Elend nodded from his place at the front of the room. “Somehow, those spikes in the Inquisitors’ bodies transfer Allomantic ability. You kill eight Mistings, and you give all their powers to one other man, such as Marsh. Sazed once told me that Marsh was always hesitant to speak of the day he was made an Inquisitor, but he did say that it was … ‘messy.’”
Ham nodded. “And when Kelsier and Vin found his room the day he was taken and made an Inquisitor, they found a corpse in there. One they initially assumed was Marsh!”
“Later, Marsh said that more than one person had been killed there,” Vin said quietly. “There just hadn’t been enough … left of them to tell.”
“Again,” Cett said, “does this all have a point?”
“Well, it seems to be doing a good job of annoying you,” Ham said lightly. “Do we need any other point?”
Elend gave them both hard looks. “The point is, Cett, that Vin discovered something earlier this week.”
The group turned toward her.
“Koloss,” Vin said. “They’re made from humans.”
“What?” Cett asked, frowning. “That’s absurd.”
“No,” Vin said, shaking her head. “I’m sure of it. I’ve checked living koloss. Hidden in those folds and rips of skin on their bodies, they are pierced by spikes. Smaller than the Inquisitor spikes, and made from different metals, but all of the koloss have them.”
“Nobody has been able to figure out where new koloss come from,” Elend said. “The Lord Ruler guarded the secret, and it’s become one of the great mysteries of our time. Koloss seem to kill each other with regularity when someone isn’t actively controlling them. Yet, there always seem to be more of the creatures. How?”
“Because they are constantly replenishing their numbers,” Ham said, nodding slowly. “From the villages they pillage.”
“Did you ever wonder,” Elend said, “back during the siege of Luthadel, why Jastes’s koloss army attacked a random village before coming for us? The creatures needed to replenish their numbers.”
“They always walk about,” Vin said, “wearing clothing, talking about being human. Yet, they can’t quite remember what it was like. Their minds have been broken.”
Elend nodded. “The other day, Vin finally got one of them to show her how to make new koloss. From what he did, and from what he’s said since, we believe that he was going to try to combine two men into one. That would make a creature with the strength of two men, but the mind of neither.”
“A third art,” Ham said, looking up. “A third way to use the metals. There is Allomancy, which draws power from the metals themselves. There is Feruchemy, which uses metals to draw power from your own body, and there is …”
“Marsh called it Hemalurgy,” Vin said quietly.
“Hemalurgy …” Ham said. “Which uses the metals to draw power from someone else’s body.”
“Great,” Cett said. “Point?”
“The Lord Ruler created servants to help him,” Elend said. “Using this art … this Hemalurgy … he made soldiers, which we call koloss. He made spies, which we call kandra. And he made priests, which we call Inquisitors. He built them all with weaknesses, so that he could control them.”
“I first learned how to take control of the koloss because of TenSoon,” Vin said. “He inadvertently showed me the secret. He mentioned that the kandra and koloss were cousins, and I realized I could control one just as I had the other.”
“I … still don’t see where you’re heading with this,” Demoux said, glancing from Vin to Elend.
“The Inquisitors must have the same weakness, Demoux,” Elend said. “This Hemalurgy leaves the mind … wounded. It allows an Allomancer to creep in and take control. The nobility always wondered what made the Inquisitors so fanatically devoted to the Lord Ruler. They weren’t like regular obligators—they were far more obedient. Zealous to a fault.”
“It happened to Marsh,” Vin whispered. “The first time I met him after he’d been made an Inquisitor, he seemed different. But, he only grew even odder during the year following the Collapse. Finally, he turned on Sazed, tried to kill him.”
“What we’re trying to suggest,” Elend said, “is that something is controlling the Inquisitors and the koloss. Something is exploiting the weakness the Lord Ruler built into the creatures and is using them as its pawns. The troubles we’ve been suffering, the chaos following the Collapse—it’s not simply chaos. No more than the patterns of people who fall sick to the mists are chaotic. I know it seems obvious, but the important thing here is that we now know the method. We understand why they can be controlled and how they’re being controlled.”
Elend continued to pace, his feet marking the dirty tent floor. “The more I think about Vin’s discovery, the more I come to believe that this is all connected. The koloss, the kandra, and the Inquisitors are not three separate oddities, but part of a single cohesive phenomenon. Now, on the surface, knowledge of this third art … this Hemalurgy … doesn’t seem like much. We don’t intend to use it to make more koloss, so what good is the knowledge?”
Cett nodded, as if Elend had spoken the man’s own thoughts. Elend, however, had drifted off a bit, staring out the open tent flaps, losing himself in thought. It was something he’d once done frequently, back when he spent more time on scholarship. He wasn’t addressing Cett’s questions. He was speaking his own concerns, following his own logical path.
“This war we’re fighting,” Elend continued, “it isn’t just about soldiers. It isn’t just about koloss, or about taking Fadrex City. It’s about the sequence of events we inadvertently started the moment we struck down the Lord Ruler. Hemalurgy—the origins of the koloss—is part of a pattern. The percentages that fall sick from the mists are also part of the pattern. The less we see chaos, and the more we see the pattern, the better we’re going to be at understanding just what we fight—and just how to defeat it.”
Elend turned toward the group. “Noorden, I want you to change the focus of your research. Up until now, we’ve assumed that the movements of the koloss were random. I’m no longer convinced that is true. Research our old scout reports. Draw up lists and plot movements. Pay particular attention to bodies of koloss that we specifically know weren’t under the control of an Inquisitor. I want to see if we can discover why they went where they did.”
“Yes, my lord,” Noorden said.
“The rest of you stay vigilant,” Elend said. “I don’t want another mistake like last week’s. We can’t afford to lose any more troops, even koloss.”
They nodded, and Elend’s posture indicated the end of the meeting. Cett was carried away to his tent, Noorden bustled off to begin this new research, and Ham went in search of something to eat. Demoux, however, stayed. Vin stood and trailed forward, stepping up to Elend’s side and taking his arm as he turned to address Demoux.
“My lord …” Demoux said, looking a bit embarrassed. “I assume General Hammond has spoken to you?”