POV: kelsier
Summary
Kelsier takes Dockson, Sazed, Ham, and a reluctantly tolerated Vin back to Camon's old lair. The door hangs broken from its upper hinge. Inside, the entire crew has been massacred — bodies dismembered, chests caved in by what looks like bare hands, dark blood pooled across most of the floorboards. The attack had happened only that morning and the room still smells of it. Vin looks at Ulef dead at her feet, the boy who once almost was her friend and in the end betrayed her, and finds she does not weep. The other crewmembers had abused her, fed her, sheltered her, hated her — and now had been pulled apart in their own lair. She does not know which feeling she is meant to have first. Dockson reads the wounds and names the thing out loud: an Inquisitor did this, and probably the same one that took an interest in Vin two months back. Only twenty in the empire, half of those out of the city at any time; the coincidence is too tight. In the long sleeping room they find Camon's new crewleader Milev bound upright to a chair, eye sockets emptied, the manner of death slow and deliberate.
Sazed stands by the wall and prays a Cazzi death-chant over the bodies — the rite of a long-dead people, he tells Vin later, who believed prayer freed the spirit back to the mountain of souls. He believes in all of them, he says when she asks; he picked this one because it felt appropriate. Vin catches Kelsier and Dockson talking aside and flares tin to listen in; she catches the words "three streets west of Fourwell Crossroads" before Sazed sets a quiet, disapproving hand on her shoulder. He has guessed what she was doing — which tells her something about how much he himself knows of Allomancy. Kelsier sends the others home with Ham and goes alone.
He walks through Fourwell Crossroads — past the soot-skinned copper fountain of the Lord Ruler standing over a defeated Deepness — to a smaller, sadder beggars' intersection three streets west. He had ordered the new crewleader to throw Camon out as a beggar rather than kill him, and Dockson has been checking that it took. Camon is not in the square. He is in a side alley nearby, killed by the ritual hook-hanging the Ministry reserves for those it judges to have misused Allomancy. The implication is plain: Camon broke under torture and admitted to having used Vin to scam the obligators. The Inquisitor is on her scent.
A foot scrapes the cobbles behind him. He flares steel and sprays coins; Vin, who has followed him, ducks under them and deflects with her own Push. He pulls her into the alley and starts to dress her down for trailing him — and feels her reflexively Soothe his anger before she even realises she has done it. He notes, half in admiration, how good she has become at this without anyone teaching her, and tells her gently that she does not have to do it to him. It is bad manners to touch the emotions of your friends, he says, and the nobility will take her for an insult if she does it in formal company. She nods. He shows her Camon's swinging corpse and tells her what the hook means, what Camon must have admitted, and what it does and does not change about her part in the job. The Ministry knows only that some skaa servant girl used Allomancy on a prelan; it would take a rare obligator to connect that to a young noblewoman in court silks. As for the Inquisitor himself — he has no answer for her question. They have already drawn enough attention here, he says, and they go.