POV: kelsier
Summary
Kelsier takes over Clubs's kitchen the moment Vin brings back the news from the Garrison gate. Orders go out in bursts. Breeze is sent to make the round of every hideout he and Kelsier have ever used together, in case Yeden is taken alive and made to give names; Dockson holds the shop with all three of Clubs's Tineyes on the roof and a bolt-lair pre-routed; an apprentice rides for Manor Renoux with a warning, though Kelsier hopes Renoux does not have to abandon his post. Ham is sent back to the Garrison to take the commission Sertes just offered him — as an ear, not a sword. Kelsier asks Sazed how much speed he has stored in his metalminds and gets the answer two or three hours; not enough. He will go alone. Vin appears at the back door in the clothes she wore to the Garrison that morning, a pack on her back, and refuses to be left. Kelsier pours her a pouch of pewter beads, tells her to swallow five for a start and to call out if she needs more, and tells her to take as much water as her pack will hold.
They leave on foot at a flat run in mistcloaks. The cloaks take the eyes off them on the Luthadel streets — even noblemen know to clear the way — and at the north gate Kelsier simply jumps the wall, his Allomantic weight crushing the first guard underfoot on the way over. Vin flares hers, drops a coin to lift, and clears the second. On the highway beyond he speeds up rather than slowing. She realises he does not mean to walk to the caves, or even jog to them. He means to run the entire two-week canal trip in one go.
Their world contracts to the pewter drag — flared pewter as the only difference between her body and an empty husk, road blurring underfoot, canalmen's tents flickering past in the mist with their barges tied up for the night. They pass two mistwraiths on the road; Kelsier does not slow for either of them, and she swallows her startle and keeps running. Time becomes formless. She drinks the ridiculous amount of water he orders her to drink, swallows more beads on the slow-downs, never lets the pewter go out. When dawn comes she is already past coherent thought. She runs because she does not know how to do anything else.
By mid-morning he stops her on the road. She nearly collides with him. He has to flare her tin for her and warn her not to extinguish her pewter yet or she will fall unconscious; her body ought to have given out hours back. Over a hilltop short of Holstep they look down into a valley speckled with corpses and find the rest of the answer. The Valtroux Garrison got there first. The cave army took the Holstep Garrison and then started home, and was caught marching. The peasants are throwing up their hands; the imperial soldiers are killing them anyway.
Kelsier starts off the ridge in the direction of the killing in the valley. Vin catches his arm, on her knees, and reminds him that he is not invincible — that he cannot stop an army by himself, that the men below cannot run on swift feet the way he can. There are still men in the caves who can actually be saved if the Lord Ruler's forces have not gotten there yet. He bows his head and goes.
The cavern is dark and silent. Kelsier concludes she was wrong and that no one stayed behind, then sees her streak off across the floor toward a flicker of torchlight he could not have spotted from twice the distance. The guard at the inner corridor is Captain Demoux, at the head of about two thousand soldiers who refused to march under Yeden out of misplaced loyalty to Kelsier himself. They thought they were being loyal. Kelsier tells him the rest of the army is dead and walks the survivors out into the mists that night.
Far from the caves with the survivors bedded down, Kelsier sits alone on a tree stump in the mists, Vin asleep at his feet on her mistcloak. Yeden's head was already on a spear by the roadside before they reached the valley. The army was the centre of the plan and the army is gone. He was the one who told these men they had supernatural help.
An old man hobbles out of the mist and sits on the stone beside him. Kelsier does not at first know him. The man is Mennis, the old skaa he sat with on Tresting's plantation the night he killed Tresting himself. Mennis is the one who has been preparing the survivors to march — bedrolls, weapons, two weeks of food each. He tells Kelsier that Yeden was a man too easily impressed and his generals had argued him into a night strike against the Holstep walls to harden the men in actual combat; that the soldiers chose their own deaths; that by skaa measure this is the largest victory the people have seen in decades, perhaps centuries. He counsels Kelsier to walk away.
Kelsier hears in the advice the thing he is actually fighting — ten centuries of resignation deep enough that the slaughter of a cave army gets entered in the ledger as a skaa win. He decides, quietly, smiling because that is how he wins, that he is not finished.