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Kelsier crouches on a garden wall above Keep Tekiel in the mists and counts five Tineyes posted around the keep on watch — a quiet city-wide hardening of the Great Houses he can read from rooftops. Open assaults are out of the question now and his strikes have to lean on misdirection. He retrieves a sack from a stand of bushes by the garden well, hauls it onto a whitewashed veranda by the reflecting pool, and dumps the body of one Lord Charrs Entrone — a known Tekiel ally he killed coming out of a skaa bloodfight earlier in the evening — where the morning gardeners will be the ones to find him. Three different houses are arranged so as to be plausible killers, with a hint pointing at each. Whichever the Tekiel blame, they will spend the next month suspecting the wrong people.

Across rooftops he crosses the city to the Sootwarrens on the northern edge of Luthadel, wearing the noble disguise Dockson built for him — false beard, a prosthetic nose, lifts hidden in the shoes, paler skin under makeup. His informant is Hoid, a scrawny bald man smoking expensive tobacco who affects bad eyesight to make himself look harmless. Kelsier plays a domineering high lord and buys what the street has on House Renoux. The answer is nothing — no one has connected the house to anything dangerous. To get Hoid off the topic without revealing his interest in it, he buys a second piece of news on House Elariel instead, and is sold the fact that Lady Shan Elariel is a Soother who carries shaved brass in her right glove. Hoid also lets slip that a rumour has been put around tying Renoux to House Venture — that Renoux is said to have leverage over Elend Venture himself, who has been assigned to watch the Renoux niece at balls. Kelsier plants two false rumours of his own about Shan and goes.

In an alleyway he sheds the mistcloak and vest, rubs ash into his arms over the scars and into his face and beard, and stumbles out as a lame skaa beggar-informant to meet his next mark at Ahlstrom Square. The mark is Lord Straff Venture himself, House Venture's head, a known Tineye who stands unbothered in the mists with a pair of guards. Straff is late-tempered and openhanded with the back of his hand; he slaps Kelsier to the cobbles for keeping him waiting, then asks his business. Kelsier feeds him a half-true rumour about House Erikell underbidding Venture on swords, designed both to crack that supply line and to push Straff toward Renoux as a replacement. Straff is not biting on house gossip. What he wants is the Survivor of Hathsin, whom rumour places back in the city, and the Eleventh Metal no nobleman has ever heard of. He thinks some very clever person is impersonating the dead Survivor — there are ways, he hints, to take a man's likeness from his corpse, his bones. Kelsier takes the implication home with him.

At Mansion Renoux he finds Vin — still in the red gown, legs tucked under her like a thief — sitting up with Sazed and Lord Renoux in the parlour to hear how the night went. He reports that House Renoux remains in the clear but that he himself is increasingly what the nobility is nervous about. When Renoux asks how he keeps so flawlessly to the part of a noble lord, the kandra answers, mildly, that it is who he is. Sazed passes on Vin's news from the Elariel ball — that Elend left at the end of the evening with young lords of Venture's rival houses Lekal and Hasting — and Kelsier asks him to investigate further.

Vin catches Kelsier on the stairs with the one item she kept from Sazed. A slim book she pulled from Elend's stack, spined as a weather treatise but openly arguing against the Lord Ruler's rule. She is calling Elend by first name now, Kelsier notes silently, and she is holding the book back because she thinks Elend might be useful to them. Kelsier takes her into his room and identifies the book by content: The Book of the False Dawn by one Deluse Couvre, a text the Ministry never quite banned because they had the sense not to draw attention to it. He explains how the nobility get away with reading things like this when skaa do not — that the Lord Ruler treats them as the heirs of his lost friends, indulged in small treasons their grandfathers might have been hanged for. He also tells her plainly that proof Elend owns forbidden books would put him on an Inquisitor's hook and throw the city further into chaos, and that Shan had her steward in Elend's books for that exact reason.

Vin pales — she had not brought it up to have Elend killed but because he might be an ally. Kelsier tells her gently that young noblemen who read banned books are not anyone's allies; they are bored heirs being fashionable, and they never overthrow anything because they are still the people on top. She is to stay away from him. She nods. He sends her to bed, certain — though he does not say it — that of all things she might do, leaving Elend alone is the one she is least likely to.