POV: sazed
Summary
Sazed and Marsh stand on the northern rim of the wide crater that hides the Conventical of Seran from the world. Sazed taps a tinmind to compound his eyesight and surveys the fortress at the bottom of the drop — flat dark walls, sealed steel plates, no windows, no movement, no light. He cannot tell whether anyone is still inside. Marsh can; he says, with the same unsettling blunt certainty he has had ever since his transformation, that the Inquisitors are gone — north, "among other things," with Luthadel on the list. He does not know how he knows.
They go down. Marsh kicks the descent cage loose; it falls, ropes smoking, and crashes at the chasm floor. He shimmies down the dangling rope after it on Allomantic agility. Sazed, who is no warrior and knows it, nonetheless has his own way down. He kneels, opens his pack, unhooks the heavy copper bracers from his upper and lower arms — his core copperminds, the archive into which Keepers have poured the accumulated text of every pre-imperial culture they could recover — and hides them in a hollow between two boulders on the rim, refusing to risk them inside. He puts on smaller iron and pewter bracelets at his ankles and tin and copper rings on his fingers, then steps off the rim and begins filling the ironmind on the way down. The ironmind takes weight away from him; the wind catches him; he lands almost weightlessly beside Marsh.
The front door takes both of them, Marsh burning pewter, Sazed tapping his own pewtermind to swell his frame to a warrior's bulk for the push. Inside is a steel-clad hall, broad and unornamented, all square pillars and flat plates. Sazed lights a lamp — Marsh's spike-filled eye sockets work in the dark, his own do not — and turns the small copper ring on his finger into a fresh coppermind to record the place into. He speaks his observations aloud as he walks, each sentence leaving his head and going into the ring; in his head it is immediately, oddly hollow, with the words already gone. Marsh disapproves of his attention to the Inquisitors' architecture and says so. Sazed answers, mildly, that no religion is unworthy of record.
The two of them find the servants. They are in a single back room, piled against the wall, days dead — killed cleanly, methodically, by sword and axe. Marsh looks at them for a long moment, then tells Sazed he is going upstairs alone. He does not want company while he sees what he is going to see in the Inquisitors' quarters. Sazed does not press it.
Left to himself, Sazed dictates the architecture and the slaughter into the coppermind, and then, inevitably, lets the dark stairwell at the back of the hall pull him down. The lower level is more square chambers and a couple of altar-blocks, but at the back of the landing he walks into a room with bloody steel tables set into the floor, no bodies, drifts of flaked dried blood, and along one wall a rack of heavy spikes of different metals — some still tipped with blood, all indistinguishable from the spikes set in Marsh's eye sockets. He has always assumed an Inquisitor had to be made from an Allomancer — Marsh was a Seeker before — and the tables and spikes together imply that wherever an Inquisitor comes from, this is the kind of room it happens in. He decides he does not really want to know how.
There is another doorway at the back of the spike room, opening onto a low rough-cut stairwell that does not match the rest of the fortress's daunting architecture. He stoops down it into a cramped little chamber whose far wall is a single steel plate nearly five feet across — covered in tight, etched writing in an old Terris dialect that he can read by sight. The opening lines name the writer: he is Kwaan, "philosopher, scholar, traitor"; he fears he may be the only sane man left of his order; his fellow Worldbringers are deaf to him because they have waited so long for the Hero of Ages that they will stretch any legend to fit a candidate; he is the one who first identified Alendi as the Hero, and he is also the one who betrayed him, because he has come to believe Alendi must not be allowed to complete his quest.
Sazed's hands are not quite steady. The Keepers have spent ten centuries trying to recover their own people's lost religion and never found more than fragments; here is a wall of pre-imperial Terris writing, by a holy man, on matters of prophecy and history both. Marsh reappears in the doorway like a piece of the room itself and reports the upstairs as empty — the other Inquisitors took anything worth taking. He wants to leave. Sazed refuses to leave the text behind: he gets out paper and charcoal and takes a rubbing, line by careful line, so the lines and punctuation will survive the journey home. He realises, as he works, that he can no longer justify the village circuit he came south on. He must take what he has back to Terris — or, better, to Luthadel, from which the text can be sent north. The second possibility makes him immediately, guiltily, glad: he has just been given a duty that aligns with the thing he most wants to do, which is to be in Luthadel again with his friends.