POV: sazed
Summary
A village in the Eastern Dominance, untold leagues from Luthadel and its army at the walls. The clay earth here is more black than brown — even this far south, ash falls. The villagers have not dared to move the corpse where it twisted itself to death in the field; they have sent for the Terrisman instead. He kneels beside the body, runs a hand along the scuffed dirt of the death-thrashings, and consults his medical coppermind — there are a handful of diseases that kill a man with this kind of seizure, and in ordinary times he would have written this off as one of them. These are not ordinary times.
Old Jed had been alone, working his row. The witness who saw it, a leather-skinned man named Teur with a reputation for tall tales, swears he saw fog in the valley in the middle of the day — that he was about to turn back because he had never been out in the mist before — and that Jed kept right on working until the mist caught him, shook him like a doll, and let him fall. Sazed has cause to believe Teur. He saw the same thing himself, weeks earlier. Mist during the day was not supposed to be possible; the mist is a nightly thing of the world and always has been.
Nobody helps him dig. Sazed taps a pewtermind for a bit of stored-up strength and works the heavy clay alone in the southern heat, his steward's robes stained dark by the end. He rolls Jed into the grave and reaches for an appropriate funeral rite. The Keeper indexes inside his religions coppermind are his own, built and refilled by hand; he pulls down HaDah, a southern agricultural faith dead for a thousand years like nearly every religion that existed before the Lord Ruler. The rite calls for a tree branch driven point-down beside the corpse's head, so that its tip breaks back through the dirt at the top of the grave. He breaks a length off one of the sturdier shrubs that pass for trees in this country, drives it in, and shovels — and partway through, to his surprise, the villagers pick up the pile and help him finish.
He stands over the marked grave and speaks a short HaDah prayer. Afterwards he offers, gently, to teach any of them more of the religion if they wish, in case their ancestors had once held it. The village stares back. Two dozen people, almost all of them middle-aged women or men past their prime; the press gangs have already taken the rest. After a long pause one of the women asks when the Lord Ruler is coming back, and why he abandoned them. He tells her, kindly, that he does not believe the Lord Ruler is coming back, and that perhaps it is time to learn other truths. They shuffle in place. He reflects, not for the first time, that the Keepers spent a thousand years gathering the dying religions of the world so that when the Lord Ruler fell the people would have something to recover — and that the people, now, are too tired and too frightened to want any of it back. He cannot blame them; he can also not stop trying. He turns toward the village to teach them something more practical instead, and goes back to thinking about the mist.