POV: vin
Summary
Vin reads the last installment of the logbook in one sitting in the Renoux gardens — the narrator camped above his cavern on the eve of going in, his fingers shaking with cold and dread, Rashek still glaring at him across the fire and the packmen still lifting boulders out of the trail one-handed in feats that have begun to frighten him. He writes, on the verge of the Well of Ascension, about the temptation in front of him — the power to fulfil any wish of his heart, an ability no man should hold — and about how he longs, when this is over, simply to be obscure. Vin turns the page and finds the booklet blank.
She goes hunting for Sazed in the library, then in the kitchen, where she finds him in his other capacity as Lord Renoux's steward, working through the household's food stores. He bows her into the side gardens to speak privately and tells her there is no further translation: the journal ends there, before the cavern. She is furious about the gap — the man went in, came out changed beyond recognition, and never wrote another word — and Sazed simply guesses that the power changed him, or that record-keeping stops mattering when you have stopped being mortal. He admits, quietly, that he has already sent a translated copy to a hiding place his fellow Keepers know to check, so that even if he dies the new knowledge does not.
They walk back through the eastern garden, plainer than the southern one and quieter for it, and Vin says out loud what has been sitting in her chest since the executions — that everything she has come to like about her current life is about to end. The crew will scatter; Kelsier has already hinted that her training is nearly done; she goes to balls with Elend knowing she is skaa, knowing it is partly her job to bring his house down, knowing that Shan is planning something she has not been able to flush out; and even if they survive the Final Empire itself they will spend the rest of their lives running from Inquisitors. Sazed tells her, gently, simply to enjoy what she has, and offers her the Astalsi doctrine of luck — each person born with a finite store of misfortune, every bad turn therefore a kind of blessing because it is one less to come. She finds it as one-sided as the religions he tried on Kelsier and tells him so.
The conversation drifts to Feruchemy. She gets him to admit how he saved her from the Inquisitor in the rain — strength stored in a pewtermind, a thrown stone delivered with the force of many men — and asks, on impulse, whether she could burn one of his Feruchemical stores. He undoes one of his oversized earrings and gives her its tiny pewter backing; she swallows it and burns. She can sense a second reserve behind her ordinary pewter, faint and walled off, present but completely beyond her reach. Sazed recognises the description: it is how it feels to a Feruchemist to try to draw on someone else's stores. Allomancers cannot steal what is not theirs. The carriage to the crew meeting has already arrived; they hurry back inside.
Kelsier comes in the other way, coin-jumping onto Renoux's own balcony at night because his face is now too well known to walk in his own front door. He swings inside, soot-knee'd from the drainage tunnel he used to escape Keep Lekal, and joins the gathering at Renoux's desk. The kandra himself sits in the back corner where his contract puts him, present without taking part. The centerpiece on the desk is a detailed map of Luthadel smuggled out by Marsh: every one of thirty-four Soothing stations pinned, every Inquisitor raid logged with a date, every Canton-of-interest district marked. A note explains the provenance — the high prelans, spooked by the house war, handed it to him personally and asked him to scout sites for additional Soothers to keep the city sedated. They have a few hours with it before it has to go back inside the hollow table-leg the Canton of Orthodoxy hired Clubs to repair.
Vin leans across the map and pins one of the Inquisitor dates. It is yesterday. Kelsier and Dockson exchange a look and tell her: Theron's crew. The last thread back to her life before Kelsier — the team that had been running the same kind of ministry con Camon's crew did — gone, like the others, with no survivors. She goes visibly sick.
The crew works on. Sazed will copy the map at speed and memorise it for the Keepers before it goes back. Kelsier proposes that they not merely avoid the stations but, in time, hit every one of them in a single night by hiring ten thieving crews to spread the work — over a hundred Ministry Mistings taken off the board in hours. Dockson takes the action item, on the condition that timing is set carefully because the Inquisitor retaliation will be massive. Ham reports that the hidden remnants of the army are doing better than expected — they consider themselves the more loyal half of the army because they did not march out with Yeden — and Breeze grumbles, as ever, about being made to visit them himself. Kelsier tells him simply to bear with it. When the question turns to Vin and House Venture, she meets his eyes and lies cleanly that she has nothing. He cannot read her, and that itself is telling.
Late that night, unable to sleep and now too famous even to walk his own commandeered halls, Kelsier stands a while on the balcony, gets gently scolded by Sazed via the watching guard, and invites Sazed in for a religion. Sazed offers the Bennet — seafaring cartographers whose captains were also priests, whose faith taught that once all of the world was catalogued mankind would find peace and harmony. Kelsier is not in the market for peace and harmony tonight. He asks instead for the Valla, the sect that outlived every other faith into the Lord Ruler's dominion despite losing their entire religious council in the first conquest — the people who kept fighting after every realistic ground for hope had been taken from them. Sazed tells him belief is often strongest when it should be weakest. Kelsier nods and lets him go.