POV: vin
Summary
Dockson runs the rebellion from the warehouse table while Kelsier lies dead in the square. He works in the way he always has — the steady, unglamorous shape of making Kelsier's vision come down to actual logistics — rationing the best gear to the steadiest companies, sending detachments to seize Luthadel's food and water deposits before the riot can. A turned palace soldier, Goradel, comes back with bad news he has been afraid to bring: Vin was seen carried into the palace dungeons by an Inquisitor, and he himself could not free her without authority he does not have. Dockson does not have the men to spare for a rescue without abandoning the assault on the palace itself; he files her under what they will try to reach when they break the gates.
Ham walks in carrying a sword with a broken hilt — Keep Elariel just fell, Keep Lekal is still holding — and goes looking for a new one. Then a knot of rebels marches in with a sack-hooded captive who promised them gold to bring him to whoever is in command. The sack comes off Elend Venture. He has come in unarmed to offer a truce. The noble houses will not resist if the skaa armies are pulled off their keeps and turned on the Ministry and the Lord Ruler instead; he has studied uprisings and what eats them is the moment the initial chaos runs out of enemies and starts turning on itself, and the empire's economy will collapse if its administrators are slaughtered wholesale. Dockson is willing to entertain it. Then Elend recognises Ham from the prison-cart fight and asks after Valette in the same breath, and Dox tells him, plainly, where she is.
Down in the dungeons Kar throws Vin back into her cell on his way upstairs to be formally confirmed over the Ministry. He is in a chatty mood. He tells her — almost in passing — that Reen died years ago under Inquisitor torturers swearing his little sister had been dead of starvation for years; that one of them never quite believed it and tracked her down anyway; that Reen never sold her out. Then guards drag a beaten, naked Sazed into the next cage and lash him by wrists and ankles to a floor ring. Vin sees, looking away too late, the old surgical scar between his legs — Terrismen stewards are eunuchs — and a body covered in fresh bruises. Kar tells her his plan, kindly: he is not going to repeat the mistake he made with Reen and torture her herself, he is going to let her watch the Terrisman be tortured slowly until she tells him what she knows about the rest of the skaa Mistings. He has business upstairs first. He leaves the guards in the antechamber.
Sazed lifts his bruised face and tells Vin he had meant to be brought to her. He had vowed to Kelsier that he would see to her safety, and a Terrisman's oath is not given lightly. He swallowed a small metalmind of stored strength before they took him — taking a hint, he says, from her. The flesh wastes off him as he draws from it, his arms shrinking and the muscle slipping away, and then he comes back, larger than Ham, larger than Vin has ever seen a human body. He snaps the bars between their cages, breaks his own door open with one slap, and tells her to move; the charge will not last and the metal is too small to hold much.
It does not. The two guards at the door run before he can catch them. The strength leaves him in the antechamber. Vin makes it as far as the torture room beyond — a long, thin stone room with a table laid out in surgical knives and a wall of trunks down one side — before a fresh Ministry squad rounds the corridor. She has no metals; she takes a torture-knife off the table and goes at them, kills one off a leap from the tabletop, takes a quarterstaff to the ribs and goes hard against the wall. Beside her, Sazed has gone down to a body that is already trying to store strength back up before the squad reaches him.
Then Elend charges into the room behind her, in a noble's ill-fitting suit and carrying a dueling cane, with five Venture guards and the turned palace soldier Goradel who knew the way. The Ministry squad outnumbers them. Elend plants himself anyway. Sazed tries to pull Vin up and out — there is beauty in compassion, but also a place for wisdom — and she sees her own mistcloak in one of the wall-trunks, the trousers and shirt thrown over it. In its side pocket: the corked vial she had forgotten she had. She drinks it.
Reserves bloom in her chest. She comes back across the room over Elend's head, blasts the squad apart in seconds, finishes the last man by Pulling his helmet to her hand and Pushing it back through his chest into the men behind him. The survivors drop their weapons and run.
Elend is mostly stuck on the fact that the girl he came to rescue is, evidently, a Mistborn standing in her underclothes. She tells him to look the other way and dresses. In the trouser pocket she finds her mother's earring and puts it back on. She tells him to lift the atium reserve out of the Lord Ruler's treasury east of the palace — the Venture family delivered there for years and he knows the building. The new government will need that wealth or the first warlord with an army will take it from them. He starts to argue and she kisses him quiet.
She tells Sazed she is climbing the spire alone. He does not stop her. He says he believes she is right about the Eleventh Metal being the key, and that he will follow once Elend is safe. She burns copper, throws the Lord Ruler's weight off her emotions for the first time in hours, and tells Elend not to worry. She thinks she knows how to kill him.