Mistborn: The Final Empire (Mistborn, #1)

Breeze shook his head. “Now that it’s all up there, I can’t help wondering if the child has a point. This is a daunting task.”


“But it can be done,” Kelsier said. “Let’s start by talking about how to break the city. What can we do that would be so threatening that it would throw the nobility into chaos, maybe even get the palace guard out into the city, exposing them to our troops? Something that would distract the Ministry, and the Lord Ruler himself, while we move our troops in to attack?”

“Well, a general revolution among the populace comes to mind,” Ham said.

“Won’t work,” Yeden said firmly.

“Why not?” Ham asked. “You know how the people are treated. They live in slums, work in mills and smithies the entire day, and half of them still starve.”

Yeden shook his head. “Don’t you understand? The rebellion has been trying for a thousand years to get the skaa in this city to rise up. It never works. They’re too beaten down—they don’t have the will or the hope to resist. That’s why I had to come to you to get an army.”

The room fell still. Vin, however, slowly nodded her head. She’d seen it—she’d felt it. One didn’t fight the Lord Ruler. Even living as a thief, crouching at the edge of society, she knew that. There would be no rebellion.

“He’s right, I’m afraid,” Kelsier said. “The skaa won’t rise up, not in their current state. If we’re going to overthrow this government, we’ll need to do it without the help of the masses. We can probably recruit our soldiers from among them, but we can’t count on the general populace.”

“Could we cause a disaster of some sort?” Ham asked. “A fire maybe?”

Kelsier shook his head. “It might disrupt trade for a while, but I doubt it would have the effect we want. Besides, the cost in skaa lives would be too high. The slums would burn, not stone nobleman keeps.”

Breeze sighed. “What, then, would you have us do?”

Kelsier smiled, eyes twinkling. “What if we turned the Great Houses against each other?”

Breeze paused. “A house war . . .” he said, taking a speculative sip of his wine. “It’s been a while since the city had one of those.”

“Which means that tensions have had plenty of time to brew,” Kelsier said. “The high nobility are growing increasingly powerful—the Lord Ruler barely has control over them anymore, which is why we have a chance of shattering his grip. Luthadel’s Great Houses are the key—they control imperial trade, not to mention enslave the greatest majority of the skaa.”

Kelsier pointed at the board, moving his finger between the line that said Chaos and the line that said Great Houses.

“If we can turn the houses inside Luthadel against each other, we can bring down the city. Mistborn will start assassinating house leaders. Fortunes will collapse. It won’t take long before there is open warfare in the streets. Part of our contract with Yeden states that we’ll give him an opening to seize the city for himself. Can you think of a better one than that?”

Breeze nodded with a smile. “It has flair—and I do like the idea of having the noblemen kill each other.”

“You always like it better when someone else does the work, Breeze,” Ham noted.

“My dear friend,” Breeze replied, “the entire point of life is to find ways to get others to do your work for you. Don’t you know anything about basic economics?”

Ham raised an eyebrow. “Actually, I—”

“It was a rhetorical question, Ham,” Breeze interrupted, rolling his eyes.

“Those are the best kind!” Ham replied.

“Philosophy later, Ham,” Kelsier said. “Stay on task. What do you think of my suggestion?”

“It could work,” Ham said, settling back. “But I can’t see the Lord Ruler letting things go that far.”

“It’s our job to see that he doesn’t have a choice,” Kelsier said. “He’s known to let his nobility squabble, probably to keep them off-balance. We fan those tensions, then we somehow force the Garrison to pull out. When the houses start fighting in earnest, the Lord Ruler won’t be able to do anything to stop them—except, perhaps, send his palace guard into the streets, which is exactly what we want him to do.”

“He could also send for a koloss army,” Ham noted.

“True,” Kelsier said. “But they’re stationed a moderate distance away. That’s a flaw we need to exploit. Koloss troops make wonderful grunts, but they have to be kept away from civilized cities. The very center of the Final Empire is exposed, yet the Lord Ruler is confident in his strength—and why shouldn’t he be? He hasn’t faced a serious threat in centuries. Most cities only need small policing forces.”

“Twenty thousand men is hardly a ‘small’ number,” Breeze said.

“It is on a national scale,” Kelsier said, holding up a finger. “The Lord Ruler keeps most of his troops on the edges of his empire, where the threat of rebellion is strongest. That’s why we’re going to strike him here, in Luthadel itself—and that’s why we’re going to succeed.”

“Assuming we can deal with that Garrison,” Dockson noted.

Kelsier nodded, turning to write House War underneath Great Houses and Chaos. “All right, then. Let’s talk about the Garrison. What are we going to do about it?”

“Well,” Ham said speculatively, “historically, the best way to deal with a large force of soldiers is to have your own large force of soldiers. We’re going to raise Yeden an army—why not let them attack the Garrison? Isn’t that kind of the point of raising the army in the first place?”

“That won’t work, Hammond,” Breeze said. He regarded his empty cup of wine, then held it up toward the boy sitting beside Clubs, who immediately scurried over to refill it.

“If we wanted to defeat the Garrison,” Breeze continued, “we’d need our own force of at least its same size. We’d probably want one much larger, since our men will be newly trained. We might be able to raise Yeden an army—we might even be able to get him one large enough to hold the city for a while. But, getting him one large enough to take on the Garrison inside its fortifications? We might as well give up now, if that’s our plan.”

The group fell silent. Vin squirmed in her chair, looking over each man in turn. Breeze’s words had a profound effect. Ham opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again, sitting back to reconsider.

“All right,” Kelsier finally said. “We’ll get back to the Garrison in a moment. Let’s look at our own army. How can we raise one of substantial size and hide it from the Lord Ruler?”

“Again, that will be difficult,” Breeze said. “There is a very good reason why the Lord Ruler feels safe in the Central Dominance. There are constant patrols on the roadways and canals, and you can hardly spend a day traveling without running into a village or plantation. This isn’t the sort of place where you can raise an army without attracting notice.”

“The rebellion has those caves up to the north,” Dockson said. “We might be able to hide some men there.”

Yeden paled. “You know about the Arguois caverns?”

Kelsier rolled his eyes. “Even the Lord Ruler knows about them, Yeden. The rebels there just aren’t dangerous enough to bother him yet.”

“How many people do you have, Yeden?” Ham asked. “In Luthadel and around it, caves included? What do we have to start with?”

Yeden shrugged. “Maybe three hundred—including women and children.”

“And how many do you think those caves could hide?” Ham asked.

Yeden shrugged again.