A Work of Art
POV: szeth
Summary
Szeth-son-son-Vallano crouches on a high lantern-ledge above the floor of Makkek's gambling den in Bornwater, dressed in the formfitting black costume and faceless black mask his current owner makes him wear for show. Below him men rub firemoss between their fingers until the green stains their skin, and the barmaids work the room with bare safehands — Bavland vices, both, that no Vorin city east of the Misted Mountains would tolerate. Szeth catches himself idly questioning the prohibitions he was raised on and recoils from the thought as from a hot stove. Makkek gestures from across the room. Szeth drops from the ledge and goes out into the streets toward Gavashaw — the rival den-owner whose name has earned him a Blade in his own house tonight.
He kills Gavashaw in silence inside the man's own audience hall and comes back to Makkek's by a route long enough to be sure he is not followed. The route turns out to be too long. A masked figure is sitting in an upper room of Makkek's house with a covered light when he climbs in the window. The figure speaks. He calls Szeth a work of art being thrown against dung. He drops something heavy onto the floor: Makkek's head. He opens his other hand to show, on his palm, Szeth's Oathstone. There is a folded paper on the table beside the lamp — two dozen names written in the warrior's script of Shinovar. Six Alethi highprinces. A Selay gerontarch. The king of Jah Keved. Notes beside several of the names on the precise method that will be required.
The Masked Master presses a Soulcaster, turns the wall of the room to smoke, and walks out through it. Szeth kneels beside the paper and reads the orders again. *Use the tactics you employed so well in Alethkar years ago.* He stays kneeling there a long time after his last sphere of Stormlight dies and the room goes fully dark. He should be trembling. He is surprised, and not pleased, that his hands are perfectly steady. Soon, he understands, the world itself will shake.