POV: vin
Summary
Vin hangs in the mist above Clubs's safe house on three coins set as the legs of a tripod — one of them the bent coin she and Kelsier once duelled with — and wishes she could just become mist. He had asked her to trust him; the Lord Ruler struck him down with one casual blow. She compares it to Reen in her head and decides, bitterly, that at least Reen had always promised to leave. The mist gives her no answer when she asks it to take her.
Sazed calls up from the lookouts' ladder and she lets herself drop back to the rooftop. The night is quiet in the wrong way — hundreds of skaa dead in the square's massacre, hundreds more trampled escaping. She tells him she was wrong about Kelsier — he was a liar, he had no plan for the Lord Ruler at all. Sazed tells her, gently, that belief that only holds in fair weather is hardly belief; the skaa are already growing legends around Kelsier and he intends to come back and collect them. She asks after the rest. The others, he says, are downstairs deciding how to scatter to other cities; he himself must ride north to the Keeper places he cannot show her, to share the logbook and what they now know of Rashek. She hears it as one more person leaving.
Voices in the street. They cross the roof. A skaa man stands below with a lantern, calling neighbours out of their doors with words about the Survivor and the Lord of the Mists — the mists themselves, he tells them, are safe; the Lord Ruler could not really kill Kelsier; their dead are in the square unburied; if he came to this man tonight he can come to any of them. The crowd swells. Sazed fetches the others up the ladder — Ham, Breeze, Dockson, Spook, Clubs. Breeze writes the man off as one religious lunatic. Then Dox points to the rest of the city. A pocket of torchlight kindles east, another south, another by another slum, until the whole of Luthadel is glowing through the mist.
Dockson gets it first. The job was never going to be a small crew toppling the Final Empire — they were always too few. A whole city's population, on the other hand, could. Sazed notes, almost to himself, that Kelsier kept asking him what gives a religion its hold and was always told the same thing: believers with someone to feel passionate about. Dox says quietly that Kelsier had known from the start what the rest of them would never have agreed to — that he was going to have to die.
Vin asks where the warehouse is that Kelsier used for his informant meetings. Dox knows. They go. She breaks the lock with pewter and the lantern light spreads across stacked piles of swords, axes, staves and helmets — the reason Kelsier needed the Renoux front to buy weapons in such numbers. A voice at the back of the warehouse says, in Renoux's cadence, that there is more to it than that. A figure steps into the lantern with Kelsier's face on it, hollow and unsmiling. Ham catches Vin's shoulder before she can reach for him. The face turns transparent for a moment and they can see the bones through the skin.
A kandra — what a mistwraith grows into — under contract since the beginning. Kelsier hired it to take his bones once he was dead and walk them through the city as proof that the Lord Ruler could not really kill him. It walks the crew through the rest of the plan they did not know they were inside. Kelsier picked them — bureaucrat, politician, general — because every new nation needs men in those shapes. The army was for trained core, not for the army's own sake; the noble houses had to fall to leave a void; the Garrison had to be pulled out so the skaa would not be cut down before they could rise; he was using them and also training them. It points them to a sheet on a table, hands Vin a small pouch, and is gone.
The sheet is the city map Marsh had sent, divided and labelled in Kelsier's hand. Distribute the weapons from this warehouse and two like it in other slums. Breeze takes the Garrison and the gates first so the gates fall in peace. Ham takes the four houses that still keep armed retinues inside the walls. Dockson stays to arm the skaa coming in as word spreads. The Soothing stations should already be down — Renoux delivered the hit order to the assassin crews before coming for them — and Clubs is to lead the assault on the palace itself. When Ham asks why Clubs is in the army column, Clubs pulls up a trouser leg to show the old soldier's scar that gave him the limp.
Vin opens the pouch. Inside: a small sack of atium beads, the Eleventh Metal wrapped in paper, and a letter. Kelsier writes that he never figured out how the metal is supposed to work — it is safe to burn and does nothing visible, but the people needed something to believe in and this was the way to give it to them; that he had only ever been borrowing the years since Mare and was ready to give them back; that the others will need her now as their Mistborn against the assassins the surviving nobility will send; that Mare always wanted a daughter and he will tell her about Vin. Tucked further in the pouch she finds the drawing of the flower Mare used to keep with her.
The crew scatters. Dox starts ordering the first wave of armed skaa into runners and distributors as torches pour into the warehouse. Vin is the only one without a name on the map. Her original assignment was to kill the surviving high noblemen, and Kelsier cancelled it on her account. Sazed suggests, mildly, that perhaps it was her job to make him cancel it. She does not let that be the end of it. She files flakes off the Eleventh Metal, swallows them with a couple of atium beads, fills her pouch with pewter dust, breaks the stone heads off a fistful of arrows and pries chain links out of a hauberk for Steel anchors. She tells Sazed that Kelsier never could feel the Lord Ruler the way she can and that he did not know what he was sending the rebellion at. There is a chamber inside Kredik Shaw that Kelsier tried to reach twice and never did. Tonight, she says, she is going to find out what is inside it.