Page 155 of The Well of Ascension

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.

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