POV: elend-venture
Summary
Elend convenes a hasty late-night council in the palace kitchen alcove rather than wake the staff of the main hall. Sazed, travel-dirty and bare-eared, sits across from him while a chef quietly prepares him food. Vin sits at Elend's side with her arm around his waist and her wolfhound OreSeur on the floor; Breeze is rumpled and annoyed at having been pulled from bed; Ham and Elend himself were already up; Dockson pulls up a stool well away from the king as always; Clubs slumps on a bench; Spook sits apart on a serving table, swinging his legs and flirting unsuccessfully with a kitchen girl.
Sazed's first report sinks the room. King Lekal is marching twenty thousand koloss toward Luthadel and seems to trust the creatures over either of the human armies already at the walls. Ham and Breeze contribute what they know from soldiers and refugees: every koloss garrison the empire had stationed snapped within a day of the Lord Ruler's death; one five-hundred-strong garrison cost Cett nearly two thousand soldiers to put down. Clubs flatly notes that twenty thousand of them could probably eat either besieging army on their own — though Ham adds that two armies in proximity should make any sane commander pause. They settle on continuing the Straff parley as planned and letting the imminent koloss threat lever him toward a covert alliance. Elend confesses to himself that of the three armies the creatures frighten him most.
Sazed's second report is harder to receive. He has been quietly tracing reports of mist — not fog, but the mist proper, by all the markers that distinguish it — appearing during the full light of day in the Outer Dominances. Vin and Clubs supply those markers without being asked: thicker than fog, moves in great rivers in the sky as if making the breeze, evaporates from inside a building or tent. Sazed himself saw it crossing a secluded valley by daylight. Worse, witnesses agree the day-mist has been killing people — curling around a victim, who seizes and dies. The wave is moving inward from the Outer Dominances toward the city; one village south of here was trapped in its hovels by it. He cannot explain why, but the Lord Ruler's death is the only causal link he has been able to find. Breeze calls it preposterous and Ham points out that humans have walked the mist for centuries — but Vin, who is the one with reason to take Sazed at his word, sits forward and does not object.
The discussion meanders, partly out of fatigue, until Allrianne appears at the kitchen doorway in a fresh gown with her hair theatrically disheveled, asking why she was not invited to the party. Breeze sends her back to her rooms. Elend and Vin both clock the deliberate mess of her hair and the time it must have taken her to dress; she had plainly heard the servants waking the council and spent the half-hour since eavesdropping. Elend is briefly pleased to have seen it before Vin could tell him. She declines to share what she is thinking about the Sazed report, kisses him, and slips back out into the mist to keep watch near his balcony.
A servant leads Sazed upstairs, where he finds Tindwyl already waiting inside his guest chamber, neatly dressed, watching him. The exchange is direct. She tells him he has overstepped the Synod yet again — that he is the calm humble Terris exemplar everyone wants to follow, not their greatest dissident, and the mist-research is a phantom he has chased out of fear of being irrelevant now that the work of overthrowing the empire is done. Sazed does not deny that she may be right; he tells her he would rather be known as arrogant and foolish than risk the people of the land by waiting for permission, and reminds her — kindly, since she dislikes the reminder — that the last time he disobeyed the Synod the Final Empire fell. She takes his hand for a moment as she passes, and goes.