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a foot into an Inquisitor chest, then Pulled herself off to spin away from another one. She rolled across the slick cobblestones, an obsidian axe nearly taking off her head as she came up and kicked two pewter-enhanced feet at the knees of an opponent. Bones crunched. The Inquisitor screamed and fell. Vin pushed herself to her feet with one hand, then Pulled on the spires up above, throwing herself up about ten feet to dodge the multitude of swings that came after her. She landed back on the ground, grabbing the handle of the fallen Inquisitor's axe. She swung it up, spraying water, her skin stained with wet ash as she blocked a blow. You cannot fight, Vin, Ruin said. Each blow only helps me. I am Ruin. She screamed, throwing herself forward in a reckless attack, shouldering aside one Inquisitor, then slamming her axe into the side of another. They growled and swung, but she stayed a step ahead, barely dodging their attacks. The one she had knocked down stood back up, his knees healed. He was smiling. A blow she didn't see took her in the shoulder, throwing her forward. She felt warm blood running down her back, but pewter deadened the pain. She threw herself to the side, regaining her feet, clutching her axe. The Inquisitors stalked forward. Marsh watched quietly, rain dripping down his face, spikes protruding from his body like the spires of Kredik Shaw. He did not join the fight. Vin growled, then Pulled herself into the sky again. She shot ahead of her foes, and bounded from spire to spire, using their metal as anchors. The twelve Inquisitors followed like a flock of ravens, leaping between spires, robes flapping, taking different paths than she. She lurched through the mists, which continued to spin around her in defiance of the rain. An Inquisitor landed against the spike she was aiming for. She yelled, swinging her axe in an overhand blow as she landed, but he Pushed off—dodging her swing—then Pulled himself right back. She kicked at his feet, sending both herself and her opponent sprawling into the air. Then, she grabbed his robe as they fell. He looked up, teeth clenched in a smile, knocking her axe out of her hand with an inhumanly strong hand. His body began to swell, gaining the unnatural bulk of a Feruchemist tapping strength. He laughed at Vin, grabbing her neck. He didn't even notice as Vin Pulled them both slightly to the side as they fell through the air. They hit one of the lower spikes, the metal piercing the surprised Inquisitor's chest. Vin wrenched herself to the side, out of the way, but hung on to his head, her weight pulling him down the spire. She didn't look as the spike ripped through his body, but when she hit the ground below, she was holding only a head. A disembodied spike splashed into an ashen puddle beside her, and she dropped the dead creature's head beside it. Marsh screamed in anger. Four more Inquisitors landed around her. |
Vin kicked at one, but it moved with Feruchemical speed, catching her foot. Another grabbed her by the arm and wrenched her to the side. She cried out, kicking her way free, but a third one grabbed her, his grip enhanced by both Allomantic and Feruchemical strength. The other three followed, holding her with claw-like fingers. Taking a deep breath, Vin extinguished her tin, then burned duralumin, steel, and pewter. She Pushed outward with a sudden wave of power; Inquisitors were thrown back by their spikes. They sprawled, falling to the ground, cursing. Vin hit the cobblestones. Suddenly, the pain in her back and her throat seemed impossibly strong. She flared tin to clear her mind, but still stumbled, woozily, as she climbed to her feet. She'd used up all of her pewter in that one burst. She moved to run, and found a figure standing in front of her. Marsh was silent, though another wave of lightning lit the mists. Her pewter was gone. She was bleeding from a wound that probably would have killed anyone else. She was desperate. Okay. Now! she thought as Marsh slapped her. The blow threw her to the ground. Nothing happened. Come on! Vin thought, trying to draw upon the mists. Terror twisted within her as Marsh loomed, a black figure in the night. Please! Each time the mists had helped her, they had done so when she was most desperate. This was her plan, weak though it seemed: to put herself in more trouble than she'd ever been in before, then count on the mists to help her. As they had twice before. Marsh knelt over her. Images flashed like bursts of lightning through her tired mind. Camon, raising a meaty hand to beat her. Rain falling on her as she huddled in a dark corner, her side aching from a deep gash. Zane turning toward her as they stood at the top of Keep Hasting, one of his hands dripping a slow stream of blood. Vin tried to scramble away across the slick, cold cobblestones, but her body wasn't working right. She could barely crawl. Marsh slammed a fist down on her leg, shattering the bone, and she cried out in shocked, icy pain. No pewter tempered the blow. She tried to pull herself up to grab one of Marsh's spikes, but he snatched her leg—the broken one—and her own effort just made her scream in agony. Now, Ruin said in his kindly voice, we will begin. Where is the atium, Vin? What do you know of it? "Please . . ." Vin whispered, reaching toward the mists. "Please, please, please . . ." Yet, they remained aloof. Once, they had swirled playfully around her body, but now they pulled back instead. Just as they'd done for the entire last year. She was crying, reaching for them, but they puffed away. Shunning her like a victim of the plague. It was the same way the mists treated the Inquisitors. The creatures rose, surrounding her, silhouettes in the dark night. Marsh yanked her back |
to him, then reached for her arm. She heard her bone snap before she felt the pain. It came, however, and she screamed. It had been a long time since she'd known torture. The streets had not been kind, but during the last few years, she'd been able to repress most of those experiences. She'd become a Mistborn. Powerful. Protected. Not this time, she realized through the haze of agony. Sazed won't come for me this time. Kelsier won't save me. Even the mists have abandoned me. I'm alone. Her teeth began to chatter, and Marsh raised her other arm. He looked down at her with spiked eyes, expression unreadable. Then snapped the bone. Vin screamed, more from the terror than the pain. Marsh watched her scream, listening to its sweetness. He smiled, then reached down for her unbroken leg. If only Ruin weren't holding him back. Then he could kill her. He strained against his bonds, lusting to do her more harm. No . . . a tiny piece of him thought. The rain fell, marking a beautiful night. The city of Luthadel lay bedecked in its funereal best, smoldering, some parts still burning despite the wet night. How he wished he'd arrived in time to see the riots and the death. He smiled, the passionate love of a fresh kill rising in him. No, he thought. He knew, somehow, that the end was very near. The ground trembled beneath his feet, and he had to steady himself with one hand before continuing his work, snapping Vin's other leg. The final day had arrived. The world would not survive this night. He laughed gleefully, fully in the throes of a blood frenzy, barely controlled as he broke Vin's body. NO! Marsh awakened. Though his hands still moved as ordered, his mind rebelled. He took in the ash, and the rain, the blood and the soot, and it disgusted him. Vin lay nearly dead. Kelsier treated her like a daughter, he thought as he broke her fingers, one at a time. She was screaming. The daughter he never had with Mare. I've given up. Just like I did with the rebellion. It was the great shame of his life. Years ago, before the Collapse, he had led the skaa rebellion. But, he'd given in. He'd withdrawn, giving up leadership of the group. And he'd done it only one year before the rebellion—with Kelsier's help—finally overthrew the Final Empire. Marsh had been its leader, but had given up. Just before the victory. No, he thought as he broke the fingers on her other hand. Not again. No more giving up! His hand moved up to her collarbone. And then he saw it. A single bit of metal, glittering in Vin's ear. Her earring. She'd explained it to him once. I don't remember it, Vin's voice whispered to him from the past. A memory of when Marsh himself had sat with her on a quiet veranda at Mansion Renoux, watching Kelsier organize a caravan below, just before Marsh left to infiltrate the ranks of |
the Steel Priesthood. Vin had spoken of her insane mother. Reen said that he came home one day and found my mother covered in blood, Vin had said. She'd killed my baby sister. Me, however, she hadn't touched—except to give me an earring . . . Don't trust anyone pierced by metal. Spook's letter. Even the smallest bit can taint a man. The smallest bit. As he looked closer, the earring—though twisted and chipped—looked almost like a tiny spike. He didn't think. He didn't give Ruin time to react. Amid the thrill of killing the Hero of Ages, Ruin's control was weaker than it had ever been. Summoning all the will he had remaining, Marsh reached out. And ripped the earring from Vin's ear. Vin's eyes snapped open. Ash and water fell on her. Her body burned with pain, and the echoing screams of Ruin's demands still reverberated in her head. But the voice spoke no further. It had been stifled midsentence. What? The mists returned to her with a snap. They flowed around her, sensing the Allomancy of her tin, which she still burned faintly. They spun around her as they once had, playful, friendly. She was dying. She knew it. Marsh was done with her bones, and was obviously growing impatient. He screamed, holding his head. Then, he reached down, grabbing his axe from the puddle beside him. Vin couldn't have run if she'd wanted to. Fortunately, the pain was fading. Everything was fading. It was black. Please, she thought, reaching out to the mists with one final plea. They felt so familiar all of a sudden. Where had she felt that feeling before? Where did she know them? From the Well of Ascension, of course, a voice whispered in her head. It's the same power, after all. Solid in the metal you fed to Elend. Liquid in the pool you burned. And vapor in the air, confined to night. Hiding you. Protecting you. Giving you power! Vin gasped, drawing in breath—a breath that sucked in the mists. She felt suddenly warm, the mists surging within her, lending her their strength. Her entire body burned like metal, and the pain disappeared in a flash. Marsh swung his axe for her head, spraying water. And she caught his arm. I have spoken of Inquisitors, and their ability to pierce copperclouds. As I said, this power is easily understood when one realizes that many Inquisitors were Seekers before their transformation, and that meant their bronze became twice as strong. There is at least one other case of a person who could pierce copperclouds. In her case, however, the situation was slightly different. She was a Mistborn from birth, and her sister was the Seeker. The death of that sister–and subsequent inheritance of power via the Hemalurgic spike used to kill that sister–left her twice as good at burning bronze as a typical Mistborn. And that let her see through the copperclouds of lesser Allomancers. THE MISTS CHANGED. TenSoon looked up through the ash. He lay, exhausted and numb, atop the hill before |
the field of lava that barred his path eastward. His muscles felt lethargic—signs that he had been pushing too hard. Even the Blessing of Potency could only do so much. He stood, forcing his horse's body to rise, looking at his nighttime surroundings. Endless fields of ash extended behind him; even the track he had worn up to the top of the hill was close to being filled in. The lava burned ahead of him. However, something seemed different. What? The mists flowed, moving about, swirling. Generally, the mists had a very chaotic pattern. Some parts would flow one way, while others would spin about in other directions. There were often rivers of motion, but they never conformed to one another. Most often, they followed the wind; this night the wind was still. And yet, the mist seemed to be flowing in one direction. As soon as he noticed it, TenSoon found it one of the most singularly strange sights he had ever beheld. Instead of swirling or spinning, the mists moved together in a seemingly purposeful flow. They coursed around him, and he felt like a stone in a huge, incorporeal river. The mists flowed toward Luthadel. Perhaps I'm not too late! he thought, regaining some of his hope. He shook himself from his stupor, and took off in a gallop back the way he had come. "Breezy, come look at this." Breeze rubbed his eyes, looking across the room to where Allrianne sat in her nightgown, looking out the window. It was late—too late. He should have been asleep. He looked back toward his desk, and the treaty he had been working on. It was the sort of thing Sazed or Elend should have had to write, not Breeze. "You know," he said, "I distinctly remember telling Kelsier that I did not want to end up in charge of anything important. Running kingdoms and cities is work for fools, not thieves! Government is far too inefficient to provide a suitable income." "Breezy!" Allrianne said insistently, Pulling on his emotions quite blatantly. He sighed, rising. "Very well," he grumbled. Honestly, he thought. How is it, of all the qualified people in Kelsier's little crew, that I end up the one leading a city? He joined Allrianne at the window, peeking out. "What is it exactly I'm supposed to see, dear? I don't . . ." He trailed off, frowning. Beside him, Allrianne touched his arm, seeming concerned as she looked out the window. "Now, that is strange," he said. The mists flowed by outside, moving like a river—and they seemed to be accelerating. The door to his room slammed open. Breeze jumped, and Allrianne squeaked. They spun to find Spook standing in the doorway, still half covered in bandages. "Gather the people," the boy croaked, holding the doorframe to keep from collapsing. "We need to move." "My dear boy," Breeze said, unsettled. Allrianne took Breeze's arm, holding on quietly, yet tightly. "My dear boy, what is this? You should be in bed!" "Gather them, Breeze!" Spook said, suddenly sounding very authoritative. |
"Take them to the storage cavern. Pack them in! Quickly! We don't have much time!" "What do you make of it?" Ham asked, wiping his brow. Blood immediately oozed from the cut again, running down the side of his face. Elend shook his head, breathing deeply—almost in gasps—as he leaned back against the side of a jagged rock outcropping. He closed his eyes, fatigue making his body shake despite his pewter. "I don't really care about mists right now, Ham," he whispered. "I can barely think straight." Ham grunted in agreement. Around them, men screamed and died, fighting the endless waves of koloss. They had some of the creatures bottled up in the natural stone corridor leading into Fadrex, but the real fights were happening on the rugged rock formations that enclosed the city. Too many koloss, tired of waiting outside, had begun crawling up to attack from the sides. It was a precarious battlefield, one that often demanded Elend's attention. They had a large number of Allomancers, but most of them were inexperienced—they hadn't even known about their powers until this very day. Elend was a one man reserve force, bounding across the defensive lines, plugging holes while Cett directed tactics below. More screams. More death. More metal hitting metal, rock, and flesh. Why? Elend thought with frustration. Why can't I protect them? He flared pewter, taking a deep breath and standing up in the night. The mists flowed overhead, as if pulled by some invisible force. For a moment, even exhausted as he was, he froze. "Lord Venture!" someone shouted. Elend spun, looking toward the sound. A youthful messenger scrambled up the side of the rock outcropping, wide-eyed. Oh, no . . . Elend thought, tensing. "My lord, they're retreating!" the lad said, stumbling to a halt before Elend. "What?" Ham asked, standing. "It's true, my lord. They pulled back from the city gates! They're leaving." Elend immediately dropped a coin, shooting himself into the sky. Mist flowed around him, its tendrils a million tiny strings being yanked eastward. Below, he saw the hulking, dark forms of the koloss running away in the night. So many of them, he thought, landing on a rock formation. We'd never have beaten them. Even with Allomancers. But, they were leaving. Running away at an inhuman speed. Moving . . . Toward Luthadel. Vin fought like a tempest, spraying rainwater through the dark night as she threw back Inquisitor after Inquisitor. She shouldn't have been alive. She'd run out of pewter, yet she felt it flaring inside, burning brighter than it ever had before. She felt as if the bleeding sun itself blazed within her, running molten through her veins. Her every Steelpush or Ironpull slammed against her as if it were made with the power of duralumin. Yet, the metal reserves within her did not vanish. Instead, they grew stronger. Vaster. She wasn't certain what was happening to her. However, she did know one thing. Suddenly, fighting twelve Inquisitors at once did not seem like an impossible task. She cried out, slapping an |
Inquisitor to the side, then ducking a pair of axes. She crouched, then jumped, leaping in an arc through the rain, coming down beside Marsh, who still lay stunned from where she had thrown him after her rebirth. He looked up, finally seeming to focus on her, then cursed and rolled away as Vin punched downward. Her fist shattered a cobblestone, throwing back a ripple of dark rainwater, splashing her arms and face, leaving specks of black ash behind. She looked up toward Marsh. He stood erect, bare-chested, his spikes glistening in the darkness. Vin smiled, then spun on the Inquisitors rushing her from behind. She yelled, dodging a swinging axe. Had these creatures ever seemed quick to her? Within the embrace of limitless pewter, she seemed to move as the mist itself did. Light. Quick. Unchained. The sky spun in a tempest of its own as she attacked, moving in a swirling frenzy. The mists whirled around her arm in a vortex as she punched one Inquisitor in the face, throwing him backward. The mists danced before her as she caught the fallen Inquisitor's axe, then sheared the arm off another of the creatures. She took his head next, leaving the others stunned with the speed of her motion. That's two dead. They attacked again. She bounded backward, Pulling herself toward the spires above. The trail of ravens launched after her, their robes snapping in the wet darkness. She hit a spire feet-first, then launched upward and Pulled on an Inquisitor's spikes, something that was easy to do with her new power. Her chosen quarry lurched upward ahead of his companions. Vin shot downward, meeting the Inquisitor in the air. She grabbed him by the eye-spikes and pulled, ripping them out with her newfound strength. Then she kicked off the creature and Pushed against the spikes in his chest. She shot upward in the air, leaving a corpse flipping end over end in the rain beneath her, massive gaps in its head where the spikes had been. They could lose some spikes and live, she knew, but the removal of others was deadly. Losing both eye-spikes appeared to be enough to kill them. Three. Inquisitors hit the spire she had Pushed off of, and they leaped up to follow her. Vin smiled, then threw the spikes she still carried, catching one of the Inquisitors in the chest with them. Then, she Pushed. The unfortunate Inquisitor was thrown downward, and he hit a flat rooftop so violently that it pushed several of his spikes up out of his body. They sparkled and spun in the air, then fell beside his immobile corpse. Four. Vin's mistcloak fluttered as she shot upward in the sky. Eight Inquisitors still chased her, reaching for her. Crying out, Vin raised her hands toward the creatures as she began to fall. Then, she Pushed. She hadn't realized how strong her new powers were. They were obviously akin to duralumin, since she could affect the spikes inside of an Inquisitor's body. Her overpowering Push forced the whole flock of |
them downward, as if they'd been swatted. In fact, her Push also hit the metal spire directly beneath her. The stone architecture holding the spire in place exploded, spraying chips and dust outward as the spire itself crushed the building beneath it. And Vin was thrown upward. Very quickly. She blasted through the sky, mists streaking past her, the force of her Push straining even her mist-enhanced body with the stress of sudden acceleration. And then she was out. She emerged into the open air, like a fish leaping from the water. Beneath her, the mists covered the nighttime land like an enormous white blanket. Around her, there was only open air. Unsettling, strange. Above her, a million stars—normally visible only to Allomancers—watched her like the eyes of those long dead. Her momentum ran out, and she spun quietly, whiteness below, light above. She notice that she'd trailed a line of mist up out of the main cloud. This hung like a tether ready to pull her back down. In fact, all the mists were spinning slightly in what looked like an enormous weather pattern. A whirlpool of white. The heart of the whirlpool was directly beneath her. She fell, plummeting back down toward the earth below. She entered the mists, drawing them behind her, breathing them in. Even as she fell, she could feel them surging about her in a massive, empire-wide spiral. She welcomed them into herself, and the vortex of mist around her grew more and more violent. Instants later, Luthadel appeared, a massive black welt upon the land. She fell down, streaking toward Kredik Shaw and its spires, which seemed to be pointing toward her. The Inquisitors were still there—she could see them standing on a flat rooftop amid the spires, looking up. Waiting. There were only eight, not counting Marsh. One lay impaled on a nearby spike from her last push; the blow had apparently torn the center spike out of his back. Five, Vin thought, landing a short distance from the Inquisitors. If a single Push could throw her up so far she passed out of the mists, then what would happen if she Pushed outward? She waited quietly as the Inquisitors charged. She could see desperation in their movements. Whatever was happening to Vin, Ruin was apparently willing to risk every one of the creatures in the hopes that they would kill her before she was complete. Mists pulled toward her, moving more and more quickly, drawn into her like water being sucked down a drain. When the Inquisitors had almost reached her, she Pushed outward again, throwing metal away from her with all the force as she could muster, while at the same time strengthening her body with a massive flare of pewter. Stone cracked. Inquisitors cried out. And Kredik Shaw exploded. Towers toppled from their foundations. Doors ripped free from their frames. Windows shattered. Blocks burst, the entire structure torn to pieces as its metals lurched away. She screamed as she Pushed, the ground trembling beneath her. Everything—even the rock and stone, which |
obviously contained residual traces of metal ore—was thrown violently back. She gasped, stopping her Push. She drew in breath, feeling the rain splatter against her. The building that had been the Lord Ruler's palace was gone, flattened to rubble which spread out and away from her like an impact crater. An Inquisitor burst from the rubble, face bleeding from where one of his spikes had ripped free. Vin raised a hand, Pulling and steadying herself from behind. The Inquisitor's head lurched, his other eye-spike pulling free. He toppled forward, and Vin caught the spike, Pushing it toward another Inquisitor who was rushing her. He raised a hand to Push it back at her. And she drove it forward anyway, ignoring his Push with a quick Push backward to stabilize herself. He was thrown away and slammed into the remnants of a wall. The spike continued forward, Pushed like a fish darting through water, ignoring the current. The spike slammed into the Inquisitor's face, crushing it, pinning his head back against the granite. Six and seven. Vin stalked across the rubble, mists storming. Overhead, they swirled furiously, forming a funnel cloud with her at its focus. It was like a tornado, but with no air currents. Just impalpable mists, as if painted on the air. Spinning, swirling, coming to her silent command. She stepped over an Inquisitor corpse that had been crushed by the rubble; she kicked his head free to make certain he was dead. Eight. Three rushed her at once. She screamed, turning, Pulling on a fallen spire. The massive piece of metal—nearly as big as a building itself—lurched into the air, spinning at her command. She slammed it into the Inquisitors like a club, crushing them. She turned, leaving the enormous iron pillar resting atop their corpses. Nine. Ten. Eleven. The storm broke, though the mists continued to swirl. The rain let up as Vin walked across the shattered building, eyes searching for Allomantic blue lines that were moving. She found one trembling before her, and she picked up and tossed aside an enormous marble disk. An Inquisitor groaned beneath; she reached for him, and realized that her hand was leaking mist. It didn't just swirl around her, it came from her, smoking forth from the pores in her skin. She breathed out, and mist puffed before her, then immediately entered the vortex and was pulled in again. She grabbed the Inquisitor, pulling him up. His skin began to heal as he used his Feruchemical powers, and he struggled, growing stronger. Yet, even the awesome strength of Feruchemy made little difference against Vin. She pulled his eye-spikes free, tossed them aside, then left the corpse slumping in the rubble. Twelve. She found the last Inquisitor huddled in a pool of rainwater. It was Marsh. His body was broken, and he was missing one of the spikes from his side. The spike hole was bleeding, but that one apparently wasn't enough to kill him. He turned his pair of spikeheads to look up at her, expression stiff. Vin paused, breathing deeply, |
