POV: vin
Summary
Vin walks up to the same palace door she and Kelsier attacked together, with the city behind her glowing yellow through the mist from a thousand fresh torches. Four skaa guards lower a spear at her. She tells them, quietly, that she knows them — men who went to mill and forge and finally to the Lord Ruler's colours to keep their families from starving — and names the new Square of the Survivor where the rebellion is gathering. A small Riot of their courage settles it; one of them tears the badge off his uniform and walks into the night, and the other three follow.
She steps inside, walks past a guardroom of startled men without touching any of them, and outruns the alarm by coin-Pushing along the bracket-lamps. She walks the last stretch — they will be waiting either way — and enters the dome-roofed central chamber. Two Inquisitors stand between her and the building-within-a-building.
She tosses a double handful of broken-headed arrowshafts threaded loosely with iron rings into the air and Pushes hard on the rings. The lead Inquisitor Pushes back, contemptuously; the rings strip free and shoot backward, but the arrowheads keep going on inertia and punch through him. The second takes a few in the legs. As she dashes past she throws pewter dust into his metal-sight and slots a glass dagger into his thigh through the blue-line confusion. She is inside.
The inner room is the den of a man who has lived too many lifetimes to throw anything away — dyed pelts on the walls, faded paintings, foreign trophies (a curved set of horns, a strange pair of wide flat shoes), a hearth at the centre. A pivoting chair turns and the man in it is wizened and liver-spotted, in his seventies. Kar — bloodied and somehow upright on the pierced leg — catches her from behind. Vin burns the Eleventh Metal at the old man and sees, beside him, a bearded contented stranger in fur-lined wool who looks like the younger man who killed Kelsier — and, beside herself, a wealthy young merchant. The metal burns out, the figures vanish, and Kar asks the Lord Ruler to keep her. A blow to the head puts her out.
Across the city in the north entryway of Keep Venture, Elend finds his father in the chaos of the rising, pulling on his coat in front of his guard captains and canalmasters. Straff is leaving with one narrowboat — the Garrison is gone, the gates are being taken, and something has happened at the Pits that the Lord Ruler will not forgive Venture for. Elend refuses to go with him. Straff smiles too readily and tells him to stay. Elend reads it cleanly: his father is setting him up to fall in his stead, in front of either the skaa or the Lord Ruler, and either way to be rid of him.
Elend decides to be in charge anyway. He sends the household — guards and servants both — to Keep Lekal under his own peace overture: their soldiers in exchange for sheltering Venture's people, because separately neither house can survive what is coming. He picks five of his best as an honour guard for himself. The captain asks where he is going. Elend tells him they are going to turn themselves in.
Vin wakes to a bucket of cold water in a bare three-walled cage cell, stripped to undergarments. Kar twists her arm until she swallows an unknown metal and burns it, and every other reserve she had vanishes — the Inquisitors have a twelfth metal of their own, and it strips an Allomancer bare. Alone in the cell, with the Lord Ruler's Soothing pressing on her so hard she can barely think, she puts the pieces together that the Eleventh Metal gave her. It had felt the way gold felt when she burned it on the rooftop with Kelsier. The other Allomantic metals all come in opposing pairs — iron and steel, zinc and brass, and so on — but gold and atium do not actually pair. They are alike. They show another version of someone, in a different time. Which means the metals are grouped into fours, not twos, and the Eleventh Metal is an alloy of either atium or gold — and somewhere out there is another metal nobody has yet named.
Kar comes back with another Inquisitor and the time. Vin sees, as she is pulled out of the cell, that the arrowhead wounds on Kar's face have already begun healing into pocked scars — Inquisitors mend that fast. They carry her up a spire stair. Each step closer the Lord Ruler's Soothing crushes her flatter until she is doing nothing but enduring him. The room at the top is a wide cylinder walled in a single sheet of streaked, fire-lit coloured glass — like coloured mist running in a circle. The Lord Ruler is on a throne at its centre, this time the jet-haired young man who killed Kelsier; she can feel without doubt that he is the same man as the old one in the den. Seven more Inquisitors wait, making nine in all. A handful of gray-robed obligators stand off to the side.
Tevidian, the lord prelan — her father — is presented. He does not recognise her. He protests the meeting; the city is in open revolt outside the spire glass and the keeps are falling. The Lord Ruler dismisses it. He has let the Great Houses cull themselves before; if the skaa come for the palace, he will deal with them personally. He has never needed armies. The casual confidence behind it convinces Vin of something Kelsier missed: he is not bluffing. He could, by himself, kill every person in the city. Kelsier sent a rebellion at a man whose strength he did not know.
Kar makes the Canton of Inquisition's petition: take the Ministry from the obligators and hand it to the Inquisitors instead. As proof of obligator corruption, he produces her — a near-pure-line Mistborn who claims the streets. The Lord Ruler steps down from the dais, takes her face in his hands, and asks for her father. She has no way to lie under that pressure. She says the name Reen gave her. Tevidian cracks at once — there was a skaa woman he had been too lax with, there had been a child — and the Lord Ruler turns from him and tells the Inquisitors he is theirs. Six are on him with obsidian knives before he can answer.
The Lord Ruler sits back down on his throne, tired in the way of a man asked to repair something he has repaired a hundred times before, and tells Kar to fetch the high prelans from their beds; the Canton of Inquisition is to be given command and authority over the Ministry, and the half-breed is to be destroyed. Kar thanks him and asks for time to question her first about the rest of the skaa Mistings she was running with. The Lord Ruler gives him that too.