POV: sazed
Summary
From the last hill above Luthadel, Straff watches smoke rise inside the wall and feels well — he has identified Amaranta's drug as Black Frayn and is self-medicating with the leaves. Janarle gives him the gate report: the koloss have breached four gates, Zinc Gate first, the main northern gate near Keep Venture the worst. Straff leisurely refuses to attack — let the creatures have a few hours to tire on the city's resistance, then his army will take them easily.
At Steel Gate, with the right door broken in and bodies piled in the arch, Sazed taps pewtermind for the strength of five men, clears koloss corpses from the gate by hand, throws his body against the door, and drains ironmind weight into himself until he is too heavy to fall over. The gate closes; his men barricade it with a length of timber; of his original four hundred only fifty remain. A messenger arrives with word that Tin Gate fell over an hour ago. He takes a single step toward Tindwyl and stops; the pounding on his gate is starting again.
In a snowy street between Zinc Gate and Keep Hasting, Clubs is killed. A koloss band bursts from a side street while a second comes up behind from the breached northern gate. Clubs pushes Breeze aside and takes one sword through the upraised arm and into the ribs in a single blow; the second swing kills him. Breeze tries instinctively to Soothe the advancing creatures and gets nothing back, and crawls into an empty skaa home to hide.
Alone in Keep Venture's grand hall with his map and a few panicked scribes, Dockson makes his last annotation — Tin Gate, fallen — and curses Kelsier aloud. Their real problem, he says, was follow-through: they took the capital and put the noblemen back in charge instead of sending Vin out to take the dominances. The stained glass shatters as the koloss jump in. He picks up the sword from the table, sends a final curse Kell's way, and charges the largest creature. It catches his weapon in an indifferent hand and brings its own sword down.
Janarle tries again outside the wall: the city has fallen, the koloss are slaughtering and weakened, they can be taken now. Straff refuses — let the creatures burn the city to the ground; fires will only help the atium surface. He marks Janarle as a man who will rebel as soon as it becomes known that Zane is gone.
On a hill west of the city, tied into his saddle, Cett watches it die beside Allrianne, Bahmen reading the field for him. He shrugs off her Riot and her pleading and tells her flatly they will wait for Straff to finish and then submit. *The good men are all dead*, he tells her. *They died inside that city.*
Sazed fights on at Steel Gate, calculating that he should have died hours ago. He has held only because his men can see the elderly and the weak standing in the square behind them. He hopes Tindwyl has found safety and that Elend will at least carry the work they did somewhere it matters, and decides he has done as well as a scholar should. His pewter runs out as he kills another creature; the largest koloss he has seen raises its sword against the red setting sun.
A coin shoots through a beam of sunlight and crushes the creature's skull from behind. Vin is on the wall, silhouetted. She leaps into the square, then Pushes the splintered right gate-door off its hinges and uses it as a flail — clearing the whole courtyard of the creatures in a single sweep. The skaa in the square begin to chant. Sazed grabs the elder, says she came as foretold, and tells him she will buy them time to flee the killers loose in the city; they run for the northern gate.
In the abandoned hovel, Breeze cannot move. He observes himself with detached fascination — a man who spent his life controlling others' emotions, undone by his own. Ham, arm in a sling, finds him; a soldier with him says they had felt him Soothing them even from hiding, even after their officer fell. Sazed appears beside him with the news that Dockson is silent for over an hour and Clubs confirmed dead, and orders the soldiers to carry Breeze to Keep Hasting. Breeze only mumbles. They carry him.