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Elend stands a second day on the Luthadel city wall with Clubs and Vin, squinting against a red autumn afternoon at a second army settling in near the canal west of his father's force. The banners are Cett's — the same lord who, two days earlier, had tried to push eight Allomancer assassins through the keep. Clubs explains the angle: this second host rolled in along the same approach as Straff, so the scouts watching Straff never saw it coming. Elend hopes aloud the two warlords will rip into each other; Clubs doubts it. Too even, too cautious. Elend grips the stone and notices how steady the thieves around him are with the new weight, and how unsteady he is. Kelsier, he can't help thinking, would have found a way out of this.

Vin cuts across his thoughts. A single rider has broken from Cett's camp at a hard gallop, two dozen mounted archers on his back. She squints through tin and curses: it is Breeze. Clubs sends riders; Vin is already setting up the fourteenth metal in her head, picks an iron bulwark on the tower beside her for an anchor, Pushes off it, and flares duralumin mid-Push. The blast throws her across the field like a thrown stone. She lands between Breeze and the riders, splits an archer's arrow back through his own forehead, kicks a horse out from under another rider, and then sets up a second duralumin Push against the lot of them at once. The flare scatters horses and men through the air like leaves in a gust — she notes to herself, slightly stunned, that duralumin throws the anchor as hard as it throws her. She runs alongside Breeze's horse on flared pewter all the way back through the Iron Gate.

Breeze in the courtyard is still Breeze — vested and dusty, doing fond combat with Ham inside ten seconds of dismounting. Elend greets him, then mildly complains that he had been hoping Breeze would stop one of the armies marching on the city. Breeze confesses, cheerfully, that he has done the exact opposite. He spent three months embedded as an advisor in Cett's court, seeded the western courts with rumours of an atium cache hidden under Luthadel, and walked Cett into marching on the capital on purpose. The point, he explains, is bargaining power: in a two- party negotiation the weaker side has none, but in a three-way standoff between two large evenly-matched armies the small third party becomes the one whose allegiance picks the winner. He bought Elend a siege rather than a sack. The reason he came back ahead of his pursuers is left delicately unspecified; he had a "falling-out" with Cett and a number of arrows after him. Spook arrives last and snickers at the detail that someone "accidentally" poisoned Cett's water supply enough to delay the march by five days.

Breeze notices the wolfhound at Vin's hip, asks what that is, and is told laconically that it is a dog. The truth — that the hound is OreSeur — Vin keeps to herself for now, in front of the open courtyard. The crew sets off back to the keep in two carriages.

In the lead carriage Elend gently teases Vin for sitting on the OreSeur secret as if she still lived in Reen's crew. The mood is light; OreSeur fills the opposite seat with his hound's body and affirms the Contract aloud when Elend asks whether he can be counted on to pull Vin out of trouble — yes for aid, no for speed; the bones have their limits. The mood breaks at the Venture courtyard. Captain Demoux of the palace guard intercepts them, quietly embarrassed: a corpse has been found in Vin's room. It is a skeleton, picked perfectly clean, several bones snapped — exactly OreSeur's discarded body from the wolfhound change, which a basket and an unlocked door turned into a maid-scaring incident. Elend thanks Demoux for keeping it quiet and asks him to discard the bones.

Then Demoux mentions the other one. He has been running dogs over the palace looking for an intruder, and they have turned up a second skeleton stuffed into a closet in an unused visitor wing — identical to the first, completely cleaned of flesh. Elend and Vin share one look and ask to see it. Alone with OreSeur in the closet, Vin picks up a bone and smells what OreSeur confirms: the sharp bile-scent of kandra digestion, still strong. These bones are hours old, not a year. Someone else — not OreSeur — has just eaten and replaced a person inside Keep Venture. Elend goes pale. A kandra is a perfect impersonator; OreSeur played Lord Renoux for over a year and fooled the man's own circle. If an enemy went to the trouble of placing one inside the palace, it was to put a spy in the king's closed meetings — which means the replaced person is someone close enough to attend them.

Vin runs the alibis silently. She, Elend, and OreSeur were on the wall together through the afternoon. Ham was missing long enough that runners struggled to find him; Dockson has been unaccounted for since the Assembly broke; Clubs only joined them at the parapet quite late; Spook was last of all to reach the gate. There is a very good chance, she realises with a sick weight in her stomach, that one of Kelsier's old crew is no longer the person they have been pretending to be.