POV: sazed
Summary
Sazed kneels in a dirt-floored hovel somewhere in the south and walks half a dozen sullen skaa children through their letters, scribed with a stick in the floor — no chalk in the village, no ink, no paper. He has been here long enough to know how meager the place is, and to wonder at it. He has led a scavenging trip up to the abandoned plantation manor and come back with little. He has suggested moving the people into the manor for the winter, and doubts they will go; the building reminds them of lords, and lords meant pain. His students learn because the Master Terrisman told them to learn, not because they want to.
He dismisses them late and walks back through the hill-like hovels in his old steward's robes and a few of his earrings — Lord Ruler's livery, technically, kept on because it is familiar, even though every detail of it is a record of oppression. Will Terris generations after him wear what the Lord Ruler dressed them in because it has simply become Terris now? He does not know. He pauses at the southern edge of the village to look down the long valley, blackened clay split by occasional brown vines, and thinks again about the mist he saw in that valley during the day — the kind of thing he had been telling himself must be a mistake.
His older guilt presses harder. The Keepers he once imagined himself becoming, when he dared to imagine the Lord Ruler gone, were heroes returning lost truths to a grateful world, telling stories around warm hearths. The world they actually inherited is tired, frightened, and indifferent, and his students attend because they were told to, not because they want what he is offering. The Synod has ruled that the Keepers' new duty is to disperse what they already know — farming, sanitation, government, medicine — to the people who never had it; that this, not investigation, is the work now. And Sazed, the Keeper who joined the rebellion against the Synod's wishes and is still not forgiven for it, cannot tell whether the itch he feels is a real sense that something larger than the Lord Ruler is still in play — something so big it has gone effectively invisible — or just the same restlessness that made him an embarrassment to his order in the first place.
A woman bolts up to him out of breath: he has come back. Her first guess is the Lord Ruler himself, and no one comes out of the other hovels to see what is shouting. Sazed checks his metalminds — strength pewtermind on, a small steel ring for speed — and walks out to the edge of the village. The figure on the road in the failing light is not the Lord Ruler. It is Marsh, black-robed, bald, head full of spikes, and he sounds wrong — his voice has gone grinding and gristly in the months since Sazed last saw him, his face will not move, and he refers to the other Inquisitors as his brethren.
The conversation is short. Marsh has come to fetch him; Sazed must come south. The Conventical of Seran — the Steel Ministry stronghold the Inquisitors and high obligators withdrew to after the Collapse — is empty. Marsh wants to search the libraries while it stays empty, and wants Sazed along in case any of his brethren are still there. Sazed hesitates; his work is here, with the villagers. Then Marsh tells him, quietly and without warning, that the mists are coming during the day, and that the Lord Ruler was only ever a delay — a cog — and that the real story has not yet begun. Sazed agrees to come. He goes back to the village to explain. Marsh does not move from the road, and lets the mist gather around him in the dark.