Amaram's Assassination Attempt

[Patrick Star]

So, I've put this idea out in passing on some other threads, and thought that such an important event deserved its own thread.

 

Basically, who tried to kill Amaram on the battlefield?  Who was Helaran working for?

 

Now, the two most likely options, based off of textual evidence between WoK and WoR, are the Skybreakers and the Ghostbloods.  After the assassination, Amaram mentions the Ghostbloods as the prime suspects.  However, Mraize tells Shallan that Helaran had looked for the Skybreakers.

 

Personally, my feeling is that Helaran was working for Nalan and the Skybreakers, and I will explain why.  First off, the Skybreakers definitely have the resources to get a shardblade and plate, as Nalan is carrying one around with him.  Even if that is actually Nalan's honorblade, which it might be, it would provide the Skybreakers with the capabilities to forcefully take another blade and plate, which Szeth could have done 10 times with Jezrien's honorblade.

 

Second, the evidence does not suggest that the Ghostbloods want to kill Amaram.  Instead, the evidence suggests that they want to capture him, and Helaran's charge does not suggest that the be the intent.  The poison dart at the end of WoR was coated with a paralysis poison, not a fatal one.

 

Now, some people may ask "Why would Nalan want to kill Amaram?  He's busy killing surgebinders!".  Nalan is not simply killing surgebinders, he is attempting to prevent a desolation from occurring, and surgebinding causes (or Nalan thinks it causes) desolations to occur.

 

Not so incidentally, Amaram and the Sons of Honor are attempting to start a new desolation to cause the Heralds to return, and appeared to be attempting to drive the Parshendi to adopt stormform (perhaps Restares supplied Venli with the stormspren?).  This would be more than enough reason for Nalan to arrange for a special kill.

 

To be clear, Nalan could not have killed Amaram himself.  Nalan is a constable in Azir, and likely holds similar positions in all the kingdoms and provinces of those kingdoms, meaning that Amaram would be off-limits to him, since he did not commit a crime.  However, a random member of the Skybreakers with no prior affiliation to Amaram would have free reign to... say... join an army that Amaram happened to be fighting at the time, bring some shards, ride into battle, then make a beeline for Amaram and kill him.  Essentially, Helaran was said Skybreaker.

 

As for why Nalan didn't make another attempt on Amaram's life, that's easy.  Amaram's leg was completely shattered.  In fact, his bridge run with Sadeas was almost certainly his first combat action since the injury, so Nalan didn't have another opportunity to kill him in battle.  In addition, Nalan likely did not know about Kaladin, or else he likely would have executed Amaram immediately.  And for the final reason, Amaram and Sadeas were fighting together, and it would be too risky to attack multiple shardbearers and risk even more of the Skybreaker's resources.

 

And there we go.  Who agrees with my "Nalan sent Helaran to kill Amaram on the Battlefield" theory?  Who disagrees?  Who has any new culprits that could have pulled off the attempt?  Please discuss!

 

Edit: Oudeis suggested that Helaran's intent may not have actually been to kill Amaram.  I do not believe this to be the case.  Amaram's leg got pinned by Helaran.  A slightly different position easily could have severed an artery and killed Amaram.  For a capture mission, that would have way too large of a risk of killing him.

Edited September 18, 2015 by Patrick Star

[mirahound]

I almost wonder if Helaran was working on his own, actually. Granted I've only read WoR once so far, so I might be missing things, but I'm not sure the Skybreakers would consider assassination legal. Then again, it was on a battlefield, so maybe they counted that as fair?

[Patrick Star]

I almost wonder if Helaran was working on his own, actually. Granted I've only read WoR once so far, so I might be missing things, but I'm not sure the Skybreakers would consider assassination legal. Then again, it was on a battlefield, so maybe they counted that as fair?

 

That's the crux of the plan.  Under the law, it's not an assasination.  It's a kill on the battlefield during an established war by an individual with no legal obligations to the party that he is fighting.

 

Nalan couldn't do it himself because he's an alethi official (police officer equivalent), and is thus technically an employee of Amaram.  That would be treason, and a crime.

 

The Geneva Conventions consider killing an enemy combatant (under "normal" circumstances) to not be a criminal offense.  I'd say that Rosharian law is similar.

[Oudeis]

Do we know killing amaram was the point of the attack?

[Patrick Star]

Do we know killing amaram was the point of the attack?

 

We don't know, but from how I read it, it's highly likely.  If they wanted to capture Amaram, I feel like a different tactic would have been used.  With the way it was handled, Amaram got pinned under his horse, which could have been a fatal wound with a bit of... better luck?

 

I don't feel like Nalan is taking prisoners.  And if the ghostbloods pulled off the assassination, I think they would have come up with a more creative solution.  It just doesn't have a ghostblood vibe to me.

[Green Hoodie Mistborn]

Based on things that Sadeas said to Amaram about his honorable act being just that, it seems clear to me that Sadeas knows of some hinky stuff that Amaram has done in the past that would likely be against the law in some way. If Nalan can track Lift across multiple kingdoms and know things about her and Ym, I'm sure he would be able to justly attack and kill Amaram rather than the roundabout way of sending a random Shardbearer to do it in battle. Also there wasn't supposed to be a Shardbearer, it was a complete surprise to all of Amaram's army. I almost wonder if the opposing force knew that they would have one fighting for them either... 

