Mistborn #02 The Well of Ascension

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 view-point. 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.
    "I don't know. I haven't ever really met the man."
    "What do your instincts tell you?"
    Noorden hesitated. "No," he finally said. "He isn't the type of man who rules by law. He just does what he wants."
    "He would bring only chaos," Elend said. "Look at the information we have from his homeland and the places he's conquered. They are in turmoil. He's left a patchwork of half alliances and promises—threats of invasion acting as the thread that—barely—holds it all together. Giving him rule of Luthadel would just set us up for another collapse."
    Noorden scratched his cheek, then nodded thoughtfully and turned back to his reading.
    I can convince him , Elend thought. If only I could do the same for the Assemblymen .
    But Noorden was a scholar; he thought the way Elend did. Logical facts were enough for him, and a promise of stability was more powerful than one of wealth. The Assembly was a different beast entirely. The noblemen wanted a return to what they'd known before; the merchants saw an opportunity to grab the titles they'd always envied; and the skaa were simply worried about a brutal slaughter.
    And yet, even those were generalizations. Lord Penrod saw himself as the city's patriarch—the ranking nobleman, the one who needed to bring a measure of conservative temperance to their problems. Kinaler, one of the steel-workers, was worried that the Central Dominance needed a kinship with the kingdoms around it, and saw an alliance with Cett as the best way to protect Luthadel in the long run.
    Each of the twenty-three Assemblymen had their own thoughts, goals, and problems. That was what Elend had intended; ideas proliferated in such an environment. He just hadn't expected so many of their ideas to contradict his own.
    "You were right, Ham," Elend said, turning.
    Ham looked up, raising an eyebrow.
    "At the beginning of this all, you and the others wanted to make an alliance with one of the armies—give them the city in exchange for keeping it safe from the other armies."
    "I remember," Ham said.
    "Well, that's what the people want," Elend said. "With or without my consent, it appears they're going to give the city to Cett. We should have just gone with your plan."
    "Your Majesty?" Sazed asked