn. You can tell her she would have been fine coming to me—I am not angry that she did not retrieve the information from Jasnah. I hired the hunter I felt best for the task, and I understood the risks. Kholin is dead, and Tyn was to achieve that at all other costs. I may not have commended her on the job, but I was satisfied.

“Deciding not to come explain in person, however—that cowardice turns my stomach. She hides, like prey.” He took a sip of his wine. “You are not a coward. She sent someone she knew I would not kill. She always has been clever.”

Great. What did that mean for Shallan? She hesitantly rose from her seat, wanting to be away from the strange little woman with the unblinking eyes. Instead, Shallan took the chance to inspect the room in greater detail. Where was the smoke from the fire going? Had they cut a flue all the way down here?

The right wall had the greater number of trophies, including several enormous gemhearts. Those were, together, likely worth more than her father’s estates. Fortunately, they weren’t infused. Even uncut as they were, they’d probably glow enough to blind. There were also shells that Shallan vaguely recognized. That tusk was probably from a whitespine. And that eye socket, that looked frighteningly close to the structure of a santhid’s skull.

Other curiosities baffled her. A vial of pale sand. A couple of thick hairpins. A lock of golden hair. The branch of a tree with writing on it she couldn’t read. A silver knife. An odd flower preserved in some kind of solution. There were no plaques to explain these mementos. That chunk of pale pink crystal looked like it might be some kind of gemstone, but why was it so delicate? Bits of it had flaked off in its case, as if simply setting it down had almost crushed it.

She stepped, hesitantly, closer to the back of the room. Smoke from the fire rose, then curled and twisted around something hanging at the top of the hearth. A gemstone? . . . No, a fabrial. It gathered the smoke as a spool gathered thread. She’d never seen anything like it.

“Do you know the man named Amaram?” asked the scarred man in white.

“No, Brightlord.”