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.

Chapter 15

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.”