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Elend returns to the camp outside Fadrex with the twenty-eight thousand koloss he has taken from the ashmount foothills, the new group bringing his total under his command to thirty-seven thousand. Ham greets him at the perimeter — surprised, in a way Elend catches and is not meant to catch, that he has come back at all. The camp is hunkered down behind walls of piled ash, a real defensive earthwork now rather than a tidy military encampment, and Elend sees in his men's faces that he has come back wrong: still in the black uniform he killed in, bloodied at the cuffs, ash-streaked, not the spotless white emperor they have been following. He cannot decide whether that disturbs them or him.

He walks the camp with Ham and asks first about Vin. There has been no word. Ham reports that Yomen permitted a soldier of theirs into the city while Elend was gone, to confirm she still lived; they sent one in Elend's name to keep up the pretence that the emperor had not left the siege. There has been silence since. Elend tells Ham not to despair — he gave Vin command of some of his koloss before her capture, and as long as those creatures still stand where she left them she is alive. Ham points out, mildly, that this would have been useful information to share earlier. Elend agrees, and asks Ham to post scouts on the small group so that he can reclaim them at once if they tear loose.

Ham asks whether Elend could somehow speak to Vin through that link. He cannot, and the answer reminds him of how blunt the instrument is. He can tell koloss to attack, freeze, follow, carry — never anything subtler than that. He cannot point one at another person and say *deliver this message*. They are weapons in the hand and not much more.

The news from home is worse than Elend feared. Most of his scouts to the Central Dominance have not returned; Demoux and the column Elend sent for Luthadel are still unaccounted for. The cities he conquered are losing population on the road to the capital, in ash-buried processions of starvation. Lekal-city has fallen to a lava flow off one of the ashmounts; Janarle in the north has not been heard from in weeks; the Southern Dominance is said to be burning. There are even tales of cities falling into the cracking earth itself. Ham asks the unanswerable question and Elend gives him the only answer he has — they will help where they can; they will not give up — and walks on.

He stops at Cett, who sits beside the path in a chair as if the siege were an afternoon's diversion. *More koloss,* Cett notes. *We're going to attack, then?* And Elend stops in the path. The mist spirit that he saw at the foothills had tried, he thinks, to warn him *not* to attack. But the meaning was murky; the gestures of a thing that may or may not be a ghost are not the kind of evidence on which an emperor bases his moves. He has to break into the storage beneath Fadrex — siege will not last another month — and he has to get Vin out. Yomen will never trade her back. Sitting and waiting puts her at as much risk as charging; charging at least gives her chaos to escape in. He tells himself, in the words Vin taught him at the ball in Luthadel, that he can be both Elend the man and Elend the king — and that the king has to be the one who makes the hard call.

He gives the order. They attack in the morning. The koloss will go first, in surprise, smashing the city defences; the human soldiers will form up behind them and take the city after that. The objective is the cache under Fadrex and Vin's freedom; the price is whatever it has to be. They will then bring the food back to Luthadel and try to keep what is left of the empire breathing as long as they can.