Vin stopped to lean against the side of the stone hallway. “Maybe Elend,” she admitted. “I think I mentioned it to Sazed too, just after it happened. That was almost two years ago.”
“That could have been enough, Mistress,” OreSeur said. “We cannot learn everything about a person, but we try our best to discover items like this—private conversations, secrets, confidential information—so that we can mention them at appropriate times and reinforce our illusion.”
Vin frowned.
“There are…other things as well, Mistress,” OreSeur said. “I hesitate because I do not wish you to imagine your friends in pain. However, it is common for our master—the one who actually does the killing—to torture their victim for information.”
Vin closed her eyes. Dockson felt so real…his guilt, his reactions…that couldn’t be faked, could it?
“Damn,” she whispered quietly, opening her eyes. She turned, sighing as she pushed open the shutters of a hallway window. It was dark out, and the mists curled before her as she leaned against the stone windowsill and looked out at the courtyard two stories below.
“Dox isn’t an Allomancer,” she said. “How can I find out for certain if he’s the impostor or not?”
“I do not know, Mistress,” OreSeur said. “This is never an easy task.”
Vin stood quietly. Absently, she pulled out her bronze earring—her mother’s earring—and worked it between her fingers, watching it reflect light. It had once been gilded with silver, but that had worn off in most places.
“I hate this,” she finally whispered.
“What, Mistress?”
“This…distrust,” she said. “I hate being suspicious of my friends. I thought I was through mistrusting those around me. I feel like a knife is twisting inside of me, and it cuts deeper every time I confront one of the crew.”
OreSeur sat on his haunches beside her, and he cocked his head. “But, Mistress. You’ve managed to eliminate several of them as impostors.”
“Yes,” Vin said. “But that only narrows the field—brings me one step closer to knowing which one of them is dead.”
“And that knowledge isn’t a good thing?”
Vin shook her head. “I don’t want it to be any of them, OreSeur. I don’t want to distrust them, don’t want to find out that we’re right….”
OreSeur didn’t respond at first, leaving her to stare out the window, mists slowly streaming to the floor around her.
“You are sincere,” OreSeur finally said.
She turned. “Of course I am.”
“I’m sorry, Mistress,” OreSeur said. “I did not wish to be insulting. I just…Well, I have been kandra to many masters. So many of them are suspicious and hateful of everyone around them, I had begun to think that your kind lacked the capacity for trust.”
“That’s silly,” Vin said, turning back to the window.
“I know it is,” OreSeur said. “But people often believe silly things, if given enough proof. Either way, I apologize. I do not know which of your friends is dead, but I am sorry that one of my kind brought you this pain.”
“Whoever he is, he’s just following his Contract.”
“Yes, Mistress,” OreSeur said. “The Contract.”
Vin frowned. “Is there a way that you could find out which kandra has a Contract in Luthadel?”
“I’m sorry, Mistress,” OreSeur said. “That is not possible.”
“I figured as much,” she said. “Are you likely to know him, whoever he is?”
“The kandra are a close-knit group, Mistress,” OreSeur said. “And our numbers are small. There is a good chance that I know him quite well.”
Vin tapped her finger against the windowsill, frowning as she tried to decide if the information was useful.
“I still don’t think it’s Dockson,” she finally said, replacing the earring. “We’ll ignore him for now. If I can’t get any other leads, we’ll come back…” She trailed off as something caught her attention. A figure walking in the courtyard, bearing no light.
Ham, she thought. But the walk wasn’t right.
She Pushed on the shield of the lamp hanging on the wall a short distance away. It snapped closed, the lamp shaking as the hallway fell into darkness.
“Mistress?” OreSeur asked as Vin climbed up into the window, flaring her tin as she squinted into the night.
Definitely not Ham, she thought.
Her first thought was of Elend—a sudden terror that assassins had come while she was talking to Dockson. But, it was early in the night, and Elend would still be speaking with his counselors. It was an unlikely time for an assassination.
And only one man? Not Zane, not judging from the height.
Probably just a guard, Vin thought. Why do I have to be so paranoid all the time?
And yet…she watched the figure walking into the courtyard, and her instincts kicked in. He seemed to be moving suspiciously, as if he were uncomfortable—as if he didn’t want to be seen.
“In my arms,” she said to OreSeur, tossing a padded coin out the window.
He hopped up obligingly, and she leaped out the window, fell twenty-five feet, and landed with the coin. She released OreSeur and nodded into the mists. He followed closely as she moved into the darkness, stooping and hiding, trying to get a good look at the lone figure. The man walked briskly, moving toward the side of the palace, where the servants’ entrances were. As he passed, she finally saw his face.
Captain Demoux? she thought.
She sat back, crouching with OreSeur beside a small stack of wooden supply boxes. What did she really know of Demoux? He was one of the skaa rebels recruited by Kelsier almost two years before. He’d taken to command, and had been promoted quickly. He was one of the loyal men who had stayed behind when the rest of the army had followed Yeden to their doom.
After the Collapse, he’d stayed in with the crew, eventually becoming Ham’s second. He had received no small amount of training from Ham—which might explain why he’d go out at night without a torch or lantern. But, even so….
