Chapter Twenty-Nine

Powerful floodlights on the front of the cycle let him see where he was going. A barren rocky mountainside, pocked by holes where trapped gases had blown out. The surfaces were smooth, even glassy, but the jagged edges were unweathered and razor sharp.

As he flew upward, he realized that this was the first time on this planet he'd been truly alone. Even when he'd worked on the schematics, Elegy had been in the room. Now it was just him, Auxiliary, and the darkness. Shaded from the sunlight by a shield that was—by definition—on a planetary scale. He pushed the cycle up the slope and soon encountered snow. His body's protections had already started to come into play, warming him from within, so he didn't notice the air temperature. The snow was his first sign that they were getting to dangerously high elevations.

So, the knight says, is this a good time to ask you what we're going to do if this works? How do we find the hidden Refuge? We spent the better part of a day searching earlier, and that was when the Cinder King didn't know what we were up to. It's going to be far more difficult this time.

"Perhaps," Nomad said, his breath misting. "Perhaps not. Cities keep to relatively strict latitudes here. I confirmed it with their navigation team. The Cinder King flies Union around the planet in a straight line."

Okay, so?

"So that greatly narrows down the area we have to search," Nomad said.

Sorry, my dutiful valet, the knight intones. I still don't follow your scattered logic. Is the elevation getting to you?

"Right, let me explain it this way," Nomad said, swerving around a large rock formation. "The Cinder King made no regular excursions—he wasn't flying out somewhere to study the entrance. Someone would have noticed if, each rotation, he mysteriously left the city.

"Yet we know that the Cinder King has been trying to get into the Refuge for years. Everyone agrees it was an obsession of his, and some few have even seen the door. So he had to study it in the normal course of their journey, during one of their regular stops to grow crops.

"Since Union always flies in a straight line around the planet, the entrance is somewhere in that specific latitude. In the direct path of the city. A place he can periodically land and study with his closest and most trusted officials, while everyone else grows food."

Right, then. So…that's still a huge area. Somewhere on a long line rounding the planet? It's a small planet, yes, but that's too much ground to search while being chased. We need to know where on that line the entrance can be found.

"Actually we don't need to know that," he said. "Not right now. Because the Cinder King knows it."

Alas, the knight thinks, my sleep-deprived squire has finally lost his mind and is speaking complete gibberish.

"Trust me on this one," Nomad said. "Finding the Refuge isn't going to be difficult. Neither is opening it. Those will be two of the easiest parts of our task."

Then what is the hard part?

Nomad didn't reply. He leaned down over his cycle, checking the time. By everyone's best guesses, he should be over halfway up his climb. Indeed, his speed was decreasing as the conventional engine slowly lost the ability to propel him. He left a melted trail behind him in the ice as he dipped lower, but he waited to engage the new engine. He needed to get as far as he could with the regular one to conserve propellant for the new one.

So…let's assume we get over the mountain, the knight muses. We somehow don't run Beacon out of energy. You work whatever magic you're planning, and we locate the door and get it open. What then?

What happens when Rebeke and the rest discover that the gate the Cinder King has been trying to open doesn't lead to some mythical, idyllic cavern and utopia of sun-free living? What happens when instead they discover it leads to some small, offworlder research facility?

"Congratulations. You've identified the hard part."

Ah. Right.

"I said I'd get Beacon's leadership through that door," he said. "That was my oath. I never said I'd solve their problem with the Cinder King or their bigger problem—the sad fact that it's unlikely their planet has any true refuge from the sun. I warned them. They're committed anyway. So it's not my problem."

That doesn't make you sad?

"I can't help everyone. I can barely deal with my own issues. I just have to keep moving forward."

Yes, but…isn't there another way? More we can do?

Once, instead of questions, Auxiliary would have given him a lecture. They'd both been through a lot since those days. Nomad sensed no condemnation in those words. Just sorrow.

He made no response, because the air was well and truly giving out now, and he doubted he could fill his lungs sufficiently. Instead he exhaled and let his body do what it did, protecting him with a little bubble of invisible pressure, a leftover from his old powers. He'd use up Investiture, but this wasn't a major drain.

Beneath him, the engine labored, but the cycle barely stayed in the air—and his progress up the slope had slowed to a crawl. So he engaged the new engine—really just a complement to the old system.

