(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Marsh walks into a small starving town in the Central Dominance, in the shadow of Mount Tyrian, the ashmount closest to Luthadel. The territory is supposed to be under Elend Venture's protection; in practice the emperor has emptied it for the Fadrex siege, and the local quakes run through Marsh like a song. He is letting Ruin think it has him entirely — a small piece of him kept asleep behind the rest — and lets the ashen sky and the broken people register as beauty. The gate is a few boards that would fall to a hard knock. The streets are emptied homes and weed-eaten gardens. Watchmen on the gate, ash sweepers in the road, all freeze and watch him pass without daring to run. He ignores them.

He has come for one building and one man. The town used to be a stopping-place for travelers and a second-home country for Luthadel nobility; the mansion he wants is slightly less cannibalised than the others on its row and still has a gate guard. Marsh kills the guard from the path with a Ministry sacrificial triangle pushed through his chest, kills the maidservant inside the same way through her skull, and walks through the unexpectedly well-kept interior with his spiked sight running pewter, Allomantic lines of metal expressing themselves as bright threads against a pristine white background. He kills two more servants on the way up. He finds his man at a desk in a top-floor study, balding, with a small moustache and a rich suit, slumped over an empty bottle. The owner of the house is a Smoker — a Misting who can throw a coppercloud — and his recent use of his power is what drew Ruin's attention. Ruin has been wanting Allomancers for spike-stock. Marsh finds the unconsciousness disappointing — without the man's terror at finding an Inquisitor in his study, the killing loses something — and entertains the idea of waiting for him to sober up. Ruin does not allow it. Marsh hammers a small bronze spike through the Smoker's heart, pulls it out drenched, and pockets it.

He notes, as he walks back out, that an Allomantic imbue is much more powerful when the spike is driven from the victim's heart directly into the waiting host; killing the Allomancer here and carrying the bloody bronze somewhere else to plant it will cost most of the Smoker's gift in transit. It feels wasteful. There is no help for it — that is the only way Ruin will let him work this one. At the front gate two skaa men have come to kneel in the road. They beg him to bring the obligators back. They will believe in the Lord Ruler again, they say, if only the Ministry will feed them as it once did. Marsh tells them they no longer have that opportunity, and that whatever they think their problems are, food will shortly not be one of them. He does not kill them; Ruin wants that privilege for itself. He leaves.

He walks the plain for about an hour and then turns to look back at the town and the mountain. As he watches, the top-left side of Tyrian blows out — a deluge of dust, ash, and rock, then a hot red flow starting down the side toward the plain. The earth shakes; the boom rolls over him. Marsh shakes his head. Food, he thinks, was the smaller of the town's problems. They needed better priorities.