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Elend, back in his white uniform but no longer king, runs an impromptu operation out of Keep Venture's carriage landing. Luthadel is freezing; the abandoned nobleman quarters are too cold for the skaa squatting in them, and the smaller skaa tenements with their single huge hearths are the only spaces that can keep the city alive through the winter. Without legal authority, he refuses to force anyone to move; he just sends crews door to door, offering warmth, and sends others to tear apart wooden walls and wooden roofs from the houses people will abandon. He had asked for volunteers and expected a handful; he got hundreds, including men who knew quite well he held no office. That, Captain Demoux notes quietly, says something.

Goradel — the one-time Lord Ruler's palace guard who long ago led Elend into Kredik Shaw to fetch Vin out — comes in to report that the deserted mansions still have most of their interior wood. Felt follows, with progress on the poisoner investigation. The passwalls — the covert ways in and out of the city that the skaa underground used to survive the Lord Ruler's interrogators — are not the route, he says; most have shut down with the siege, and the few still running are now only letting frightened residents out. The route in is underwater: the river-grates have been pried free and locked back into place so a swimmer can slip through unobserved. Elend orders fresh locks on the grates and watchers posted, hoping to take the kandra spy and the Cett-or- Straff poisoner alive. Demoux brings him a young parishioner, Larn, who swears on his sharp eyes to having seen an Inquisitor moving at night near Kredik Shaw; he is not the only one of Demoux's flock to have done so. Elend puts a patrol on the area.

Ham arrives, complaining that the sparring grounds are empty because his men are all here. He and Elend talk over the standoff: Cett in Keep Hasting is wedged in against Straff whether he wants to be or not, and the koloss are the wild card that nobody can predict. Someone needs to do something nobody is expecting. Elend asks Ham how mad he is feeling.

Ham takes him to Granny Hilde — a near-blind, sharp-fingered old woman who has run a passwall cut into the city's outer wall, a few minutes' ride from Keep Venture itself, for as long as Ham can remember. The pouch of coin Elend gives her includes three extra clips to put a grandson on the inside to let him back in. Ham, on the way out, tells him for the first time that he was born and raised in the city himself — to skaa parents with a nobleman grandfather, in the underground but with a family — and that he used this same passwall for years to sneak his wife and children in and out for visits. Elend hands his horse over to him, mounts, and rides for the koloss.

The camp is exactly as Sazed described it — bare creatures, broken landscape, fights flaring without apparent cause — with two new wrinkles. The koloss are wearing clothes torn from Suisna's villagers, and they have begun telling visitors that they are not koloss but humans — that they will live in the city and they will kill its people to take it. They also wear strange pouches strapped at their belts, the biggest creatures carrying scores of them. Elend is escorted past all of it to the small huddle of human tents where Jastes guards from Jastes's dwindling staff are visibly terrified.

Jastes is alone, drinking, hair gone, eyes hollow. He pours Elend a cup of strong spirits; Elend pours it on the floor. Their old friendship has been eaten down to nothing. Jastes blames it on having actually tried the politics they used to argue about, in his own dominance, and on what happened to his family when his rivals struck first. Elend has no answer he is willing to give. When Jastes calls his guards in to take him hostage, Elend — to his own surprise — drops both of them, drags Jastes over his desk, and pins him there with the obsidian knife Vin once gave him. He tells Jastes to march his army out of the dominance, presses the blade to his throat as a dozen guards burst in, walks him past them to the line between human camp and koloss camp, and gives him back to his men.

He is not done. Back among the koloss escort, looking down at a small one in the group, he decides on the spot to attack it. The creature ignores him first, spinning the wrong way; then it almost kills him. Two knife-wounds and a sword-cut later — he is nearly cut in half by the backswing — he gets the blade into the koloss's eye, and the thing drops. The other koloss watch with the same blank curiosity they brought to the start of the fight. He hands them the dead one's horse as explanation ("he ate my horse"), takes its sword and its pouches, and is escorted out of the camp. Once safely clear, he opens a pouch. It is full of boxings — counterfeit ones, hardwood blanks under gold paint. Jastes has been paying his army the way nobody since the dawn of the Final Empire has paid one: in money. Bad money. But enough that the koloss take it.