POV: breeze
Summary
Breeze sits on his horse at the edge of Zinc Gate's courtyard and does his best to pretend he is not in the middle of a war. It works poorly. The gates boom and splinter under the koloss ram; rocks fly back over the wall with more accuracy than the defenders'; snow falls with the ash. He has long since used up his vials and chokes down handfuls of brass dust between Soothings. He can manage hundreds of men at once when they are packed close enough — more than even Kelsier ever could — but every group he leaves wilts back into terror, and the entire mass is beyond him. He frets briefly about his suit and tells himself the suit will be ruined by his blood, and to be serious. He works on, telling himself that Allrianne is away, that Vin, Elend, and Spook are safe, that Sazed is to thank for sending them out.
Vin runs the canal towpath south at full pewter drag — only the second of her life. She handles the drag-trance better this time, but the focus turns inward and she rages at the crew for not letting her stay, for refusing her protection. She sees images of dead friends as she runs. Kelsier had gone back for Spook and OreSeur and died rather than abandon a friend; she had argued against him, and had been wrong. His last words to her, that she still had much to learn about friendship, run through her with the wind. She covers a day's walking in a few hours and cries the entire way.
Snow and ash fall together in Luthadel as Clubs rides up beside Breeze at Zinc Gate. The creatures cannot be Soothed — he has tried. He talks twenty years of campaigning out in the distant dominances and the barrens, always victorious, always with koloss on his own side. Breeze asks how two men like them — a thief tired of doing the Lord Ruler's bidding and a soother who plays with people's emotions for sport — ended up at the front of an idealist's army. Clubs answers that they must just be idiots, and they blame Kelsier for it. Then the gates burst open.
At Steel Gate Sazed takes word from a messenger that Zinc Gate has fallen. He asks Dockson to send somebody else to lead Steel Gate — he has less confidence in his own ability to lead or fight than even in the boy nobleman captain beside him — and is reminded by the messenger that that is exactly why Dockson sent him. Turning, he notices a hundred skaa gathered in the back of the courtyard in ash-stained clothing. He tries to send them home. The elder calls him *Holy First Witness* — the man who brought news of the Lord Ruler's death and put the spear in the Lady Heir's hand — and tells him they have come to watch the koloss fall. He tries to refuse the reverence; Tindwyl's warning that participants make themselves into objects of worship comes back to him.
The largest koloss haul themselves over the heap of their own dead onto the wall, throw the young captain into the courtyard below, and break the gate inward. Soldiers freeze or flee. Sazed reasons that if he does not do something nobody will. He taps decades of stored strength and speed from his metalminds — his expanding bracers and rings made for exactly this moment — pulls his now-restrictive robe off in a loincloth, shoves through the line of men, and faces the lead koloss at nearly its own size. He breaks its face with a single punch, turns on the soldiers in a voice deeper than his own, and bellows them back into the fight.
Vin collapses on the snow-buried highway when her pewter burns out, still hours from Luthadel. She catches the smell of stew and the sound of children laughing from a skaa hovel in a way- village off the road, and the laughter unmoors her — laughter impossible in the Lord Ruler's time. The couple inside take her for a lost child; she Soothes their suspicion and Riots their helpfulness and asks for pewter. There is no usable pewter, but the abandoned landlord's stable holds a barrel of rusted horseshoes. She tests one with a Steelpush — perfect. She invents a personal moving spikeway on the spot, juggling shoes through the air, Pushing off them as they fall and Pulling them back after she passes. The villager asks if she is the Heir they have heard of. *Yes*, she says, and Pushes herself south in a continuous arc of flipping metal — as Kelsier had been at the end, fighting the Inquisitor.