It worked perfectly, shooting down a jet of superheated steam and lifting him a good ten feet higher above the frozen landscape. He'd gotten above the perpetual cloud cover here, so he could finally see the stars. He took a moment to admire the rings—which, unless he was remembering wrong, were another oddity. The few other planets he'd visited with rings always had them at the equator, but not these. Strange rings, strange gravity, strange sunlight. What a bizarre planet.

Unfortunately, the rings reminded him of the ship up there, newly arrived. No. He couldn't think about how close the Night Brigade was right now. He focused instead on the path.

His eyes adjusted, and he dimmed the floodlight. The snow had fallen away also—not enough atmosphere. Now it was just him and the grey stone, like a ramp up toward the cosmere itself. These scattered peaks weren't high, around a thousand feet, despite their steep incline. But just because this peak was relatively low didn't mean it wasn't worth climbing, and he still felt proud as he neared the top.

He cut the engine at the summit, settling down gently. His feet were silent as they touched the stone. There was no appreciable atmosphere here to carry the sound waves. He enjoyed the moment, parked at the very top of the world, surveying the curvature of the small planet and looking out over the smoldering clouds. The sun was still a ways off, not even illuminating the horizon.

Higher mountains rose to either side of him. He couldn't spot a lower pass the city could sneak through. The fugitives would have to come all the way up this slope. On the back side, the slope was even steeper—cutting downward in a way that would have been improbable in a normal mountain range. Weathering below would not have needed long to collapse this higher section. But here, the peaks only had to last a day until they were remade.

He turned toward the stars again. They'd always seemed so friendly to him. So full of stories. How many of those stars had he visited now? Just a fraction of them, and yet the cosmere had begun to feel like a small place. Instinctively he tried to find Taln's Scar, but the patch of red wasn't visible from this angle.

Do you remember, the knight asks, when you first realized the Night Brigade was chasing you?

Nomad sent annoyance through the bond.

Ah, that's right, the hero realizes. You can't speak up here. How special…how delightful. I can talk, and you can't interrupt? You know, for a lowly valet, you certainly do monopolize a great deal of the speaking opportunities.

More annoyance. So much annoyance.

Lovely! Well, I'm going to assume you remember. It's not a thing one forgets lightly. You walked right up to them and essentially turned yourself in.

Nomad had mistakenly assumed that they wouldn't be interested in him because he no longer held the Dawnshard. He thought he'd send them on their way, misunderstanding cleared up. Storms, he'd been a fool. It was a similar attitude that had originally landed him in the army on Roshar, carrying siege equipment.

Do you ever miss the way you were back then?

Indifference. No, that naivete had almost gotten him killed so many times. In the case of the Night Brigade, he'd completely missed the danger. He'd soon learned that, with their twisted arts, they could kill him and fashion a spike from his soul that would lead them to the person he had given the Dawnshard. To them, Nomad was a crucial link in a very important chain. And he was far more useful dead than alive.

Yeah, I thought you wouldn't want to go back to the person you'd been. And you know, I don't miss those days either.

This surprised him, and he sent that emotion. He thought for sure that Auxiliary regretted what he'd become.

What's life about, if not growth? I don't like the person I was back on Roshar either, before we knew each other.

I like change, Nomad. My kind were too static for too long, particularly we highspren. And sometimes the way you talk makes me think you believe, or can pretend, that you are an entirely different person now.

But you aren't. You're still that man. The capacity for what you've become was always there. I guess that sounds depressing or negative, but I don't mean it so. If we pretend that we're a different person each day, then what good does it do? It implies we can't truly change. That we don't learn. We just turn into another being. Does that make sense?

Barely.

I just want to say…I'm glad to be here. Seeing this all with you. Even with the cost, I'm glad to be here.

Something about that twisted Nomad up inside. Auxiliary was barely there, a fragment of the being he'd once been, so brilliant and capable. What kind of damaged individual would be glad to have gone through what he had?

But then again, the view from atop the world…looking out over infinite clouds, with stars overhead…

Storms. Nomad couldn't be proud of who he was now. He was a man who couldn't ever go home—not because of the army that chased him, but because…because he would never be able to face his friends as the person he'd become.

No, he wasn't someone different. He was, indeed, still himself. That was what made it painful.

Auxiliary always had been the perceptive one. But he also often misunderstood people. And that was certainly the case with Nomad just then.

He activated the steam jet again, turned, and drove back down into the atmosphere until he could change the engine over to its regular configuration.

By the time he arrived at Beacon, they were ready, excess weight jettisoned, new engine components in place. He'd be going back up that mountain again, this time with a hundred and thirty-five people relying on him not to doom them to a silent death.