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Sazed arrives in Urteau with Breeze, Allrianne, and Captain Goradel at the head of a two-hundred-man escort. He travels in the carriage with the other two for the sake of his ambassadorial image, having rejoined them after parting with the Terris caravan. Goradel worries aloud about how brutal the city is supposed to be; Breeze reassures him that the point of ambassadors is precisely that they are the king's expendable layer. Sazed watches the city through the falling ash. Like every other city under the Lord Ruler it has no wall — only Luthadel was ever allowed one — and as they approach he notices the road sinking into the drained canal beds Urteau now uses as its streets. Allrianne finds it eerie. They are met inside the city by the Citizen's brown-uniformed soldiers; the king will see them at once.

Quellion receives them stripped of furniture, in a whitewashed conference room in a confiscated nobleman's house. He stands behind his desk in plain skaa shirt and trousers dyed deep red, surrounded by perhaps twenty of his red-clad government, and tells Sazed flatly that they are unwanted. The objection is not to the soldiers; it is to the man who sent them. Elend Venture is a liar and a tyrant — he keeps his throne because his Mistborn wife forced Straff Venture and Ashweather Cett to kneel under koloss guard. Quellion reminds Sazed that he himself claims to have walked with the Survivor before the Collapse, then serves one of the very noble houses Kelsier meant to overthrow. He asks Sazed whether the Survivor ever spoke of peace. Sazed, honestly, says no.

Quellion turns to his men and tells them, calmly, that what they feel right now — a softening of their judgement — is the work of Breeze, whom he names openly as a Soother of the old nobility's kind. Breeze raises his glass and tells the Citizen that of course he has been Soothing him, and suggests Quellion ought to wonder why he just heard himself say what he said. It is a pure bluff and a wasted opening — an indignant denial would have served them better, Sazed thinks — but it lodges in Quellion's head for the rest of the meeting. Sazed tries the only argument left: these are not normal times. The mists are killing people; the Citizen himself, Sazed can see, knows this is true. The Central Dominance can grow food where this city cannot, and Venture has learned to control the koloss. Quellion hears that as a threat — first peace, then control of the koloss, next he will be claiming Venture controls the mists — and tells Sazed his answer is that they follow the Survivor and need not fear the future. The audience is over. Sazed asks leave to stay in the city anyway. Quellion, with a wave, grants what he cannot prevent and warns them to obey the laws.

Back in the carriage Breeze is darkly amused — murderous revolutionaries, everyone in matching grey, ditches for streets, every tenth building burned down. Sazed is not amused. The leaders here are not desperate, and the population is more cowed than in any other city they have visited. They notice a staged-looking bonfire of tapestries and noble furniture burning in a courtyard for their benefit, and a soldier walking alongside the carriage tells them, with surprising authority, that Quellion keeps storerooms of such things for exactly these moments. Sazed looks again and realises the man is wearing a heavy cloth bandage tied across his eyes under his hood — and is Spook. Breeze is delighted. Spook will not explain the blindfold; he says only that he has thought through what they will need, and that the inns the Citizen has banned are no use to them. He has another base in mind.

He leads them to the boarded-up regional Canton of Inquisition building. Quellion has left the Ministry buildings alone — afraid, Spook thinks, of Inquisitors — though Spook points out the Inquisitors are too busy hunting Vin to notice. Pulling boards from the door, Sazed finds that a board he cannot budge comes free in Spook's one-handed grip. He has been practising with weights, Sazed tells himself, and accepts the explanation only halfway. Spook asks Sazed to call him just Spook, not "Lord" — he never did wheedle a title out of Elend — and remarks that he has things to talk over with Sazed later, about gods and men. He throws his shoulder into the door and walks into the dark inside without lighting a lantern; Sazed has to call for one before Spook remembers, and apologises, and strikes a light. Breeze notes quietly to Sazed that the boy has changed.

The building is not the haunted place Sazed feared — it is just an old bureaucratic office, dusty tapestries and broad red rugs, the kind of place administrators once kept ledgers in. The Cantons of Orthodoxy and Inquisition had been rivals; in a building like this one, in Urteau, the Inquisitors themselves rarely came in person. Spook knows where he is going. In a small back storeroom he flips up a hidden trapdoor and climbs down into the dark; Vin has been here before, in her scout of the city. At the bottom they find a small stone antechamber whose wall has been pulled aside to open onto a vast underground chamber — the cache the Lord Ruler left under every city. Spook proposes they make it their base. The entrance is only one man wide, easily held; the building above can house the soldiers and the cavern below the supplies; they can fall back into it under attack and defend it against a determined assault. Sazed sees that he is right. Then he hears water. They descend the steps into the chamber, and out beyond the rows of shelves the lantern light finds the surface of an enormous underground lake. Breeze observes, drily, that now they know where the canal water has gone.