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Elend gathers his inner circle in the command tent — Ham, Cett, Noorden, a thinner Demoux — to lay out what Vin discovered in the koloss paddock. Vin sits at the back, still working through it. He starts with Inquisitors: nobody really knows how they are made, but the obligators he and Sazed interviewed after the Collapse confirmed the parts that matter — an Inquisitor is built from an ordinary man who keeps his memory but gains new Allomantic powers, as the family already knows from Marsh. Cett interrupts to ask what any of this has to do with the siege of Fadrex. Elend tells him they are at war with something larger than Yomen, and turns to Noorden for proof of it.

Noorden gives the verdict the scribes have been keeping to themselves: the percentages in the sickness are not natural. Nature is repetitive but never exact; the three-sixteens pattern in Demoux's numbers is too clean. Something intelligent had to have shaped it. Elend takes that and presses Noorden on what the Canton of Orthodoxy used to whisper about the Canton of Inquisition. The rumour, Noorden admits, was that an Inquisitor is made by fusing many Allomancers into one. Ham catches up to the implication and almost shouts it — *that* is why the Ministry hunted skaa Mistings so hard, why the room Vin and Kelsier found Marsh in after his change had had a corpse in it that had not been just one body. Vin quietly confirms what Marsh later told her: there had not been enough left to count.

Elend turns the table to Vin's discovery. Koloss, she says, are made from humans. They are spiked. Smaller spikes than an Inquisitor's, in mixed metals, hidden under the folds of skin. No koloss have ever been born; none have ever needed to be, since the koloss keep their numbers up by spiking the next group of captives; the Lord Ruler kept that secret for a thousand years, and Jastes's koloss who razed a village before marching on Luthadel had been replenishing as much as terrorising. Human had been about to demonstrate the procedure on an unconscious soldier in the triage tent when Vin froze him. Ham names the third art aloud — Allomancy draws from metal, Feruchemy draws from one's own body, the third draws from somebody else's — and Vin gives it the name Marsh used: Hemalurgy. The Lord Ruler built his soldiers, his spies, and his priests on it. He had built into each of them the same flaw — a wound in the mind that any outside Allomancer could reach through — and Vin tells them she only learned to control koloss because TenSoon called the two creatures cousins, and she had realised one could be Pushed the way the other could. The same weakness explains Marsh's fanaticism under the Lord Ruler — and his recent slide.

Elend paces and, by the time he is talking, is mostly thinking out loud. The war they are fighting is not just men or koloss or one obligator king holding a city. The Hemalurgy system is one piece of a larger design. The sickness numbers are another. He sends Noorden off to throw out the assumption of koloss randomness and replot every uncontrolled koloss movement on record. The room empties. Demoux lingers.

He has come to follow up something Ham already raised: the three hundred and twenty-seven men who lay sick for sixteen days have started to be looked at sideways by the rest of the army, are eating apart, are forming their own circle. The camp is calling them the mistfallen. Whether to force reintegration depends on whether Elend is about to attack Fadrex or to settle in for a long siege; soldiers should not fight beside men they do not trust. Yomen's next ball — held in the Canton of Resource — is only days away. Elend makes the easier decision and tells Demoux to organise the mistfallen into their own company under his command; they will worry about the rest after they hold Fadrex.

Voices outside — Vin checks her metals and moves between Elend and the door — and Ham brings in a worn red-haired scout. Demoux recognises him: Conrad, one of his old lieutenants left with Penrod. Conrad is the long-awaited messenger from Luthadel, and the news is the opposite of what Elend expected. Penrod never received the supply request. He is asking Elend for troops to help him put the city down. Luthadel is rioting and the food stores have already been pillaged. Conrad himself is one of four messengers; he is the only one to make it through, having shaken a koloss band off by sending his horse one way and hiding while they butchered it. Elend slams the table once, then catches himself, and sends the man for food and rest.

That night Vin finds Elend alone on the camp's perimeter looking up at the watch fires on the Fadrex cliffs while Tineye patrols pass silently. Their enemy, he tells her, has exposed himself: koloss attacks on his messengers, riots in Luthadel — all to make him pull back from Fadrex. Vin feels the chill of it and presses a hand to his lips. Whatever they say, Ruin hears. From here on the most important conclusions pass between them in silence: stay at Fadrex. Find the cavern. There is no falling back. Elend walks off to check his guard posts; Vin stays, looking up at the watch fires.

She closes her eyes against the mists, which always pull a half-inch away from her, and reaches for them as she has reached so many times — pleading, half certain there is a strength locked in them she once drew from to fight the Lord Ruler — and gets nothing back. The night gives her no answer, and after a long moment she turns and goes inside.