Above, in the spaces between trenches, people worked fields. There were virtually no structures up there; everything was down below. People lived in those trenches, which seemed to be two or three stories deep. How did they avoid being washed away in highstorms? True, they’d cut large channels leading out from the city—ones nobody seemed to live in, so the water could escape. Still didn’t seem safe, but it was pretty cool.

She could hide really well in there. That was why she’d come, after all. To hide. Nothing else. No other reason.

The city didn’t have walls, but it did have a number of guard towers spaced around it. Her pathway led down from the hills and joined with a larger road, which eventually stopped in a line of people awaiting permission to get into the city.

“How on Roshar did they manage to cut away so much rock!” Wyndle said, forming a pile of vines beside her, a twisting column that took him high enough to be by her waist, face tilted toward the city.

“Shardblades,” Lift said.

“Oh. Ooooh. Those.” He shifted uncomfortably, vines writhing and twisting about one another with a scrunching sound. “Yes. Those.”

She folded her arms. “I should get me one of those, eh?”

Wyndle, strangely, groaned loudly.

“I figure,” she explained, “that Darkness has one, right? He fought with one when he was trying to kill me and Gawx. So I ought to find one.”

“Yes,” Wyndle said, “you should do just that! Let us pop over to the market and pick up a legendary, all-powerful weapon of myth and lore, worth more than many kingdoms! I hear they sell them in bushels, following spring weather in the east.”

“Shut it, Voidbringer.” She eyed his tangle of a face. “You know something about Shardblades, don’t you?”

The vines seemed to wilt.

“You do. Out with it. What do you know?”

He shook his vine head.

“Tell me,” Lift warned.

“It’s forbidden. You must discover it on your own.”

“That’s what I’m doing. I’m discovering it. From you. Tell me, or I’ll bite you.”

“What?”

“I’ll bite you,” she said. “I’ll gnaw on you, Voidbringer. You’re a vine, right? I eat plants. Sometimes.”

“Even assuming my crystals wouldn’t break your teeth,” Wyndle said, “my mass would give you no sustenance. It would break down into dust.”

“It’s not about sustenance. It’s about torture.”

Wyndle, surprisingly, met her expression with his strange eyes grown from crystals. “Honestly, mistress, I don’t think you have it in you.”

She growled at him, and he wilted further, but didn’t tell her the secret. Well, storms. It was good to see him have a backbone … or, well, the plant equivalent, whatever that was. Backbark?