Szeth's Squires

[jamesbondsmith]

17 hours ago, robardin said:

And as has often been the case with these bonds, the Ideals are in part expressions of how the particular Radiant views either the world or themself, as we see with the variants on the Third Ideal of the Windrunners. So perhaps it depends on how the Skybreaker in question views the Crusade's original purpose and relative completion.

We see that Skybreakers become Masters only at the Fourth Ideal (which from what we see in Skybreaker training is the level at which they can take on squires), but we've only seen one Fourth Ideal actually declared: Szeth's Crusade: "I will cleanse the Shin of their false leaders".

This could be interpreted in different ways: physical elimination of the "false" leaders who had (knowingly) proclaimed the Desolations ended, Nahel bonds a thing of the past, and condemned him to being Truthless for saying otherwise; or, exposing and casting down their leaders as misled (perhaps by Nale himself!). Or yet other ways.

So it'll be interesting to see how Szeth goes about completing this "to the satisfaction of his highspren". They seem to allow technicalities, so it doesn't have to be something as extreme as "kill them all!" as a superset solution, if it turns out Szeth discovers that there was one particular person or subgroup genuinely misleading all the others. (Like what if it was ultimately something Taravangian engineered, who knows the Shin language, by somehow corresponding or otherwise manipulating them in order to "maketouseaTruthlessCanwecraftaweapon" as Floorboard 17 paragraph 2 of the Diagram conceived of?)

I always found his 'until I find a more perfect Ideal' caveat to be really interesting. Was he just giving himself leeway in case he again made the wrong decision about a code to follow, or do Skybreaker oaths all allow for changes in codes, similar to how laws can be reinterpreted/amended/struck down?

Spoiler

 

Considering they jump ship from supporting to humanity to supporting the singers it seems likely that changing who they support is built in.

 

I really like the idea that he ends up being required to take out Taravangian because he was the one who lead to Szeth wrongly becoming Truthless.