POV: vin
Summary
Vin crouches with Kelsier on a Luthadel rooftop in a quiet rain after retrieving his coin pouch, looking across at Kredik Shaw's forest of dark spires. The damp does not seem to trouble Kelsier, so she does not let it trouble her; the rain will mute their approach. Even before he names their target she can feel something seeping out of the palace — a flat, smothering ache that drains the hope out of her. Kelsier explains it: the Lord Ruler radiates emotion the way a powerful Soother does, and he has her burn copper until the feeling dies away. Their target is a small interior chamber that the Lord Ruler visits in person once every three days. Kelsier tried for it three years ago — the job that broke him into the Pits — and he is going in again with no plan tonight, betting that the suddenness of the strike will buy them what planning could not. When she asks why he still needs the room when he supposedly has the Eleventh Metal to kill the Lord Ruler, he gives her no answer. He hands her a fistful of coins and tells her to keep her atium vial within reach.
They drop off the roof and run the wet cobbles, Vin flaring tin to see and copper to stay invisible to bronze, and cut down two door guards at a service entrance before either can shout. Inside the corridor Kelsier elbows a third soldier into the wall and ducks into a guard chamber where a hazekiller squad is half through a meal. He spins a wrenched-loose candelabrum like a quarterstaff while Vin — startled into action — fans coins out by Steelpush and drops four men in two passes. A second squad pours in through the opposite door. Kelsier rips every lantern from its bracket, blackens the room, and finishes the rest by sound. Vin stands in the dark with the dagger shaking in her grip, Reen's absence in the room a presence of its own; she has just killed four men, and she will have to get used to that, because she made him bring her.
They Steel-leap down a corridor of side passages — the palace garrison wears no metal on its uniforms, hazekillers all — and arrive at the central chamber. Six braziers light a domed room whose walls are tooled in silver-inlay murals of the Lord Ruler — depicting a mountain, a cavern, an unidentified radiance, and a shape of black behind it. At the centre stands a small shrine-like building, a building inside the building. Kelsier opens its oaken door. A Steel Inquisitor is waiting inside.
Two more glide in through side archways. The first catches Kelsier by the throat and lifts him off the floor, names him to his face as the Survivor of Hathsin, turns on Vin, and demands to know which nobleman fathered her — saying it will let Kelsier die quickly if she answers. Kelsier coughs a feint into bringing the creature close, drives a dagger into its neck, shatters its forearm at the bone, and as he drops he Steel-Pushes his coin pouch into her chest hard enough to throw her clear of the chamber, past both of the remaining Inquisitors and out into the corridor before they realise what has happened.
She runs blind. One Inquisitor takes off after her, Pulls the pouch in her hand to yank her off her feet, and stalks down the corridor to her like he has all the time in the world. She drops the pouch, ducks into a side shrine, and finds an altar, candelabra, and a bowl of small triangular blades on a pillar. The Inquisitor tears a candelabrum from her hands as easily as taking a stick from a child, then scoops out a fistful of the sharp triangles — cutting his own palm bloody on them without seeming to notice — and snaps them at her by Steelpush with a strength she cannot resist. Hiding behind the altar she has the sense to look for non-metal cover, finds a thick leather-bound book on the floor beside it, and downs Kelsier's gift vial of atium in one gulp.
The Inquisitor's atium shadow steps around the altar before he does, and she catches the triangles he flings on the book's cover, every one. Then a hundred shadow-selves bloom from the creature's body. He has atium too. She slips past a squad of hazekillers in the corridor without a single weapon touching her, weaving on atium-sight through twelve men's swings as if invincible — and rounds a corner straight onto the second Inquisitor, who drives a wooden axe set with obsidian teeth into her side. The wound is the slow kind that kills.
Pewter-flared and dazed, she stumbles out into the rain through a side door and Pulls herself up into the spires by Steelpushing off them in sequence. The night is black, the mist gone in the downpour, and she has to navigate by sense of metal alone. She tricks the pursuing Inquisitor by Pushing the triangle-pierced book one way while she Pulls herself another — and listens, from a wet spire across the rain, for him to strike the wrong one. He does. She tears a strip from her shirt to bind the gash, sees how bad it is by tin-sight, and knows pewter is the only thing keeping her conscious.
Then she hears him jumping spire to spire again. He cannot see her, hear her, or sense her Allomancy through her copper. He finds her anyway. Her grip gives out and she drops a short way onto the slick roof of a smaller spire-tower, crawls into the corner where two towers meet, and lies in a puddle of ashy rainwater waiting for him to finish her. He lands above her and steps closer. Then a sound like breaking branches — and she is in someone else's arms. Warm arms. Not the Inquisitor's. She looks up at a face she half-recognises, lets it pull her close, and goes.