feeling rainwater trail down her arms and drip off her fingers. She still burned within, and she looked up, staring into the vortex of mists. It was spinning so powerfully, twisting down. She was having trouble thinking for all the energy that coursed through her. She looked down again. This isn't Marsh, she thought. Kelsier's brother is long dead. This is something else. Ruin. The mist swirled in a final tempest, the circular motion growing faster—yet tighter—as the final wisps of mist spun down and were pulled into Vin's body. Then the mists were gone. Starlight shone above, and flecks of ash fell in the air. The night landscape was eerie in its stillness, blackness, and clarity. Even with tin—which let her see at night far better than a normal person could—the mists had always been there. To see the night landscape without them was . . . wrong. Vin began to tremble. She gasped, feeling the fire within her blaze hotter and hotter. It was Allomancy as she'd never known it. It felt as if she had never understood it. The power was far greater than metals, mere Pushes and Pulls. It was something awesomely more vast. A power that men had used, yet never comprehended. She forced her eyes open. There was one Inquisitor left. She had drawn them to Luthadel, forced them to expose themselves, laying a trap for someone far more powerful than herself. And the mists had responded. It was time to finish what she had come to do. Marsh watched limply as Vin fell to her knees. Shaking, she reached for one of his eye-spikes. There was nothing he could do. He'd used up most of the healing in his metal-mind, and the rest would do him no good. Stored healing worked by way of speed. He could either heal himself a small amount very quickly, or wait and heal himself slowly, yet completely. Either way, he was dead as soon as Vin pulled those spikes free. Finally, he thought with relief as she grabbed the first spike. Whatever I did . . . it worked. Somehow. He felt Ruin's rage, felt his master realizing his mistake. In the end, Marsh had mattered. In the end, Marsh hadn't given up. He'd done Mare proud. Vin pulled the spike free. It hurt, of course—hurt far more than Marsh would have thought possible. He screamed—both in pain and in joy—as Vin reached for the other eye-spike. And then, she hesitated. Marsh waited expectantly. She shook, then coughed, cringing. She gritted her teeth, reaching toward him. Her fingers touched the spike. And then, Vin vanished. She left behind the misty outline of a young woman. That dissipated and was soon gone, too, leaving Marsh alone in the wreckage of a palace, head blazing with pain, body covered in sickly, sodden ash. She once asked Ruin why he had chosen her. The primary answer is simple. It had little to do with her personality, attitudes, or even skill with Allomancy. She was simply the only child Ruin could find who |
was in a position to gain the right Hemalurgic spike—one that would grant her heightened power with bronze, which would then let her sense the location of the Well of Ascension. She had an insane mother, a sister who was a Seeker, and was—herself—Mistborn. That was precisely the combination Ruin needed. There were other reasons, of course. But even Ruin didn't know them. DAY BROKE WITH NO MISTS. Elend stood atop the rocky heights in front of Fadrex City, looking out. He felt far better with a night's rest behind him, though his body ached from fighting, his arm throbbed where he'd been wounded, and his chest hurt where he'd carelessly allowed a koloss to punch him. The massive bruise would have crippled another man. Koloss corpses littered the ground before the city, piled particularly high in the corridor leading into Fadrex itself. The whole area smelled of death and dried blood. Far more often than Elend would have liked, the field of blue corpses was broken by the lighter skin of a human. Still, Fadrex had survived—if only because of the last-minute addition of several thousand Allomancers and the eventual retreat of the koloss. Why did they leave? Elend wondered, thankful yet frustrated. And, perhaps more importantly, where are they going? Elend turned at the sound of footsteps on rock and saw Yomen climbing the rough-hewn steps to join him, puffing slightly, still pristine in his obligator's robes. Nobody had expected him to fight. He was, after all, a scholar, and not a warrior. Like me, Elend thought, smiling wryly. "The mists are gone," Yomen said. Elend nodded. "Both day and night." "The skaa fled inside when the mists vanished. Some still refuse to leave their homes. For centuries, they feared being out at night because of the mists. Now the mists disappear, and they find it so unnatural that they hide again." Elend turned away, looking back out. The mists were gone, but the ash still fell. And it fell hard. The corpses that had fallen during the night hours were nearly buried. "Has the sun always been this hot?" Yomen asked, wiping his brow. Elend frowned, noticing for the first time that it did seem hot. It was still early morning, yet it already felt like noon. Something is still wrong, he thought. Very wrong. Worse, even. The ash choked the air, blowing in the breeze, coating everything. And the heat . . . shouldn't it have been getting colder as more ash flew into the air, blocking the sunlight? "Form crews, Yomen," Elend said. "Have them pick through the bodies and search for wounded among that mess down there. Then, gather the people and begin moving them into the storage cavern. Tell the soldiers to be ready for . . . for something. I don't know what." Yomen frowned. "You sound as if you're not going to be here to help me." Elend turned eastward. "I won't be." Vin was still out there somewhere. He didn't understand why she had said what she had about the atium, but |
he trusted her. Perhaps she had intended to distract Ruin with lies. Elend suspected that somehow, the people of Fadrex owed her their lives. She'd drawn the koloss away—she'd figured something out, something that he couldn't even guess at. She always complains that she's not a scholar, he thought, smiling to himself. But that's just because she lacks education. She's twice as quick-witted as half the "geniuses" I knew during my days at court. He couldn't leave her alone. He needed to find her. Then . . . well, he didn't know what they'd do next. Find Sazed, perhaps? Either way, Elend could do no more in Fadrex. He moved to walk down the steps, intending to find Ham and Cett. However, Yomen caught his shoulder. Elend turned. "I was wrong about you, Venture," Yomen said. "The things I said were undeserved." "You let me into your city when my men were surrounded by their own koloss," Elend said. "I don't care what you said about me. You're a good man in my estimation." "You're wrong about the Lord Ruler, though," Yomen said. "He's guiding this all." Elend just smiled. "It doesn't bother me that you don't believe," Yomen said, reaching up to his forehead. "I've learned something. The Lord Ruler uses unbelievers as well as believers. We're all part of his plan. Here." Yomen pulled the bead of atium free from its place at his brow. "My last bead. In case you need it." Elend accepted the bit of metal, rolling it over in his fingers. He'd never burned atium. For years, his family had overseen its mining—but, by the time Elend himself had become Mistborn, he'd already either spent what he'd been able to obtain, or had given it to Vin to be burned. "How did you do it, Yomen?" he asked. "How did you make it seem you were an Allomancer?" "I am an Allomancer, Venture." "Not a Mistborn," Elend said. "No," Yomen said. "A Seer—an atium Misting." Elend nodded. He'd assumed that was impossible, but it was hard to rely on assumptions about anything anymore. "The Lord Ruler knew about your power?" Yomen smiled. "Some secrets, he worked very hard to guard." Atium Mistings, Elend thought. That means there are others too . . . gold Mistings, electrum Mistings . . . Though, as he thought about it, some—like aluminum Mistings or duralumin Mistings—would be impossible to find because they couldn't use their metals without being able to burn other metals. "Atium was too valuable to use in testing people for Allomantic powers anyway," Yomen said, turning away. "I never really found the power all that useful. How often does one have both atium and the desire to use it up in a few heartbeats? Take that bit and go find your wife." Elend stood for a moment, then tucked the bead of atium away and went down to give Ham some instructions. A few minutes later, he was streaking across the landscape, doing his best to fly with the horseshoes as Vin had taught him. Each Hemalurgic |
spike driven through a person's body gave Ruin some small ability to influence them. This was mitigated, however, by the mental fortitude of the one being controlled. In most cases—depending on the size of the spike and the length of time it had been worn—a single spike gave Ruin only minimal powers over a person. He could appear to them, and could warp their thoughts slightly, making them overlook certain oddities—for instance, their compulsion for keeping and wearing a simple earring. SAZED GATHERED HIS NOTES, carefully stacking the thin sheets of metal. Though the metal served an important function in keeping Ruin from modifying—or perhaps even reading—their contents, Sazed found them a bit frustrating. The plates were easily scratched, and they couldn't be folded or bound. The kandra elders had given him a place to stay, and it was surprisingly lush for a cave. Kandra apparently enjoyed human comforts—blankets, cushions, mattresses. Some even preferred to wear clothing, though those who didn't declined to create genitals for their True Bodies. That left him wondering about scholarly sorts of questions. They reproduced by transforming mistwraiths into kandra, so genitals would be redundant. Yet, the kandra identified themselves by gender—each was definitely a "he" or a "she." So, how did they know? Did they choose arbitrarily, or did they actually know what they would have been, had they been born human rather than as a mistwraith? He wished he had more time to study their society. So far, everything he'd done in the Homeland had been focused on learning more of the Hero of Ages and the Terris religion. He'd made a sheet of notes about what he'd discovered, and it sat at the top of his metallic stack. It looked surprisingly, even depressingly, similar to any number of sheets in his portfolio. The Terris religion, as one might have expected, focused heavily on knowledge and scholarship. The Worldbringers—their word for Keepers—were holy men and women who imparted knowledge, but also wrote of their god, Terr. It was the ancient Terris word for "to preserve." A central focus of the religion had been the histories of how Preservation—or Terr—and Ruin had interacted, and these included various prophecies about the Hero of Ages, who was seen as a successor to Preservation. Aside from the prophecies, however, the Worldbringers had taught temperance, faith, and understanding to their people. They had taught that it was better to build than to destroy, a principle at the core of their teachings. Of course there had been rituals, rites, initiations, and traditions. There were also lesser religious leaders, required offerings, and codes of conduct. It all seemed good, but hardly original. Even the focus on scholarship was something shared by several dozen other religions Sazed had studied. That, for some reason, depressed him. It was just another religion. What had he expected? Some astounding doctrine that would prove to him once and for all that there was a god? He felt like a fool. Yet, he also felt betrayed. This was what he'd ridden across the empire, feeling elated and anticipatory, |
to discover? This was what he'd expected to save them? These were just more words. Pleasant ones, like most in his portfolio, but hardly compelling. Was he supposed to believe just because it was the religion his people had followed? There were no promises here that Tindwyl still lived. Why was it that people had followed this, or any, of the religions? Frustrated, Sazed dipped into his metalminds, dumping a group of accounts into his mind. Writings the Keepers had discovered—journals, letters, other sources from which scholars had pieced together what had once been believed. He looked through them, thought of them, read them. What had made these people so willing to accept their religions? Were they simply products of their society, believing because it was tradition? He read of their lives, and tried to persuade himself that the people were simpletons, that they hadn't ever truly questioned their beliefs. Surely they would have seen the flaws and inconsistencies if they'd just taken the time to be rational and discerning. Sazed sat with closed eyes, a wealth of information from journals and letters in his mind, searching for what he expected to find. However, as the time passed, he did not discover what he sought. The people did not seem like fools to him. As he sat, something began to occur to him. Something about the words, the feelings, of the people who had believed. Before, Sazed had looked at the doctrines themselves. This time, he found himself studying the people who had believed, or what he could find of them. As he read their words over again in his mind, he began to see something. The faiths he had looked at, they couldn't be divorced from the people who had adhered to them. In the abstract, those religions were stale. However, as he read the words of the people—really read them—he began to see patterns. Why did they believe? Because they saw miracles. Things one man took as chance, a man of faith took as a sign. A loved one recovering from disease, a fortunate business deal, a chance meeting with a long lost friend. It wasn't the grand doctrines or the sweeping ideals that seemed to make believers out of men. It was the simple magic in the world around them. What was it Spook said? Sazed thought, sitting in the shadowy kandra cavern. That faith was about trust. Trusting that somebody was watching. That somebody would make it all right in the end, even though things looked terrible at the moment. To believe, it seemed, one had to want to believe. It was a conundrum, one Sazed had wrestled with. He wanted someone, something, to force him to have faith. He wanted to have to believe because of the proof shown to him. Yet, the believers whose words now filled his mind would have said he already had proof. Had he not, in his moment of despair, received an answer? As he had been about to give up, TenSoon had spoken. Sazed had begged for a sign, and received |
it. Was it chance? Was it providence? In the end, apparently, it was up to him to decide. He slowly returned the letters and journals to his metalminds, leaving his specific memory of them empty—yet retaining the feelings they had prompted in him. Which would he be? Believer or skeptic? At that moment, neither seemed a patently foolish path. I do want to believe, he thought. That's why I've spent so much time searching. I can't have it both ways. I simply have to decide. Which would it be? He sat for a few moments, thinking, feeling, and—most important—remembering. I sought help, Sazed thought. And something answered. Sazed smiled, and everything seemed a little bit brighter. Breeze was right, he thought, standing and organizing his things as he prepared to go. I was not meant to be an atheist. The thought seemed a little too flippant for what had just happened to him. As he picked up his metal sheets and prepared to go meet with the First Generation, he realized that kandra passed outside his humble little cavern, completely oblivious to the important decision he'd just made. But, that was how things often went, it seemed. Some important decisions were made on a battlefield or in a conference room. But others happened quietly, unseen by others. That didn't make the decision any less important to Sazed. He would believe. Not because something had been proven to him beyond his ability to deny. But because he chose to. As, he realized, Vin had once chosen to believe and trust in the crew. Because of what Kelsier had taught her. You taught me too, Survivor, Sazed thought, moving out into the stone tunnel to meet with the kandra leaders. Thank you. Sazed made his way through the cavern corridors, suddenly eager at the prospect of another day interviewing the members of the First Generation. Now that he had covered most of their religion, he planned to find out more about the First Contract. As far as he knew, he was the only human other than the Lord Ruler to have ever read its words. The members of the First Generation treated the metal bearing the contract with noticeably less reverence than the other kandra. That had surprised him. Of course, Sazed thought, turning a corner, it does make some kind of sense. To the members of the First Generation, the Lord Ruler was a friend. They remember climbing that mountain with him—their leader, yes, but not a god. Kind of like the members of the crew, who had trouble seeing Kelsier in a religious light. Still lost in thought, Sazed wandered into the Trustwarren, whose broad metallic doors were open. He paused, however, just inside. The First Generation waited in their alcoves, as was common. They didn't come down until Sazed closed the doors. Oddly, however, the members of the Second Generation stood at their lecterns, addressing the crowds of kandra—who, despite being far more reserved than a similar group of humans would have been, still displayed an air of anxiety. ". . |
. does it mean, KanPaar?" one lesser kandra was asking. "Please, we are confused. Ask the First Generation." "We have spoken of this thing already," said KanPaar, leader of the Seconds. "There is no need for alarm. Look at you, crowding together, murmuring and rumormongering as if you were humans!" Sazed moved up to one of the younger kandra, who stood gathered outside the doorway to the Trustwarren. "Please," he whispered. "What is the source of this concern?" "The mists, Holy Worldbringer," the kandra—a female, he thought—whispered back. "What of them?" Sazed asked. "The fact that they are staying later and later in the day?" "No," the kandra girl replied. "The fact that they're gone." Sazed started. "What?" The kandra nodded. "Nobody noticed it until early this morning. It was still dark out, and a guard walked by to check one of the exits. He says there was no mist at all outside, despite it being night! Others went out too. They all agree." "This is a simple matter," KanPaar said to the chamber. "We know that it was raining last night, and sometimes rain disperses the mists for a short time. They will return tomorrow." "But, it's not raining now," one of the kandra said. "And, it wasn't raining when TarKavv went out on patrol. There have been mists in the morning for months now. Where are they?" "Bah," KanPaar said, waving his hand. "You worried when the mists started staying in the mornings, now you complain that they are gone? We are kandra. We are eternal—we outwait everything and anything. We don't gather in rowdy mobs. Go back to what you were doing. This means nothing." "No," a voice whispered into the cavern. Heads turned up, and the entire group hushed. "No," Haddek—leader of the First Generation—whispered from his hidden alcove. "This is important. We have been wrong, KanPaar. Very . . . very wrong. Clear the Trustwarren. Leave only the Keeper behind. And spread the word. The day of the Resolution may have come." This comment only served to agitate the kandra further. Sazed stood frozen with wonder; he had never seen such a reaction in the normally calm creatures. They did as they were told—kandra appeared to be very good at that—and left the room, but there were whispers and debates. The Seconds slunk out last, looking humiliated. Sazed watched them go, thinking about KanPaar's words. We are eternal—we outwait everything and anything. Suddenly, the kandra began to make more sense to Sazed. How easy it would be to ignore the outside world if one were immortal. They had outlasted so many problems and predicaments, upheavals and riots, that anything occurring on the outside must have seemed trivial. So trivial, in fact, that it was even possible to ignore the prophecies of one's own religion as they started to come true. Eventually, the room was empty, and a pair of beefy members of the Fifth Generation pushed the doors closed from outside, leaving Sazed alone on the floor of the room. He waited patiently, arranging his notes on |
his desk as the members of the First Generation hobbled out of their hidden stairwells and joined him on the floor of the Trustwarren. "Tell me, Keeper," Haddek said as his brothers seated themselves, "what do you make of this event?" "The departure of the mists?" Sazed asked. "It does seem portentous—though, admittedly, I cannot give a specific reason why." "That is because there are things we have not yet explained to you," Haddek said, looking toward the others. They seemed very troubled. "Things relating to the First Contract, and the promises of the kandra." Sazed readied a sheet of metal paper. "Please, continue." "I must ask that you not record these words," Haddek said. Sazed paused, then set down his pen. "Very well—though I warn you. The memory of a Keeper, even without his metalminds, is very long." "That cannot be helped," said one of the others. "We need your counsel, Keeper. As an outsider." "As a son," another whispered. "When the Father made us," Haddek said. "He . . . gave us a charge. Something different from the First Contract." "To him, it was almost an afterthought," one of the others added. "Though once he mentioned it, he implied it was very important." "He made us promise," Haddek said. "Each of us. He told us that someday, we might be required to remove our Blessings." "Pull them from our bodies," one of the others added. "Kill ourselves," Haddek said. The room fell silent. "You are certain this would kill you?" Sazed asked. "It would change us back to mistwraiths," Haddek said. "That is the same thing, essentially." "The Father said we would have to do it," another said. "There wasn't a 'might' about it. He said that we would have to make certain the other kandra knew of this charge." "We call it the Resolution," Haddek said. "Each kandra is told of it when he or she is first birthed. They are given the charge—sworn and ingrained—to pull their Blessing free, should the First Generation command it. We have never invoked this charge." "But you're considering it now?" Sazed asked, frowning. "I do not understand. Simply because of the way that the mists are acting?" "The mists are the body of Preservation, Keeper," Haddek said. "This is a very portentous event." "We have been listening to our children discuss it all morning," another said. "And it troubles us. They do not know all the mists represent, but they are aware of their importance." "Rashek said that we'd know," another said. "He told us. 'The day will come when you have to remove your Blessings. You'll know when it arrives.' " Haddek nodded. "He said that we'd know. And . . . we are very worried." "How can we order the deaths of all of our people?" another asked. "The Resolution has always bothered me." "Rashek saw the future," Haddek said, turning. "He held the power of Preservation and wielded it. He is the only man ever to have done so! Even this girl of whom the Keeper speaks did not |
