(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Sazed, chief ambassador of the New Empire, sits in an ornate room at Lekal City's country manor with a sheet of paper on his lap and goes through the Canzi religion one last time. He has been working through it for a day. It is one of over three hundred pre-Ascension faiths the Keepers catalogued, all of them killed off by the Lord Ruler in his first century, and one of about a hundred Sazed has not yet ruled out. The Canzi contradict themselves: they teach that each body is a work of art the inhabiting spirit chose and designed, and at the same time that the disabled bear bodies given to them as punishment for past evil. He makes a note at the bottom of the sheet — logically inconsistent, obviously untrue — and slides the sheet into a thick portfolio of others like it.

He is doing this, he tells himself, because if any religion catalogued by his people contains the essence of truth he will find it, and if none does he will rule them all out. He has been doing it for a year, since Tindwyl died. Two-thirds of the way through the stack he has not yet found one that survives serious scrutiny. He will not say out loud what the project really is. The exercise feels, from the inside, much like hiding from the pain.

Breeze is across the room eating grapes and waiting on King Lekal next door to sign the treaty they came south to extract. He has his weight back, his red vest back, and his old Soothing habit back, which Sazed can feel on his own emotions and chooses to ignore. They talk around the wait. Breeze is enjoying himself; Sazed notes drily that only a Terrisman would come south to conquer a city by treaty and then worry about being impolite to the king he was threatening. Breeze is, Sazed tells him outright, a far kinder man than he wants to be seen as. Breeze looks faintly caught out and changes the subject.

The subject he changes to is Sazed's religions. He asks to be preached at, the way Sazed used to try to convert him. Sazed tells him that he has stopped wearing his copperminds; that he has taken all of his metalminds off and packed them away; that he will not teach a religion that cannot answer his questions. If there were a god, he says, the Lord Ruler would not have happened. The world would not be what it is now. He will not preach any more.

Breeze hears that for what it is and goes quiet. After a moment he says — quietly, looking out the window — that Sazed was always the best of the crew because he believed in something, and that he does not believe Sazed is meant for atheism, no matter how thoroughly he tries to commit to it. Sazed does not argue. He is too tired and too brash already for a Terrisman to argue further. Breeze then tells him — first time aloud — thank you, for hauling him out of his own grief a year ago, when he might otherwise never have moved. Sazed keeps the bitter private answer to himself: that Breeze saw destruction and death but the woman he loves is still alive, and if Sazed had been so lucky he could have come back too.

Sazed also touches, through his shirt, the scars across his abdomen where Marsh embedded a fistful of Feruchemical rings during the fight at the Well. He used the stored health in those rings to keep himself alive that night; later he had them cut back out, over Vin's protests. He notes drily, in his head, that the Inquisitors killed the entire Terris ruling council at Tathingdwen, and that as far as he can tell no Keeper refugee has reached the New Empire in the year since. He is most likely the last living Feruchemist — and, as a Terris steward castrated as a child, the last who could pass the heredity along. The art is going to die with him, give or take a trace in the Terris bloodlines.

The door opens. An aide brings in the signed treaty. King Lekal's signature is small, almost cramped, in the oversized space at the bottom. He knows he has lost. Lekal City is now a vassal of the New Empire.

The chapter closes on a further excerpt of "the Hero of Ages." The writer states that each correction Rashek made to the world made the next one necessary: the plants had to be reworked so they could survive the new harsh environment, which left them less nutritious to mankind, and so mankind had to be reworked too, given the ability to live on the diminished food and breathe air that fell as ash.