POV: vin
Summary
Vin climbs a tall tenement near Clubs's shop to where Spook is keeping early-evening watch — the slot of the night when house raids most often start. From the slanted roof she flares tin and sees the glow off in the distance: Keep Hasting is falling tonight, Elariel on the attack, and no one in the city is fighting before dark, as if the Great Houses still feel they have to pretend the Lord Ruler is not watching. She thinks through what the crew has actually achieved against what they set out to do, and admits that even if the strike on the palace never happens, three Great Houses gone and the rest gutted is already a victory the skaa can carry for decades.
She tells Spook, with apology, that Elend broke things off but that she still loves him; he says he had seen as much. She asks whether she can keep his handkerchief, and he shrugs yes. He hands her one Tineye rule before they part: tin gives you everything at once — sight, sound, the wood under your hand, the rats below — and the trick is choosing what to ignore. Kelsier lands behind them with his usual lack of warning and collects Vin for Marsh's second meeting at the Soothing station he is supposedly scouting that night.
They drop to street level to save metal and walk most of the way. He thanks her, quietly, for what she said about Mare up on the kitchen roof — given the choice he would rather believe his wife did not betray him, and she has handed him a reason to choose that — and asks, in return, whether Elend's dismissal might have been an attempt to scare her out of the city for her own protection. She tells him she does not know any more, that he and the crew have ruined her certainties, and he says, smiling, that he is not sorry about it.
On the way he stops at a skaa tenement. The doorkeeper opens to him as Lord Kelsier; the families packed sleeping on the floor wake under stove-light and reach to touch his scarred arms, whispering of the Survivor and of the Lord of the Mists. He promises another shipment of food now that Hasting is gone and lets parents push their sons forward to be blessed. Vin stands back and watches him love these people — genuinely, not as performance — the way a father loves his children, not as equals; and reminds herself that he has been doing this two houses a night and that, to him, it counts as the easy part of the work.
They reach the Soothing station Marsh is using as cover; a faint light burns in the agreed window. They go up the stairwell. Kelsier is in the middle of saying he hopes the Garrison stays out long enough for the war to keep running when he stops dead in the doorway. Blood is pooling around his boot. The body in the centre of the room has been flayed, dismembered, and the skull crushed — an Inquisitor's work, fresh enough that the Inquisitor may still be near. Kelsier kneels over Marsh frozen, hand half-raised. Vin has to call him twice before he comes back to himself. On her way to the window she palms a hollow table leg from a desk, with a folded sheet of paper tucked inside.
Back in Clubs's kitchen Dox reads the note aloud. Marsh writes that the Inquisitors are watching him and have begun asking the wrong questions — he has been pressing for the secret weakness the other obligators only whisper about, and is sure now both that the weakness exists and that he has pushed too far. He prepares the note in case he is taken. Kelsier stands at the cupboard in his usual lean but with none of the usual levity, dressed in black above and below the mistcloak, looking — Vin catches herself thinking — almost menacing in proper light. He gives orders. Renoux pulls out tomorrow under the prepared retreat-to-his-lands story, with a Thug and a Tineye to bring him back once the boats are abandoned a day out. The shop is to be empty within fifteen minutes, apprentices included, and to relocate to the backup lair only he and Dox knew about. He will join them in two days. Marsh knew everything, he says, and an Inquisitor will have had it all out of him before the killing. They struck him where it could not have hurt worse, and he intends, he says, to do likewise. He walks out into the mist alone.
South of the city, in the cramped rifts of the Pits of Hathsin, an older condemned skaa called Walin forces himself down through cracks barely wider than his body, counting bodies and days. There is no light this deep and only two directions; he gropes the walls for the rough budding of crystal and tries not to count how many days he is past his last find. On his seventh day his fingers find the ring of toothed crystals and, deep in the pocket they line, the small rock sphere of a geode. The crystals tear his arm open getting it out. He climbs back up expecting whips and finds instead, at the lip of the rift in the night mists, a man in a shredded black cloak who hauls him out by the wrist. The man tells him the guards are dead and the prisoners loose, tells him to crack the geode and sell the metal inside in whatever city's underground he reaches first, and — when Walin asks — names himself as a survivor.
Kelsier climbs down into the rift alone. He looks at his scars in the dark. He could not have done this when he was first down here, but her dreams are reason enough now. He burns tin and the rift opens up around him; he burns iron, and faint blue lines reach down into the dark at every pocket still seeded with residual atium. He gives the first line the lightest of Pulls. Something shatters in the dark beneath him.
This is the plan he has been carrying since the morning he killed Mare's taskmasters and first noticed iron pointing at the pockets. Allomancy used near a geode crystal breaks it; the Lord Ruler sends condemned skaa down here instead of Allomancers for exactly that reason, and the crystals take roughly three centuries to regrow. He intends, tonight, to take the Final Empire's only source of atium off the board for the next three of them.