POV: vin
Summary
Vin and the rest of the crew walk back from the Fountain Square executions to Clubs's kitchen in near silence. No one touches the baywraps a maid has thoughtfully covered on the table; the headache from her pewter drag has gone strangely quiet inside her own head, dwarfed by what they have just watched.
Kelsier restarts the plan. With the Garrison gone, the lever becomes the nobility. Breeze lays out the logic: a few thousand troops cannot take the palace and the treasury unless the Great Houses are already busy tearing one another apart, so the house war has to be pushed past the point of return. Kelsier adds that he does not want the war to end at all — the nobility are what actually grinds the skaa, and if enough top houses fall, the whole Final Empire may shake itself apart. Dockson confirms the line of attack: the aristocracy is a financial machine, and the way to break a Great House is to starve its accounts. Breeze and Dox will pull old aliases out of retirement for solitary house calls; Vin is to keep watching from inside the parties and seed bad information.
Then the room's eyes turn on her, and she realises the houses they mean are at the top — House Venture, with one of its most important members already letting her dance with him at every ball. The fact that she has been told to stay away from Elend and is now being told to mine him for his house's finances is not lost on her, but the executions are still close enough to override the resentment. She agrees to see what she can find.
Sazed arrives, on time as ever, with two pieces of business. The two thousand survivors of the army are still hidden in the Renoux warehouses and cannot stay there indefinitely; Kelsier sets Dox and Ham to slip them into Luthadel in small squads, each squad believing it is the only remnant left so that any one of them being caught cannot give away the rest. Ham is told to keep recruiting and double the force within two months, and to sell the cave army as a success rather than a slaughter, since it did at least pull the Garrison out of the city. Second, Sazed hands over a letter from Marsh: in the city, with news, with a meeting place set for tonight.
Kelsier takes Vin out to scout an abandoned shell in the Twists. They settle on the upper floor of a derelict across the street and watch the dusk go to mist. Vin picks at the rotting windowsill and finally asks the question that has been sitting under everything since the square: there is a piece of the plan he is still not telling them, the part about the Lord Ruler himself. She felt his Soothing today through her own copper, something she is sure should not be possible. He waves her off — the Eleventh Metal will take care of him — and when she pushes harder, admits the metal is real and the old legends real, but that he has no idea yet how to use it. He thinks the Lord Ruler is more man than god, kept up by armies and wealth. She does not believe him.
The conversation drifts to Feruchemy — internal only, traded out of the user's own body, capable of stranger things than Allomancy but bounded by the fact that the metal is only a vessel — and to atium as the one answer to any single Feruchemist. He hands her a bead of it in case Marsh's meeting turns out to be a trap. The casual passing-around startles her into noticing she has stopped flinching at its price; Kelsier says, quietly, that he has not, and she remembers the white scratches he keeps hidden under sleeves and gloves now that his face is too famous to show.
She also pins him down on the ninth metal he has been letting her avoid. It is gold. He files a flake off a boxing, swallows one himself, and lets her try. She burns it and is suddenly in two places: a watchful, half-starved child who never trusted anyone, and a harder, looser-living woman who drinks from cups other people have poured. The two reach across the room and touch each other's faces, and then the metal is spent and Vin is on the floor with her back to the wall, shaking. Kelsier explains: gold is atium's complement, a glimpse sideways rather than forward — the person you might have been. His own teacher Gemmel had called a gold-shadow someone who did not exist but could have. She decides quietly that she will not burn it again if she can help it.
Marsh arrives shortly after the mists thicken, and they cross to the meeting building. In the half-light Vin sees what he has done to himself for the cover: the eye-rimming tattoos of a Ministry acolyte, with the thick red line down one side of the face that marks the Canton of Inquisition. He has gone straight at the Inquisitors' own arm of the church, and the tattoos will mark him for the rest of his life either as an obligator or as a fraud. He brushes off Vin's alarm — there was not much of a life to keep before this — and asks them to be quick.
His infiltration has gone almost too well; his knowledge and standing as a noble-blood Seeker have already made him conspicuous. The news is worth the risk. The Ministry runs hidden Soothing stations across Luthadel — dozens of them, concentrated in the skaa slums — each a team of Soothers flattening everyone's emotions around them, with a Smoker hiding the team and a Seeker watching for any Allomancer who burns nearby. It explains why recruitment in Luthadel has felt like wading uphill. Marsh promises a list of station addresses if he can manage one, and asks Kelsier not to waste the advantage by being clever with it too soon.
On the Inquisitors themselves, he has less but enough to matter. They appear to have every Allomantic power, so they were almost certainly Mistborn before whatever was done to them; they are long-lived but not immortal; new ones have to be recruited from the noble ranks because the old ones do, eventually, die of age. They are people, only changed. Kelsier takes the point — if they age, they can be killed. Marsh adds that the Inquisitors and the regular obligators do not get along; the lord prelan runs the church on paper, but the Inquisitors think they should.
Kelsier thanks him as he leaves. Marsh tells him, flatly, that he is not doing this for him, and is gone. Kelsier stands a long moment watching the empty doorway, and Vin believes that he means the gratitude. Then he gathers her up: House Lekal is throwing another ball in a few days, and she has work to do.