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Sazed sits at his stolen desk by the underground lake in the cache, working through the diagrams for the wooden barriers that — if his measurements are right — will divert Urteau's water back up into its drained canals. The Lord Ruler's engineers had not done much to make this reservoir; they had widened the natural inlets and let the cavern fill faster than the outlets could drain. Stopping the inlets should send the water back over the streets, and harder than it used to flow.

For the first time since he set them aside, he has been using his copperminds. He pulls an index of his stored library out of one — and as soon as he sets the index back in, the experience of having drawn it disappears from his mind, leaving only the title he scribbled to the side. With the title he can draw the book itself in full, take only the chapters on water pressure, and put the rest back before they decay. Engineering is not what a Keeper was trained for, but the Synod had memorised everything; he is, as the running joke between him and Tindwyl used to go, both one of the most learned and one of the most ignorant men ever to live. He notices, despite himself, that he is enjoying the work.

Breeze arrives, cane tapping, and sits across the desk. He looks at the diagrams and tells Sazed he may have missed his calling. He pokes at Sazed's obvious guilt and gets the predictable answer — Elend put Sazed in charge of Urteau, so Sazed should be planning the city's overthrow, not letting Spook do it. Breeze argues, dryly, that being in charge is exactly about making other people do what they should do; this is delegation, not abdication. And he tells Sazed something more important. Spook is no Kelsier — no one has Kelsier's presence — but he is becoming what Kelsier was useful for, which is a man people can choose to believe in. Breeze had told Spook a few weeks ago that they could not topple Quellion the way they had toppled the Lord Ruler because they did not have Kelsier for it. He is starting to think he was wrong.

Spook himself comes over from the lakeside a few minutes later, exhausted and refusing to admit it. Something does not feel right, he tells them. By now Quellion should have tried something. Quellion is a classical bully: he came to power by force and he keeps it through fear, alcohol, and tiny permitted freedoms. Bullies do not allow a rival to sit in their city for weeks unopposed. He has had no assassins on the perimeter, and Quellion's troops outside just sit there watching.

Breeze asks how Quellion took Urteau in the first place, given the noble houses had been better-armed. Spook answers: the mists. Quellion led the people out into them, declared that anyone faithful to the Survivor would be safe, and then — as the mistsickness killings began on cue — declared the deaths to be a winnowing of evil. He passed a law requiring everyone to go out at night so the city could see who was struck down and who was not. The ones who survived were declared pure, and the killings of the nobility began from there. The detail Quellion omitted from his preaching, Spook adds in passing, is that the nobility never got taken by the mists at all. Not skaa with noble blood — actual nobles. Sazed stops him: *what?* Spook shrugs. That is what the stories say. Sazed turns the detail over, alarmed; he does not think Elend knows of the pattern, since their army and their Luthadel noble holdouts have all been skaa.

They are interrupted by Goradel, who is rarely solemn and is now: someone is waiting for Spook above. Not Durn, as Spook expects, but a woman who calls herself the Citizen's sister.

Upstairs, in the bare audience chamber of the Inquisition building — steel decorative plates on the walls that remind Sazed uncomfortably of the Conventical of Seran — they receive Beldre. She is young, auburn, sitting with her hands tightly in her lap; she meets their eyes but the courage is unconvincing. She is here, she says quietly at last, because they are going to kill her brother. Breeze protests their innocence; Spook cuts him off — *Beldre knows why we're here; everyone in the city does* — and asks her if she honestly expects them to believe she walked in here only to plead. She tells him he is of the Survivor's crew, and the man who saved a child from a burning building does not hurt women. Spook, in his bandaged spectacle-hood, says nothing for a long moment.

He takes the others into the hallway. Allrianne declares she does not like the girl, which Breeze takes as competitive jealousy. Breeze reads her properly: she is terrified, which means she has not done this before, which means she is in fact noble. Allrianne confirms it from the girl's hands. Sazed notes she is also naive enough to have assumed they would simply listen and let her go. Spook tilts his head as if listening to something only he can hear. Then he goes back in.

He tells Beldre he is going to give her plenty of time to make her case. She protests; she did not even tell her brother she was leaving; he is going to take her prisoner. He confirms it without ornament and turns to Breeze: how do they think Urteau would react if they began spreading the rumour that the Citizen's own sister had fled the palace and taken sanctuary with the embassy? Breeze is delighted. Beldre protests that nobody will believe she defected; Spook points out that the guards outside watched her slip past their post on the way in, and now have to confirm she entered the building of her own will. She sinks back into her chair. Sazed, watching, understands the second half of the plan: a public defection will force Quellion to attack a fortified position the Canton building can hold against him, and the optics of a failed attack will fracture his rule. Spook has, somewhere along the way, become clever.

Beldre gathers a last small dignity. What would the Survivor say, she asks, if he knew what they were planning? Spook laughs without warmth. He has a feeling, he tells her, that the Survivor would suggest they do exactly this.