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- The floor was scattered with corpses, their twisted limbs shadowed and haunting in the light of Dockson’s solitary lantern. They weren’t rotting yet—the attack had happened only that morning—but there was still a smell of death about the room. The scent of blood drying slowly, the scent of misery and of terror.
- Vin remained in the doorway. She’d seen death before—seen it often, on the streets. Knifings in alleys. Beatings in lairs. Children dead of starvation. She had once seen an old woman’s neck snapped by the backhand of an annoyed lord. The body had lain in the street for three days before a skaa corpse crew had finally come for it.
- Yet, none of those incidents had the same air of intentional butchery that she saw in Camon’s lair. These men hadn’t simply been killed, they had been torn apart. Limbs lay separated from torsos. Broken chairs and tables impaled chests. There were only a few patches of floor that were not covered in sticky, dark blood.
- [...]
- Interesting, Vin thought, picking her way through shattered furniture, stepping clear of blood pools, making her way to Kelsier’s side. He crouched beside a pair of corpses. One, Vin noticed in a moment of shock, had been Ulef. The boy’s face was contorted and pained, the front of his chest a mass of broken bones and ripped flesh—as if someone had forcibly torn the rib cage apart with his hands. Vin shivered, looking away.
- [...]
- Vin looked up from Ulef’s mangled corpse, trying to remain strong. She shrugged. “None of them were my friends.”
- “That’s kind of coldhearted, Vin.”
- “I know,” she said with a quiet nod.
- Kelsier regarded her for a moment, then crossed the room to speak with Dockson.
- Vin looked back at Ulef’s wounds. They looked like the work of some crazed animal, not a single man.
- The Inquisitor must have had help, Vin told herself. There is no way one person, even an Inquisitor, could have done all this. There was a pileup of bodies near the bolt exit, but a quick count told her that most—if not all—of the crew was accounted for. One man couldn’t have gotten to all of them quickly enough…could he have?
- There are a lot of things we don’t know about the Inquisitors, Kelsier had told her. They don’t quite follow the normal rules.
- Vin shivered again.
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