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.”