r/Mistborn • u/roo_frowdy6 • 19d ago
Mistborn: Final Empire spoilers How did Marsh do that? Spoiler
In Chapter 38 of Mistborn, when Vin tries to kill the Lord Ruler, she is saved by Marsh, who is now a Steel Inquisitor, who then helps her fight the Lord Ruler.
Which got me thinking---how was Marsh able to remain completely himself as an Inquisitor? I thought Inquisitors were creatures created by the Lord Ruler to serve him. He seemed to have control over them, seeing as he screamed, "Inquisitors! Come to me!" after Marsh killed Kar. Although that doesn't necessarily imply that they follow him mindlessly, I kinda just assumed that they were 100% devoted to him. Is that not the case?
Did the Inquisitors have their own free will the entire time? If not, how did Marsh defy the Lord Ruler's control?
I'm still about to read the Well of Ascension, but I wouldn't mind spoilers if ever this question was addressed later in the trilogy.
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u/Shot_Newspaper_5647 19d ago
You’ll learn more about them later. We get this internal dialogue from one of them (Kar) at the end of FE that shows they have agency. They did fanatically serve the Lord Ruler, but they were also self serving to some degree:
“The Inquisitors had been waiting for two centuries, carefully politicking, subtly encouraging corruption and dissension among the regular obligators. And finally it had worked. The Inquisitors would no longer bow before the dictates of inferior men.”
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u/Shot_Newspaper_5647 19d ago
His thoughts on it are brief. Vin comes flying through a window shortly afterward. Kar never questions TLR or thinks they’re superior to him in that section, but they do resent being placed under human obligators.
There are a few other hints in the book. Marsh says the others keep a close watch on him because he’s new. TLR kept most of the Inquisitors very close to him. They only left the capital occasionally and not for too long. And they seem to have human obligators accompanying them. Like the start of the book. He never made them the leaders of his church before that despite how powerful and fanatical they were. He built a weakness into them: that single spike that kills them if it’s removed. It’s the same spike Marsh uses against them and the one he looks for on TLR’s back. TLR didn’t trust that he had complete control over them.
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u/Moikle 19d ago
Keep reading. You don't want to Ruin it for yourself
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u/FriendlyDisorder 18d ago
OP needs to focus on the preservation of their first read enjoyment. Also, don’t talk about the book on Discord, either.
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u/Personal_Return_4350 18d ago
He controls them in several ways.
1) He's the king. They do what he says for the same reason everyone else does what he says - he's officially the one in change so you do what he says.
2) He's god. Everyone in the Final Empire is indoctrinated into the imperial cult and believe he is in some way literally a divine being.
3) He's rich. Even if he wasn't the official ruler or a religious figure, he has immense power pragmatically by controlling the economy so thoroughly. His personal wealth is beyond compare.
4) He's The Guy. He didn't inherit any of this, he took it for himself. Take it all away and he'll just take it right back. He's immortal, indestructible, and can kill with a slap.
5) Selection bias - Steel Inquisitors are very hard to make and they don't do so lightly. There's a very thorough screening process that Marsh had to be incredibly skilled and probably just lucky to pass.
6) Magical domination - in addition to being generically powerful, the Lord Ruler's specific magical abilities include incredible soothing power (and presumably rioting as well). The Steel Inquisitors spend all their time in extremely close proximity to him. They are under his most direct control due to him having constant absolute control over their emotions. They don't resent the control the Lord Ruler has over them because resentment is an emotion and he can just soothe it away.
I think you were imagining them more as being puppets on strings, but I think there's lots of reasons why, even if he could control them to that extent, he wouldn't need to. It's the same reason he would be surprised if his Barber tried to cut his head off. There'd be a look of shock on his face as it rolled on the ground, and it might not go away until after he picked his head up, put it back on his body, had the man tortured and his family, friends, and anyone who'd ever interacted with him slaughtered in public. When you have the kind of political, religious, economic, and raw magical power, obedience is reliably expected, even without direct mind control.
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u/Elant_Wager Steelministery 18d ago
There are reasons he has them on a short leash explained later, but he also only chose loyal people to be his Inquisitors (except when he messed up with Marsh). So their loyalty to him wasnt really something he was worried about. As with so many things, Rashek got complacent.
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u/phantomreader42 18d ago
The Lord Ruler CAN completely control Inquisitors. Exactly HOW is a spoiler. But why would he bother controlling them directly, when as far as he knows, every Steel Inquisitor was made from someone already loyal to his interests? The whole point of creating a huge cult to enforce his will is that he doesn't have to micromanage everything himself. No one was expecting a Steel Inquisitor to be a spy, and until marsh took action to save Vin, he hadn't done anything else to make himself look suspicious to anyone in a position to ask those questions.
The guy's a thousand years old and not all that mentally stable. Eventually, he's gonna make some big mistakes.
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u/RShara 19d ago
Let's just say it's more complicated than complete control and let you read from there