Prologue
Summary
A plantation north of Luthadel under a sky that drops ash instead of rain. Lord Tresting stands on a hill patio in a new suit shipped down by canal from the capital, parading his workers for an obligator sent personally by Lord Venture. The skaa below move with the slow, head-down apathy of people who have been beaten into it; Tresting remarks that one would think a thousand years of practice would have made them more efficient. He boasts that he loses only a half-dozen skaa a month to beatings and exhaustion, and that runaways stopped being a problem after he executed the families of the first few. The obligator — a senior prelan whose facial tattoos run nearly back to his ears — listens, nods, and then quietly tells him that the suspicions about his nighttime use of skaa women have been addressed: he is too useful, and tidy enough about those messes, to warrant a Steel Inquisitor visit. The prelan promises Tresting a favourable report to Lord Venture and even hints that a man of his efficiency might one day move up into the capital. Tresting, flush with prospects, decides which girl from the fourteenth hovel he will send for that night, and turns back to the fields — only to lock eyes, for a single startled moment, with a straight-backed skaa whose stare carries something he has never seen on a worker's face before. The skaa smiles at him, then is gone. Tresting cannot find him again in the crowd. He orders the southern crews beaten anyway and goes back to entertaining his guest.
Past dusk a travel-worn stranger walks into one of the skaa hovels among Tresting's people, eating their bland soup and trading rumour. A skaa elder named Tepper berates him for skipping the day's fieldwork; the stranger answers that the master flogs men for coughing wrong anyway, then casually opens the door on the night mist until Tepper himself begs him to close it. Out of his pack the stranger shakes breads, fruits, and even cured sausages — all of it lifted that afternoon from Tresting's own pantry — and the hovel falls on the food in silence. The other skaa cluster around when the talk turns to the far north, where a Lord Renoux is said to have forbidden unauthorised beatings on his estates, and is even rumoured to be considering paying his workers wages. The old man Mennis sits with the stranger by the wall, asks him why he smiles so often, and gets a quiet answer back: the Lord Ruler thinks he has claimed laughter for himself, and the stranger is disinclined to let him have it.
The conversation breaks off when distant screams come on the breeze — a mother named Jess, whose pretty daughter has been sent for at the manor. Mennis flatly tells the stranger that Tresting has the girls killed once he has finished with them, by the Lord Ruler's own command, to keep half-breed children from being noticed. The stranger goes still, and then smiles his unsettling smile, says he has not come to lead any rebellion but to stir a little trouble, and walks out into the mist no skaa is willing to enter.
Mennis lies awake the rest of the night fearing what Tresting will do to the rest of them when he is interrupted at his evening pleasures. What comes instead, in the grey early light, is Jess's daughter at her mother's door, returned untouched, and a thread of black smoke twisting above the hill where the manor used to be. The great house is a burnt-out shell; Tresting lies inside with a knife wound in his chest, the obligator beside him, and all the household soldiery dead with them. The girl says the man who saved her had layered scars running up his arms past the elbow, and that he threw a torch into the building on the way out. Some of the gathered skaa whisper that he must have been a mistwraith; Mennis remembers that he walked out into the mist and walked back unharmed, and that no one is meant to leave the Pits of Hathsin alive — but those scars are what that place leaves.
The stranger crosses the open ground past Mennis on his way out, still smiling. New days are coming, he tells the old skaa quietly, and is gone. Mennis turns to the others and tells them what they all already know: they cannot stay. The Lord Ruler will assume that they did this, and there will be no mercy from his obligators or his koloss. He sends them east toward the caves where travellers say rebel skaa shelter, days of walking and nights spent in the mist away. Tepper protests at the thought of sleeping in the open mist; Mennis tells him there is no other choice. The stranger's name, he eventually gathers, is Kelsier.