If I were going to replace someone on the crew, Vin thought, I wouldn’t pick an Allomancer—that would make the impostor too easy to spot. I’d pick someone ordinary, someone who wouldn’t have to make decisions or attract notice.
Someone close to the crew, but not necessarily on it. Someone who is always near important meetings, but someone that others don’t really know that well….
She felt a small thrill. If the impostor were Demoux, it would mean that one of her good friends hadn’t been killed. And it would mean that the kandra’s master was even smarter than she’d given him credit for being.
He rounded the keep, and she followed quietly. However, whatever he’d been doing this night, it was already completed—for he moved in through one of the entrances on the side of the building, greeting the guards posted there to watch.
Vin sat back in the shadows. He’d spoken to the guards, so he hadn’t snuck out of the palace. And yet…she recognized the stooped posture, the nervous movements. He’d been nervous about something.
That’s him, she thought. The spy.
But now, what should she do about it?
34
There was a place for me, in the lore of the Anticipation—I thought myself the Announcer, the prophet foretold to discover the Hero of Ages. Renouncing Alendi then would have been to renounce my new position, my acceptance, by the others.
And so I did not.
“That won’t work,” Elend said, shaking his head. “We need a unanimous decision—minus the person being ousted, of course—in order to depose a member of the Assembly. We’d never manage to vote out all eight merchants.”
Ham looked a bit deflated. Elend knew that Ham liked to consider himself a philosopher; indeed, Ham had a good mind for abstract thinking. However, he wasn’t a scholar. He liked to think up questions and answers, but he didn’t have experience studying a text in detail, searching out its meaning and implications.
Elend glanced at Sazed, who sat with a book open on the table before him. The Keeper had at least a dozen volumes stacked around him—though, amusingly, his stacks were neatly arranged, spines pointing the same direction, covers flush. Elend’s own stacks were characteristically haphazard, pages of notes sticking out at odd angles.
It was amazing how many books one could fit into a room, assuming one didn’t want to move around very much. Ham sat on the floor, a small pile of books beside him, though he spent most of his time voicing one random idea or another. Tindwyl had a chair, and did not study. The Terriswoman found it perfectly acceptable to train Elend as a king; however, she refused to research and give suggestions about keeping his throne. This seemed, in her eyes, to cross some unseen line between being an educator and a political force.
Good thing Sazed isn’t like that, Elend thought. If he were, the Lord Ruler might still be in charge. In fact, Vin and I would probably both be dead—Sazed was the one who actually rescued her when she was imprisoned by the Inquisitors. It wasn’t me.
He didn’t like to think about that event. His bungled attempt at rescuing Vin now seemed a metaphor for all he had done wrong in his life. He’d always been well-intentioned, but he’d rarely been able to deliver. That was going to change.
“What about this, Your Majesty?” The one who spoke was the only other person in the room, a scholar named Noorden. Elend tried to ignore the intricate tattoos around the man’s eyes, indications of Noorden’s former life as an obligator. He wore large spectacles to try to hide the tattoos, but he had once been relatively well placed in the Steel Ministry. He could renounce his beliefs, but the tattoos would always remain.
“What have you found?” Elend asked.
“Some information on Lord Cett, Your Majesty,” Noorden said. “I found it in one of the ledgers you took from the Lord Ruler’s palace. It seems Cett isn’t as indifferent to Luthadel politics as he’d like us to think.” Noorden chuckled to himself at the thought.
Elend had never met a cheerful obligator before. Perhaps that was why Noorden hadn’t left the city like most of his kind; he certainly didn’t seem to fit into their ranks. He was only one of several men that Elend had been able to find to act as scribes and bureaucrats in his new kingdom.
Elend scanned Noorden’s page. Though the page was filled with numbers rather than words, his scholar’s mind easily parsed the information. Cett had done a lot of trading with Luthadel. Most of his work had been done using lesser houses as fronts. That might have fooled noblemen, but not the obligators, who had to be informed of the terms of any deal.
Noorden passed the ledger over to Sazed, who scanned the numbers.
“So,” Noorden said, “Lord Cett wanted to appear unconnected to Luthadel—the beard and the attitude only serving to reinforce that impression. Yet, he always had a very quiet hand in things here.”
Elend nodded. “Maybe he realized that you can’t avoid politics by pretending you’re not part of them. There’s no way he would have been able to grab as much power as he did without some solid political connections.”
“So, what does this tell us?” Sazed asked.
“That Cett is far more accomplished at the game than he wants people to believe,” Elend said, standing, then stepping over a pile of books as he made his way back to his chair. “But, I think that much was obvious by the way he manipulated me and the Assembly yesterday.”
Noorden chuckled. “You should have seen the way you all looked, Your Majesty. When Cett revealed himself, a few of the noble Assemblymen actually jumped in their seats! I think the rest of you were too shocked to—”
“Noorden?” Elend said.
“Yes, Your Majesty?”
“Please focus on the task at hand.”
“Um, yes, Your Majesty.”
“Sazed?” Elend asked. “What do you think?”
