1
POV: elend-venture
Summary
A year after the night the Lord Ruler died, King Elend Venture stands on the Luthadel city wall watching another army settle in around the capital he inherited. The sky drops black flakes from a particularly active run of the Ashmounts; below him fifty thousand soldiers light their evening cookfires under a bloody-red setting sun. Ham leans on the parapet beside him and gives the count. Elend has twenty thousand men at best — half-trained peasants paid out of an empty treasury — and the Lord Ruler's fabled atium cache is still missing, which is the single hole in his rule he cannot stop falling through. Every warlord in the old empire believes he is sitting on it; none of them are wrong about how badly his kingdom needs it.
The two men talk the way the king talks to all of the surviving crew these days — gently, around the absence of Kelsier. Ham admits he has no idea what to do here; the Survivor was always the one who turned brainstorms into plans, and the rest of them have been improvising into the gap for twelve months. The army at the gates is the worst kind of problem Elend can imagine: it belongs to his own father, Straff Venture, a man Elend understands well enough to know is likely to be a tyrant worse than the one they just overthrew — a petty bully wearing a nobleman's manners. Elend has a proposal half-finished back at the keep that will let him invoke a king's right of parlay before the twenty-four-man Assembly he founded can panic and surrender the city out from under him. He asks Ham to call the crew together — Dockson is just back from Terris, though Spook is still a week out and Breeze has not written in months — then turns back to the campfires, only to realise he has lost track of Vin entirely.
She is across the city, dropping into a damp alley as the mist climbs the cobbles in translucent vines. A year has not changed the nightly rhythms of Luthadel: the skaa still bolt their doors at dusk despite the new free government, and Vin has the streets to herself. She burns tin and pewter out of habit — she leaves them flared most hours she is awake — copper as armour against any bronze burner sweeping the night, and steel at the corners, where she flicks a coin out into the haze and reads the lines of nearby metal for anything that moves. She is still five feet and slight and unintimidating, and she likes it. She also likes the mist itself, which softens the cramped city into shadowed mountains and chandler-melt tenements she can move through unseen.
The figure she meets at the centre of a square is OreSeur — the kandra who once played Lord Renoux and then walked Kelsier's bones, now reassigned to her under Contract by Kelsier's arrangement and wearing a deliberately forgettable balding body. The two of them treat each other as politely as people who do not particularly like each other can. He addresses her as Mistress and waits to be told what to do; she keeps her instructions clipped. She tells him she may have been wrong about being followed tonight, and admits to herself a small regret: she had been hoping the masked Mistborn she has been calling the Watcher would turn up to spar again. The Watcher has been threading through her city for months — half-a-dozen near-encounters, all declined — and his interest is conspicuously in her and not in Elend. She still has no idea who he is.
She decides to head back to the wall. As OreSeur turns to comply, the mist opens around them and a fan of coins comes flying for her chest.