POV: sazed
Summary
Sazed unclasps the last of his steel bracers in a puff of ash and lets it fall — five months of pouring his own slowness into a pewter-cast husk gone in six days of running. The cost has bought him distance: by his cartography coppermind, Luthadel is now only a week away. He has crossed into the Central Dominance, past the northern Ashmounts Faleast and Tyrian; the pines have given way to the white aspens that grow around the capital. He shoulders a much lighter pack — he has been dropping the less valuable metalminds as he ran.
Standing beside the empty central canal he sees the smoke of an army between him and the city. Curiosity wins over the empty steel bracers; he locates a tall stand of aspens, fills an ironmind to lighten his body, climbs the thinnest tree to its tip, and taps his tinmind for distance vision. The army is not an army of men. It is twenty thousand koloss settled around hundreds of cookfires — bald, blue-skinned, red-eyed, sized from a child's height to ten feet, the largest with skin pulled so tight it tears bloodily around the eyes and the mouth. He pulls down a coppermind from his pack containing notes on the species he once studied for their religion: their bodies continue to grow but their skin does not, the giants are dying of being too large for themselves, their society runs on sudden casual murder, and the Lord Ruler kept them as far from cities as he could.
He looks long enough to see one koloss casually kill another near a fire, strip the dead one's swords, take a small leather pouch off the corpse's strap and add it to his own — every koloss carries one or several of those pouches. Then a patrol of seven appears at the base of his aspen, surrounding him before his close-up vision returns. The lead koloss — its skin only just starting to tear — orders him down. He goes down, hefting his pewtermind in case he needs the strength, leaves his pack to be carried by another in the patrol, and is walked toward the centre of the camp. A koloss beside him kills its neighbour with its bare hands on the way, breaks the dead one's neck, takes its sword and pouch and continues without comment. "I hated him," Sazed is told, when he asks why.
The patrol stops at a tent past a small hillock — the only tent in the camp — guarded by several dozen human imperial soldiers. Sazed is shoved through them, his pack thrown after, into a chamber where a balding young nobleman in a Luthadel suit paces nervously and snaps "King Lekal" when Sazed greets him. It is Jastes Lekal, Elend Venture's old friend from the keep-tower book club — apparently the only man on record to have raised koloss under his own name. Yes, he says, they obey him, and no, he will not explain how. He wants Sazed as his steward. Sazed refuses politely: the Terris are free now, and no Terrisman serves any man as master. Keep him as prisoner if he must, but he will not serve.
The standoff resolves the way Sazed meant it to. He is plainly a problem Jastes cannot afford, and the koloss are plainly a problem Jastes does not fully control — Sazed sees the flicker on his face. They strike the obvious deal: Sazed will go on to Luthadel carrying a message. Tell Elend the army is coming. Give him the numbers; he cannot fight twenty thousand koloss either. Tell him that if he opens the city to Jastes in exchange for the Lord Ruler's atium, Jastes will hold off Cett and Straff for him and let him keep Luthadel as an allied neighbour.
Sazed takes his pack back, says nothing of what he thinks of the proposal, and is walked out of the camp under guard. The two warring kings outside Luthadel were already more than enough. Now there is a third, and his soldiers eat ash and grass and each other.