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Sazed slaps his last horse on the rump and sends it galloping out across the ashplain — its white coat gone rough grey, its ribs beginning to show. With the carriage rigged for soldiers to pull and food too scarce to spare, there is no longer a reason to keep it. Breeze stands beside him and asks if it will survive; Sazed thinks it will for a time, scratching at the ash for what scrub remains. Their guard of two hundred waits in the road. The loss of the horse feels to Sazed like a symbol. Breeze heads for the curtained, lightened carriage to sit with Allrianne for the day's miles; Sazed elects to walk. His old steward's instincts will not let him be carried by other men.

He walks at the head of the column with his portfolio under his arm and his hood up against the falling ash, and tries to make sense of his visit to Elend and Vin. He is more troubled now than before he came. Vin had let Elend die in order to save him, he reminds himself — and she had done it because of things he himself had taught her. He has somehow become the person other people come to with their problems, while privately suspecting he is a hypocrite, capable of formulating answers that sound good and incapable of taking his own advice. He carries the dried flower from Tindwyl in his sleeve pocket. The thought of any action makes him feel sick.

This, he tells himself, is what religion is for. It carries people through times like these. He opens his portfolio as he walks. He has read hundreds of religions across his catalogue and found in each only contradiction. Most of the crew, he knows, have trouble worshipping Kelsier as the skaa do because they knew him as a man first; perhaps it is the same for him with the religions, that he knows them too well to be moved by any of them. He does not disparage their believers — but divinity, he keeps telling himself, should not let its followers be slaughtered or let good men trying to save the world destroy it instead. There must be an answer. He dares not consider what he will do if there is not.

They cross into the Central Dominance and the country changes. The road runs through field after field of brown, struggling crops that Elend has ordered planted to feed the empire through what is coming. The roadside is heaped with ash that the skaa workers have to clear off every morning, and most of the fields have to be hand-watered as well as cleared. Sazed cannot decide whether the people understand how dire the situation is, or are simply grateful to be given orders. The plants look small beside the piles. Skaa work the rows in postures barely different from those of the Lord Ruler's day.

Captain Goradel — bald, good-natured, in Ham's usual mould — falls in beside him. The fields, Goradel tells him, give him hope. Really, Sazed asks. The captain explains. He grew up working the outer fields out of Luthadel and his parents disowned him when he enlisted under the Lord Ruler — and yes, he says, he was the palace guardsman who led Elend in to rescue Vin the night she killed the Lord Ruler, though it turned out she needed no rescuing. He had not left the fields for the work; he had left for the hopelessness of growing what would belong to another man. These people, he says, work because they want to. They work, Sazed answers, because they will starve if they do not. Sure, Goradel says — but not because someone is standing over them with a whip. There is a difference, to a farmer. You can see it in how they stand. Sazed walks on without an answer. Before leaving him, Goradel suggests a supply stop at Luthadel. Sazed agrees, and tells him that he himself will leave the column for several days and meet them again on the northern highway. Goradel does not ask where he is going.

A few days later Sazed walks alone to the rim of the valley that holds the Pits of Hathsin — the place where Kelsier's wife was murdered, the place where the Survivor was born — and looks down on what is now the home of the Terris people. There are perhaps forty thousand of them left after the mists and the trek south; many of the men are eunuchs, like him. The valley shelters them: the Lord Ruler's old mining works supply buildings and water; the Central Dominance scrub, hardier than crops and adapted to ash, feeds short-legged ash-grazing sheep on the slopes. The Terris, who were always herders before the Lord Ruler's Ascension, find themselves with an easier life than most of the empire. What a strange world this has become, Sazed thinks.

The valley sees him on the slope. Children run for adults, heads appear in shack doorways, the sheep gather at his feet on the chance of being fed. Several old men climb up to meet him, still wearing their colour-V steward's robes — the V-pattern that once announced which noble house each had served. *Lord Sazed,* one calls. *Your Majesty,* says another. Sazed raises his hands and asks them please not to call him that. They glance at one another and ask, instead, to bring their Master Keeper something warm to eat.