use the power. Only Rashek! The Father." "Where, then, are the mists?" another asked. The room fell silent again. Sazed sat, pen held in his hand, yet not writing anything. He leaned forward. "The mists are the body of Preservation?" The others nodded. "And . . . it has disappeared?" Again, a nod. "Does this not mean, then, that Preservation has returned?" "That is impossible," Haddek said. "Preservation's power remains, for power cannot be destroyed. His mind, however, was all but destroyed—for this was the sacrifice he made to imprison Ruin." "The sliver remains," another reminded. "The shadow of self." "Yes," Haddek said. "But that is not Preservation, just an image—a remnant. Now that Ruin has escaped, I think we can assume that even it has been destroyed." "I think it is more," another began. "We could—" Sazed held up his hands, getting their attention. "If Preservation has not returned, then has, perhaps, someone else taken up his power to use in this fight? Is that not what your teachings say will happen? That which has been sundered must again begin to find its whole." Silence. "Perhaps," Haddek said. Vin, Sazed thought, growing excited. This is what it means to be the Hero of Ages! I am right to believe. She can save us! Sazed took a piece of metal paper, beginning to scribble down his thoughts. At that moment, however, the doors to the Trustwarren burst open. Sazed paused, turning with a frown. A group of rock-boned Fifth Generationers clomped into the room, followed by the willowy members of the Second Generation. Outside, the cavern hallway was empty of its earlier crowd. "Take them," KanPaar said furtively, pointing. "What is this!" Haddek exclaimed. Sazed sat where he was, pen held in his fingers. He recognized the urgent, tense posture in the figures of the Second Generationers. Some looked frightened, others determined. The Fifth Generationers moved forward quickly, their movements enhanced by the Blessing of Potency. "KanPaar!" Haddek said. "What is this?" Sazed slowly stood up. Four Fifth Generationers came over to surround him, bearing hammers as weapons. "It's a coup," Sazed said. "You can no longer lead," KanPaar said to the First Generation. "You would destroy what we have here, polluting our land with outsiders, letting the talk of revolutionaries cloud kandra wisdom." "This is not the time, KanPaar," Haddek said, the members of the First Generation crying out as they were prodded and grappled. "Not the time?" KanPaar asked angrily. "You spoke of the Resolution! Have you no idea the panic this has caused? You would destroy everything we have." Sazed turned calmly, looking at KanPaar. Despite his angry tone, the kandra was smiling slightly through translucent lips. He had to strike now, Sazed thought, before the First Generation said more to the common people—making the Seconds redundant. KanPaar can stuff them all away somewhere, and then prop up dummies in the alcoves. Sazed reached for his pewtermind. One of the Fifths snapped it away with a too-quick grab of the hand, and two others took Sazed by the arms. |
He struggled, but his kandra captors were inhumanly strong. "KanPaar!" Haddek yelled. The First's voice was surprisingly strong. "You are of the Second Generation—you owe obedience to me. We created you!" KanPaar ignored him, directing his kandra to bind the members of the First Generation. The other Seconds stood in a cluster behind him, looking increasingly apprehensive and shocked at what they were doing. "The time for the Resolution may indeed be here!" Haddek said. "We must—" He cut off as one of the Fifths gagged him. "That is exactly why I must take leadership," KanPaar said, shaking his head. "You are too unstable, old one. I will not trust the future of our people to a creature who could, at a whim, order them to kill themselves." "You fear change," Sazed said, meeting the kandra's eyes. "I fear instability," KanPaar said. "I will make certain the kandra people have a firm and immutable leadership." "You make the same argument as many revolutionaries," Sazed said. "And I can see your concern. However, you must not do this thing. Your own prophecies are coming to a head. I understand now! Without the part the kandra are to play, you could inadvertently cause the end of all things. Let me continue my research—lock us in this room if you must—but do not—" "Gag him," KanPaar said, turning. Sazed struggled, with no success, as his mouth was bound and he was pulled from the Trustwarren, leaving the atium—the body of a god—behind, and in the hands of traitors. I've always wondered about the strange ability Allomancers have to pierce the mists. When one burned tin, he or she could see farther at night, looking through the mists. To the layman, this might seem like a logical connection—tin, after all, enhances the senses. The logical mind, however, may find a puzzle in this ability. How, exactly, would tin let one see through the mists? As an obstruction, they are unconnected with the quality of one's eyesight. Both the nearsighted scholar and the long-sighted scout would have the same trouble seeing into the distance if there were a wall in the way. This, then, should have been our first clue. Allomancers could see through the mists because the mists were, indeed, composed of the very same power as Allomancy. Once attuned by burning tin, the Allomancer was almost part of the mists. And therefore, they became more translucent to him. VIN . . . FLOATED. She wasn't asleep, but she didn't quite feel awake either. She was disoriented, uncertain. Was she still lying in the broken courtyard of Kredik Shaw? Was she sleeping in her cabin aboard the narrowboat with Elend? Was she in her palace quarters, back in Luthadel, the city under siege? Was she in Clubs's shop, worried and confused by the kindness of this strange new crew? Was she huddled in an alleyway, crying, back hurting from another of Reen's beatings? She felt about her, trying to make sense of her surroundings. Her arms and legs didn't seem to work. In fact, she couldn't |
even really focus on them. The longer she floated, however, the clearer her vision became. She was . . . in Luthadel. After killing the Inquisitors. Why couldn't she feel anything? She tried to reach down, to push herself to her knees, but the ground seemed strangely far away. And, she saw no arms in front of her. She just continued to float. I'm dead, she thought. Even as that occurred to her, she woke up a bit more. She could see, though it was as if she looked through a very blurry, distorting pane of glass. She felt . . . a power buzzing within her. A strength unlike that of limbs—but somehow more versatile. She managed to turn, getting a sweeping view of the city. And, halfway through her turn, she came face-to-face with something dark. She couldn't tell how far away it was. It seemed close and distant at the same time. She could view it with detail—far more detail than she could see in the actual world—but she couldn't touch it. She knew, instinctively, what it was. Ruin no longer looked like Reen. Instead, he manifested as a large patch of shifting black smoke. A thing without a body, but with a consciousness greater than that of a simple human. That . . . is what I've become, Vin realized, thoughts becoming clearer. Vin, Ruin spoke. His voice was not that of Reen, but instead something more . . . guttural. It was a vibration that washed across her, like an Allomantic pulse. Welcome, Ruin said, to godhood. Vin remained silent, though she quested out with her power, trying to get a sense of what she could do. Understanding seemed to open to her. It was like before, when she'd taken the power at the Well of Ascension. She immediately knew things. Only this time, the power was so vast—the understanding so great—that it seemed to have shocked her mind. Fortunately, that mind was expanding, and she was growing. Awakening. She rose above the city, knowing that the power spinning through her—the core of her existence—was simply a hub. A focus for power that stretched across the entire world. She could be anywhere she wished. Indeed, a part of her was in all places at once. She could see the world as a whole. And it was dying. She felt its tremors, saw its life ebbing. Already, most of the plant life on the planet was dead. Animals would go quickly—the ones who survived were those who could find a way to chew on dead foliage now covered by ash. Humans would not be far behind, though Vin found it interesting to note that a surprising percentage of them had found their way down into one or another of the storage caverns. Not storage caverns . . . Vin thought, finally understanding the Lord Ruler's purpose. Shelters. That's why they're so vast. They're like fortresses for people to hide in. To wait, to survive a little longer. Well, she would fix that. She felt electrified with power. She |
reached out and plugged the ashmounts. She soothed them, deadened them, smothered their ability to spray ash and lava. Then, she reached into the sky and wiped the smoke and darkness from the atmosphere—like a maid wiping soot from a dirty window. She did all of this in a matter of instants; not more than five minutes would have passed on the world below. Immediately, the land began to burn. The sun was amazingly powerful—she hadn't realized how much the ash and smoke had done to shield the land. She cried out, spinning the world quickly so that the sun moved to its other side. Darkness fell. And, as soon as she did that, tempests began to swoop across the landscape. Weather patterns were disrupted by the motion, and in the sea a sudden wave appeared, enormously large. It rolled toward the coast, threatening to wipe away several cities. Vin cried out again, reaching to stop the wave. And something blocked her. She heard laughter. She turned in the air, looking to where Ruin sat like a shifting, undulating thundercloud. Vin, Vin . . . he said. Do you realize how like the Lord Ruler you are? When he first took the power, he tried to solve everything. All of man's ills. She saw it. She wasn't omniscient—she couldn't see the entirety of the past. However, she could see the history of the power she held. She could see when Rashek had taken it, and she could see him, frustrated, trying to pull the planet into a proper orbit. Yet, he pulled it too far, leaving the world cold and freezing. He pushed it back again, but his power was too vast—too terrible—for him to control properly at that time. So, he again left the world too hot. All life would have perished. He opened the ashmounts, clogging the atmosphere, turning the sun red. And, in doing so, he saved the planet—but doomed it as well. You are so impetuous, Ruin thought. I have held this power for a period of time longer than you can imagine. It takes care and precision to use it correctly. Unless, of course, you just want to destroy. He reached out with a power Vin could feel. Immediately, without knowing how or why, she blocked him. She threw her power up against his, and he halted, unable to act. Below, the tsunami crashed into the coast. There were still people down there. People who had hidden from the koloss, who had survived on fish from the sea when their crops failed. Vin felt their pain, their terror, and she cried out as she reached to protect them. And, again, was stopped. Now you know the frustration, Ruin said as the tsunami destroyed villages. What was it your Elend said? For every Push, there is a Pull. Throw something up, and it will come back down. Opposition. For Ruin, there is Preservation. Time immemorial! Eternity! And each time I push, YOU push back. Even when dead, you stopped me, for we are forces. I can do nothing! |
And you can do nothing! Balance! The curse of our existence. Vin suffered as the people below were crushed, washed away, and drowned. Please, she said. Please just let me save them. Why? Ruin asked. What is it I told you before? Everything you do serves me. It is out of kindness that I stop you. For, even if you were to reach your hand out for them, you would destroy more than you preserve. That is always the way it is. Vin hung, listening to the screams. And yet, a part of her mind—now so vast, now capable of many thoughts at once—dissected Ruin's words. They were untrue. He said that all things destroyed, yet he complained about balance. He warned that she would only destroy more, but she could not believe that he would stop her out of kindness. He wanted her to destroy. It couldn't be both ways. She knew herself as his opposite. She could have saved those people, if he hadn't stopped her. True, she probably didn't have the accuracy to do it yet. That wasn't the power's fault, however, but hers. He had to stop her so that she wouldn't learn, as the Lord Ruler had, and become more capable with the power. She spun away from him, moving back toward Luthadel. Her awareness was still expanding, but she was confused by something she saw. Bright points of light, dotting the landscape, shining like flares. She drew closer, trying to figure out what they were. Yet, just as it was difficult to look directly at a bright lantern and see what was emitting the light, it was difficult to discern the source of this power. She figured it out as she reached Luthadel. A large glow was coming from the broken palace. Most of the light was shaped vaguely like . . . Spires. Metal. That's what caused the glowing power. I was right. Metal is power, and it's why Ruin couldn't read things written in steel. Vin turned away from a brightly shining spire. Ruin was there, as always, watching her. I was surprised when Preservation said he wanted to create you, Ruin said, a bit of curiosity in his voice. Other life is ordered by way of nature. Balanced. But Preservation . . . he wanted to create something intentionally unbalanced. Something that could choose to preserve at times, but to ruin at others. Something in the form of that which we'd seen before. It was intriguing. I find it odd that he expended so much of himself to create you. Why would he weaken himself, eventually giving me the strength to destroy the world, simply to place human beings on his world? I know that others call his death to imprison me a sacrifice, but that wasn't the sacrifice. His sacrifice came much earlier. Yes, he still tried to betray me—to imprison me. But, he could not stop me. He could only slow me. Forestall. Delay. Since the day we created you, there has been an imbalance. I was stronger. And he knew |
it. Vin frowned—or, at least, she felt as if she were frowning, though she no longer had a body. His words . . . He says he's stronger, Vin thought. Yet, we are equally matched. Is he lying again? No . . . he didn't lie. Looking back with her ever-expanding mind, she saw that everything Ruin said, he believed. He truly thought that whatever she did helped him. He saw the world through the lenses of destruction. He wasn't lying about being more powerful than she. Yet, they were obviously matched at the moment. Which meant . . . There's another piece of Ruin out there, Vin thought. Preservation is weaker because he gave up a piece of himself to create mankind. Not his consciousness—that he used to fuel Ruin's prison—but an actual bit of his power. What she had suspected before, she now knew with certainty. Ruin's power was concentrated, hidden somewhere by Preservation. The atium. Ruin was stronger. Or, he would be, once he recovered the last part of his self. Then, he would be able to destroy completely—they would no longer be balanced. She swung about in frustration, a glowing white aura of mist with wispy tendrils expanding across the entire world. There's so much I still don't know, Vin thought. It was an odd thing to acknowledge, with her mind broadening to include so much. Yet, her ignorance was no longer that of a person. Her ignorance was related to experience. Ruin had such a huge head start on her. He had created for himself servants who could act without his direction, and so she could not block them. She saw his planning manifest in the world. She saw him subtly influencing the Lord Ruler a thousand years ago. Even while Rashek held the power of Preservation, Ruin had whispered in his ear, directing him toward an understanding of Hemalurgy. And, Rashek had obeyed without realizing it, creating minions—armies—for Ruin to take when the time was right. Vin could see them—the koloss—converging toward Luthadel. I will give you credit, Vin, Ruin said, hovering nearby. You destroyed my Inquisitors. All but one, at least. They were very difficult to make. I . . . She stopped focusing on him, at least with most of her mind. Something else drew her attention. Something moving into Luthadel, flying on spears of light. Elend. Looking back, we should have been able to see the connection between the mists, Allomancy, and the power at the Well of Ascension. Not only could Allomancers' vision pierce the mists, but there was the fact that the mists swirled slightly around the body of a person using any kind of Allomancy. More telling, perhaps, was the fact that when a Hemalurgist used his abilities, it drove the mists away. The closer one came to Ruin, the more under his influence, and the longer one bore his spikes, the more the mists were repelled. ELEND STOOD IN THE RUBBLE of Kredik Shaw, mind numb as he contemplated the destruction. It seemed . . . impossible. What force |
could have leveled such an enormous, majestic building? What could have caused such destruction, breaking apart buildings and flinging rubble several streets away? And, all of the destruction was focused here, at what had once been the center of the Lord Ruler's power. Elend skidded down some rubble, approaching the center of what looked like an impact crater. He turned around in the dark night, looking at the fallen blocks and spires. "Lord Ruler . . ." he swore quietly, unable to help himself. Had something happened at the Well of Ascension? Had it exploded? Elend turned, looking across his city. It appeared to be empty. Luthadel, largest metropolis in the Final Empire, seat of his government. Empty. Much of it in ruins, a good third of it burned, and Kredik Shaw itself flattened as if it had been pounded by the fist of a god. Elend dropped a coin and shot away, heading along his original path toward the northeastern section of the city. He'd come to Luthadel hoping to find Vin, but had been forced to take a slight detour to the south in order to get around a particularly large swath of lava burning the plains around Mount Tyrian. That sight, along with the sight of Luthadel in ruin, left him very disturbed. Where was Vin? He jumped from building to building. He kicked up ash with each leap. Things were happening. The ash was slowly trickling away—in fact, it had mostly stopped falling. That was good, but he remembered well a short time ago when the sun had suddenly blazed with an amazing intensity. Those few moments had burned him so that his face still hurt. Then, the sun had . . . dropped. It had fallen below the horizon in less than a second, the ground lurching beneath Elend's feet. Part of him assumed that he was going mad. Yet, he could not deny that it was now nighttime, even if his body—and one of the city clocks he had visited—indicated that it should have been afternoon. He landed on a building, then jumped off, Pushing against a broken door handle. He shivered as he moved in the open air of darkness. It was night—the stars blazing uncomfortably above—and there was no mist. Vin had told him that the mists would protect him. What would protect him now that they were gone? He made his way to Keep Venture, his palace. He found the building to be a burned-out husk. He landed in the courtyard, staring up at his home—the place he had been raised—trying to make sense of the destruction. Several guards in the brown colors of his livery lay decomposing on the cobblestones. All was still. What in the hell happened here? he thought with frustration. He poked through the building, but found no clues. All had been burned. He left via a broken window on the top floor, then paused at something he saw in the rear courtyard. He dropped to the ground. And there, beneath a patio canopy that had kept off much |
of the ash, he found a corpse in a fine gentlemen's suit lying on the cobbles. Elend rolled it over, noting the sword thrust through its stomach and the posture of a suicide. The corpse's fingers still held the weapon. Penrod, he thought, recognizing the face. Dead, presumably, by his own hand. Something lay scrawled in charcoal on the patio floor. Elend wiped away the drifted ash, smudging the letters in the process. Fortunately, he could still read them. I'm sorry, it read. Something has taken control of me . . . of this city. I am lucid only part of the time. Better to kill myself than to cause more destruction. Look toward the Terris Dominance for your people. Elend turned toward the north. Terris? That seemed like a very odd place in which to seek refuge. If the people of the city had fled, then why would they have left the Central Dominance, the place where the mists were the weakest? He eyed the scribbles. Ruin . . . a voice seemed to whisper. Lies . . . Ruin could change text. Words like Penrod's couldn't be trusted. Elend bid a silent farewell to the corpse, wishing he had the time to bury the old statesman, then dropped a coin to Push himself into the air. The people of Luthadel had gone somewhere. If Ruin had found a way to kill them, then Elend would have found more corpses. He suspected that if he took the time to search, he could probably find people still hiding in the city. Likely, the disappearance of the mists—then the sudden change from day to night—had driven them into hiding. Perhaps they had made it to the storage cavern beneath Kredik Shaw. Elend hoped that not many had gone there, considering the damage that had been done to the palace. If there were people there, they would be sealed in. West . . . the wind seemed to whisper. Pits . . . Ruin usually changes text so that it's very similar to what it said before, Elend thought. So . . . Penrod probably did write most of those words, trying to tell me where to go to find my people. Ruin made it sound like they went to the Terris Dominance, but what if Penrod originally wrote that they went to the Terris people? It made good sense. If he'd fled Luthadel, he would have gone there—it was a place where there was already an established group of refugees, a group with herds, crops, and food. Elend turned west, leaving the city, cloak flapping with each Allomantic bound. Suddenly, Ruin's frustration made even more sense to Vin. She felt she held the power of all creation. Yet, it took everything she had to get even a few words to Elend. She wasn't even certain if he'd heard her or not. She knew him so well, however, that she felt a . . . connection. Despite Ruin's efforts to block her, she felt as if some part of her had been able to |
get through to some part of Elend. Perhaps in the same way Ruin was able to communicate with his Inquisitors and followers? Still, her near-impotence was infuriating. Balance, Ruin spat. Balance imprisoned me. Preservation's sacrifice—that was to siphon off the part of me that was stronger, to lock it away, to leave me equal with him again. For a time. Only for a time. And what is time to us, Vin? Nothing. It may seem odd to those reading this that atium was part of the body of a god. However, it is necessary to understand that when we said "body" we generally meant "power." As my mind has expanded, I've come to realize that objects and energy are actually composed of the very same things, and can change state from one to another. It makes perfect sense to me that the power of godhood would be manifest within the world in physical form. Ruin and Preservation were not nebulous abstractions. They were integral parts of existence. In a way, every object that existed in the world was composed of their power. Atium, then, was an object that was one-sided. Instead of being composed of half Ruin and half Preservation—as, say, a rock would be—atium was completely of Ruin. The Pits of Hathsin were crafted by Preservation as a place to hide the chunk of Ruin's body that he had stolen away during the betrayal and imprisonment. Kelsier didn't truly destroy this place by shattering those crystals, for they would have regrown eventually—in a few hundred years—and continued to deposit atium, as the place was a natural outlet for Ruin's trapped power. When people burned atium, then, they were drawing upon the power of Ruin—which is, perhaps, why atium turned people into such efficient killing machines. They didn't use up this power, however, but simply made use of it. Once a nugget of atium was expended, the power would return to the Pits and begin to coalesce again—just as the power at the Well of Ascension would return there again after it had been used. THIS IS, SAZED THOUGHT, without a doubt, the oddest dungeon I have ever been in. Granted, it was only the second time he had been imprisoned. Still, he had observed several prisons in his lifetime, and had read of others. Most were like cages. This one, however, consisted only of a hole in the ground with an iron grate covering the top. Sazed scrunched down inside of it, stripped of his metalminds, his legs cramped. It was probably built for a kandra, he thought. One without bones, perhaps? What would a kandra without bones be like? A pile of goo? Or, perhaps, a pile of muscles? Either way, this prison had not been meant to hold a man—particularly not one as tall as Sazed. He could barely move. He reached up, pushing against the grate, but it was secure. A large lock held it in place. He wasn't certain how long he had been in the pit. Hours? Perhaps even days. They still hadn't given him anything |
