POV: vin
Summary
Vin sits by the firepit at dawn on the road north, watching the mists fail to burn off as the sun comes up. The farther they have ridden from Luthadel the longer the mists linger past morning — wrong by every natural reckoning. She thinks again about the Deepness, is increasingly sure it is the mists themselves rather than a monster or a tyrant, and considers how one fights a thing larger than a continent that feels neither anger nor mercy. The Well's thumpings, troublingly, grow softer the farther north she travels.
She feels the mist spirit move suddenly from her side to the tent, and finds it standing over the sleeping Elend with an insubstantial blade raised. Her dagger meets something tangible in its hand; the spirit fades as the sun finally overcomes the mist. She tells Elend nothing. Spook returns from his scout with news of five men camped behind them and stays to talk while she builds the fire. He says she is less afraid than she used to be, and admits that beside a Mistborn he feels redundant — only tin, weak, useless — and calls himself a coward in a way she does not understand until much later.
Back in the city, the warning drums begin. The crew climb to the wall to find Straff's army gone from the northern horizon and the koloss camp in a massive internal brawl. Tindwyl recognises it for what it is: the creatures always whip themselves into a charge this way. The dark smudge resolves and sweeps toward Luthadel. Clubs bellows orders down the wall — messengers, archers, river grates — and Dockson sorts the crew into gates as soldiers clog the stairwells: Tindwyl to Tin Gate under Keep Venture, Breeze and Ham to Pewter Gate and Zinc Gate where the koloss are charging first, Sazed to Steel Gate as the plan had it. Ash begins to fall with the snow.
On the march north, Straff — held upright in his saddle by stimulants — gets the messenger he has been waiting for. The koloss are attacking Luthadel, exactly as Zane said they would. Janarle looks impressed; Straff orders the column turned about and explicitly tells him to take their time. The creatures will be allowed their fill of the city before he arrives.
At Steel Gate's watchtower Sazed stands with the scouts, no orders of his own to give, and watches arrows fail to slow the charging creatures. The larger ones carry uprooted trees as rams. His scholar's eye, tapping tinsight, notes that the koloss are smarter than the city has credited them — they cannot make tools, but they recognise that the gates need to be rammed — and that the gates themselves were never built to withstand a real siege. A messenger pulls six of his ten companies to reinforce Pewter Gate. Then the koloss, tired of piling at the eastern gates, ford the river and turn toward Steel Gate.
Vin hits the camp of the five followers like a storm: pewter dust into the firepit blown across the cookers, the tents collapsed from inside on her Pulled stakes, the guards stopped by a single coin held above their faces. The man who climbs out of the larger tent is Jastes Lekal, aged and haggard and pleading. Elend steps out of the trees beside her. Jastes admits he tried to lead his koloss away from the city and could not, that his supply carts of wooden coins burnt, and that he fled north rather than be torn apart when the creatures demanded an attack. Elend catalogs the charges — raising a tyrannical army, slaughtering innocent villages, abandoning that army leaderless outside the most populated city in the Empire — forgives his old friend personally, and beheads him in the same breath because his kingdom cannot.
In the woods afterward Elend sits on a rock with Jastes's blood on his sword and tells Vin he understands now what it is to be a knife for someone else — that they are both tools, not for each other but for the kingdom and its people. He has never killed a man before. He and Jastes were once going to ally two great houses in a real political friendship; he admits he himself abandoned the city too.
Spook catches up and breaks. His uncle had told him that Straff would pull back and let the koloss take the city; that was why Sazed sent them away. He knew and kept the secret out of fear, because Elend would have insisted on going back. The Well's thumpings have been getting softer for a reason: she has been walking away from it. The Well is not in the Terris mountains; Sazed lied about that too. Standing on the road and listening, she feels its pull come clear: south. Luthadel.
She drinks the last of her pewter, tells Elend to travel only by day and watch the mists for the spirit she thinks means him harm, and runs south in a pewter drag alone.