POV: kelsier
Summary
Kelsier turns up a dusty wine bottle from a false-backed drawer behind Camon's old bar and pours three cups for himself, Dockson, and Vin. The trick to finding things, he tells them, is never to stop looking — there is always another secret. There are problems to clean up after the meeting. He needs another Smoker now that Clubs has walked, and he needs more atium; the supply Dockson took eight months to steal is already half-gone, spent buying a certain contract and paying for the murders at Tresting's plantation. Vin does not drink her wine. She does not drink anything she did not prepare herself. They are interrupted by the Smoker himself. Clubs limps back down the stairs, having waited for Breeze to leave the building so he could trust his own decision without a Soother in the room. He is in, he tells Kelsier — not for the money, but because the Lord Ruler is going to get him eventually anyway and he would rather go out spitting at the man than waiting on him. Then he leaves to ready his shop for guests.
Kelsier takes Dockson and Vin up to the lair's flat roof under the Luthadel night mists. He needs more atium, and the way to get it is to take it from one of the Great Houses — also the first move in the long house-war he intends to start. Dockson names Venture as the strongest target, with a study safe on the third floor of Keep Venture behind a southern balcony and about a dozen hazekillers guarding the keep beyond its regular soldiery. Kelsier strips down to a loose shirt and bare feet, ties on a belt with two sheaths and a row of vials, swallows a fresh dose of metals, throws on a Mistborn cloak of overlapping ribbon, and steps off the edge of the building into the dark.
He travels across the city by Steelpushing off coins and roof-fixtures and Ironpulling himself toward larger metal anchors, tin burning low to thin the mists for his eyes and ears. He pulls himself toward Keep Venture's bronze roof — a long upward arc that ends with him hitting the wall feet-first and climbing the last few floors off a coin and a window fitting — and lands on the upper service walkway behind a startled guard whose throat he cuts before the alarm can rise. He drops to a third-floor balcony and Steelpushes the two guards stationed on it off in opposite directions over the rail, deliberately loud, because one purpose of the night's visit is to make sure the keep knows it was struck. The southern study is empty. He locates the real safe behind a small painted panel in the wall, snaps its catch with a flared Ironpull, braces against the opposite wall and tears the box free of its mountings. Two more guards rush in. He Pushes one of their own swords through one of them, pulls and Pushes a heavy dagger through the other.
Then the hazekillers arrive. All eight of them, in grey robes, dueling canes, wooden shields, no metal anywhere on their bodies for him to push or pull, working as a coordinated unit that has been trained for this exact fight. He flings his coin pouch into one of them and Pushes the coins inside through the shield and out a stained-glass window with the man riding it. The rest close in. He tears a silvery paperweight off the study desk and turns it into a flying weapon — Pushing it and Pulling it through the room one anchor at a time, breaking shoulders and skulls, never quite letting it land, until only one hazekiller is left and that one drops his cane and runs.
A larger party then pours into the study behind him — full Allomancers, several Thugs among them — spraying coins. He throws himself out a floor-to-ceiling conservatory window into the night, drags the safe behind him by an Ironpull tether, smashes it open on the cobbles below, and finds a small pouch of atium beads inside. He pockets it along with some gems and bank notes and runs into the mist toward Clubs's shop, pewter burning hard to hold off the pain of his bruised side and arm. He notes, with a kind of grim satisfaction, the mangled corpse of the hazekiller he sent through the window on his way out. As far as Kelsier is concerned, any night that ends with a pile of dead noblemen is a good one.