to eat, though a member of the Third Generation had poured some water on him. Sazed was still wet with it, and he had taken to sucking on the cloth of his robes to assuage his thirst. This is silly, he thought, not for the first time. The world is ending, and I'm in prison? He was the final Keeper, the Announcer. He should be up above, recording events. Because, truth be told, he was beginning to believe that the world would not end. He had accepted that something, perhaps Preservation itself, was watching over and protecting mankind. He was more and more determined to follow the Terris religion—not because it was perfect, but because he would rather believe and have hope. The Hero was real. Sazed believed that. And he had faith in her. He had lived with Kelsier and had helped the man. He had chronicled the rise of the Church of the Survivor during the first years of its development. He had even researched the Hero of Ages with Tindwyl and taken it upon himself to announce Vin as the one who fulfilled the prophecies. But it was only recently that he'd started to have faith in her. Perhaps it was his decision to be someone who saw miracles. Perhaps it was the daunting fear of the ending that seemed to loom just ahead. Perhaps it was the tension and anxiety. Regardless, somehow, from the chaos, he drew peace. She would come. She would preserve the world. However, Sazed needed to be ready to help. And that meant escaping. He eyed the metal grate. The lock was of fine steel, the grate itself of iron. He reached up tentatively, touching the bars, draining a bit of his weight and putting it into the iron. Immediately, his body grew lighter. In Feruchemy, iron stored physical weight, and the grate was pure enough to hold a Feruchemical charge. It went against his instincts to use the grate as a metalmind—it wasn't portable, and if he had to flee, he'd leave behind all of the power he'd saved. Yet, what good would it be to simply sit in the pit and wait? He reached up with the other hand, touching the steel lock with one finger. Then, he began to fill it as well, draining his body of speed. He instantly began to feel lethargic, as if his every motion—even his breathing—was more difficult. It was like he had to push through some thick substance each time he moved. He stayed that way. He had learned to enter a kind of meditative trance when he filled metalminds. Often, he would fill many at once, leaving himself sickly, weak, slow, and dull-minded. When he could, it was better to simply . . . Drift. He wasn't certain how long the meditation lasted. Occasionally, the guard came to pour water on him. When the sounds came, Sazed would let go and huddle down, pretending to sleep. But, as soon as the guard withdrew, he would reach back up and continue to fill the metalminds. |
More time passed. Then, he heard sounds. Sazed huddled down again, then waited expectantly for the shower of water. "When I sent you back to save my people," a voice growled, "this wasn't exactly what I had in mind." Sazed popped his eyes open, glancing upward, and was surprised to see a canine face looking through the grate. "TenSoon?" Sazed asked. The kandra grunted and stepped back. Sazed perked up as another kandra appeared. She wore a delicate True Body made of wood, willowy and almost inhuman. And, she held some keys. "Quickly, MeLaan," TenSoon growled with his dog's voice. He had apparently switched back to the wolfhound, which made sense. Moving as a horse through the sometimes steep and narrow tunnels of the Homeland would have been difficult. The female kandra unlocked the grate, then pulled it back. Sazed eagerly climbed free. In the room, he found several other kandra wearing deviant True Bodies. In the corner, the prison guard lay bound and gagged. "I was seen entering the Homeland, Terrisman," TenSoon said. "So we have little time. What has happened here? MeLaan told me of your imprisonment—KanPaar announced that the First Generation had ordered you taken. What did you do to antagonize them?" "Not them," Sazed said, stretching his cramped legs. "It was the Second Generation. They have taken the Firsts captive, and plan to rule in their stead." The girl—MeLaan—gasped. "They would never!" "They did," Sazed said, standing. "I fear for the safety of the Firsts. KanPaar may have been afraid to kill me because I am human. However, the Firsts . . ." "But," MeLaan said, "the Seconds are kandra. They wouldn't do something like that! We're not that kind of people." TenSoon and Sazed shared a look. All societies have people who break the rules, child, Sazed thought. Particularly when power is concerned. "We have to find the Firsts," TenSoon said. "And recover the Trustwarren." "We will fight with you, TenSoon," one of the other kandra said. "We're finally throwing them off!" another said. "The Seconds, and their insistence that we serve the humans!" Sazed frowned at this. What did humans have to do with this conflict? Then, however, he noticed how the others regarded TenSoon. The dog's body, he realized. To them, TenSoon is a revolutionary of the highest order—all because of something Vin ordered him to do. TenSoon met Sazed eyes again, opening his mouth to speak. Then, however, he paused. "They're coming," he said with a curse, his dog's ears flattening. Sazed spun with concern, noticing shadows on the rock wall of the corridor leading into the prison chamber. The chamber was small, with six or so pit cells in the floor. There were no other entrances. Despite their brave words, TenSoon's companions immediately shied back, huddling against the wall. They were obviously not accustomed to conflict, particularly with their own kind. TenSoon shared none of their timidity. He charged forward as soon as the group of Fifths entered the room, ramming his shoulder into one's chest, howling and clawing at another. There is |
a kandra who fits in with his people as poorly as I do with my own, Sazed thought, smiling. He stepped backward, moving up onto the top of the prison grate, touching its metals with his bare feet. The Fifths had trouble fighting TenSoon—he had trained with Vin, and was apparently quite confident in his dog's body. He kept moving, knocking them over. However, there were five of them, and only one TenSoon. He was forced to retreat. The wounds in his body close as he orders them, Sazed noticed. That must be why the guards usually carry hammers. Which made it fairly obvious how one had to fight kandra. TenSoon backed up beside Sazed. "I apologize," the dog growled. "This isn't much of a rescue." "Oh, I don't know," Sazed said with a smile, the Fifths surrounding them. "You needn't give up so quickly, I think." The Fifths charged, and Sazed tapped iron from the grate beneath his bare feet. Immediately, his body grew several times heavier than normal, and he grabbed a kandra guard by the arms. Then fell on him. Sazed always said he wasn't a warrior. However, the number of times he'd said that, then been forced to fight anyway, made him think he was losing that excuse. The truth was, he'd been in far more battles over the last few years than he felt he had any right to have survived. Either way, he knew some rudimentary moves—and, with both Feruchemy and surprise to aid him, that was about all he needed. Tapping weight increased the density of his body and of his bones, keeping him from damaging himself as he collapsed on top of the soldier. Sazed felt a satisfying crack as they hit the grate, Sazed's greatly increased weight crushing the kandra guard's bones. They used stone True Bodies, but even that wasn't enough. Sazed released the metalmind, then began to fill it instead, making his body incredibly light. He touched his foot to the steel lock, and tapped speed. Suddenly, he was faster than any man had a right to be. He stood up even as the other four guards turned toward him in surprise. He stopped filling his ironmind, regaining normal weight, then reached with a blurring speed to pick up the hammer of the fallen soldier. He didn't have enhanced strength, but he had speed. He slammed the hammer down on a kandra shoulder, growing heavier to add to the momentum of his blow. The kandra's bones shattered. Sazed snapped his foot on the lock and tapped all of the remaining speed. He crouched, pivoting, and slammed his hammer into the knees of two kandra who were trying to attack him with their own hammers. They cried out, falling, as Sazed's speed ran out. He stood up straight. TenSoon was sitting atop the final guard, pinning him to the ground. "I thought you were a scholar," the dog noted, his captive squirming. Sazed tossed aside the hammer. "I am," he said. "Vin would have fought her way free from this prison days |
ago. Now, I believe we should deal with these . . ." He waved toward the fallen Fifths, who seemed to have quite a bit of trouble moving with their bones broken. TenSoon nodded. He motioned for some of his friends to help him with the one he was sitting on. They held the captive tentatively, but there were enough of them to keep the prisoner still. "What have you done here, FhorKood?" TenSoon demanded of the captive. Sazed kept an eye on the other Fifths, and was forced to slam a mallet against one of them, breaking more bones as he tried to sneak away. FhorKood spat. "Dirty Third," he muttered. "You are the traitor this time," TenSoon said, smiling slightly. "KanPaar brands me a Contract-breaker, then he overthrows the First Generation? If the world weren't ending, I'd find that far more amusing. Now, speak!" Sazed paused as he noticed something. The other cells in the floor were occupied. He leaned down, recognizing something about the muscles he saw inside. They were . . . discolored, and a bit deformed. Like . . . hanging moss. "TenSoon!" he said, looking up. "Perhaps the First Generation is still alive. Come here." TenSoon moved over, then looked down at the pit, frowning with canine lips. "MeLaan! The keys!" She rushed over, unlocking the grate. With some consternation, Sazed was able to determine that there were multiple sets of squirming muscles in the pit, each of a slightly different color. "We need bones," TenSoon said, standing. MeLaan nodded, rushing from the room. Sazed shared a look with TenSoon. "They must have killed the other kandra in these cells," TenSoon said softly. "Traitors to our kind, imprisoned endlessly. It was to have been my fate. Either way, it is clever—everyone thinks that these cells hold dire criminals. It wouldn't be odd for the Fifths to continue feeding them, and nobody would suspect that the occupants had been replaced with the First Generation, assuming they didn't look too closely at the color of the muscles." "We need to keep moving," Sazed said. "Get to KanPaar." TenSoon shook his head. "We won't get far without the Firsts to tell our story, Terrisman. Go and store more of your Feruchemy. We may need it." With that, TenSoon moved over, crouching over to their captive. "You have two options, FhorKood," he said. "Either relinquish those bones, or I'll digest your body and kill you, as I did OreSeur." Sazed frowned, watching. The captured kandra seemed terrified of TenSoon. The Fifth's body liquefied, and he moved slug-like away from the granite bones. TenSoon smiled. "What is that for?" Sazed asked. "Something Zane taught me," TenSoon said, his dog's body beginning to melt, the hair falling out. "Nobody expects a kandra to be an impostor. In a few moments, FhorKood here will return to the Second Generation and tell them that the traitor TenSoon has been captured. I should be able to stall long enough for the Firsts to regenerate—they will take far longer than I do to make bodies." Sazed |
nodded. MeLaan returned a short time later with a large sack full of bones, and TenSoon—having re-created FhorKood's body with incredible speed—moved out of the chamber on his mission. Then, Sazed sat down, removing the lock and holding it to use as a metalmind, using an iron hammer in the other hand to store weight. It felt odd to just sit there, but apparently the Firsts would need a few hours to regenerate their bodies. There really isn't a rush, is there? Sazed thought. I have the First Generation here—they're the ones I needed. I can continue to question them, learn what I want. TenSoon will have KanPaar distracted. It doesn't matter that the Seconds will be in charge for a few more hours. What harm could they possibly do? I believe that the mists were searching for someone to become a new host for them. The power needed a consciousness to direct it. In this matter, I am still rather confused. Why would power used to create and destroy need a mind to oversee it? And yet, it seems to have only a vague will of its own, tied in to the mandate of its abilities. Without a consciousness to direct it, nothing could actually be created or destroyed. It's as if the power of Preservation understands that its tendency to reinforce stability is not enough. If nothing changed, nothing would ever come to exist. That makes me wonder who or what the minds of Preservation and Ruin were. Regardless, the mists—the power of Preservation—chose someone to become their host long before all of this happened. That someone, however, was immediately seized by Ruin and used as a pawn. He must have known that by giving her a disguised Hemalurgic spike, he would keep the mists from investing themselves in her as they wished. The three times she drew upon their power, then, were the three times when her earring had been removed from her body. When she had fought the Lord Ruler, his Allomancy had ripped it free. When fighting Marsh in Fadrex, she had used the earring as a weapon. And, at the end, Marsh ripped it out, freeing her and allowing the mists—which were now desperate for a host, since Preservation's last wisp was gone—to finally pour themselves into her. SOMETHING CHANGED. Vin arose from her contemplation of the world. Something important was happening. She didn't have enough experience to tell what it was immediately, but she did see Ruin's nexus suddenly shoot away. She followed. Speed wasn't an issue. In fact, she didn't even really feel like she was moving. She "followed" because that was how her mind interpreted the experience of instantly moving her consciousness to the place where Ruin had focused his. She recognized the area. The Pits of Hathsin, or a place nearby. As a portion of her mind had noticed earlier, the Pits themselves had become a massive refugee camp, the people there quickly consuming the resources that the Terris people had carefully stored. A part of her smiled. The Terris gave of |
their goods freely, helping those who had fled Luthadel. The Lord Ruler had worked to breed the Terris so they were docile. However, had he expected that in making his perfect servants, he would also create a thoughtful, kindly people who would give of their last flocks to help those who were starving? The thing that she'd noticed earlier didn't have to do with the Terris or their guests. She saw it as she drew closer. A shining blaze of . . . something. Powerful, more mighty than the sun itself to her eyes. She focused on it, but could see little. What could shine so magnificently? "Take this," a voice said. "Find humans, and trade for weapons and supplies." "Yes, Lord KanPaar," a second voice said. They were coming from the center of the shining area. It was to the side of the Pits, only a few minutes' travel from the refugees. Oh, no . . . Vin thought, feeling a sudden dread. "The foolish Firsts have sat on this treasure for far too long," KanPaar said. "With these riches, we could be ruling, not serving, mankind." "I . . . thought we didn't want to change things?" the second voice said. "Oh, we won't. Not quickly, at least. For now, just this small amount needs to be sold . . ." Hidden beneath the ground, Vin thought, heightened mind making the connections. In a place that already shines because of the large number of metal deposits. Ruin would never have been able to know where the atium was. The depth of the Lord Ruler's strategies amazed her. He had held on for a thousand years, maintaining such an amazing secret, keeping atium safe. She imagined obligators communicating only on metal plates, giving instructions for the operations at the Pits. She imagined caravans traveling from the Pits, carrying atium mixed with gold and coins to hide where it was moving and what exactly was going on. You don't know what I do for mankind, the Lord Ruler had said. And I didn't, Vin thought. Thank you. She felt Ruin surge with power, and she blocked him. But just as she had been able to get a tendril of power past Ruin to Elend, Ruin was able to get the tiniest thread through. It was enough, for the one who had spoken was tainted with Hemalurgy. A spike in each shoulder drew Ruin's power and allowed him to speak to their bearer. A kandra? Vin thought, her senses finally managing to peer through the atium glare to see a creature with a translucent body standing in a cavern, just beneath the ground. Another kandra was crawling out of a hole nearby, carrying a small pouch of atium. Ruin seized control of the kandra KanPaar. The creature stiffened, his metal spikes betraying him. Speak of this, Ruin said to KanPaar, Vin feeling his words as they pulsed into the kandra. How much atium is there? "Wha . . . who are you?" KanPaar said. "Why are you in my head?" I am God, |
the voice said. And you are mine. All of you are mine. Elend landed outside the Pits of Hathsin, throwing up a puff of ash. Oddly, some of his own soldiers were there, guarding the perimeter. They rushed forward, spears held anxiously, then froze when they recognized him. "Lord Venture?" one of the men asked with shock. "I know you," Elend said, frowning. "From my army at Fadrex." "You sent us back, my lord," the other soldier said. "With General Demoux. To help Lord Penrod in Luthadel." Elend glanced up at the night sky, speckled with stars. Some time had passed during his travel to the Pits from Luthadel. If time were now passing normally, the night was halfway through. What would happen when the sun rose again? "Quickly," Elend said. "I need to speak with the leaders of this camp." The return of the First Generation was accomplished with as much flair as Sazed had hoped. The old kandra, now wearing larger bodies, still bore the distinctive colorings and aged skin of their generation. He had feared that the ordinary kandra would not recognize them. However, he hadn't counted on the long life spans of the kandra people. Even if the Firsts only emerged once every century, most of the kandra would have seen them several times. Sazed smiled as the group of Firsts moved into the main kandra chamber, continuing to cause shock and surprise in the others. They proclaimed KanPaar had betrayed them and imprisoned them, then called the kandra people to assemble. Sazed stayed back behind MeLaan and the others, watching for snags in their plan. To the side, he saw a familiar kandra approaching. "Keeper," TenSoon said, still wearing the body of a Fifth. "We need to be careful. There are strange things afoot." "Such as?" Sazed asked. Then, TenSoon attacked him. Sazed started, and his moment of confusion cost him dearly. TenSoon—or whoever it was—got his hands around Sazed's throat and began to choke him. They fell backward, drawing the attention of the surrounding kandra. Sazed's assailant—bearing bones of rock—weighed far more than Sazed, and was easily able to roll to the top, his hands still on Sazed's neck. "TenSoon?" MeLaan asked, sounding terrified. It's not him, Sazed thought. It can't be. . . . "Keeper," his assailant said between clenched teeth. "Something is very wrong." You're telling me! Sazed tried to gasp for breath, reaching toward the pocket of his robe, struggling to grab the metalmind lock inside. "I can barely keep myself from crushing your throat right now," the kandra continued. "Something has control of me. It wants me to kill you." You're doing a pretty good job! Sazed thought. "I'm sorry," TenSoon said. The Firsts had gathered around them. Sazed was barely able to focus, panic controlling him as he fought a much stronger, much heavier foe. He grabbed hold of his impromptu steelmind, but only then realized that speed would do him little good when he was being held so tightly. "It has come, then," whispered Haddek, leader of the Firsts. Sazed |
barely noticed as one of the other Firsts began to shake. People were crying out but the blood thumping in Sazed's ears kept him from hearing what they were saying. Haddek turned away from the gasping Sazed. And then, in a loud voice, yelled something. "The Resolution has come!" Above him, TenSoon jerked. Something within the kandra seemed to be fighting—tradition and a lifetime of training warred against the control of an outside force. TenSoon released Sazed with one hand, but kept choking him with the other. Then, with his free hand, the kandra reached toward his own shoulder. Sazed blacked out. The kandra people always said they were of Preservation, while the koloss and Inquisitors were of Ruin. Yet, the kandra bore Hemalurgic spikes, just like the others. Was their claim, then, simple delusion? No, I think not. They were created by the Lord Ruler to be spies. When they said such things, most of us interpreted that as meaning he planned to use them as spies in his new government, because of their ability to imitate other people. Indeed, they were used for this purpose. But I see something much more grand in their existence. They were the Lord Ruler's double agents, planted with Hemalurgic spikes, yet trusted—taught, bound—to pull them free when Ruin tried to seize them. In Ruin's moment of triumph, when he'd always assumed the kandra would be his on a whim, the vast majority of them immediately switched sides and left him unable to seize his prize. They were of Preservation all along. "THE TERRISMEN DID A GOOD job with this place, my lord," Demoux said. Elend nodded, walking through the quiet nighttime camp with hands clasped behind his back. He was glad he'd stopped to change into a fresh white uniform before leaving Fadrex. As it was supposed to, the clothing attracted attention. The people seemed to take hope simply from seeing him. Their lives had been cast into chaos—they needed to know that their leader was aware of their situation. "The camp is enormous, as you can see," Demoux continued. "Several hundred thousand people now live here. Without the Terrismen, I doubt that the refugees would have survived. As it is, they managed to keep sickness to a minimum, to organize crews to filter and bring fresh water to the camp, and to distribute food and blankets." Demoux hesitated, glancing at Elend. "Food is running out, however," the general said quietly. Apparently, when he'd discovered that Penrod was dead and that most of Luthadel's population was at the Pits, he decided to keep his men there to help. They passed another campfire, and the people there rose. They watched Elend and his general with hope. At this campfire, Demoux stopped as a young Terris-woman approached and handed him and Elend some warm tea to drink. Her eyes lingered fondly on Demoux, and he thanked her by name. The Terris people were affectionate toward Demoux—they were thankful to him for bringing soldiers to help organize and police the mass of refugees. The people needed leadership |
and order in these times. "I shouldn't have left Luthadel," Elend said quietly. Demoux didn't respond immediately. The two of them finished their tea, then continued on, walking with an honor guard of about ten soldiers, all from Demoux's group. The general had sent several messengers back to Elend. They had never arrived. Perhaps they hadn't been able to get around the lava field. Or perhaps they had run afoul of the very same army of koloss Elend had passed on his way to Luthadel. Those koloss . . . Elend thought. The ones we drove away from Fadrex, plus more, are coming directly in this direction. There are even more people here than there were in Fadrex. And they don't have a city wall, or many soldiers at all, to protect them. "Have you been able to figure out what happened in Luthadel, Demoux?" Elend asked quietly, pausing in a darkened area between campfires. It still felt so strange to be out with no mists to obscure the night. He could see so much further—yet, oddly, the night didn't seem as bright. "Penrod, my lord," Demoux said softly. "They say he went mad. He began finding traitors in the nobility, even within his own army. He divided the city, and it turned into another house war. Almost all of the soldiers killed one another, and the city half burned down. The majority of the people escaped, but they have very little by way of protection. A determined group of bandits could probably wreak havoc on this whole group." Elend fell silent. House war, he thought with frustration. Ruin, using our own tricks against us. That's the same method Kelsier used to seize the city. "My lord . . ." Demoux said tentatively. "Speak," Elend said. "You were right to send me and my men back," Demoux said. "The Survivor is behind this, my lord. He wanted us here for some reason." Elend frowned. "What makes you say that?" "These people," Demoux said, "they fled Luthadel because of Kelsier. He appeared to a pair of soldiers, then a group of people, in the city. They say he'd told them to be ready for disaster, and to lead the people out of the city. It's because of them that so many escaped. Those two soldiers and their friends had supplies prepared, and they had the presence of mind to come here." Elend's frown deepened. Yet, he had seen too much to reject even such a strange story. "Send for these men," he said. Demoux nodded, waving for a soldier. "Also," Elend said, remembering that Demoux and his men had been sick from the mists, "see if anyone here has any Allomantic metals. Pass them out to your soldiers and have them ingest them." "My lord?" Demoux said, confused, as he turned. "It's a long story, Demoux," Elend said. "Suffice it to say that your god—or somebody—has made you and your men into Allomancers. Divide your men by the metal it turns out they can burn. We're going to need all of the Coinshots, |
