To Kill
POV: szeth
Summary
Szeth-son-son-Vallano, called Truthless of Shinovar and clad in Parshendi white, sits unnoticed at the back of a treaty-signing feast in the Alethi capital of Kholinar. The hall is loud with drumming, drink, and dancing. He picks his path through the revelers, stepping past Dalinar slumped drunken at a table, noting that Jasnah is absent and that the heir Elhokar holds the high table in conversation with two unimportant companions.
Outside the feast hall Szeth passes nine statues of the Heralds in their alcoves — one place is conspicuously empty — and turns toward the king's chambers. Two royal guards challenge him. Szeth breathes in Stormlight from the sapphire lamps along the wall, calls his own Shardblade from mist, and uses Lashings to throw one guard at the ceiling while severing the other's soul with his Blade. The alarm goes up: a Shardbearer is loose in the palace.
Szeth runs the corridors and side rooms toward the king, weaving Lashings and Stormlight as he goes — pinning a door shut with a Full Lashing, slicing a stone block free of the wall and dropping it on a pursuing squad, dodging volleys of thrown spears with a Reverse Lashing — until he finally meets a single armored bodyguard in the king's antechamber. The man wears Shardplate and carries a six-foot Shardblade with a design like burning flames. They duel through the hallway, Szeth dancing across ceilings and walls, scoring one cracked breach in the Plate and pressing for more.
Szeth recognizes a clue in the bodyguard's swordsmanship — too skilled for an ordinary man — and realizes the king was never escorted away by the fleeing guards: he stayed behind disguised in his own armor. He turns and presses the duel again, this time as a known fight against Gavilar himself. The two trade blows; Gavilar lands a gauntleted punch that breaks Szeth's jaw, but Szeth Lashes the wooden balcony downward repeatedly until it tears free from the palace and falls. The king crashes with it, impaled through the cracked seam of his Plate by a broken length of wood.
Standing over the dying king, Szeth absorbs Stormlight from Gavilar's broken Plate to begin healing his shattered jaw. Gavilar mistakes him for an agent of someone called Thaidakar, names Restares and Sadeas as suspects, and presses a small black sphere on a chain into Szeth's hand, begging that those who want it must not get it. His last words are a request: tell my brother he must find the most important words a man can say. Szeth honors the dying request — sacred to his people — by dipping the king's own hand in his blood and scrawling the message on the balcony wood. He leaves Gavilar's Shardblade behind and slips into the night with the dark sphere.