“Better?” he asked.
She nodded.
“You’ve just done something incredibly unfair to your body,” Kelsier said. “It should have shut down hours ago, but you have pewter to make it keep going. You’ll recover—you’ll even get better at pushing yourself like this—but right now you just have to keep burning the pewter and stay awake. We can sleep later.”
Vin nodded again. “Why …” Her voice croaked as she spoke. “Why did we stop?”
“Listen.”
She did. She heard … voices. Yelling.
She looked up at him. “A battle?”
Kelsier nodded. “The city of Holstep is about an hour more to the north, but I think we’ve found what we came for. Come on.”
He released her, dropping a coin and jumping over the canal. Vin followed, following him as he rushed up a nearby hill. Kelsier crested it, peeking over the top. Then he stood up, staring at something to the east. Vin crested the hill, and easily saw the battle—such as it was—in the distance. A shift in the wind brought scents to her nose.
Blood. The valley beyond was speckled with corpses. Men still fought on the far side of the valley—a small, ragged group in unmatched clothing was surrounded by a much larger, uniformed army.
“We’re too late,” Kelsier said. “Our men must have finished off the Holstep Garrison, then tried to march back to the caves. But Valtroux City is only a few days away, and its garrison is five thousand strong. Those soldiers got here before we did.”
Squinting, using tin despite the light, Vin could see that he was right. The larger army wore imperial uniforms, and if the line of corpses was any indication, it had ambushed the skaa soldiers as it passed. Their army didn’t have a chance. As she watched, the skaa began to throw up their hands, but the soldiers just kept on killing them. Some of the remaining peasants fought desperately, but they were falling almost as quickly.
“It’s a slaughter,” Kelsier said angrily. “The Valtroux Garrison must have orders to wipe out the entire group.” He stepped forward.
“Kelsier!” Vin said, grabbing his arm. “What are you doing?”
He turned back to her. “There are still men down there. My men.”
“What are you going to do—attack an entire army by yourself? For what purpose? Your rebels don’t have Allomancy—they won’t be able to run away on swift feet and escape. You can’t stop an entire army, Kelsier.”
He shook himself free of her grip; she didn’t have the strength to hold on. She stumbled, falling to the rough black dirt, throwing up a puff of ash. Kelsier began to stalk down the hill toward the battlefield.
Vin climbed to her knees. “Kelsier,” she said, shaking quietly with fatigue. “We aren’t invincible, remember?”
He paused.
“You’re not invincible,” she whispered. “You can’t stop them all. You can’t save those men.”
Kelsier stood quietly, his fists clenched. Then, slowly, he bowed his head. In the distance, the massacre continued, though there weren’t many rebels left.
“The caves,” Vin whispered. “Our force would have left men behind, right? Maybe they can tell us why the army exposed itself. Maybe you can save the ones who stayed behind. The Lord Ruler’s men will certainly search out the army’s headquarters—if they aren’t trying already.”
Kelsier nodded. “All right. Let’s go.”
Kelsier dropped down into the cavern. He had to flare tin to see anything in the deep darkness, lit only by a bit of reflected sunlight from far above. Vin’s scraping in the crack above sounded thunderous to his overenhanced ears. In the cavern itself … nothing. No sound, no light.
So she was wrong, Kelsier thought. No one stayed behind.
Kelsier breathed out slowly, trying to find an outlet for his frustration and anger. He’d abandoned the men on the battlefield. He shook his head, ignoring what logic told him at the moment. His anger was still too fresh.
Vin dropped to the ground beside him, her figure no more than a shadow to his straining eyes.
“Empty,” he declared, his voice echoing hollowly in the cavern. “You were wrong.”
“No,” Vin whispered. “There.”
Suddenly, she was off, scrambling across the floor with a catlike litheness. Kelsier called after her in the darkness, gritted his teeth, then followed her by sound down one of the corridors.
“Vin, get back here! There’s nothing—”
Kelsier paused. He could just barely make out a flicker of light ahead of him in the corridor. Bloody hell! How did she see it from so far away?
He could still hear Vin ahead of him. Kelsier made his way more carefully, checking his metal reserves, worried about a trap left by Ministry agents. As he drew nearer to the light, a voice called out ahead. “Who’s there? Say the password!”
Kelsier continued walking, the light growing bright enough for him to see a spear-holding figure backlit in the corridor ahead. Vin waited in the darkness, crouching. She looked up questioningly as Kelsier passed. She seemed to have gotten over the drain of the pewter drag, for the moment. When they finally stopped to rest, however, she’d feel it.
“I can hear you!” the guard said anxiously. His voice sounded slightly familiar. “Identify yourself.”
Captain Demoux, Kelsier realized. One of ours. It’s not a trap.
“Say the password!” Demoux commanded.
“I need no password,” Kelsier said, stepping into the light.
Demoux lowered his spear. “Lord Kelsier? You’ve come … does that mean the army succeeded?”
Kelsier ignored the question. “Why aren’t you guarding the entrance back there?”
“We … thought it would be more defensible to retreat to the inner complex, my lord. There aren’t a lot of us left.”
Kelsier glanced back toward the entrance corridor. How long until the Lord Ruler’s men find a captive willing to talk? Vin was right after all—we need to get these men to safety.
Vin stood and approached, studying the young soldier with those quiet eyes of hers. “How many of you are there?”
“About two thousand,” Demoux said. “We … were wrong, my lord. I’m sorry.”
Kelsier looked back at him. “Wrong?”
“We thought that General Yeden was acting rashly,” Demoux said, blushing in shame. “We stayed behind. We … thought we were being loyal to you, rather than him. But we should have gone with the rest of the army.”
“The army is dead,” Kelsier said curtly. “Gather your men, Demoux. We need to leave now.”
That night, sitting on a tree stump with the mists gathering around him, Kelsier finally forced himself to confront the day’s events.
He sat with his hands clasped before him, listening to the last, faint sounds of the army’s men bedding down. Fortunately, someone had thought to prepare the group for quick departure. Each man had a bedroll, a weapon, and enough food for two weeks. As soon as Kelsier discovered who had been so foresighted, he intended to give the man a hefty promotion.
Not that there was much to command anymore. The remaining two thousand men included a depressingly large number of soldiers who were past or before their prime—men wise enough to see that Yeden’s plan had been insane, or men young enough to be frightened.