Thugs, and Lurchers we can get." Sazed's eyes fluttered open, and he shook his head, groaning. How long had he been out? Probably not long, he realized, as his vision cleared. He'd passed out from lack of air. That kind of thing usually only left one unconscious for a short time. Assuming one woke up at all. Which I did, he thought, coughing and rubbing his throat, sitting up. The kandra cavern glowed with the quiet light of its blue phosphorescent lanterns. By that light, he could see that he was surrounded by something strange. Mistwraiths. The cousins of the kandra, the scavengers that hunted at night and fed on corpses. They moved about Sazed, masses of muscle, flesh, and bone—but with those bones combined in strange, unnatural ways. Feet hanging off at angles, heads connected to arms. Ribs used like legs. Except, these bones were not actually bone at all, but stone, metal, or wood. Sazed stood up solemnly as he looked over the remnants of the kandra people. Littered across the floor, among the jumbled mass of mistwraiths—who oozed about like giant, translucent slugs—were discarded spikes. Kandra Blessings. The things that had brought them sentience. They had done it. They had held to their oath, and had removed their spikes rather than be taken over by Ruin. Sazed looked over them with pity, amazement, and respect. The atium, he thought. They did this to stop Ruin from getting the atium. I have to protect it! He stumbled away from the main chamber, regaining his strength as he made his way to the Trustwarren. He paused, however, as he approached, noticing sounds. He peeked around a corner, and looked down the corridor through the open Trustwarren doorway. Inside, he found a group of kandra—perhaps twenty in number—working to push back the plate on the floor that covered the atium. Of course they didn't all become mistwraiths, he thought. Some would have been outside of the hearing of the Firsts, or wouldn't have had the courage to pull their spikes free. In fact, as he thought about it, he was even more impressed that so many had obeyed the command from the First Generation. Sazed easily recognized KanPaar directing the work inside. The kandra would take the atium and would deliver it to Ruin. Sazed had to stop them. But it was twenty against one—with Sazed having only one small metalmind. It didn't seem like good odds for him. However, then Sazed noticed something sitting outside the doors of the Trust-warren. A simple cloth sack, of little note save for the fact that Sazed recognized it. He'd carried his metalminds in it for years. They must have tossed it there after taking Sazed captive. It lay about twenty feet down the corridor from him, right beside the doorway into the Trustwarren. In the other room, KanPaar looked up, staring directly toward Sazed's position. Ruin had noticed him. Sazed didn't pause to think further. He reached into his pocket, grabbed the steel lock, and tapped it. He rushed through the corridor on inhumanly |
quick feet, snatching his sack from the ground as kandra began to cry out. Sazed snapped open the sack, and found a collection of bracelets, rings, and bracers inside. He dumped them out, spilling the precious metalminds to the floor and grabbed two particular ones. Then, still moving at blurring speed, he dashed to the side. His steelmind ran out. One of the rings he'd grabbed was pewter. He tapped it for strength, growing in size and bulk. Then, he slammed the doors to the Trustwarren closed, causing those now trapped inside to cry out in shock. Finally, he tapped the other ring—this one iron. He grew several times heavier, making himself into a doorstop, holding the massive metal doors to the Trustwarren closed. It was a delaying tactic. He stood, holding the doors shut, his metalminds depleting at an alarming rate. They were the same rings he'd worn at the siege of Luthadel, the ones that had been embedded within him. He'd replenished them following the siege, before he'd given up Feruchemy. They would not last long. What would he do when the kandra burst through the door? He searched desperately for a way to bar or block the portal, but could see nothing. And, if he let go for even a moment, the kandra inside would burst free. "Please," he whispered, hoping that—like before—the thing that listened would give him a miracle. "I'm going to need help. . . ." "I swear it was him, my lord," said the soldier, a man named Rittle. "I've believed in the Church of the Survivor since the day of Kelsier's own death, my lord. He preached to me, converted me to the rebellion. I was there when he visited the caves and had Lord Demoux fight for his honor. I'd know Kelsier like I'd know my father. It was the Survivor." Elend turned to the other soldier, who nodded in agreement. "I didn't know him, my lord," said this man. "However, he matched the descriptions. I think it was really him, I do." Elend turned to Demoux, who nodded. "They described Lord Kelsier very accurately, my lord. He is watching over us." Elend. . . . A messenger arrived and whispered something to Demoux. The night was dark, and in the torchlight, Elend turned to study the two soldiers who had seen Kelsier. They didn't look like highly reliable witnesses—Elend hadn't exactly left his best soldiers behind when he'd gone campaigning. Still, others had apparently seen the Survivor too. Elend would want to speak with them. He shook his head. And, where in the world was Vin? Elend. . . . "My lord," Demoux said, touching his arm, looking concerned. Elend dismissed the two soldier witnesses. Accurate or not, he owed them a great debt—they had saved many lives with their preparation. "Scout's report, my lord," Demoux said, face illuminated by a pole-top torch flickering in the night breeze. "Those koloss you saw, they are heading this way. Moving quickly. Scouts saw them approaching in the distance from a hilltop. They . . |
. could be here before the night is over." Elend cursed quietly. Elend. . . . He frowned. Why did he keep hearing his name on the wind? He turned, looking into the darkness. Something was pulling him, guiding him, whispering to him. He tried to ignore it, turning back to Demoux. And yet, it was there, in his heart. Come. . . . It seemed like Vin's voice. "Gather an honor guard," Elend said, grabbing the torch by its shaft, then throwing on an ashcloak and buttoning it down to his knees. Then, he turned toward the darkness. "My lord?" Demoux said. "Just do it!" Elend said, striding off into the darkness. Demoux called for some soldiers, following in a hurry. What am I doing? Elend thought, pushing his way through the waist-deep ash, using the cloak to keep his uniform somewhat clean. Chasing at dreams? Maybe I'm going mad. He could see something in his mind. A hillside with a hole in it. A memory, perhaps? Had he come this way before? Demoux and his soldiers followed quietly, looking apprehensive. Elend pushed onward. He was almost— He stopped. There it was, the hillside. It would have been indistinguishable from the others around it, except there were tracks leading up to it. Elend frowned, pushing forward through the deep ash, moving to the point where the tracks ended. There, he found a hole in the ground, leading down. A cave, he thought. Perhaps . . . a place for my people to hide? It wouldn't be big enough for that, likely. Still, the caves Kelsier had used for his rebellion had been large enough to hold some ten thousand men. Curious, Elend poked down into the cave, walking down its steep incline, throwing off the cloak. Demoux and his men followed with curiosity. The tunnel went down for a bit, and Elend was surprised to find that there was light coming from ahead. Immediately, he flared pewter, growing tense. He tossed aside his torch, then burned tin, enhancing his vision. He could see several poles that glowed blue at the top. They appeared to be made of rock. What in the world . . .? He moved forward quickly, motioning for Demoux and his men to follow. The tunnel led to a vast cavern. Elend stopped. It was as large as one of the storage caverns. Larger, perhaps. Down below, something moved. Mistwraiths? he realized with surprise. Is this where they hide? In holes in the ground? He dropped a coin, shooting himself through the poorly lit cavern to land on the stone floor a distance away from Demoux and the others. The mistwraiths weren't as large as others he had seen. And . . . why were they using rocks and wood in place of bones? He heard a sound. Only tin-enhanced ears let him catch it, but it sounded distinctly unlike a sound a mistwraith would make. Stone against metal. He waved sharply to Demoux, then moved carefully down a side corridor. At its end, he stopped in surprise. |
A familiar figure stood against a pair of large metal doors, grunting, apparently trying to hold them closed. "Sazed?" Elend asked, standing up straighter. Sazed looked up, saw Elend, and was apparently so surprised that he lost control of the doors. They burst open, throwing the Terrisman aside, revealing a group of angry, translucent-skinned kandra. "Your Majesty!" Sazed said. "Do not let them escape!" Demoux and his soldiers clanked up behind Elend. That's either Sazed, or a kandra who ate his bones, Elend thought. He made a snap decision. He'd trusted the voice in his ear. He'd trust that this was Sazed. The group of kandra tried to get past Demoux's soldiers. However, the kandra weren't particularly good warriors, and their weapons were made of metal. It took Elend and Demoux all of about two minutes to subdue the group, breaking their bones to keep them from healing and escaping. Afterward, Elend walked over to Sazed, who had stood up and dusted himself off. "How did you find me, Your Majesty?" "I honestly don't know," Elend said. "Sazed, what is this place?" "The Homeland of the kandra people, Your Majesty," Sazed said. "And the hiding place of the Lord Ruler's atium hoard." Elend raised an eyebrow, following Sazed's pointed finger. There was a room beyond the doors, and a pit in the floor. Great, Elend thought. Now we find it. "You don't look too excited, Your Majesty," Sazed noted. "Kings, armies, Mistborn—even Kelsier himself—have been searching for this cache for years." "It's worthless," Elend said. "My people are starving, and they can't eat metal. This cavern, however . . . it might prove useful. What do you think, Demoux?" "If there are any other chambers like that first one, my lord, it could hold a substantial percentage of our people." "There are four large caverns," Sazed said. "And four entrances that I know of." Elend turned to Demoux. He was already giving orders to his soldiers. We have to get the people down here before the sun rises, Elend thought, remembering the heat. At the very least, before those koloss arrive. After that . . . well, they would have to see. For now, Elend had only one goal. Survival. Snapping has always been the dark side of Allomancy. A person's genetic endowment may make them a potential Allomancer, but in order for the power to manifest, the body must be put through extraordinary trauma. Though Elend spoke of how terrible his beating was, during our day, unlocking Allomancy in a person was easier than it had once been, for we had the infusion of Preservation's power into the human bloodlines via the nuggets granted to nobility by the Lord Ruler. When Preservation set up the mists, he was afraid of Ruin escaping his prison. In those early days, before the Ascension, the mists began to Snap people as they did during our time—but this action of the mists was one of the only ways to awaken Allomancy in a person, for the genetic attributes were buried too deeply to be brought |
out by a simple beating. The mists of that day created Mistings only, of course—there were no Mistborn until the Lord Ruler made use of the nuggets. The people misinterpreted the mists' intent, as the process of Snapping Allomancers caused some—particularly the young and the old—to die. This hadn't been Preservation's desire, but he'd given up most of his consciousness to form Ruin's prison, and the mists had to be left to work as best they could without specific direction. Ruin, subtle as ever, knew that he couldn't stop the mists from doing their work. However, he could do the unexpected and encourage them. And so, he helped make them stronger. That brought death to the plants of the world, and created the threat that became known as the Deepness. VIN TURNED TOWARD RUIN, projecting a smile. The cloud of twisting black mist seemed agitated. So, you can influence a single minion, Ruin snapped, turning upon itself, rising in the air. Vin followed, streaking up to loom over the entire Central Dominance. Below, she could see Demoux's soldiers rushing to the camp, waking the people, organizing them to flight. Already, some of them were making their way along the tracks in the ash toward the safety of the caverns. She could feel the sun, and knew that the planet was far too near it to be safe. Yet, she could do nothing more. Not only would Ruin have stopped her, but she didn't understand her power yet. She felt as the Lord Ruler must have—almighty, yet clumsy. If she tried to move the world, she would only make things worse. But, she had accomplished something. Ruin had his koloss pounding toward them at breakneck speed, but they still wouldn't arrive at the Pits for several hours. Plenty of time to get the people to the caverns. Ruin must have noticed what she was studying, or perhaps he sensed her smugness. You think you've won? he asked, sounding amused. Why, because you managed to stop a few kandra? They were always the weakest of the minions the Lord Ruler created for me. I have made a habit of ignoring them. Either way, Vin, you cannot really think that you have beaten me. Vin waited, watching as the people fled to the relative safety of the caverns. Even as the bulk of them arrived—soldiers separating them into groups, sending them to the different entrances—her good humor began to fade. She had managed to get through to Elend, and while it had seemed like a great victory at the moment, she could now see that it was little more than another stalling tactic. Have you counted the koloss in my army, Vin? Ruin asked. I've made them from your people, you know. I've gathered hundreds of thousands. Vin focused, enumerating instantly. He was telling the truth. This is the force I could have thrown at you at any time, Ruin said. Most of them kept to the Outer Dominances, but I've been bringing them in, marching them toward Luthadel. How many times must I tell |
you, Vin? You can't win. You could never win. I've just been playing with you. Vin pulled back, ignoring his lies. He hadn't been playing with them—he'd been trying to discover the secrets that Preservation had left, the secret that the Lord Ruler had kept. Still, the numbers Ruin had finally managed to marshal were awe-inspiring. There were far more koloss than there were people climbing into the caverns. With a force like that, Ruin could assault even a well-fortified position. And, by Vin's count, Elend had fewer than a thousand men with any battle training. On top of that, there was the sun and its destructive heat, the death of the world's crops, the tainting of water and land with several feet of ash . . . Even the lava flows, which she had stopped, were beginning again, her plugging of the ashmounts having provided only a temporary solution. A bad one, even. Now that the mountains couldn't erupt, great cracks were appearing in the land, and the magma, the earth's burning blood, was boiling out that way. We're just so far behind! Vin thought. Ruin had centuries to plan this. Even when we thought we were being clever, we fell for his plots. What good is it to sequester my people beneath the ground if they're just going to starve? She turned toward Ruin, who sat billowing and shifting upon himself, watching his koloss army. She felt a hatred that seemed incompatible with the power she held. The hatred made her sick, but she didn't let go of it. This thing before her . . . it would destroy everything she knew, everything she loved. It couldn't understand love. It built only so that it could destroy. At that moment, she reversed her earlier decision. She'd never again call Ruin a "him." Humanizing the creature gave it too much respect. Seething, watching, she didn't know what else to do. So, she attacked. She wasn't even certain how she did it. She threw herself at Ruin, forcing her power up against its power. There was friction between them, a clash of energy, and it tormented her divine body. Ruin cried out, and—mixing with Ruin—she knew its mind. Ruin was surprised. It didn't expect Preservation to be able to attack. Vin's move smacked too much of destruction. Ruin didn't know how to respond, but it threw its power back against her in a protective reflex. Their selves crashed, threatening to dissolve. Finally, Vin pulled back, lacerated, rebuffed. Their power was too well matched. Opposite, yet similar. Like Allomancy. Opposition, Ruin whispered. Balance. You'll learn to hate it, I suspect, though Preservation never could. "So, this is the body of a god?" Elend asked, rolling the bead of atium around in his palm. He held it up next to the one that Yomen had given him. "Indeed, Your Majesty," Sazed said. The Terrisman looked eager. Didn't he understand how dangerous their situation was? Demoux's scouts—the ones that had returned—reported that the koloss were only minutes away. Elend had ordered his troops posted at |
the doorways to the Homeland, but his hope—that the koloss wouldn't know where to find his people—was a slim one, considering what Sazed had told him about Ruin. "Ruin can't help but come for it," Sazed explained. They stood in the metal-lined cavern called the Trustwarren, the place where the kandra had spent the last thousand years gathering and guarding the atium. "This atium is part of him. It's what he's been searching for all this time." "Which means we'll have a couple hundred thousand koloss trying to climb down our throats, Sazed," Elend said, handing back the bead of atium. "I say we give it to him." Sazed paled. "Give it to him? Your Majesty, my apologies, but that would mean the end of the world. Instantly. I am certain of it." Great, Elend thought. "It will be all right, Elend," Sazed said. Elend frowned up at the Terrisman, who stood peacefully in his robes. "Vin will come," Sazed explained. "She is the Hero of Ages—she will arrive to save this people. Don't you see how perfect this all is? It's arranged, planned. That you would come here, find me, at this exact moment . . . That you'd be able to lead the people to safety in these caverns . . . Well, it all fits together. She'll come." Interesting time for him to get his faith back, Elend thought. He rolled Yomen's bead between his fingers, thinking. Outside the room, he could hear whispers. People—Terris stewards, skaa leaders, even a few soldiers—stood listening. Elend could hear the anxiety in their voices. They had heard of the approaching army. As Elend watched, Demoux carefully pushed his way through them and entered the room. "Soldiers posted, my lord," the general said. "How many do we have?" Elend asked. Demoux looked grim. "The two hundred and eighty I brought with me," he said. "Plus about five hundred from the city. Another hundred ordinary citizens that we armed with those kandra hammers, or spare weapons from our soldiers. And, we have four different entrances to this cavern complex we need to guard." Elend closed his eyes. "She'll come," Sazed said. "My lord," Demoux said, pulling Elend aside. "This is bad." "I know," Elend said, exhaling softly. "Did you give the men metals?" "What we could find," Demoux said quietly. "The people didn't think to bring powdered metal with them when they fled Luthadel. We've found a couple of noblemen who were Allomancers, but they were only Copperclouds or Seekers." Elend nodded. He'd bribed or pressed the useful nobleman Allomancers into his army already. "We gave those metals to my soldiers," Demoux said. "But none of them could burn them. Even if we had Allomancers, we cannot hold this location, my lord! Not with so few soldiers, not against that many koloss. We'll delay them at first, because of the narrow entrances. But . . . well . . ." "I realize that, Demoux," Elend said with frustration. "But do you have any other options?" Demoux was silent. "I was hoping you'd have some, |
my lord." "None here," Elend said. Demoux grew grim. "Then we die." "What about faith, Demoux?" Elend asked. "I believe in the Survivor, my lord. But . . . well, this looks pretty bad. I've felt like a man waiting his turn before the headsman ever since we spotted those koloss. Maybe the Survivor doesn't want us to succeed here. Sometimes, people just have to die." Elend turned away, frustrated, clenching and unclenching his fist around the bead of atium. It was the same problem, the same trouble he always had. He'd failed back during the siege of Luthadel—it had taken Vin to protect the city. He'd failed in Fadrex City—only the koloss getting distracted had rescued him there. A ruler's most basic duty was to protect his people. In this one area, Elend continually felt impotent. Useless. Why can't I do it? Elend thought with frustration. I spend a year searching out storage caverns to provide food, only to end up trapped with my people starving. I search all that time looking for the atium—hoping to use it to buy safety for my people—and then I find it too late to spend it on anything. Too late. . . . He paused, glancing back toward the metal plate in the floor. Years searching for . . . atium. None of the metals Demoux had given his soldiers had worked. Elend had been working under the assumption that Demoux's group would be like the other mistfallen back in Urteau—that they'd be composed of all kinds of Mistings. Yet, there had been something different about Demoux's group. They had fallen sick for far longer than the others. Elend pushed forward, rushing past Sazed, grabbing a handful of beads. A vast wealth, unlike anything any man had ever possessed. Valuable for its rarity. Valuable for its economic power. Valuable for its Allomancy. "Demoux," he snapped, rising and tossing the bead to him. "Eat this." Demoux frowned. "My lord?" "Eat it," Elend said. Demoux did as asked. He stood for a moment. Two hundred and eighty men, Elend thought. Sent away from my army because of all the ones who fell sick, they were the most sick. Sixteen days. Two hundred and eighty men. One-sixteenth of those who fell sick. One out of sixteen Allomantic metals. Yomen had proven that there was such a thing as an atium Misting. If Elend hadn't been so distracted, he would have made the connection earlier. If one out of sixteen who fell sick remained that way the longest, would that not imply that they'd gained the most powerful of the sixteen abilities? Demoux looked up, eyes widening. And Elend smiled. Vin hovered outside the cavern, watching with dread as the koloss approached. They were already in a blood frenzy—Ruin had that much control over them. There were thousands upon thousands of them. The slaughter was about to begin. Vin cried out as they drew closer, throwing herself against Ruin again, trying to drive her power to destroy the thing. As before, she was rebuffed. She felt herself screaming, |
trembling as she thought about the impending deaths below. It would be like the tsunami deaths on the coast, only worse. For these were people she knew. People she loved. She turned back toward the entrance. She didn't want to watch, but she wouldn't be able to do anything else. Her self was everywhere. Even if she pulled her nexus away, she knew that she'd still feel the deaths—that they would make her tremble and weep. From within the cavern, echoing, she sensed a familiar voice. "Today, men, I ask of you your lives." Vin hovered down, listening, though she couldn't see into the cavern because of the metals in the rock. She could hear, however. If she'd had eyes, she would have been crying, she knew. "I ask of you your lives," Elend said, voice echoing, "and your courage. I ask of you your faith, and your honor—your strength, and your compassion. For today, I lead you to die. I will not ask you to welcome this event. I will not insult you by calling it well, or just, or even glorious. But I will say this. "Each moment you fight is a gift to those in this cavern. Each second we fight is a second longer that thousands of people can draw breath. Each stroke of the sword, each koloss felled, each breath earned is a victory! It is a person protected for a moment longer, a life extended, an enemy frustrated!" There was a brief pause. "In the end, they will kill us," Elend said, voice loud, ringing in the cavern. "But first, they shall fear us!" The men yelled at this, and Vin's enhanced mind could pick out around two hundred and fifty distinct voices. She heard them split, rushing toward the different cavern entrances. A moment later, someone appeared from the front entrance near her. A figure in white slowly stepped out into the ash, brilliant white cape fluttering. He held a sword in one hand. Elend! she tried to cry at him. No! Go back! Charging them is madness! You'll be killed! Elend stood tall, watching the waves of koloss as they approached, trampling down the black ash, an endless sea of death with blue skin and red eyes. Many carried swords, the others just bore rocks and lengths of wood. Elend was a tiny white speck before them, a single dot on an endless canvas of blue. He raised his sword high and charged. ELEND! Suddenly, Elend burst with a brilliant energy, so bright that Vin gasped. He met the first koloss head-on, ducking beneath the swinging sword and decapitating the creature in one stroke. Then, instead of jumping away, he spun to the side, swinging. Another koloss fell. Three swords flashed around him, but all missed by just a breath. Elend ducked to the side, taking a koloss in the stomach, then whipped his sword around—his head barely passing beneath another swing—and took off a koloss arm. He still didn't Push himself away. Vin froze, watching as he took down one koloss, then beheaded |
