That didn’t sound right to Vin. There was more. She remembered that fear in the Lord Ruler’s eyes. Terror.
He said “do,” not “did.” “What I do for mankind.” That implies that he was still doing it, whatever it was.
You have doomed yourselves….
She shivered in the evening air. The sun was setting, making it even easier to see the illuminated Keep Venture— Elend’s choice of headquarters for the moment, though he might still move to Kredik Shaw. He hadn’t decided yet.
“You should go to him, Mistress,” Sazed said. “He needs to see that you are well.”
Vin didn’t reply immediately. She stared out over the city, watching the bright keep in the darkening sky. “Were you there, Sazed?” she asked. “Did you hear his speech?”
“Yes, Mistress,” he said. “Once we discovered that there was no atium in that treasury, Lord Venture insisted that we go seek help for you. I was inclined to agree with him— neither of us were warriors, and I was still without my Feruchemical storages.”
No atium, Vin thought. After all of this, we haven’t found a speck of it. What did the Lord Ruler do with it all? Or…did someone else get to it first?
“When Master Elend and I found the army,” Sazed continued, “its rebels were slaughtering the palace soldiers. Some of them tried to surrender, but our soldiers weren’t letting them. It was a…disturbing scene, Mistress. Your Elend…he didn’t like what he saw. When he stood up there before the skaa, I thought that they would simply kill him too.”
Sazed paused, cocking his head slightly. “But. . the things he said, Mistress…his dreams of a new government, his condemnation of bloodshed and chaos…Well, Mistress, I fear that I cannot repeat it. I wish I’d had my metalminds, so that I could have memorized his exact words.”
He sighed, shaking his head. “Regardless, I believe that Master Breeze was very influential in helping calm that riot. Once one group started listening to Master Elend, the others did too, and from there…well, it is a good thing that a nobleman ended up as king, I think. Master Elend brings some legitimacy to our bid for control, and I think that we will see more support from the nobility and the merchants with him at our head.”
Vin smiled. “Kell would be angry with us, you know. He did all this work, and we just turned around and put a nobleman on the throne.”
Sazed shook his head. “Ah, but there is something more important to consider, I think. We didn’t just put a nobleman on the throne—we put a good man on the throne.”
“A good man…” Vin said. “Yes. I’ve known a few of those, now.”
Vin knelt in the mists atop Keep Venture. Her splinted leg made it harder to move around at night, but most of the effort she used was Allomantic. She just had to make certain that her landings were particularly soft.
Night had come, and the mists surrounded her. Protecting her, hiding her, giving her power. .
Elend Venture sat at a desk below, beneath a skylight that still hadn’t been patched from the time Vin had thrown a body through it. He didn’t notice her crouching above. Who would? Who saw a Mistborn in her element? She was, in a way, like one of the shadow images created by the Eleventh Metal. Incorporeal. Really just something that could have been.
Could have been…
The events of the last day were difficult enough to sort through; Vin hadn’t even tried to make sense of her emotions, which were a far bigger mess. She hadn’t gone to Elend yet. She hadn’t been able to.