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TenSoon, in his wolfhound body and carrying Kelsier's bones in a sack he has stowed in a hedge outside the city, pads down the Urteau streets and is shocked by what he finds. He visited the place often when he was Straff Venture's kandra two years ago, and it was a fine city then — never matching Luthadel's sprawl or its noble majesty, but worthy of a Great House seat. A third of it is now a burned ruin. The remaining buildings sit in an unsettling mixture: the noble mansions are empty, even the ones that did not burn, and the skaa tenements are packed too tight. He sits on his haunches and watches the streetslot canals, which had been dry the last time he was here, push slowly past with dark water — ash-pated, debris-clogged in places, but passable. Makeshift boats nudge through them. He cannot tell, looking, what to make of the city he is in. What was the purpose of burning a third of Urteau and then refilling its canals? He does not know yet. He sees no army camped outside. If Vin had been here, she had moved on.

He overhears the people as he walks. They are despairing in pieces but, on the whole, oddly cheerful — they survived the night the city burned, and they think of the two-thirds they saved as a miracle and not the third they lost as a loss. They feel they defeated the fire. This is not a conquered city. He thinks about that as he turns inward through the press.

Following the foot traffic toward the city center, TenSoon finds Elend's soldiers — spear and scroll on their sleeves — guarding the entrance to, of all places, a Ministry building. There is a queue going in and out. He briefly considers walking back out of the city to fetch Kelsier's bones and putting them on for the entrance he made at Keep Venture in Luthadel a few weeks earlier. He decides against. Two appearances of the Survivor in a season is more than he is willing to inflict on a planet already burning. There is another shock available to him, equally arresting and a great deal less theologically dangerous.

He walks up the steps as a wolfhound. One of the guards yells at him about a stray dog and waves the butt of a spear. TenSoon sits back on his haunches and tells the man, in plain Eastern, that he belongs to no man — he is his own master. The guard jumps backward. TenSoon gets a quiet, embarrassing pleasure from it; the world is ending and here he is startling random soldiers with talking-dog tricks. He notes, more soberly, that this is the first time he has ever spoken aloud what he is openly: that he is a kandra outside the Homeland without a Contract, and that, by his own reckoning, no kandra has done such a thing in seven hundred years. The satisfaction is strange and not entirely his.

He claims a message from the emperor for whoever leads the building, and the first guard — now well past his shock and falling into the new normal of life with a talking dog — points him in. He pads past lines and clerks who barely glance at him, and through them, somehow, finds Breeze.

Breeze is sitting on a throne-like chair settling petitions with a cup of wine in his hand, looking, in TenSoon's opinion, very pleased with himself. He recognises the dog at once — *too well-behaved for a wolfhound* — and laughingly guesses he must be Lord Renoux back from the dead. TenSoon tells him, no, a different kandra; it is complicated. Some of the old wariness flares — Breeze is a Soother, and a Soother burning duralumin could simply take command of a kandra body, by the Secret no human is supposed to know — but TenSoon reminds himself that Breeze is only a Misting and that Allomancy itself is weaker than it used to be. He has never quite liked Breeze, an old bias against Soothers generally and possibly against humans broadly. He skips the small talk and asks for Vin. Breeze waves him through to Sazed, who, he says, handles questions like this better than he does.

In a stripped obligator's office in the back of the building — one that had been someone's sleeping quarters before the city changed hands — Sazed gives TenSoon the bad news. Vin is at Fadrex, where she and Elend hoped to find another of the caches. Fadrex is halfway across the empire. TenSoon slumps. Even on the Blessing of Potency it will be weeks of running. He listens for a moment as Sazed explains how Spook nearly died, how Breeze took over the day-to-day government because Sazed himself does not enjoy the petitions.

TenSoon takes a long look at Sazed across the desk. The Keeper looks the same: the robes, the four Keeper bracers on his arms, his careful courtesy. Something is missing all the same, and TenSoon cannot put a name to it. It troubles him. This is one of the people he watched for months while pretending to be Vin's hound; the Sazed he knew would never have let a kandra speak openly without leaning forward.

He weighs telling the truth. He has been trained his entire life to keep the kandra hidden from Keepers — they pry, they record, the riches of kandra culture have been guarded for centuries precisely from people like the one across the desk from him. But if the world is ending, then the people who write down what survives are the people the kandra should be talking to. And of the whole crew, Sazed is the one TenSoon has long respected most. He tells Sazed, carefully, that his message for Vin concerns the Hero of Ages and the coming end of the world.

Sazed does not so much as twitch. He does not lean forward. He does not ask. He simply asks whether TenSoon wants to rest first or run today, and offers to provision him for the road. TenSoon, the truth he has been hoarding for centuries now lying unused on the desk, can only sit there and conclude — for the thousandth time — that he will never understand humans.