POV: vin
Summary
Vin flies in over Kredik Shaw's spires through the mist, the city below a tide of rebel torches converging on the palace. She picks out the throne tower easily — a single ring of bonfires around one spire, the one glass-walled chamber lit from inside — and feels the Lord Ruler within. The skaa army has no chance against him in person; she has to reach him first.
Inside, the Lord Ruler has just formally given the Ministry to the Canton of Inquisition and dismissed the prelans. The other Inquisitors file off to sleep off the day; Kar lingers to enjoy his win. Servants are putting out the external bonfires when coins begin to click against the stained-glass wall. The southern half of it shatters inward, and Vin drops through in a swirl of mist with a glass dagger in each hand.
She burns the Eleventh Metal at the Lord Ruler and the bearded past-self appears again on the dais beside the throne. She rushes him with both daggers — meaning to drive them into the past-self rather than the present body — and the blades pass straight through. Unlike her own gold-shadow, this one is insubstantial as an atium shadow. Her plan is dead.
Kar tackles her off the dais and locks her into a soldier's chokehold that her flared pewter cannot break and a Steelpush against a door-latch cannot snap him out of. The Lord Ruler watches it placidly from the throne and tells her that Kar was a soldier in another life and knows how to hold a person fast no matter their strength. She is going dark when, in the reflection on the curved glass, a second Inquisitor walks in behind them, reaches around Kar, and pulls a long iron spike — the same kind that pins their eye-sockets — out of his back. Kar simply drops dead. The Inquisitors' weakness: pull the spine spike and the body dies. The cowl falls back. It is Marsh — alive, spiked himself, recruited rather than tortured into the Canton, and standing over a small heap of spikes he has just pulled out of the other Inquisitors sleeping in the next rooms.
Marsh charges the Lord Ruler up the dais. The Lord Ruler swings a backhand at him of the kind that killed Kelsier and Marsh just barely ducks under it; he spins around to the back of the man and tears the seam of his black coat open, plainly looking for a spine spike of his own. There is none. The Lord Ruler breaks Marsh with one elbow and throws him the length of the room to hit the far window and slide to the floor. He is not an Inquisitor. He cannot be killed that way.
He turns slowly and strips off the torn coat. He is plainly both Allomancer and Feruchemist — the muscle, the speed, the casual youth in a body older than the empire — and every visible piece of jewellery on him is a deliberate joke, except for two thin bracelets pierced through the skin of his upper arms. Vin catches the trick a moment too late: those are the only ones an enemy cannot Push or Pull off him. They are the real anchors.
He Pushes outward with a force so heavy that the metals in Vin's own stomach try to leave her body the way an iron filing would leave a hand. The doors blow off their mountings, every loose coin and dagger scrapes out through the broken window, even bits of coloured glass shiver loose from the dais. He has just done to a body what an Allomancer is not supposed to be able to do — exactly what she did to Shan's coppercloud. Not the same in scale; the same in kind.
Vin crashes into a stone support pillar at speed and feels her right leg break. Pewter holds her conscious. The Lord Ruler walks down off the dais to her, picks Marsh up by the throat one-handed across the room, and demands aloud how dare a creature he himself made dominant rise against him.
The word lands. Vin burns the last flake of Eleventh Metal in her body. The bearded past-self appears again at his shoulder — fur cloak, heavy boots, herdsman's clothing. Not a hero, not a tyrant. A Terris packman from a thousand years ago. She names him out loud: Rashek. The man from the logbook who hated his master because his master was an outsider chosen as their Hero, and who must have killed him at the Well of Ascension and gone in and taken the Hero's power for himself. The Lord Ruler roars at her that she knows nothing of any of it, drops Marsh, and turns his Push on her in earnest, pinning her against the pillar so hard her ribs lock and she cannot draw breath.
She is going out. She burns iron anyway. If he can Push metals inside a body, she should be able to Pull them; if he can pierce a coppercloud she can do the like. Blue lines bloom for every loose ring on him and nothing for the bracelets. Her pewter is nearly gone. The mist curling on the floor is not curling around her the way it usually does; something is pushing it away. She reaches into the mist for what is in it. Two new blue lines appear. She Pulls.
The bracelets tear out of his arms in a spray of blood. The pressure releases her and she drops. He tries to lunge after the bracelets on the floor; with the last of her strength she Pushes them out through the broken window over the city as the sun breaks the horizon, and they fall away into the red.
The metal had been holding back the years. The handsome young man in front of her crumples through middle age into a wheezing, hair-thin old husk crawling across the broken glass toward where the bracelets had gone. Sazed reaches the room with a vial of metals and a plain wooden spear; he gets her drinking. Marsh climbs back to his feet — Inquisitors heal fast — and waves Sazed off, telling him to see to the girl. The cheering outside the broken window is for someone else, and it has been cheering long enough for it to be heard above the wind.
They walk together to where the Lord Ruler has dragged himself to the lip of the broken window. Marsh tells him the rest of the Inquisitors are dead in their beds by his hand, and that as the only Inquisitor left he now owns the Ministry the Lord Ruler himself just signed over to the Canton. Sazed tells him the cheers below were never his. The old man wheezes that they cannot understand what he was doing for mankind and that they have just doomed themselves. Vin tells him she carries a message from a friend — that he is hope and cannot be killed — and rams the wooden spear through his heart.