another in a single, fluid stroke. Elend moved with a grace she had never seen from him—she had always been the better warrior, yet at this moment, he put her to shame. He wove between koloss blades as if he were taking part in a prerehearsed stage fight, body after body falling before his gliding blade. A group of soldiers in Elend's colors burst from the cavern entrance, charging. Like a wave of light, their forms exploded with power. They, too, moved into the koloss ranks, striking with incredible precision. Not a single one of them fell as Vin watched. They fought with miraculous skill and fortune, each koloss blade falling just a little too late. Blue corpses began to pile up around the glowing force of men. Somehow, Elend had found an entire army who could burn atium. Elend was a god. He'd never burned atium before, and his first experience with the metal filled him with wonder. The koloss around him all emitted atium shadows—images that moved before they did, showing Elend exactly what they would do. He could see into the future, if only a few seconds. In a battle, that was just what one needed. He could feel the atium enhancing his mind, making him capable of reading and using all of the new information. He didn't even have to pause and think. His arms moved of their own volition, swinging his sword with awesome precision. He spun amid a cloud of phantom images, striking at flesh, feeling almost as if he were in the mists again. No koloss could stand against him. He felt energized—he felt amazing. For a time, he was invincible. He'd swallowed so many atium beads he felt as if he'd throw up. For its entire history, atium had been a thing that men had needed to save and hoard. Burning it had seemed such a shame that it had been used only sparingly, only in instances of great need. Elend didn't need to worry about any of that. He just burned as much as he wanted. And it made him into a disaster for the koloss—a whirlwind of exact strikes and impossible dodges, always a few steps ahead of his opponents. Foe after foe fell before him. And, when he began to get low on atium, he Pushed himself off a fallen sword back to the entrance. There, with plenty of water to wash it down, Sazed waited with another bag of atium. Elend downed the beads quickly, then returned to the battle. Ruin raged and spun, trying to stop the slaughter. Yet, this time, Vin was the force of balance. She blocked Ruin's every attempt to destroy Elend and the others, keeping it contained. I can't decide if you're a fool, Vin thought toward it, or if you simply exist in a way that makes you incapable of considering some things. Ruin screamed, buffeting against her, trying to destroy her as she had tried to destroy it. However, once again, their powers were too evenly matched. Ruin was forced to pull back. |
Life, Vin said. You said that the only reason to create something was so that you could destroy it. She hovered beside Elend, watching him fight. The deaths of the koloss should have pained her. Yet, she did not think of the death. Perhaps it was the influence of Preservation's power, but she saw only a man, struggling, fighting, even when hope seemed impossible. She didn't see death, she saw life. She saw faith. We create things to watch them grow, Ruin, she said. To take pleasure in seeing that which we love become more than it was before. You said that you were invincible—that all things break apart. All things are Ruined. But there are things that fight against you—and the ironic part is, you can't even understand those things. Love. Life. Growth. The life of a person is more than the chaos of its passing. Emotion, Ruin. This is your defeat. Sazed watched anxiously from the mouth of the cavern. A small group of men huddled around him. Garv, leader of the Church of the Survivor in Luthadel. Harathdal, foremost of the Terris stewards. Lord Dedri Vasting, one of the surviving Assembly members from the city government. Aslydin, the young woman whom Demoux had apparently come to love during his few short weeks at the Pits of Hathsin. A smattering of others, important—or faithful—enough to get near the front of the crowd and watch. "Where is she, Master Terrisman?" Garv asked. "She'll come," Sazed promised, hand resting on the rock wall. The men fell quiet. Soldiers—those without the blessing of atium—waited nervously with them, knowing they were next in line, should Elend's assault fail. She has to come, Sazed thought. Everything points toward her arrival. "The Hero will come," he repeated. Elend sheared through two heads at once, dropping the koloss. He spun his blade, taking off an arm, then stabbed another koloss through the neck. He hadn't seen that one approaching, but his mind had seen and interpreted the atium shadow before the real attack came. Already he stood atop of carpet of blue corpses. He did not stumble. With atium, his every step was exact, his blade guided, his mind crisp. He took down a particularly large koloss, then stepped back, pausing briefly. The sun crested the horizon in the east. It started to grow hotter. They had been fighting for hours, yet the army of koloss still seemed endless. Elend slew another koloss, but his motions were beginning to feel sluggish. Atium enhanced the mind, but it did not boost the body, and he'd started to rely on his pewter to keep him going. Who would have known that one could get tired—exhausted, even—while burning atium? Nobody had ever used as much of the metal as Elend had. But he had to keep going. His atium was running low. He turned back toward the mouth of the cavern, just in time to see one of his atium soldiers go down in a spray of blood. Elend cursed, spinning as an atium shadow passed through him. He ducked |
the swing that followed, then took off the creature's arm. He beheaded the one that followed, then cut another's legs out from beneath it. For most of the battle, he hadn't used fancy Allomantic jumps or attacks, just straightforward swordplay. His arms were growing tired, however, and he was forced to begin Pushing koloss away from him to manage the battlefield. The reserve of atium—of life—within him was dwindling. Atium burned so quickly. Another man screamed. Another soldier dead. Elend began to back toward the cavern. There were just so many koloss. His band of two hundred and eighty had slain thousands, yet the koloss didn't care. They kept attacking, a brutal wave of endless determination, resisted only by the pockets of atium Mistings protecting each of the entrances to the Homeland. Another man died. They were running out of atium. Elend screamed, swinging his sword about him, taking down three koloss in a maneuver that never should have worked. He flared steel and Pushed the rest away from him. The body of a god, burning within me, he thought. He gritted his teeth, attacking as more of his men fell. He scrambled up a pile of koloss, slicing off arms, legs, heads. Stabbing chests, necks, guts. He fought on, alone, his clothing long since stained from white to red. Something moved behind him, and he spun, raising his blade, letting the atium lead him. Yet, he froze, uncertain. The creature behind him was no koloss. It stood in a black robe, one eye socket empty and bleeding, the other bearing a spike that had been crushed back into its skull. Elend could see straight into the empty eye socket, through the creature's head, and out the back. Marsh. He had a cloud of atium shadows around him—he was burning the metal too, and would be immune to Elend's own atium. Human led his koloss soldiers through the tunnels. They killed any person in their path. Some had stood at the entrance. They had fought long. They had been strong. They were dead now. Something drove Human on. Something stronger than anything that had controlled him before. Stronger than the little woman with the black hair, though she had been very strong. This thing was stronger. It was Ruin. Human knew this. He could not resist. He could only kill. He cut down another human. Human burst into a large open chamber filled with other little people. Controlling him, Ruin made him turn away and not kill them. Not that Ruin didn't want him to kill them. It just wanted something else more. Human rushed forward. He crawled over tumbled rocks and stones. He shoved aside crying humans. Other koloss followed him. For the moment, all of his own desires were forgotten. There was only his overpowering desire to get to . . . A small room. There. In front of him. Human threw open the doors. Ruin yelled in pleasure as he entered this room. It contained the thing Ruin wanted. "Guess what I found," Marsh growled, stepping up, Pushing against |
Elend's sword. The weapon was ripped from his fingers, flying away. "Atium. A kandra was carrying it, looking to sell it. Foolish creature." Elend cursed, ducking out of the way of a koloss swing, pulling his obsidian dagger from the sheath at his leg. Marsh stalked forward. Men screamed—cursing, falling—as their atium died out. Elend's soldiers were being overrun. The screams tapered off as the last of his men guarding this entrance died. He doubted the others would last much longer. Elend's atium warned him of attacking koloss, letting him dodge—barely—but he couldn't kill them very effectively with the dagger. And, as the koloss took his attention, Marsh struck with an obsidian axe. The blade fell, and Elend leaped away, but the dodge left him off balance. Elend tried to recover, but his metals were running low—not just his atium, but his basic metals. Iron, steel, pewter. He hadn't been paying much attention to them, since he had atium, but he'd been fighting for so long now. If Marsh had atium, then they were equal—and without basic metals, Elend would die. An attack from the Inquisitor forced Elend to flare pewter to get away. He cut down three koloss with ease, his atium still helping him, but Marsh's immunity was a serious challenge. The Inquisitor crawled over the fallen bodies of koloss, scrambling toward Elend, his single spikehead reflecting the too-bright light of the sun overhead. Elend's pewter ran out. "You cannot beat me, Elend Venture," Marsh said in a voice like gravel. "We've killed your wife. I will kill you." Vin. Elend didn't believe it. Vin will come, he thought. She'll save us. Faith. It was a strange thing to feel at that moment. Marsh swung. Pewter and iron suddenly flared to life within Elend. He didn't have time to think about the oddity; he simply reacted, Pulling on his sword, which lay stuck into the ground a distance away. It flipped through the air and he caught it, swinging with a too-quick motion, blocking Marsh's axe. Elend's body seemed to pulse, powerful and vast. He struck forward instinctively, forcing Marsh backward across the ashen field. Koloss backed away for the moment, shying from Elend, as if frightened. Or awed. Marsh raised a hand to Push on Elend's sword, but nothing happened. It was . . . as if something deflected the blow. Elend screamed, charging, beating back Marsh with the strikes of his silvery weapon. The Inquisitor looked shocked as it blocked with the obsidian axe, its motions too quick for even Allomancy to explain. Yet Elend still forced him to retreat, across fallen corpses of blue, ash stirring beneath a red sky. A powerful peace swelled in Elend. His Allomancy flared bright, though he knew the metals inside of him should have burned away. Only atium remained, and its strange power did not—could not—give him the other metals. But it didn't matter. For a moment, he was embraced by something greater. He looked up, toward the sun. And he saw—just briefly—an enormous figure in the air just above him. |
A shifting, brilliant personage of pure white. Her hands held to his shoulders with her head thrown back, white hair streaming, mist flaring behind her like wings that stretched across the sky. Vin, he thought with a smile. Elend looked back down as Marsh screamed and leaped forward, attacking with his axe in one hand, seeming to trail something vast and black like a cloak behind him. Marsh raised his other hand across his face, as if to shield his dead eyes from the image in the air above Elend. Elend burned the last of his atium, flaring it to life in his stomach. He raised his sword in two hands and waited for Marsh to draw close. The Inquisitor was stronger and was a better warrior. Marsh had the powers of both Allomancy and Feruchemy, making him another Lord Ruler. This was not a battle Elend could win. Not with a sword. Marsh arrived, and Elend thought he understood what it had been like for Kelsier to face the Lord Ruler on that square in Luthadel, all those years ago. Marsh struck with his axe; Elend raised his sword in return and prepared to strike. Then, Elend burned duralumin with his atium. Sight, Sound, Strength, Power, Glory, Speed! Blue lines sprayed from his chest like rays of light. But those were all overshadowed by one thing. Atium plus duralumin. In a flash of knowledge, Elend felt a mind-numbing wealth of information. All became white around him as knowledge saturated his mind. "I see now," he whispered as the vision faded, and along with it his remaining metals. The battlefield returned. He stood upon it, his sword piercing Marsh's neck. It had gotten caught on the spikehead jutting out of Marsh's back, between the shoulder blades. Marsh's axe was buried in Elend's chest. The phantom metals Vin had given him burned to life within Elend again. They took the pain away. However, there was only so much that pewter could do, no matter how high it was flared. Marsh ripped his axe free, and Elend stumbled backward, bleeding, letting go of his sword. Marsh pulled the blade free from his neck, and the wound vanished, healed by the powers of Feruchemy. Elend fell, slumping into a pile of koloss bodies. He would have been dead already, save for the pewter. Marsh stepped up to him, smiling. His empty eye socket was wreathed in tattoos, the mark that Marsh had taken upon himself. The price he had paid to overthrow the Final Empire. Marsh grabbed Elend by the throat, pulling him back up. "Your soldiers are dead, Elend Venture," the creature whispered. "Our koloss rampage inside the kandra caverns. Your metals are gone. You have lost." Elend felt his life dripping away, the last trickle from an empty glass. He'd been here before, back in the cavern at the Well of Ascension. He should have died then and he'd been terrified. This time, oddly, he was not. There was no regret. Just satisfaction. Elend looked up at the Inquisitor. Vin, like a glowing |
phantom, still hovered above them both. "Lost?" Elend whispered. "We've won, Marsh." "Oh, and how is that?" Marsh asked, dismissive. Human stood at the side of the pit in the center of the cavern room. The pit where Ruin's body had been. The place of victory. Human stood, dumbfounded, a group of other koloss stepping up to him, looking equally confused. The pit was empty. "Atium," Elend whispered, tasting blood. "Where is the atium, Marsh? Where do you think we got the power to fight? You came for that atium? Well it's gone. Tell your master that! You think my men and I expected to kill all of these koloss? There are tens of thousands of them! That wasn't the point at all." Elend's smile widened. "Ruin's body is gone, Marsh. We burned it all away, the others and I. You might be able to kill me, but you'll never get what you came for. And that is why we win." Marsh screamed in anger, demanding the truth, but Elend had spoken it. The deaths of the others meant that they had run out of atium. His men had fought until it was gone, as Elend had commanded, burning away every last bit. The body of a god. The power of a god. Elend had held it for a moment. More important, he'd destroyed it. Hopefully, that would keep his people safe. It's up to you now, Vin, he thought, still feeling the peace of her touch upon his soul. I've done what I can. He smiled at Marsh again, defiantly, as the Inquisitor raised his axe. The axe took off Elend's head. Ruin raged and thrashed about, enraged and destructive. Vin only sat quietly, watching Elend's headless body slump back into the pile of blue corpses. How do you like that! Ruin screamed. I killed him! I Ruined everything you love! I took it from you! Vin floated above Elend's body, looking down. She reached out with incorporeal fingers, touching his head, remembering how it had felt to use her power to fuel his Allomancy. She didn't know what she had done. Something akin to what Ruin did when it controlled the koloss, perhaps. Only opposite. Liberating. Serene. Elend was dead. She knew that, and knew that there was nothing she could do. That brought pain, true, but not the pain she had expected. I let him go long ago, she thought, stroking his face. At the Well of Ascension. Allomancy brought him back to me for a time. She didn't feel the pain or terror that she had known before, when she'd thought him dead. This time, she felt only peace. These last few years had been a blessing—an extension. She'd given Elend up to be his own man, to risk himself as he wished, and perhaps to die. She would always love him. But she would not cease to function because he was gone. The opposite, perhaps. Ruin floated directly above her, throwing down insults, telling her how it would kill the others. Sazed. Breeze. Ham. Spook. So few |
left of the original crew, she thought. Kelsier dead so long ago. Dockson and Clubs slaughtered at the Battle of Luthadel. Yeden dead with his soldiers. OreSeur taken at Zane's command. Marsh, fallen to become an Inquisitor. And the others who joined us, now gone as well. Tindwyl, TenSoon, Elend . . . Did Ruin think she would let their sacrifices be for nothing? She rose, gathering her power. She forced it against the power of Ruin, as she had the other times. Yet, this time was different. When Ruin pushed back, she didn't retreat. She didn't preserve herself. She drove onward. The confrontation made her divine body tremble in pain. It was the pain of a cold and hot meeting, the pain of two rocks being smashed together and ground to dust. Their forms undulated and rippled in a tempest of power. And Vin drove on. Preservation could never destroy you! she thought, almost screaming it against the agony. He could only protect. That's why he needed to create humankind. All along, Ruin, this was part of his plan! He didn't give up part of himself, making himself weaker, simply so that he could create intelligent life! He knew he needed something of both Preservation and of Ruin. Something that could both protect and destroy. Something that could destroy to protect. He gave up his power at the Well, and into the mists, giving it to us so that we could take it. He always intended this to happen. You think this was your plan? It was his. His all along. Ruin cried out. Still, she drove on. You created the thing that can kill you, Ruin, Vin said. And you just made one huge final mistake. You shouldn't have killed Elend. You see, he was the only reason I had left to live. She didn't shy back, though the conflict of opposites ripped her apart. Ruin screamed in terror as the force of her power completely melded with Ruin's. Her consciousness—now formed and saturated with Preservation—moved to touch that of Ruin. Neither would yield. And, with a surge of power, Vin bid farewell to the world, then pulled Ruin into the abyss with her. Their two minds puffed away, like mist under a hot sun. Once Vin died, the end came quickly. We were not prepared for it—but even all of the Lord Ruler's planning could not have prepared us for this. How did one prepare for the end of the world itself? SAZED WATCHED QUIETLY from the mouth of the cavern. Outside, the koloss raged and stomped about, looking confused. Most of the men who had been watching with Sazed had fled. Even most of the soldiers had retreated into the caverns, calling him a fool for waiting. Only General Demoux, who had managed to crawl back to the cavern after his atium ran out, remained, just a few steps into the tunnel. The man was bloody, his arm ending in a tourniquet, his leg crushed. He coughed quietly, waiting for Aslydin to return with more bandages. Outside, the |
sun rose into the sky. The heat was incredible, like an oven. Cries of pain echoed from deep within the cavern behind Sazed. Koloss were inside. "She'll come," Sazed whispered. He could see Elend's body. It had fallen back down the pile of koloss corpses. It was stark, bright white and red against the black and blue of the koloss and ash. "Vin will come," Sazed said insistently. Demoux looked dazed. Too much blood lost. He slumped back, closing his eyes. Koloss began to move toward the cavern mouth, though they didn't have the direction or frenzy they'd displayed before. "The Hero will come!" Sazed said. Outside, something appeared, as if from mists, then slumped down in the bodies beside Elend's corpse. It was followed immediately by something else, a second figure, which also fell motionless. There! Sazed thought, scrambling out of the cavern. He dashed past several koloss. They tried to swing for him, but Sazed wore his metalminds. He felt he should have his copperminds to use in case he needed to record something important. He wore his ten rings, the ones he'd used to fight during the siege of Luthadel, for he knew that he might need them. He tapped a bit of steel and dodged the koloss attacks. He moved quickly through the mass of confused-looking koloss, climbing over bodies, moving up to the scrap of white cloak that marked Elend's resting place. His corpse was there, headless. A small body lay beside his. Sazed fell to his knees, grabbing Vin by the shoulders. Beside her, atop the pile of dead koloss, lay another body. It was that of a man with red hair, one whom Sazed did not recognize, but he ignored it. For Vin was not moving. No! he thought, checking for a pulse. There was none. Her eyes were closed. She looked peaceful, but very, very dead. "This can not be!" he yelled, shaking her body again. Several koloss lumbered toward him. He glanced upward. The sun was rising. It was getting hard to breathe for the heat. He felt his skin burning. By the time the sun reached its zenith, it would likely be so hot the land would burn. "Is this how it ends?" he screamed toward the sky. "Your Hero is dead! Ruin's power may be broken, the koloss may be lost to him as an army, but the world will still die!" The ash had killed the plants. The sun would burn away anything that remained. There was no food. Sazed blinked out tears, but they dried on his face. "This is how you leave us?" he whispered. And then, he felt something. He looked down. Vin's body was smoking slightly. Not from the heat. It seemed to be leaking something . . . or, no. It was connected to something. The twists of mist he saw, they led to a vast white light. He could just barely see it. He reached out and touched the mist, and felt an awesome power. A power of stability. To the side, the other |
corpse—the one he didn't recognize—was also leaking something. A deep black smoke. Sazed reached out with his other hand, touching the smoke, and felt a different power—more violent. The power of change. He knelt, stunned, between the bodies. And, only then, did it start to make sense. The prophecies always used the gender-neutral, he thought. So that they could refer to either a man or a woman, we assumed. Or . . . perhaps because they referred to a Hero who wasn't really either one? He stood up. The sun's power overhead felt insignificant compared to the twin—yet opposite—powers that surrounded him. The Hero would be rejected of his people, Sazed thought. Yet, he would save them. Not a warrior, though he would fight. Not born a king, but would become one anyway. He looked upward again. Is this what you planned all along? He tasted of the power, but drew back, daunted. How could he use such a thing? He was just a man. In the brief glimpse of forces that he touched, he knew that he'd have no hope of using it. He didn't have the training. "I can't do this," he said through cracked lips, reaching to the sky. "I don't know how. I cannot make the world as it was—I never saw it. If I take this power, I will do as the Lord Ruler did, and will only make things worse for my trying. I am simply a man." Koloss cried out in pain from the burning. The heat was terrible, and around Sazed, trees began to pop and burst into flames. His touch on the twin powers kept him alive, he knew, but he did not embrace them. "I am no Hero," he whispered, still reaching to the sky. His arms twinkled, golden. His copperminds, worn on his forearms, reflected the light of the sun. They had been with him for so long, his companions. His knowledge. Knowledge. . . . The words of the prophecy were very precise, he thought suddenly. They say . . . they say that the Hero will bear the future of the world on his arms. Not on his shoulders. Not in his hands. On his arms. By the Forgotten Gods! He slammed his arms into the twin mists and seized the powers offered to him. He drew them in, feeling them infuse his body, making him burn. His flesh and bones evaporated, but as they did, he tapped his copperminds, dumping their entire contents into his expanding consciousness. The copperminds, now empty, dropped with his rings to the pile of blue corpses beside the bodies of Vin, Elend, and Ruin's nameless body. Sazed opened eyes as large as the world itself, drawing in power that latticed all of creation. The Hero will have the power to save the world. But he will also have the power to destroy it. We never understood. He wouldn't simply bear the power of Preservation. He needed the power of Ruin as well. The powers were opposites. As he drew them in, they threatened |
