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Chapter Thirty-Six Part Three

The Lord Ruler’s throne room is one final look at the gothic cathedral motif that has been a part of this book. I took the stained-glass concept to the extreme, expanding it to make a room that was really nothing more than one giant stained glass window. So, to me, it’s a fusion of the gothic motifs and a kind of new-wave artistic rendering. I found that appropriate for the final of the ‘ball rooms’ that I get to show in this book.

The obligator vs Inquisitor political maneuvering here is supposed to feel like only a sliver of a much larger political system. You can, hopefully, imagine the various Cantons struggling for dominance over the centuries. This right here is a nice little culmination of that, with Vin forming the apex of the Inquisitor argument.

I really like this scene because it shows that other things are going on besides Kelsier’s plan and the crew’s plot. It’s very amusing to me that this entire other book happened at the same time–the Inquisitors researching, looking for weaknesses in the other obligator power structure, then hunting down Vin so that they can use her to prove their point. All of the things that have happened with Vin being hunted–their chasing of her and her brother for over a decade, their slaughter of Camon and Theron’s thieving crews, the bait for Kelsier at the crossroads–all of this was done simply so that they could find Vin and use her to take control of the Ministry. It’s ironic, really, that the two plots would intersect, and that Vin would find herself at the center of both of them.

Tevidian’s death here was one of the reasons why I started the book with a discussion between a Lord and an obligator, explaining what happens to skaa women after noblemen rape them. There’s a nice symmetry to the book in my mind–a cohesion bookended by an explanation in the first chapter, then a payoff near the end.

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I figured it would make sense that the Lord Ruler would be so old, so experienced, and so powerful that he wouldn’t be able to be lied to. He’s been around people for centuries and centuries. It’s very hard to fool him.

His extreme power in Allomancy takes a little bit more explaining. It’ll take me three books to get to the real reasons for that one. So, you’ll need to be patient.