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*The Terrismen did a good job with this place, my lord,* Demoux says. Elend walks the night camp at his side, hands behind his back. He has changed into a fresh white uniform before riding in, and the clothing does what it is supposed to do — eyes lift, hope lifts. The Pits camp now holds several hundred thousand people. Without the Terrismen the refugees would not have survived: sickness is down, water is filtered, food is portioned, blankets distributed. The food is, however, running out. Demoux stayed on with his soldiers after he reached Luthadel and learned Penrod was dead and the population was already here.

They pause at a campfire where a young Terris-woman brings warm tea. Her eyes linger on Demoux; he thanks her by name. *I should not have left Luthadel,* Elend says quietly. Demoux does not answer. They walk on. The general's earlier messengers never reached Fadrex — lost to the lava field, or perhaps to the same koloss army Elend himself passed coming north. That army is now bearing straight on this camp, and the camp has no walls and almost no soldiers.

Elend presses Demoux on what happened in Luthadel. *Penrod,* Demoux says softly. He went mad — began finding traitors in the nobility and his own army, divided the city, and let it slide into another house war. Almost every soldier killed another, the city half burned, the population fled with little protection. Elend hears Ruin in it; the trick is Kelsier's own, the one that took the city the first time, turned on them. *My lord,* Demoux ventures, *the Survivor is behind this. He wanted us here.* Elend frowns. Demoux explains: it was Kelsier who got the population out. He appeared to a pair of soldiers and then to a group of citizens in Luthadel, told them to be ready for disaster, told them where to lead the people. It is because of those witnesses that anyone made it here at all. Elend tells him to send for them. And, recalling Demoux's long bout of mist sickness at Fadrex, he tells him to find any Allomantic metals in the camp and pass them out — his men were not sick, they were Snapping, and the camp needs every Coinshot, Thug, and Lurcher it can put on the line before dawn.

Far below, Sazed comes back to himself. He has been out only a short time — the throttle cut his air rather than killing him. He is surrounded by mistwraiths. Cousins of the kandra, scavengers of corpses, masses of muscle wound around the wrong bones at the wrong angles — except these bones are not bone. They are stone and wood and metal. Among the oozing translucent shapes lie discarded Blessing spikes. The kandra who heard the Resolution called have obeyed it. They pulled the spikes; they reverted in place; the sentient people they were are gone. Sazed looks across the chamber with pity, amazement, and respect. They did this to keep Ruin from the atium. He has to protect it.

He stumbles to the Trustwarren and stops at the corner. Inside, twenty or so kandra — those out of earshot of the call, or unwilling to obey — are working with KanPaar to push the floor-plate back from the hoard. He realises he is impressed that so many obeyed; this is the holdout. Then Sazed sees something he recognises in the corridor a dozen paces from him: the simple cloth sack he has carried his metalminds in for years, dropped there after he was taken. KanPaar looks up. Ruin, through him, has noticed.

Sazed does not think. He taps the steel lock in his pocket, runs at impossible speed down the corridor, snatches the sack as the kandra inside cry out. He spills its contents to the stone — bracelets, rings, bracers — and grabs two specific rings. His steelmind runs out as he reaches the doorway. One ring is pewter; he taps it and grows in size and bulk. He slams the great metal doors of the Trustwarren shut on the kandra inside, who cry out in shock. Then he taps the other — iron — and becomes several times heavier than himself, a doorstop, holding the doors closed against everything pressing on the other side. The two rings are the same he wore embedded in his body at the siege of Luthadel; he had refilled them after that fight, before he gave up Feruchemy for a year, but they will not last long. He can see no way to bar the doors. If he lets go for a moment the kandra go free. *Please,* he whispers to whatever is listening — the same thing that answered him before — *I am going to need help.*

Two camp witnesses are ushered to Elend under torchlight. Rittle swears he has known the Survivor like his own father since the day Kelsier died, that he was there at Kelsier's cavern visit and the Demoux duel. *It was him, my lord.* The second man only matches the description, but he believes too. Demoux vouches that they describe Kelsier accurately. *He is watching over us,* Demoux tells him. Elend is not sure these are his most reliable witnesses, but he has seen too much to reject the story.

*Elend …,* a voice says at his ear.

A scout's report arrives: the koloss are moving fast and may reach the camp before night ends. Elend swears quietly. *Elend …,* the voice says again. He turns toward the dark. Something is pulling at him. It sounds like Vin's voice. *Come ….*

He grabs a torch and throws on an ashcloak and tells Demoux to gather an honour guard. He strides off into the night with Demoux and his soldiers hurrying after him, wading through waist-deep ash, half-convinced he is going mad. A hillside takes shape in his mind. Have I been here before, he thinks. He pushes on; he is almost — there. He stops at exactly the hillside he saw, indistinguishable from every other hill around it except that a set of tracks ends at it. At the end of the tracks there is a hole in the ground.

He pokes down into it. Pewter flared, then tin for sight; he tosses his torch aside as the corridor opens into a vast cavern, as large as a storage cavern or larger. Blue glow-poles light it. Down on the floor, oozing shapes use stone and wood for bones. Mistwraiths, he thinks, then catches a sound that is not a mistwraith's — stone scraping on metal. He waves Demoux's men forward and follows the noise down a side passage.

A familiar figure is straining against two enormous metal doors, fighting to hold them shut. *Sazed?* Sazed looks up — and in the surprise of it, loses the doors. They burst open and throw him aside, and a knot of furious translucent-skinned kandra tries to bolt past. *Your Majesty,* Sazed gasps. *Do not let them escape.* Demoux and his men crowd up behind. *That is either Sazed or a kandra who ate his bones,* Elend thinks; he trusted the voice into the dark, he will trust this is Sazed. The fight is over in two minutes — the kandra are poor warriors and they carry only metal weapons; soldiers with hammers shatter their bones to keep them from healing.

Afterwards, Sazed dusts himself off and asks Elend how he found him. *I honestly don't know,* Elend says. *Sazed, what is this place?* *The Homeland of the kandra people, Your Majesty,* Sazed tells him, and points past the open doors at the room beyond and the pit in its floor. *And the hiding place of the Lord Ruler's atium hoard.* Elend looks at it without joy. Kings have died searching for this. His people are starving and cannot eat metal. The cavern itself, though — that he can use. Demoux estimates that if the other chambers are this size they can hold a substantial percentage of the Pits camp. Sazed tells him there are four chambers of this scale and four entrances he knows of. Elend turns to Demoux, who is already giving orders. He has one goal between now and dawn, between now and the koloss. Survival.