POV: sazed
Summary
On the eighth morning out of the Conventical, Sazed wakes to a thin film of ash on his blanket and an empty patch of dirt where Marsh had been sleeping. He waits. Marsh does not come back. He cooks his soup and washes his robes and shaves his head and oils his boots and sets out the rubbing from the Conventical plate and reads a few words from it and puts it carefully away. Marsh does not come back. Eventually Sazed decides he cannot wait any longer and starts north on his own; Marsh knows the way and can catch up.
Some distance up the eastern fork of the road he stops on a hilltop and taps his geography coppermind for the darkness on the horizon, then pulls in the gazetteer entry: the village is called Urbene, its skaa are herdsmen, the place is described as picturesque. Goats are roaming the road unwatched, which is wrong — the skaa south of here are starving and unguarded livestock should not exist. He goes down anyway.
A shift in the wind brings the smell. He fills a scent tinmind against it, deadens his nose, and walks into a village of bodies. Half-rotted corpses lie outside the doors of the nearest hovel and far more inside — emaciated, blanket- wrapped, sitting upright against the walls; in several houses he finds gnawed human bones at the centre of the floor. There has been no slaughter here; the skaa starved and dehydrated inside their houses with goats grazing untouched ten paces away. The doorways are still standing open.
He hears breathing in the last hovel and finds one survivor among the dead — a man so dirty he had been mistaken for one of the corpses, bald, sunken, eyes wide. Sazed speaks gently and the man bolts, scrambles over the bodies, huddles in the back of the room. There is no food, the survivor tells him. Except there. He looks at the pile of bones at the centre of the room. He did not eat the food, he says. Why can't he go outside? Mist.
Sazed looks at the open doorway and the high sun. There is no mist outside; the sun will not set for an hour. He turns back. Day mist? The survivor nods. And it stayed? Days, weeks, the man says. All mist.
Sazed presses for what it did. The man's answers come out half-sense. Jell was the bull-headed one who walked out — the mist shook him to the ground and he writhed. (Those are the corpses outside the doorways.) Others walked out and the mist let them; they called back to the village that it had not taken them. Others were shaken to the ground and got back up later. Others died where they stood. There is no rule Sazed can extract from his answers. The survivor lapses, then rises abruptly and tears the meat from one of the corpses with his teeth. Sazed catches the bone out of his hand and carries him bodily into the sun; the man stops fighting at once, kneels, and asks why the Lord Ruler abandoned them. Sazed tells him the Lord Ruler was a tyrant. The man says he loved us, the mist used to be ours and now it hates us, and bolts down the path out of the village.
Sazed takes nothing from the village but the knowledge. There is more wrong with the world than two armies outside Luthadel. On his way out of the hovel he digs out the largest of his steelminds — into which he has spent months methodically pouring his own slowness — and straps it to his forearm. Feruchemical steel stores physical speed; tapping it returns months of saved motion in a burst. He has been keeping this one for the chance he might need to be somewhere very fast. He puts it on.