Sazed looked up from his book—a codified and annotated version of the city’s charter, as written by Elend himself. The Terrisman shook his head. “You did a very good job with this, I think. I can see very few methods of preventing Lord Cett’s appointment, should the Assembly choose him.”
“Too competent for your own good?” Noorden said.
“A problem which, unfortunately, I’ve rarely had,” Elend said, sitting and rubbing his eyes.
Is this how Vin feels all the time? he wondered. She got less sleep than he, and she was always moving about, running, fighting, spying. Yet, she always seemed fresh. Elend was beginning to droop after just a couple of days of hard study.
Focus, he told himself. You have to know your enemies so that you can fight them. There has to be a way out of this.
Dockson was still composing letters to the other Assemblymen. Elend wanted to meet with those who were willing. Unfortunately, he had a feeling that number would be small. They had voted him out, and now they had been presented with an option that seemed an easy way out of their problems.
“Your Majesty…” Noorden said slowly. “Do you think, maybe, that we should just let Cett take the throne? I mean, how bad could he be?”
Elend stopped. One of the reasons he employed the former obligator was because of Noorden’s different viewpoint. He wasn’t a skaa, nor was he a high nobleman. He wasn’t a thief. He was just a scholarly little man who had joined the Ministry because it had offered an option other than becoming a merchant.
To him, the Lord Ruler’s death had been a catastrophe that had destroyed his entire way of life. He wasn’t a bad man, but he had no real understanding of the plight of the skaa.
“What do you think of the laws I’ve made, Noorden?” Elend asked.
“They’re brilliant, Your Majesty,” Noorden said. “Keen representations of the ideals spoken of by old philosophers, along with a strong element of modern realism.”
“Will Cett respect these laws?” Elend asked.
“I don’t know. I haven’t ever really met the man.”
“What do your instincts tell you?”
Noorden hesitated. “No,” he finally said. “He isn’t the type of man who rules by law. He just does what he wants.”
“He would bring only chaos,” Elend said. “Look at the information we have from his homeland and the places he’s conquered. They are in turmoil. He’s left a patchwork of half alliances and promises—threats of invasion acting as the thread that—barely—holds it all together. Giving him rule of Luthadel would just set us up for another collapse.”
Noorden scratched his cheek, then nodded thoughtfully and turned back to his reading.
I can convince him, Elend thought. If only I could do the same for the Assemblymen.
But Noorden was a scholar; he thought the way Elend did. Logical facts were enough for him, and a promise of stability was more powerful than one of wealth. The Assembly was a different beast entirely. The noblemen wanted a return to what they’d known before; the merchants saw an opportunity to grab the titles they’d always envied; and the skaa were simply worried about a brutal slaughter.
And yet, even those were generalizations. Lord Penrod saw himself as the city’s patriarch—the ranking nobleman, the one who needed to bring a measure of conservative temperance to their problems. Kinaler, one of the steelworkers, was worried that the Central Dominance needed a kinship with the kingdoms around it, and saw an alliance with Cett as the best way to protect Luthadel in the long run.
Each of the twenty-three Assemblymen had their own thoughts, goals, and problems. That was what Elend had intended; ideas proliferated in such an environment. He just hadn’t expected so many of their ideas to contradict his own.
“You were right, Ham,” Elend said, turning.
Ham looked up, raising an eyebrow.
“At the beginning of this all, you and the others wanted to make an alliance with one of the armies—give them the city in exchange for keeping it safe from the other armies.”
“I remember,” Ham said.
“Well, that’s what the people want,�
� Elend said. “With or without my consent, it appears they’re going to give the city to Cett. We should have just gone with your plan.”
“Your Majesty?” Sazed asked quietly.
“Yes?”
“My apologies, but it is not your duty to do what the people want.”
Elend blinked. “You sound like Tindwyl.”
“I have known few people as wise as she, Your Majesty,” Sazed said, glancing at her.
“Well, I disagree with both of you,” Elend said. “A ruler should only lead by the consent of the people he rules.”
“I do not disagree with that, Your Majesty,” Sazed said. “Or, at least, I do believe in the theory of it. Regardless, I still do not believe that your duty is to do as the people wish. Your duty is to lead as best you can, following the dictates of your conscience. You must be true, Your Majesty, to the man you wish to become. If that man is not whom the people wish to have lead them, then they will choose someone else.”
Elend paused. Well, of course. If I shouldn’t be an exception to my own laws, I shouldn’t be an exception to my own ethics, either. Sazed’s words were really just a rephrasing of things Tindwyl had said about trusting oneself, but Sazed’s explanation seemed a better one. A more honest one.
“Trying to guess what people wish of you will only lead to chaos, I think,” Sazed said. “You cannot please them all, Elend Venture.”
The study’s small ventilation window bumped open, and Vin squeezed through, pulling in a puff of mist behind her. She closed the window, then surveyed the room.
“More?” she asked incredulously. “You found more books?”
“Of course,” Elend said.
“How many of those things have people written?” she asked with exasperation.
Elend opened his mouth, then paused as he saw the twinkle in her eye. Finally, he just sighed. “You’re hopeless,” he said, turning back to his letters.
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