 

I also don't think that Nalan worries about staying in a particular kingdom if he needs to be elsewhere, as he was present at Gavilar's assassination, and then shows up on the Shattered Plains to pick up

Szeth

[Awesomness]

Amaram wants to bring the voidbringers  because he believes the Heralds will show up too. Nalan (obviusly) knows no herald will come to save the day (well, Taln may try, if he actually is who he claims to be). So he want´s to kill Amaram to stop him. 

I think Nalan didn´t go to kill Amaram himself because he was busy chasing and killing surgebinders, and Amaram is just a human, a minor threat.

[Oudeis]

Do we know Amaram was the target? I discuss what we know in this thread. Maybe he was just trying to win that battle for the other side. Maybe that spit of land is more important than we realize. Who was the other army, anyway? Maybe he had some entirely alternate purpose. Who knows?

[AerionBFII]

Ugh i am so on the fence about this...Amazing theory though!

 

Mraize said he was looking for the Sky Breakers but he never said he found them but if he did Helaran might have been going through some sort of initiation when he tried to kill Amaram. He already had Shard and Plate but no powers from what i recall. I think the Sky Breakers are nothing but a former shell of what they were, highly informed and well trained but i can hardly see Nin hunting down all Surge-Binders down but training his own.. sorry got off topic.

 

I have not read this in a while but didn't Mraize tell Shalan that her family had deep connections in the Ghostbloods?

Didn't he mention her father and her brother?? Any way my opinion is that Helaran was a Ghostblood but he was secretly searching out the Skybreakers..

[Patrick Star]

Do we know Amaram was the target? I discuss what we know in this thread. Maybe he was just trying to win that battle for the other side. Maybe that spit of land is more important than we realize. Who was the other army, anyway? Maybe he had some entirely alternate purpose. Who knows?

 

I'm not sure about this.  I feel like the leader of the opposing side would have been mentioned by now.

 

Ugh i am so on the fence about this...Amazing theory though!

 

Mraize said he was looking for the Sky Breakers but he never said he found them but if he did Helaran might have been going through some sort of initiation when he tried to kill Amaram. He already had Shard and Plate but no powers from what i recall. I think the Sky Breakers are nothing but a former shell of what they were, highly informed and well trained but i can hardly see Nin hunting down all Surge-Binders down but training his own.. sorry got off topic.

 

I have not read this in a while but didn't Mraize tell Shalan that her family had deep connections in the Ghostbloods?

Didn't he mention her father and her brother?? Any way my opinion is that Helaran was a Ghostblood but he was secretly searching out the Skybreakers..

 

It's possible that it was indeed the ghostbloods, but I feel like it's unlikely.  First off, Amaram identifies the ghostbloods as the culprits immediately, and I'm not sure if that actually being the case makes the most narrative sense.

 

The main reason that I don't think that the ghostbloods did it was because they want to capture Amaram, or at least they do in WoR.  Mraize specifically says that Amaram's life belongs to another (perhaps they were going to hand him off to Nalan?).  Helaran's actions do not indicate an intention for capturing him.  As I tacked on to my response, Amaram's leg got pinned and completely messed up.  Any number of factors could have led to a major artery in his leg being severed, causing him to bleed out.  Too risky for a capture mission.

 

Now, it is definitely possible that the Ghostbloods changed their mind after Kaladin killed Helaran (with Kaladin being the "another"), but I'm not really on board with that idea.  They would have to know about Kaladin being enslaved.  And if they knew about that, I get the feeling that the Ghostbloods would have heavily recruited Kaladin by playing off of his thirst for vengeance.  And the Ghostbloods aren't bound by the legality of their actions, so it should have been super easy for them to finish Amaram off while his leg was healing (which the Skybreakers couldn't do).

 

Now, it's definitely possible that Amaram identified Helaran as a Davar, and used the family's connection to make the ghostblood assumption.  That would be a logical chain of events.

[Oudeis]

I'm not sure about this.  I feel like the leader of the opposing side would have been mentioned by now.

 

First: Why? Helaran's identity was barely hinted at in the first book; several people guessed it before the second book came out, and kudos to them. Why do we have to assume that if something were going to be important several books down the line, we'd know more than we do? And we do know quite a bit. Eshonai is hugely important; she was one of the five people who decided to assassinate Gavilar. And the closest we get to knowing much about her is that one chapter is titled with her name, and a very brief scene in that same chapter.

 

The Highprince was almost certainly Vamah (if you'll read this post on the thread I mentioned before, it collects all the pertinent data I could find in the two relevant chapters from Way of Kings). And the leader was named Hallaw.

 

Well, anyway, maybe you're right. Maybe the breadcrumbs we have gotten are just there to make the world seem more developed. I'm certainly not positive that we know why Helaran was there. I'm just saying, I'm not convinced that "kill Amaram" was the goal.