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The duel begins in the cleared pocket at the crossroads with both Kelsier and the Inquisitor burning atium and reading one another's shadows. Kelsier leads with daggers and a kick off the creature's face; he Pulls an unfortunate soldier toward himself with iron and then pivots, swinging the man on the invisible tether like a stone on a chain into the Inquisitor. The creature shrugs the impact off, comes back up smiling under a thin line of blood across its eye-tattoos, and tears an entire iron prison cage off its cartwheels. It hurls the cage at Kelsier from a few paces away with a building at his back; he threads his own Push through the open doorway, lands inside the cage in midair, holds himself at its centre with outward Pushes, and rides it into the wall. Then he Pushes outward with everything he has, bursts the cage from inside, and throws the bars back at their thrower in a stream of metal.

The duel turns. The Inquisitor is stronger than him, but the air around them fills with bits of metal — coin pouches, sword caps, dagger blades, broken bars — and Kelsier keeps them all moving in atium-fanned arcs through Pulls and Pushes that look closer to a swarm of birds than to combat. Vin, up the alley brickwork now to see better, realises she has had him wrong: this is what he is good at, this is what he chose to teach her in steel and iron, and he has been holding back from showing it. The creature has to keep slapping things out of the air; its escape jumps get blocked by larger pieces shot over its head.

Meanwhile Ham and his squad have been working back to front up the line of carts, with Ham himself at the spear-point doing the loud, blunt work of a Thug. They reach the last cart. The lock comes off; Renoux steps out and stands aside while his hired servants flee. Then Elend Venture of all people pushes through the soldier ring with a dueling cane and two bodyguards, grabs Renoux by his suit and demands to know which cage Valette was in. The Inquisitor uses the moment: leaps onto the cart's roof, drops down behind Renoux and buries an axe in his back, then turns on Elend next. Kelsier thinks once — *she loves him* — blasts himself across the courtyard, smashes the creature flat and gets his hands around its throat. The Inquisitor tries desperately to pry them loose. Marsh was right: the creatures fear dying. Kelsier shouts at Elend that the girl was not on the barges and gets him dragged off by his bodyguard.

In the alley Dockson climbs up beside Vin to ask after the field. She reports the cages empty, Renoux down with an axe in his back. Dox tells her, cryptically, that an axe in the back may or may not be fatal for him — he does not know much about kandra. The word lands in Vin's head and she files it.

The Inquisitor forces Kelsier's grip apart by raw strength and skids itself free with an iron Pull. Kelsier catches Renoux's eye across the square, nods once, and the kandra obligingly drops dead in front of everyone. Ham gets ordered out with what is left of the rebel squad. The duel continues. The Inquisitor stumbles back against the overturned cart and the spike-tips that jut from the back of its skull catch in the wood. Kelsier beats its face with a cobblestone — fueled, he thinks, more by rage than by pewter — until the spikes pin its head fast in the wood, kicks a corpse over to claim an obsidian axe, and beheads the creature in a single two-handed blow. The head stays where it is, pinned to the wood by its own spikes.

He turns to face the soldier ring with his scarred arms plain, the cloak torn off him at some point in the fight. The skaa packed up the slope of streets pick up a chant — Survivor of Hathsin — and the soldiers begin to look around realising they are surrounded by thousands. For a moment Kelsier thinks the city itself may be about to break.

Then it lands. Every skaa in earshot cringes under the kind of vast, snuffing Soothing only one man in the empire can produce. The hope dies, freshly lit and too new to hold. A single black carriage crests the hill above fountain square and rolls down a corridor the people open for it without being told. The Lord Ruler has come.

Even from the alley, against her own flared copper, Vin can still feel his touch on her emotions. He steps out of the carriage — tall, jet-haired, pale, no older than Kelsier himself, in a long black coat trailing behind him and every finger ringed (the rings themselves a quiet boast: metal does not threaten him). A small wedge of rebels in mismatched armour, one of Ham's Thugs at their head, breaks through the soldier line and rams a spear straight through him for a dead wife. He walks on with the spear sticking out of him as if neither it nor they are worth his attention. A second spear is driven through his back; he ignores it as well. An Inquisitor cuts the rebels down behind him.

He stops a pace from Kelsier with one shaft almost touching his chest, glances once at the headless Inquisitor on the wood, and remarks — almost in passing — that those are very hard to replace. He reminds Kelsier he was killed once already, in the Pits. Kelsier tells him, voice carrying across the square, that he stands for the one thing no tyrant has ever found a way to put down: hope.

A backhand of casual force takes off the left side of Kelsier's face. The Lord Ruler pulls one of the spears out of his own body and drives it down through Kelsier's chest. He yanks out the other on the walk back to the carriage, tosses it aside, and tells the soldiers, almost in afterthought, to begin the executions. Fresh Inquisitors come riding down out of the square above on black horses with obsidian axes.

Vin throws herself across the slaughter to him. There is no pulse. Half his face is gone; the other half still wears the trace of a smile. She begs him for the Eleventh Metal, for the plan, for any of it. Ham finds her there and tows her away. In the back of her head, the old voice — Reen — tells her he warned her this man would leave too.