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Marsh returns to Luthadel in stealth — far more carefully than he had walked into the unnamed western village days before. An Inquisitor inside Elend's imperial seat would be reported on immediately, and that would inconvenience Ruin. He moves by night, hood up, Steel-leaping from rooftop to rooftop. The emperor is far from his own city; Ruin has been left a wide playground. The buried part of Marsh surfaces briefly at the sight of his old home — the rebel who once ran skaa resistance out of these alleys still feels something like responsibility for the people in them — and submerges itself again. On the road in he had stopped at four villages, slain their food guards, and put their granaries to the torch; the other Inquisitors, he understands, are walking the empire doing the same. They are looking for the one thing Ruin wants. Marsh has not found it. The city around him has deteriorated badly — ash in heaps the Lord Ruler's forced labour would once have scraped into the river, refuse in every alley, food production crowding out everything else — and the buried part of him is offended by the squalor while the new part of him smiles at it.

He lands at Keep Venture, its lower windows still boarded over from the koloss siege, and Steel-pushes up to a second-floor balcony. He knows this building well; he stayed in it for months before Ruin took him. Penrod's rooms are easy to find — the only suite that is both lit and guarded. He crouches a few corridors away and watches with inhuman eyes, planning his approach.

He turns the Hemalurgic art over in his head as he waits. Spike size is largely incidental: a pinch of metal is enough, just as a pinch fuels the other two arts. Inquisitor spikes are oversize to terrify, and big enough to survive being driven in. The relevant variable is time spent outside a body since the kill — the charge bleeds off. To pierce Penrod without granting him anything he needs only to bind, and the five-inch spike he forged days ago in the western village is now drained to the right level. He thinks about the map of placement points across the human body — the two or three hundred sites that, depending on which is chosen, will make of the host one shape of creature or another. He does not know the points himself. Ruin will move his hand on the strike.

He thinks too about the night Inquisitors first came for him. He had been spying inside the Steel Priesthood for Kelsier and was waiting in his room for what he had assumed was his final drop. He had not been compromised; he had been chosen. The Inquisitors broke in, threw him to the floor, pinned a screaming woman down on top of him, and drove a spike through her chest and into his eye. He cannot remember most of what came next — only fragments: more Allomancers killed against his body, more spikes hammered into him, the rest of the order whirling in celebration with axes when the work was done. The day, he thinks, of his birth. A fine day. Penrod is to get nothing like it — only one small, half-drained spike.

The placement has to be exact, and the spike has to stay in Penrod long enough for Ruin to find a way in. Initially it must reach his blood; once embedded, the skin can knit over it without breaking the link. The chronic problem of spiking, Marsh reflects, is making the host forget the metal sticking out of him. Ruin has been trying to spike Elend for some time without success. Most attempts fail. The handful that succeed are worth the rest.

Then Ruin comes upon him fully, and his body stops being his own. He moves to direct order: not the guards, the door, the antechamber, the bedroom. He kicks his way in. Penrod — dignified, aging, sharp enough to react — has already left the bed and seized a hardwood dueling cane from the nightstand. Marsh, inwardly amused at the cane, draws his obsidian hand-axe. Ruin instructs him to fight, not to kill — to let Penrod believe he is winning. That order is strange, but a directly controlled body has no room to ask. Marsh has to tap speed repeatedly from one of his spike-metalminds in mid-swing to slow his own axe so it lands on the cane rather than Penrod's neck. He cuts him shallowly, again and again, the small spike palmed in his left hand. The bedchamber guards burst in. Three ordinary men against an Inquisitor is no contest at all, but, from where they stand, perhaps it looks like one.

More guards pour through the antechamber door. Ruin orders the next move: feign fear, drive the spike, leave by the window. Marsh taps speed. Ruin guides his left palm precisely into Penrod's chest and the spike straight through the heart. Penrod screams. Marsh is already gone, out through the bedchamber window.

Not long after, he hangs upside down beneath a stone outcropping outside the same window, too quietly to be detected by anyone, listening with tin-enhanced ears as the surgeons confer inside. They tell Penrod the metal shard passed dangerously near his heart. Dangerously near, Marsh thinks, smiling. It is in the heart. But since Penrod is alive, no surgeon can believe otherwise; when they try to ease the spike out the bleeding worsens and they conclude they cannot. Penrod reports he feels well, even strong. They will try again later, fail again, eventually leave the metal in place. The skin will heal over it. Ruin will be able to touch Penrod's thoughts — to nudge, not to puppet — and Penrod will in time stop noticing the bump under his shirt. He will be Ruin's as surely as any spiked creature. Marsh lets go and drops into the dark.