to annihilate each other. And yet, because he was of one mind on how to use them, he could keep them separate. They could touch without destroying each other, if he willed it. For these two powers had been used to create all things. If they fought, they destroyed. If they were used together, they created. Understanding swelled within him. Over a thousand years, the Keepers had collected the knowledge of mankind and stored it in their copperminds. They had passed it down from Keeper to Keeper, each man or woman carrying the entire bulk of knowledge, so that he or she could pass it on when necessary. Sazed had it all. And, in a moment of transcendence, he understood it all. He saw the patterns, the clues, the secrets. Men had believed and worshipped for as long as they had existed, and within those beliefs, Sazed found the answers he needed. Gems, hidden from Ruin in all the religions of mankind. There had been a people called the Bennett. They had considered mapmaking to be a solemn duty; Sazed had once preached their religion to Kelsier himself. From their detailed maps and charts, Sazed discovered how the world had once looked. He used his powers to restore the continents and oceans, the islands and coastlines, the mountains and rivers. There had been a people known as the Nelazan. They had worshipped the stars, had called them the Thousand Eyes of their god, Trell, watching them. Sazed remembered well offering the religion to the young Vin while she had sat, captive, undergoing her first haircut with the crew. From the Nelazan, the Keepers had recovered star charts, and had dutifully recorded them—even though scholars had called them useless, since they hadn't been accurate since the days before the Ascension. Yet, from these star charts, and from the patterns and movements of the other planets in the solar system they outlined, Sazed could determine exactly where the world was supposed to sit in orbit. He put the planet back into its old place—not pushing too hard, as the Lord Ruler once had, for he had a frame of reference by which to measure. There had been a people known as the Canzi who had worshipped death; they had provided detailed notes about the human body. Sazed had offered one of their prayers over the bodies they had found in Vin's old crew hideout, back when Kelsier had still lived. From the Canzi teachings about the body, Sazed determined that the physiology of mankind had changed—either by the Lord Ruler's intention or by simple evolution—to adapt to breathing ash and eating brown plants. In a wave of power, Sazed restored the bodies of men to the way they had been before, leaving each person the same, yet fixing the problems that living for a thousand years on a dying world had caused. He didn't destroy men, warping and twisting them as the Lord Ruler had when he'd created the kandra, for Sazed had a guide by which to work. He learned other things too. |
Dozens of secrets. One religion worshipped animals, and from it Sazed drew forth pictures, explanations, and references regarding the life that should have lived on the earth. He restored it. From another—Dadradah, the religion he had preached to Clubs before the man died—Sazed learned about colors and hues. It was the last religion Sazed had ever taught, and with its poems about color and nature, he could restore the plants, sky, and landscape to the way they had once been. Every religion had clues in it, for the faiths of men contained the hopes, loves, wishes, and lives of the people who had believed them. Finally, Sazed took the religion of the Larsta, the religion that Kelsier's wife—Mare—had believed in. Its priests had composed poetry during their times of meditation. From these poems—and from a scrap of paper that Mare had given to Kelsier, who had given it to Vin, who had given it to Sazed—he learned of the beautiful things that the world had once held. And he restored flowers to the plants that had once borne them. The religions in my portfolio weren't useless after all, he thought, the power flowing from him and remaking the world. None of them were. They weren't all true. But they all had truth. Sazed hovered over the world, changing things as he felt he must. He cradled the hiding places of mankind, keeping the caverns safe—even if he did move them about—as he reworked the world's tectonics. Finally, he exhaled softly, his work finished. And yet, the power did not evaporate from him, as he had expected it to. Rashek and Vin only touched small pieces of it at the Well of Ascension, he realized. I have something more. Something endless. Ruin and Preservation were dead, and their powers had been joined together. In fact, they belonged together. How had they been split? Someday, perhaps, he would discover the answer to that question. Somebody would need to watch over the world, care for it, now that its gods were gone. It wasn't until that moment that Sazed understood the term Hero of Ages. Not a Hero that came once in the ages. But a Hero who would span the ages. A Hero who would preserve mankind throughout all its lives and times. Neither Preservation nor Ruin, but both. God. Vin was special. Preservation chose her from a very young age, as I have mentioned. I believe that he was grooming her to take his power. Yet, the mind of Preservation was very weak at that point, reduced only to the fragment that we knew as the mist spirit. What made him choose this girl? Was it because she was a Mistborn? Was it because she had Snapped so early in life, coming to her powers even as she went through the pains of the unusually difficult labor her mother went through to bear her? Vin was unusually talented and strong with Allomancy, even from the beginning. I believe that she must have drawn some of the mist into her when she was still |
a child, in those brief times when she wasn't wearing the earring. Preservation had mostly gotten her to stop wearing it by the time Kelsier recruited her, though she put it back in for a moment before joining the crew. Then, she'd left it there at his suggestion. Nobody else could draw upon the mists. I have determined this. Why were they open to Vin and not others? I suspect that she couldn't have taken them all in until after she'd touched the power at the Well of Ascension. It was always meant, I believe, to be something of an attuning force. Something that, once touched, would adjust a person's body to be able to accept the mists. Yet, she did make use of a small crumb of Preservation's power when she defeated the Lord Ruler, a year before she even began hearing the thumping of the power's return to the Well. There is much more to this mystery. Perhaps I will tease it out eventually, as my mind grows more and more accustomed to its expanded nature. Perhaps I will determine why I was able to take the powers myself. For now, I only wish to make a simple acknowledgment of the woman who held the power just before me. Of all of us who touched it, I feel she was the most worthy. SPOOK AWOKE FROM THE NIGHTMARE, then sat up. The cavern around him was dark, lit only by candles and lamps. He stood, stretching. Around him, people gasped. He walked past them, seeking out his friends. The cavern was packed—holding everyone from Urteau who had been willing to come and hide. As such, it was difficult for Spook to pick his way through the shuffling, coughing, chatting bodies. As he walked, the whispers grew louder, and people stood, following. Beldre came running up to him, wearing a white dress. "Spook?" she asked with wonder. "What . . . what happened?" He just smiled, putting his arm around her. They made their way to the front of the cavern. Breeze sat at a table—of course, he would have furniture, while pretty much everyone else sat on the rock floor. Spook smiled at him, and the Soother raised an eyebrow. "You're looking well, my boy," Breeze said, taking a drink of his wine. "You could say that," Spook said. "That's all you're going to say?" Beldre said to Breeze. "Look at him! He's been healed!" Breeze shrugged, putting down his wine and standing. "My dear, with all the oddities that have been happening lately, young Spook's appearance doesn't measure up. A simple healing? Why, that's rather mundane, if you ask me." Breeze smiled, catching Spook's eye. "Shall we then?" Spook asked. Breeze shrugged. "Why not? What do you think that we'll find?" "I'm not sure," Spook admitted, stepping into the antechamber beyond the cavern. He started to climb the ladder. "Spook," Beldre said warily. "You know what the scouts said. The entire city was burning from the heat of the sun. . . ." Spook looked up, noting the light |
shining between the cracks of the trapdoor. He smiled, then pushed it open. There was no city outside. Just a field of grass. Green grass. Spook blinked at the strange sight, then crawled out onto the soft earth, making room for Breeze. The Soother's head popped out, then cocked to the side. "Now, there's a sight," he said, crawling out beside Spook. Spook stood up in the grass. It came up to his thighs. Green. Such a strange color for plants. "And . . . the sky," Breeze said, shading his eyes. "Blue. Not a hint of ash or smoke. Very odd. Very odd indeed. I'll bet Vin had something to do with this mess. That girl never could do things the proper way." Spook heard a gasp from behind, and turned to see Beldre climbing out of the cavern. He helped her step up onto the ground, then they walked in silent wonder through the tall grass. The sun was so bright overhead, yet it wasn't uncomfortably hot. "What happened to the city?" Beldre whispered, holding Spook's arm. He shook his head. Then, however, he heard something. He turned, thinking he saw motion on the horizon. He walked forward, Beldre at his side, Breeze calling down for Allrianne to come up and see what had happened. "Are those . . . people?" Beldre asked, finally seeing what Spook had. The people in the distance saw them, too, and as soon as they drew close, Spook smiled and waved at one. "Spook?" Ham called. "Kid, is that you?" Spook and Beldre hurried forward. Ham stood with others, and behind them Spook could see another trapdoor in the middle of the grassy meadow floor. People he didn't recognize—some wearing uniforms from Elend's army—were climbing out. Ham rushed over, wearing his usual vest and trousers, and grabbed Spook in an embrace. "What are you doing here?" Ham asked, letting go. "I don't know," Spook said. "Last I knew, I was in Urteau." Ham looked up at the sky. "I was in Fadrex! What happened?" Spook shook his head. "I don't know if the places we used to know have meaning anymore, Ham. . . ." Ham nodded, turning as one of the soldiers pointed. Another batch of people was emerging from a hole a short distance away. Spook and Ham walked forward—at least, until Ham saw someone in the other batch of people. Spook vaguely recognized her as Ham's wife, who had been back in Luthadel. The Thug let out a cry of excitement, then rushed forward to greet his family. Spook made his way from hole to hole. There appeared to be six of them, some well populated, others not so much. One stood out. It wasn't a trapdoor, like the others, but a slanted cave entrance. Here, he found General Demoux speaking with a small group of people, a pretty Terriswoman holding his arm. "I was in and out of consciousness for it," Demoux was saying, "but I saw him. The Survivor. It had to be him—hanging in the sky, glowing. Waves |
of color moved through the air, and the ground trembled, the land spinning and moving. He came. Just like Sazed said he would." "Sazed?" Spook spoke up, Demoux noticing him for the first time. "Where is he?" Demoux shook his head. "I don't know, Lord Spook." Then he paused. "Where did you come from, anyway?" Spook ignored the question. The openings and holes formed a pattern. Spook walked through the thick grass, leading Beldre, making his way to the very center of the pattern. The wind blew softly, bending the stalks of grass in wave-like undulations. Ham and Breeze rushed to catch up to him, already arguing about something trivial, Ham with a child on one arm, his other around his wife's shoulders. Spook froze as he caught sight of a bit of color in the grass. He held up a hand, warning the others, and they stepped forward more quietly. There, in the center of the grass, was a field of . . . somethings. Colorful somethings, growing from the ground, with tops like bright-colored leaves. They were shaped like upside-down bells, with long straight stalks, the petals at the top open toward the sun. As if reaching for its light and gaping to drink it in. "Beautiful . . ." Beldre whispered. Spook stepped forward, moving among the plants. Flowers, he thought, recognizing them from the picture Vin had carried. Kelsier's dream finally came true. At the center of the flowers, he found two people. Vin lay wearing her customary mistcloak, shirt, and trousers. Elend was in a brilliant white uniform, complete with cape. They were holding hands as they lay amid the flowers. And they were both dead. Spook knelt beside them, listening to Ham and Breeze cry out. They examined the bodies, checking for vital signs, but Spook focused on something else, almost hidden in the grass. He picked it up—a large leather tome. He opened it, reading the first page. I am, unfortunately, the Hero of Ages, read the delicate, careful letters. Spook thought he recognized the handwriting. As he flipped through the book, a slip of paper fell free. Spook picked it up—one side had a faded drawing of a flower, the very picture he'd been thinking about moments before. On the other side was a note scrawled in the same handwriting as the book. Spook, it read. I tried to bring them back, but apparently fixing the bodies doesn't return the souls. I will get better at this with time, I expect. However, be assured that I have spoken with our friends, and they are quite happy where they are. They deserve a rest, I think. The book contains a short record of the events that led up to the world dying and being reborn, along with some musings I have made about the history, philosophy, and science of recent occurrences. If you look to your right, you will find a much larger group of books in the grass. These contain all of the knowledge—repeated verbatim—that was contained in my metalminds. Let the knowledge of |
the past not be forgotten. Rebuilding will be difficult, I think—but likely far easier than living beneath the Lord Ruler or surviving Ruin's attempt to destroy the world. I think you'll be surprised at the number of people who fled to the storage caverns. Rashek planned very well for this day. He suffered much beneath Ruin's hand, but he was a good man, who ultimately had honorable intentions. You did well. Know that the message you sent via Captain Goradel saved us all, in the end. The people will need leadership in the years to come. Likely, they will look to you. I'm sorry that I cannot be there in person to help you, but know that I am . . . about. I have made you Mistborn, and healed the damage you did to your body by flaring tin so much. I hope you don't mind. It was Kelsier's request, actually. Consider it a parting gift from him. Watch over them for me. P.S. There are still two metals that nobody knows about. You might want to poke about and see if you can figure out what they are. I think they'll interest you. Spook looked up, staring at the strangely empty, blue sky. Beldre came over and knelt beside him, looking over his paper, then giving him a quizzical look. "You look troubled," she said. Spook shook his head. "No," he said, folding up the little slip of paper and putting it in his pocket. "No, I'm not troubled. In fact, I actually think everything is going to be all right. Finally." You can also find extensive annotations of every chapter in the book, along with deleted scenes, a very active blog, and expanded world information at www.brandonsanderson.com. Mistborn: The Final Empire introduced the Final Empire, a land ruled over by a powerful immortal known as the Lord Ruler. A thousand years ago, the Lord Ruler took the power at the Well of Ascension and supposedly defeated a powerful force or creature known only as the Deepness. The Lord Ruler conquered the known world and founded the Final Empire. He ruled for a thousand years, stamping out all remnants of the individual kingdoms, cultures, religions, and languages that used to exist in his land. In their place he set up his own system. Certain peoples were dubbed "skaa," a word that meant something akin to slave or peasant. Other peoples were dubbed nobility, and most of these were descendants of those who had supported the Lord Ruler during his years of conquest. The Lord Ruler had supposedly given them the power of Allomancy in order to gain powerful assassins and warriors with intelligence, as opposed to the brutish koloss, and had used them well in conquering and maintaining his empire. Skaa and nobility were forbidden to interbreed. During the thousand years of the Lord Ruler's reign, many rebellions occurred among the skaa, but none were successful. Finally, a half-breed Mistborn known as Kelsier decided to challenge the Lord Ruler. Once the most famous gentleman thief in the Final Empire, Kelsier |
was known for his daring schemes. Those eventually ended with his capture, however, and he was sent to the Lord Ruler's death camp at the Pits of Hathsin, the secret source of atium. It was said that nobody ever escaped the Pits of Hathsin alive—but Kelsier did just that. He gained the powers of a Mistborn during that time, and managed to free himself, earning the title "the Survivor of Hathsin." At this point, he turned from his selfish ways and decided to try his most daring plan yet: the overthrow of the Final Empire. He recruited a team of thieves, mostly half-breed Mistings, to help him achieve his goal. During this time, he also discovered a young half-breed Mistborn girl named Vin. Vin was as yet unaware of her powers, and Kelsier brought her into the crew to train her, theoretically to have someone to whom he could pass his legacy. Kelsier's crew slowly gathered an underground army of skaa rebels. Despite their progress, the crew began to wonder if Kelsier was setting himself up to be another Lord Ruler. He sought to make himself a legend among the skaa, becoming almost a religious figure to them. At the same time, Vin—who had been raised on the streets by a cruel brother—grew to trust people for the first time in her life. As this happened, Vin began to believe in Kelsier and his purpose. Even before mastering her Allomantic talents, Vin was used as a spy among the nobility, and was trained to infiltrate their balls and parties playing the part of "Valette Renoux," a young noblewoman from the countryside. During the first of these balls, she met Elend Venture, a young, idealistic nobleman and heir of his house. He eventually convinced her that not all noblemen were deserving of their poor reputation, and the two fell in love, despite Kelsier's best efforts. The crew also discovered a journal, apparently written by the Lord Ruler himself during the days before the Ascension. This book painted a different picture of the tyrant—it depicted a melancholy, tired man who was trying his best to protect the people against the Deepness, despite the fact that he didn't really understand it. In the end, it was revealed that Kelsier's plan had been much broader than simply using a skaa army to overthrow the empire. In part the effort to raise troops provided an opportunity to spread rumors about himself. He also used it to train his crew in the arts of leadership and persuasion. The true extent of his plan was revealed when he sacrificed his life in a very visible way, making himself a martyr to the skaa and finally convincing them to rise up and overthrow the Lord Ruler. One of Kelsier's crewmembers—a man who had been playing the part of "Lord Renoux," Valette's uncle—turned out to be a kandra named OreSeur. OreSeur took on Kelsier's form, then went about creating rumors that Kelsier had returned from the grave, further inspiring the skaa. After this, OreSeur's Contract passed to Vin. It was Vin |
who actually killed the Lord Ruler. She discovered that he wasn't actually a god, or even immortal—he had simply found a way to extend his life and his power by using Allomancy and Feruchemy at the same time. He wasn't the hero from the logbook—but, instead, was that man's servant, a Feruchemist of some great power. Still, he was much stronger in Allomancy than Vin. While she was fighting him, she drew upon the mists somehow, burning them in place of metals. She still doesn't know why or how this happened. With that power—and with the knowledge of his true nature—she was able to defeat and kill the Lord Ruler. The Final Empire was thrown into chaos. Elend Venture took control of Luthadel, the capital, and put Kelsier's crew in prime governmental positions. The fledgling kingdom managed to survive for a year under Elend's leadership. Elend set up a type of parliament, named the Assembly, and gave them a great deal of power. While Elend showed expertise in the theories of leadership, he lacked practical experience. His rule became unstable as various members of the Assembly began to jockey for power. Rumors of the Lord Ruler's atium cache—combined with the prize that was Luthadel, the largest city in the empire—eventually drew several predators to the Central Dominance. The worst of these was Straff Venture, Elend's own father. Straff marched a sizable army to Luthadel, secretly bringing with him a Mistborn son, named Zane. Fortunately for Luthadel, Breeze managed to convince a second army—led by Ashweather Cett—to march on the city as well. Surprised by the presence of the other, each tyrant realized that he couldn't afford to attack the city, for afterward he would be vulnerable to the other army. So, they settled down into a siege, more worried about each other than they were about Elend. About this time, a Keeper named Tindwyl arrived in Luthadel. Sazed invited her to come and help Elend learn to be a better king. She worked with him, trying to teach him to temper his idealism with a measure of realism. Elend convinced the crew to help him play Straff and Cett against each other, with the ultimate goal of getting them to fight. Elend hoped that if the two invaders weakened their armies against one another, his own force—by far the smallest of the three—could defeat the remnants. He began to meet with Straff and Cett, trying to manipulate them. During his maneuvering, however, a faction in the Assembly managed to depose him via a law he himself had written. Elend refused to use his army to seize back the city, a decision that Tindwyl and the crew thought was foolishly idealistic. Instead, he decided to play the political game and try to convince the Assembly to reinstate him. During all of this, Vin had troubles of her own. She had discovered a mysterious "mist spirit" that came out at nights, watching her. She noticed that the logbook author—Alendi—had seen a similar manifestation before he arrived at the Well of Ascension. In addition, Vin |
began to hear strange thumpings when she burned bronze. Vin's emotions regarding Elend and her own worth to him went through a great deal of turmoil. She loved him, but didn't think that the two of them were right for each other. She worried that she was too brutal, and not enough of a politician, to make him a good wife. Complicating this was Zane, Straff's Mistborn son and Elend's half-brother, who spent many evenings sparring with Vin, tempting her and driving a wedge between her and Elend. Vin began to rely upon the kandra OreSeur, who was—by Elend's order—to remain by her side at all times and watch over her. The two became friends despite their initial dislike for one another. About this time, Sazed returned to Luthadel, having discovered some very alarming facts during his wanderings. First, it appeared that the mists were beginning to come during the day. Second, the mists were somehow causing people to fall sick and die. Third, there was a large army of koloss marching on Luthadel, led by Jastes Lekal. Sazed began to work on researching these things, along with translating a strange inscription he had discovered in the South while traveling with Marsh. This inscription turned out to record the last words of Kwaan, a scholar who—some thousand years earlier—had been deeply involved with Alendi, Rashek, and the Terris prophecies. Sazed also began to interact with Tindwyl, who disapproved of his rebellious nature, yet harbored some deep feelings for him. Elend's campaign in the Assembly failed, and they elected Ferson Penrod as their king instead of Elend. Oddly, however, being deposed finally made Elend begin to understand what it meant to be a king and leader. He began to intertwine his philosophies about justice with the things Tindwyl was teaching him, and actually started to become an inspiring and effective leader—even if he no longer held the throne. The city's problems, however, grew even worse as Jastes Lekal's koloss arrived. It quickly became clear that he had only marginal control over the murderous beasts. Eventually, Zane prompted Vin to assault Cett's base inside of Luthadel. (Cett had entered to make a play for the throne himself.) She and Zane slaughtered their way to the top floor of the keep, where Vin had a breakdown prompted by what she'd just done. She fled, leaving Cett alive. Soon after, Zane attacked her, driven to madness by strange voices in his head. Vin and Zane fought, and OreSeur revealed himself as a spy, another kandra named TenSoon, who had killed and impersonated the real OreSeur. Vin managed to kill Zane, even though he had atium, then she ran to Elend. Her emotional problems in remission, she convinced Sazed to marry Elend and her. Following his near-assassination, Cett retreated from Luthadel and withdrew his armies from the siege. Elend's attempts to get Jastes to withdraw were unsuccessful. Outside, Straff realized that if he simply pulled back, the koloss would probably attack and destroy the city—leaving Straff himself to return and take control once the beasts had exhausted |
