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Spook wakes in his cramped rented room in Urteau under cloth, wax, and shutters stuffed with rags to dim the world enough to let him sleep. Even so, the seam of daylight at the shutter's edge is enough for him to see by. His reserve of tin has burned out overnight, the way it now does as automatically as breath; he refills it with the day's dose from the dust in his bedside pail. He worries he is doing himself permanent harm — but the world is ending, Elend and Vin have sent him here alone, the Citizen's spies say their other operatives are on the way, and he intends to learn everything he can before they arrive. He puts on a pair of glasses fitted with plain glass and reties the dark cloth across his eyes, opens the shutters, and lets the noonday sun hit him. The cloth blocks just enough light to keep him from being blinded; the glass keeps him from having to close his eyes; his enhanced sight filters out the cloth the way it filters out mist.

He goes out, hardwood dueling cane along his back, and meets Durn in Urteau's widest streetslot — Marketpit, broad enough in its canal days for three boats abreast, now a beggars' boulevard. Durn keeps up his beggar's act, but Spook can smell soap and fine wine on him; he is in truth one of the city's most powerful thief lords, talented enough at disguise to walk it unrecognised. Durn drums complex unheard patterns on the ground while they speak — patterns Spook feels through the earth and a master musician would have envied. He talks like a Citizen devotee: the city is finally skaa-ruled, look at the market, look at the lack of public beatings. Spook answers that the killings have only moved to quiet alleys, and that the Lord Ruler at least killed his skaa openly. Then Durn points: brown-clad soldiers are escorting in a batch of prisoners. Spook counts ten, the number expected, and stands.

The procession leads them up out of the streetslot and into a wealthier district where charred scars now stand among the houses and the air smells permanently of smoke. Quellion himself is there — wearing not the regulation skaa grey but a new red shirt and trousers, declared an officer's privilege only that morning. Beldre is with him, as always, eyes sorrowful inside her frame of auburn hair. The Citizen tells the crowd that the prisoners are noblemen who failed to flee Urteau as ordered — that they hid; that they are too arrogant to listen; that this is the will of every skaa. His soldiers shove the ten through the doors of a confiscated mansion, bar the door from the outside, take up a perimeter, and torch the building. Spook hears the fingers tearing at the boarded windows, the thumping on the locked door, the people inside screaming as they burn. He is not a Mistborn and cannot fight a squad of soldiers alone; Elend and Vin sent him to gather information, not to act. He turns away, hating himself.

He argues with Durn over it. They had noble blood, Durn says. They were skaa, Spook answers — only their grandparents were nobles. Durn tells him he heard the Survivor speak once, that this is the sort of thing Kelsier taught: death to nobles, rule by skaa, sometimes you have to destroy a thing to build a better. Spook hisses that the Citizen's name is not to be uttered in the same breath as the Survivor's. He had heard Kelsier speak too; the same words from Quellion's mouth become words of hate, and Spook feels sick. He demands the real news he is paying for. Durn says only, "Count the skulls," and disappears into the crowd.

Spook takes a roundabout route back to Marketpit, beating the Citizen to the market. He watches the man work the stalls, touching shoulders, blessing skaa, telling them that the falling ash is a sign from the Survivor himself — the ashes of fallen tyranny, from which a skaa-ruled nation will rise. He thinks this man is no Kelsier and is not worthy to use his name. He works his way to the front of the crowd, hiding his sight behind the blindfold and his cane beneath his shirt, and feels his way like a blind beggar to a position right next to Beldre — who, as usual, has been left to stand quietly at the Citizen's elbow, easily forgotten. She smells faintly of perfume, which the Citizen has supposedly forbidden.

He whispers in her ear: does she approve of her brother's murders? She spins; the crowd carries her away from him. He maneuvers back. He asks her how the burnings differ from the Lord Ruler's random executions in Luthadel's city square. She spins again, finds him in the throng; the crowd shoves them apart. She mouths a question her lips do not voice — only a tin flarer could read it — *Who are you?* He pushes through, takes her wrist, and as the crowd surges toward Quellion's lectern, leaves the two of them at its back like shells on a beach. He tells her, softly, that he is the man who will kill her brother. She does not scream. Others have said the same, she mouths. He answers that he knew the Survivor — that Kelsier named him, called him friend — that Quellion's city would horrify him — and tells her to warn her brother that he is coming.

The Citizen has stopped speaking. From the lectern he sees them at the back of his own crowd. He shouts. Soldiers run. The streetslot is steep-walled and the ramps are all guarded. Spook charges the nearest squad, whips out his cane, ducks a sword by the feel of its wind, hammers one soldier unconscious with the heavy hardwood, breaks the forearm of another, raises his cane against a third and watches the cane shatter against steel. He grabs the fallen soldier's sword and presses the last man — and his sword stops in the air, held as if pushed through something solid. Quellion is across the way, clutching Beldre for an anchor, openly burning steel to Push on the blade. Spook drops the sword before it can be thrown back at him and dives away.

He tries to run past, and the first man he had downed — apparently a Thug — comes up with crushing strength and grabs his foot. Two Allomancers, Spook thinks, in this city of dead noblemen; somebody is not as disdainful of noble blood as he claims. He wrestles the Thug round as a shield against the swordsman, but the swordsman runs his own friend straight through to skewer Spook in the chest — a move only another Thug could have made. The blade snaps off in the two bodies. Three Allomancers, Spook thinks, dazed. His enhanced senses, that should have made the pain unbearable, instead let everything go black.

The chapter closes on a further excerpt of "the Hero of Ages." The writer reads Rashek's handling of Preservation's power as a sequence of escalating skill compressed into minutes that a god would have felt as hours — from the ignorant first act that shoved the planet too near its sun, to the adult who built the ashmounts to cool the air, to the artisan who shaped microbes to digest the ash and plants designed to live in it. Throughout, his mind-set is read as reactive, patching the damage he had already caused rather than undoing it.