POV: dalinar
Summary
Dalinar, hours after staggering out of the rockslide and into his own camp, lets a surgeon at his cuts and changes out of his blood-crusted padding. He cannot sleep. The red mist still tints the world, and the Thrill simmers at the base of his ribs like a coal that will not go out. He trudges back to the command tent and looks over the generals' revised plan to take the Rift's wall, then pulls back the second half of it — no descent into the city. He has something else in mind for that part.
An envoy is reported coming out of the city under a truce flag. *Shoot them*, Dalinar tells the messenger; *kill anyone who walks out, and leave the bodies where they fall.* Sadeas nods, then draws him outside the tent. The scribes have been stalled, as ordered: Gavilar still believes his brother is dead and his own old orders to lay siege still stand. Why keep him ignorant, Sadeas wants to know. *Because* — Dalinar tells him — *my brother could not do what is about to be done here.* Sadeas presses one private question of his own: *you actually thought those soldiers were mine. You thought I would turn on him.* Dalinar admits he had worried. Sadeas tells him, low and flat, that he would cut his own heart out before betraying Gavilar — the throne is a job with no praise and less pleasure, and he means this kingdom to last for centuries. *Continue stalling the scribes,* Dalinar says. *Better for Gavilar to be able to disavow this honestly.*
Back in the tent, an armourer has replaced Oathbringer's pommel gem; Dalinar pulls the Blade out of the stones and calls the attack — at night, by torchlight on the wall. With his Plate in shards and himself too wrung-out to lead the charge, the assault goes in the mundane way: ladders, arrows, men crushed under stones. Teleb and Sadeas finally clear the wall. Dalinar orders fifty elites under Captainlord Kadash and two barrels of oil to meet him inside.
On the rim he stops at the cliff's edge and looks down at the city stacked on platforms along the chasm. Teleb tells him there are tens of thousands of people down there. *Burn it,* Dalinar says. Archers send fire-arrows into oil-soaked walkways; the very struts of Rathalas are wood, and they catch. Flamespren climb in the blaze, larger and angrier than they ought to be. Sadeas brings word that the traitor scouts have been confirmed: Tanalan bribed them to peel Dalinar off from the army with the false Shardbearer report, hoping either to kill him or to bait a leaderless attack on the Rift's defences.
Dalinar leads his fifty around the north rim, crosses a narrow span, and descends one tier to the hidden door he remembers from the boy Tanalan's safehold — the door is metal now and openly guarded. Kadash's shortbowmen drop the two sentries. Oathbringer takes the hinges off in a stroke. *Light those,* Dalinar says of the barrels. *Roll them down. Burn out anyone hiding inside.* Black smoke pours back out of the tunnel.
Up on the rim again, a soldier waves him over. A tier below, on a still-unburned walkway, a man is trying to fight his way back toward a white palace whose upper windows are crowded with the silhouettes of a woman and children. It is Tanalan — not hidden in the hole at all. *Throw a rope,* Dalinar says. *Bring him up. Shoot the bodyguards.* They haul a sobbing Tanalan over the rim and the elites push the regular Kholin troops back to give the captive a private audience with the Blackthorn. *I,* Dalinar tells him, *am an animal. An animal reacts as it is prodded. Once it has gone feral, you cannot whistle it back.* Tanalan screams for his children. The palace cracks loose with its occupants and crashes into the fires below.
Dalinar turns from him then, breath gone out of him, and tells Sadeas it is enough — let the rest escape out the canyon mouth. Sadeas tells him gently that it is too late. His own earlier order — *kill anyone who comes out* — is already being executed by a battalion of archers Sadeas stationed below; the walkways down are burning, the city is closed from underneath as well as above. Dalinar presses Oathbringer to Tanalan's throat to finish the last loose end himself, and as he does Tanalan starts to laugh — *you don't know? you killed our messengers. you poor, stupid fool. she came to us, to plead. did you not even know where your own wife was?* Ice goes through Dalinar. He drops the Blade and strangles Tanalan with his bare hands until the man dies smiling, then orders the elites to go back into the hole the barrels were rolled into. The heat will not let them. Kadash is on his knees being sick. The Thrill is gone; nothing comes in to bolster him; soldiers eventually carry him away from the rim, limp.
Six hours later he stands in the tent over a sheet-covered body, hands clasped behind his back to hide the shaking. Kalami and the head scribes have been whispering: Evi must have defected — drugged her guard, slipped away in the night, been found burned in an enemy safehouse. The story fits, and he lets it stand. He pulls the corner of the sheet back. The right side of his wife's face is untouched; the left is gone. He had ordered barrels of fire rolled into the place she had gone to plead with Tanalan for mercy. *Keep her body quiet,* he tells Kalami. *Tell the camp she was murdered by an assassin in the night.* It will give the men a story they can stomach for what they did today; it will also give Kalami a "secret" she will not dig past. *Not my fault,* he thinks. *Not my responsibility.* As he walks out of the tent he begins to hear screams — children, faintly, in his head. Evi's voice joins them.