Brandon Sanderson - Edgedancer 

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.

“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.”

“Good. ’Cuz I don’t got that many toes.”

They hurried through the cavernous Indicium, which was already feeling empty. Only a half hour or so since the diktat—Wyndle was keeping track—and everyone was on their way out. People locked the doors in the advent of a storm, and moved on to safe places. For those with regular homes, those homes would do, but for the poor that meant storm bunkers.

Poor parshmen. There weren’t many in the city, not as many as in Azimir, but by the prince’s orders they were being gathered and turned out. Left for the storm, which Lift considered hugely unfair.

Nobody listened to her complaints about that though. And Wyndle implied … well, they might be turning into Voidbringers. And he would know.

Still didn’t seem fair. She wouldn’t leave him out in a storm. Even if he claimed it probably wouldn’t hurt them.

She followed Wyndle’s vines as he led her up two floors, then started counting off rows. The floor on this level was of painted wood, and it felt weird to walk on it. Wooden floors. Wouldn’t they break and fall through? Wooden buildings always felt so flimsy to her, and she stepped lightly just in case. It—

Lift frowned, then crouched down, looking one way, then the other. What was that?

“Two-Two-One…” Wyndle said. “Two-Two-Two…”

“Voidbringer!” Lift hissed. “Shut up.”

He twisted about, creeping up the wall near her. Lift pressed her back against the wall, then ducked around a corner into a side corridor and pressed her back against that wall instead.

Booted feet thumped on the carpet. “I can’t believe you call that a lead,” a woman’s voice said. Lift recognized it as Darkness’s trainee. “Weren’t you in the guard?”

“Things work differently in Yezier,” a man snapped. The other trainee. “Here, everyone is too coy. They should just say what they mean.”

“You expect a Tashikki street informant to be perfectly clear ?”

“Sure. Isn’t that his job?”

The two strode past, and thankfully didn’t glance down the side hall toward Lift. Storms, those uniforms—with the high boots, stiff Eastern jackets, and large-cuffed gloves—were imposing. They looked like generals on the field.

Lift itched to follow and see where they went. She forced herself to wait.

Sure enough, a few seconds later a quieter figure passed in the hallway. The assassin, clothing tattered, head bowed, with that large sword—it had to be some kind of Shardblade—resting on his shoulder.

“I do not know, sword-nimi,” he said softly, “I don’t trust my own mind any longer.” He paused, stopping as if listening to something. “That is not comforting, sword-nimi. No, it is not.…”

He trailed after the other two, leaving a faint afterimage glowing in the air. It was almost imperceptible, less pronounced now that he was moving than it had been in Darkness’s headquarters.

“Oh, mistress,” Wyndle said, curling up to her. “I nearly expired of fright! The way he stopped there in the hallway, I was sure he’d seen me somehow!”

At least the hallways were dark, with those sphere lanterns mostly out. Lift nervously slipped into the hallway and followed the group. They stopped at the right door, and one produced a key. Lift had expected them to ransack the place, but of course they wouldn’t need to do that—they had legal authority.