themselves in combat. Many of the crewmembers realized that this was what would happen. Sazed convinced them that they should lie to Vin and Elend, telling them that the city would be safe and sending them north to search for the Well of Ascension. This ploy succeeded. Vin and Elend left, taking Spook with them, and in their absence the koloss finally attacked. The city's army fought well, Sazed himself holding one of the city gates against terrible odds. During the fighting, Clubs, Dockson, and Tindwyl were killed. As the koloss were about to destroy everything, Vin returned to the city, having learned from Spook that she had been deceived. Vin exploited an Allomantic weakness in the koloss revealed to her by TenSoon/OreSeur the kandra, taking control of the koloss in the same way the Lord Ruler once had. She used those koloss to attack Straff's army when it returned, and she was joined by Cett at the last moment. With Straff dead, Vin forced Penrod, Cett, and Straff's second-in-command to swear allegiance to Elend, naming him emperor. The city was saved. However, Vin continued to hear the strange thumpings in her mind. She'd become convinced that she—not the ancient man Alendi—was the Hero of Ages. She soon realized that the Well of Ascension wasn't actually in the northern mountains, but instead beneath Luthadel. She and Elend investigated this, discovering that beneath Kredik Shaw, there was a large secret cavern stockpiled with food. Beyond that cavern was another, filled with dark smoke. Beyond that, a pool of glowing power. The Well of Ascension. Sazed, up above, was still reeling from Tindwyl's death. He had thrown himself into his studies, and discovered—to his alarm—that something was very wrong with the prophecies. He rushed after Vin and Elend, intent on stopping them from taking the power at the Well, but was blocked by Marsh. As the two fought, Vin took the power and did what she thought was the right thing. Though the mist spirit stabbed Elend, Vin didn't use the Well's power to heal him. Instead, she released it as the prophecies said she had to do in order to stop the mists from destroying the world. She made the wrong choice. A dark force imprisoned near the Well of Ascension had altered the prophecies and led Vin to do what was necessary to release it. The thing burst free, leaving Vin with the horror of what she had done. The mist spirit, however, provided a way for her to save Elend by making him into a Mistborn. The book ended with Vin and Elend on the walls of Luthadel, having saved the city but also having released a terrible force upon the world. Sazed, crushed by Tindwyl's death, had come to believe that his faith was worthless. Spook was riddled with guilt for abandoning Clubs to die in the city, and both Breeze and Ham bore emotional scars from their seemingly hopeless fight against the koloss. On top of all this, as Sazed had reported, the mists had changed somehow, and they |
now killed people who went into them. Elend, however, was determined to consolidate their new empire and find a way to fight the thing that Vin had released. When she asked him what they were going to do now, he had only one answer for her: They were going to survive. No matter what. One year has passed. ABOUT THE AUTHOR BRANDON SANDERSON grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. He lives in Utah with his wife and children and teaches creative writing at Brigham Young University. He is the author of such bestsellers as the Mistborn® trilogy and its sequels, The Alloy of Law, Shadows of Self, and The Bands of Mourning; The Stormlight Archive novels The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance; and other novels, including The Rithmatist and Steelheart. In 2013, he won a Hugo Award for Best Novella for The Emperor’s Soul, set in the world of his acclaimed first novel, Elantris. Additionally, he was chosen to complete Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time® sequence. For behind-the-scenes information on all of Brandon Sanderson’s books, visit brandonsanderson.com, or sign up for email updates here or here. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS If I were to take the time to individually thank each and every person who helped with all the stories in here, this section might be as long as one of the stories themselves! Instead, I’m going to focus this note on the people who specifically helped put the collection together. (Along with the team that worked on Edgedancer, which is the story unique to this collection.) But I do want to take a moment to give a hearty thanks to those who have worked with me on my short fiction over the years. Early in my career, I would never have dared consider myself a short-fiction writer—but ten years of practice has paid off, and the stories in this collection are the result. (Though do note, I use the word “short” loosely here. Most of these are very long for short fiction.) A lot of wonderful people have helped me over the years; most of them are the names you’ll commonly find at the start of my novels. I’m a lucky man to have had so much encouragement, feedback, and support during my career. For Arcanum Unbounded specifically, Isaac Steѿart (my longtime artistic collaborator) is responsible for the beautiful endpapers, the star charts, and most of the symbols you find inside the book. Ben McSweeney did the illustrations for the various stories, Dave Palumbo did the cover art, and Greg Collins was the designer. Moshe Feder, editor for all of my epic fantasy novels, was the editor on this project—and though he wasn’t officially the editor on many of the shorts when they were first published, he has a habit of stepping in and doing revisions for me, unpaid, on any short fiction I write. (Indeed, he gets mad if I don’t send them to him, and refuses to invoice me if I try to pay him for them.) So he’s done a ton of pro bono work over the years, helping me |
become a short-fiction writer. He deserves some extra praise for this. And, as always, the Inciting Peter Ahlstrom was head of my in-house editorial efforts. (Literally in house. He works out of my home.) Peter is responsible for collecting all the comments from various people doing reads, adding his own detailed continuity and editorial notes, and then smoothing everything over once I’ve taken the hacksaw to stories. The copyeditor was Terry McGarry. At Tor, thanks go to Tom Doherty, Marco Palmieri, Patti Garcia, Karl Gold, Rafal Gibek, and Robert Davis. Joshua Bilmes was the agent on this in the United States, and John Berlyne was the agent in the UK. Heaps of thanks go to everyone at their respective agencies. Our alpha and gamma readers on Edgedancer include Alice Arneson, Ben Oldsen, Bob Kluttz, Brandon Cole, Brian T. Hill, Darci Cole, David Behrens, Eric James Stone, Eric Lake, Gary Singer, Ian McNatt, Karen Ahlstrom, Kellyn Neumann, Kristina Kugler, Lyndsey Luther, Mark Lindberg, Matt Wiens, Megan Kanne, Nikki Ramsay, Paige Vest, Ross Newberry, and Trae Cooper. And, as is traditional, I leave with a hearty thanks to my family: Joel, Dallin, Oliver, and Emily. You guys are awesome! BY BRANDON SANDERSON THE STORMLIGHT ARCHIVE The Way of Kings Words of Radiance THE MISTBORN SAGA THE ORIGINAL TRILOGY Mistborn The Well of Ascension The Hero of Ages THE WAX AND WAYNE SERIES The Alloy of Law Shadows of Self The Bands of Mourning Elantris Warbreaker The Rithmatist Arcanum Unbounded: The Cosmere Collection ALCATRAZ VS. THE EVIL LIBRARIANS Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians The Scrivener’s Bones The Knights of Crystallia The Shattered Lens The Dark Talent THE RECKONERS Steelheart Firefight Calamity THE SELISH SYSTEM CENTRAL to this system is the planet of Sel—home to multiple empires that, uniquely, have remained somewhat ignorant of one another. It is a willful kind of ignorance, with each of the three great domains pretending that the others are mere blips on the map, barely worth notice. The planet itself facilitates this, as it is larger than most, with its size at around 1.5 cosmere standard, and gravity at 1.2 cosmere standard. Vast continents and sweeping oceans create a diverse landscape, with an extreme amount of variation on this one planet. Here you will find both snow-covered plains and expansive deserts, a fact I would have found remarkable upon my first visit, had I not by then discovered that this was a natural state of many planets in the cosmere. Sel is notable for being dishardic, one of few planets in the cosmere to attract two separate Shards of Adonalsium: Dominion and Devotion. These Shards were extremely influential in the development of human societies on the planet, and most of their traditions and religions can be traced back to these two. Uniquely, the very languages and alphabets used today across the planet were directly influenced by the two Shards. I believe that early on, the Shards took an unconcerned approach to humankind—and society was shaped by the slow, steady discovery of the powers that permeated the landscape. This is difficult |
to determine for certain now, however, as at some point in the distant past, both Devotion and Dominion were destroyed. Their Investiture—their power—was Splintered, their minds ripped away, their souls sent into the Beyond. I am uncertain whether their power was left to ravage the world untamed for a time, or was immediately contained. This all happened during the days of human prehistory on Sel. At this point, the bulk of the Investiture that made up the powers of Dominion and Devotion is trapped on the Cognitive Realm. Collectively, these powers—which have a polarized relationship—are called the Dor. Forced together as they are, trapped and bursting to escape, they power the various forms of magic on Sel, which are multitude. Because the Cognitive Realm has distinct locations (unlike the Spiritual Realm, where most forms of Investiture reside), magic on Sel is very dependent upon physical position. In addition, the rules of perception and intent are greatly magnified on Sel, to the point that language—or similar functions—directly shapes the magic as it is pulled from the Cognitive Realm and put to use. This overlap between language, location, and magic on the planet has become so integral to the system that subtle changes in one can have profound effects on how the Dor is accessed. Indeed, I believe that the very landscape itself has become Invested to the point that it has a growing self-awareness, in a way unseen on other planets in the cosmere. I do not know how this happened, or what the ramifications will be. I’ve begun to wonder if something greater is happening on Sel than we, at the universities of Silverlight, have guessed. Something with origins lost in time. Perhaps the Ire know more, but they are not speaking on the topic, and have repeatedly denied my requests for collaboration. Brief mention should be given to the entities known as the seons and the skaze, Splinters of self-aware Investiture who have developed humanlike mannerisms. I believe there is a link between them and the puzzle of Sel’s nature. The rest of the system is of little relevance. Though there are a number of other planets, only one exists in a habitable zone—if barely. It is barren, inhospitable, and prone to terrible dust storms. Its proximity to the sun, Mashe, makes it uncomfortably warm, even for one who has spent a good portion of her life on the Dayside of Taldain. DAY FIFTY-EIGHT SHAI was ready when Frava next visited. The woman paused in the doorway, the guards shuffling out without objection as Captain Zu took their place. “You’ve been busy,” Frava noted. Shai looked up from her research. Frava wasn’t referring to her progress, but to the room. Most recently, Shai had improved the floor. It hadn’t been difficult. The rock used to build the palace—the quarry, the dates, the stonemasons—all were matters of historic record. “You like it?” Shai asked. “The marble works well with the hearth, I think.” Frava turned, then blinked. “A hearth? Where did you … Is this room bigger than it was?” “The storage |
room next door wasn’t being used,” Shai mumbled, turning back to her book. “And the division between these two rooms was recent, constructed only a few years back. I rewrote the construction so that this room was made the larger of the two, and so that a hearth was installed.” Frava seemed stunned. “I wouldn’t have thought…” The woman looked back to Shai, and her face adopted its usual severe mask. “I find it difficult to believe that you are taking your duty seriously, Forger. You are here to make an emperor, not remodel the palace.” “Carving soulstone relaxes me,” Shai said. “As does having a workspace that doesn’t remind me of a closet. You will have your emperor’s soul in time, Frava.” The arbiter stalked through the room, inspecting the desk. “Then you have begun the emperor’s soulstone?” “I’ve begun many of them,” Shai said. “It will be a complex process. I’ve tested well over a hundred stamps on Gaotona—” “Arbiter Gaotona.” “—on the old man. Each is only a tiny slice of the puzzle. Once I have all of the pieces working, I’ll recarve them in smaller, more delicate etchings. That will allow me to combine about a dozen test stamps into one final stamp.” “But you said you’d tested over a hundred,” Frava said, frowning. “You’ll only use twelve of those in the end?” Shai laughed. “Twelve? To Forge an entire soul? Hardly. The final stamp, the one you will need to use on the emperor each morning, will be like … a linchpin, or the keystone of an arch. It will be the only one that will need to be placed on his skin, but it will connect a lattice of hundreds of other stamps.” Shai reached to the side, taking out her book of notes, including initial sketches of the final stamps. “I’ll take these and stamp them onto a metal plate, then link that to the stamp you will place on Ashravan each day. He’ll need to keep the plate close at all times.” “He’ll need to carry a metal plate with him,” Frava said dryly, “and he will need to be stamped each day? This will make it difficult for the man to live a normal life, don’t you think?” “Being emperor makes it difficult for any man to live a normal life, I suspect. You will make it work. It’s customary for the plate to be designed as a piece of adornment. A large medallion, perhaps, or an upper-arm bracer with square sides. If you look at my own Essence Marks, you’ll notice they were done in the same way, and that the box contains a plate for each one.” Shai hesitated. “That said, I’ve never done this exact thing before; no one has. There is a chance … and I’d say a fair one … that over time, the emperor’s brain will absorb the information. Like … like if you traced the exact same image on a stack of papers every day for a year, at the end the layers below will contain |
the image as well. Perhaps after a few years of being stamped, he won’t need the treatment any longer.” “I still name it egregious.” “Worse than being dead?” Shai asked. Frava rested her hand on Shai’s book of notes and half-finished sketches. Then she picked it up. “I will have our scribes copy this.” Shai stood up. “I need it.” “I’m sure you do,” Frava said. “That is precisely why it should be copied, just in case.” “Copying it will take too long.” “I will have it back to you in a day,” Frava said lightly, stepping away. Shai reached for her, and Captain Zu stepped up, sword already half out of its sheath. Frava turned to him. “Now, now, Captain. That won’t be needed. The Forger is protective of her work. That is good. It shows that she is invested.” Shai and Zu locked gazes. He wants me dead, Shai thought. Badly. She’d figured him out by now. Guarding the palace was his duty, one that Shai had invaded by her theft. Zu hadn’t captured her; the Imperial Fool had turned her in. Zu felt insecure because of his failure, and so he wanted to remove Shai in retribution. Shai eventually broke his gaze. Though it galled her, she needed to take the submissive side of this interaction. “Be careful,” she warned Frava. “Do not let them lose even a single page.” “I will protect this as if … as if the emperor’s life depended on it.” Frava found her joke amusing, and she gave Shai a rare smile. “You have considered the other matter we discussed?” “Yes.” “And?” “Yes.” Frava’s smile deepened. “We will talk again soon.” Frava left with the book, nearly two months’ worth of work. Shai knew exactly what the woman was up to. Frava wasn’t going to have it copied—she was going to show it to her other Forger and see if it was far enough along for him to finish the job. If he determined that it was, Shai would be executed, quietly, before the other arbiters could object. Zu would likely do it himself. It could all end here. DAY FIFTY-NINE SHAI slept poorly that night. She was certain that her preparations had been thorough. And yet now, she had to wait as if with a noose around her neck. It made her anxious. What if she’d misread the situation? She had made her notations in the book intentionally opaque, each of them a subtle indication of just how enormous this project was. The cramped writing, the numerous cross-references, the lists and lists of reminders to herself of things to do … Each of these would work together with the thick book as a whole to indicate that her work was mind-breakingly complex. It was a forgery. One of the most difficult types—a forgery that did not imitate a specific person or object. This was a forgery of tone. Stay away, the tone of that book said. You don’t want to try to finish this. You want to let Shai continue to do the |
hard parts, because the work required to do it yourself would be enormous. And … if you fail … it will be your head on the line. That book was one of the most subtle forgeries she’d ever created. Each word in it was true and yet a lie at the same time. Only a master Forger might see through it, might notice how hard she was working to illustrate the danger and difficulty of the project. How skilled was Frava’s Forger? Would Shai be dead before morning? She didn’t sleep. She wanted to and she should have. Waiting out the hours, minutes, and seconds was excruciating. The thought of lying in bed asleep when they came for her … that was worse. Eventually, she got up and retrieved some accounts of Ashravan’s life. The guards playing cards at her table gave her a glance. One even nodded with sympathy at her red eyes and tired posture. “Light too bright?” he asked, gesturing at the lamp. “No,” Shai said. “Just a thought in my brain that won’t get out.” She spent the night in bed pouring herself into Ashravan’s life. Frustrated to be lacking her notes, she got out a fresh sheet and began some new ones she’d add to her book when it returned. If it did. She felt that she finally understood why Ashravan had abandoned his youthful optimism. At least, she knew the factors that had combined to lead him down that path. Corruption was part of it, but not the main part. Again, lack of self-confidence contributed, but hadn’t been the decisive factor. No, Ashravan’s downfall had been life itself. Life in the palace, life as part of an empire that clicked along like a clock. Everything worked. Oh, it didn’t work as well as it might. But it did work. Challenging that took effort, and effort was sometimes hard to muster. He had lived a life of leisure. Ashravan hadn’t been lazy, but it didn’t require laziness to be swept up in the workings of imperial bureaucracy—to tell yourself that next month you’d go and demand that your changes be made. Over time, it had become easier and easier to float along the course of the great river that was the Rose Empire. In the end, he’d grown indulgent. He’d focused more on the beauty of his palace than on the lives of his subjects. He had allowed the arbiters to handle more and more government functions. Shai sighed. Even that description of him was too simplistic. It neglected to mention who the emperor had been, and who he had become. A chronology of events didn’t speak of his temper, his fondness for debate, his eye for beauty, or his habit of writing terrible, terrible poetry and then expecting all who served him to tell him how wonderful it was. It also didn’t speak of his arrogance, or his secret wish that he could have been something else. That was why he had gone back over his book again and again. Perhaps he had been looking for |
that branching point in his life where he had stepped down the wrong path. He hadn’t understood. There was rarely an obvious branching point in a person’s life. People changed slowly, over time. You didn’t take one step, then find yourself in a completely new location. You first took a little step off a path to avoid some rocks. For a while, you walked alongside the path, but then you wandered out a little way to step on softer soil. Then you stopped paying attention as you drifted farther and farther away. Finally, you found yourself in the wrong city, wondering why the signs on the roadway hadn’t led you better. The door to her room opened. Shai bolted upright in her bed, nearly dropping her notes. They’d come for her. But … no, it was morning already. Light trickled through the stained-glass window, and the guards were standing up and stretching. The one who had opened the door was the Bloodsealer. He looked hungover again, and carried a stack of papers in his hand, as he often did. He’s early this morning, Shai thought, checking her pocket watch. Why early today, when he’s late so often? The Bloodsealer cut her and stamped the door without a word, causing the pain to burn in Shai’s arm. He hurried out of the room, as if off to some appointment. Shai stared after him, then shook her head. A moment later, the door opened again and Frava entered. “Oh, you’re up,” the woman said as the Strikers saluted her. Frava set Shai’s book down on the table with a thump. She seemed annoyed. “The scribes are done. Get back to work.” Frava left in a bustle. Shai leaned back in her bed, sighing in relief. Her ruse had worked. That should earn her a few more weeks. DAY SEVENTY “SO this symbol,” Gaotona said, pointing at one of her sketches of the greater stamps she would soon carve, “is a time notation, indicating a moment specifically … seven years ago?” “Yes,” Shai said, dusting off the end of a freshly carved soulstamp. “You learn quickly.” “I am undergoing surgery each day, so to speak,” Gaotona said. “It makes me more comfortable to know the kinds of knives being used.” “The changes aren’t—” “Aren’t permanent,” he said. “Yes, so you keep saying.” He stretched out his arm for her to stamp. “However, it makes me wonder. One can cut the body, and it will heal—but do it over and over again in the same spot, and you will scar. The soul cannot be so different.” “Except, of course, that it’s completely different,” Shai said, stamping his arm. He had never quite forgiven her for what she had done in burning ShuXen’s masterpiece. She could see it in him, when they interacted. He was no longer just disappointed in her, he was angry at her. Anger faded with time, and they had a functional working relationship again. Gaotona cocked his head. “I … Now that is odd.” “Odd in what way?” Shai asked, watching the seconds |
pass on her pocket watch. “I remember encouraging myself to become emperor. And … and I resent myself. For … mother of light, is that really how he regarded me?” The seal remained in place for fifty-seven seconds. Good enough. “Yes,” she said as the seal faded away. “I believe that is exactly how he regarded you.” She felt a thrill. Finally that seal had worked! She was getting close now. Close to understanding the emperor, close to having the puzzle come together. Whenever she neared the end of a project—a painting, a large-scale soul Forgery, a sculpture—there came a moment in the process where she could see the entire work, even if it was far from finished. When that moment came, in her mind’s eye, the work was complete; actually finishing it was almost a formality. She was nearly there with this project. The emperor’s soul spread out before her, with only some few corners still shadowed. She wanted to see it through; she longed to find out if she could make him live again. After reading so much about him, after coming to feel as if she knew him so well, she needed to finish. Surely her escape could wait until then. “That was it, wasn’t it?” Gaotona asked. “That was the stamp that you’ve tried a dozen times without success, the seal representing why he stood up to become emperor.” “Yes,” Shai said. “His relationship with me,” Gaotona said. “You made his decision depend upon his relationship with me, and … and the sense of shame he felt when speaking with me.” “Yes.” “And it took.” “Yes.” Gaotona sat back. “Mother of lights…” he whispered again. Shai took the seal and put it with those that she had confirmed as workable. Over the last few weeks, each of the other arbiters had done as Frava had, coming to Shai and offering her fantastic promises in exchange for giving them ultimate control of the emperor. Only Gaotona had never tried to bribe her. A genuine man, and one in the highest levels of imperial government no less. Remarkable. Using him was going to be far more difficult than she would have liked. “I must say again,” she said, turning to him, “you’ve impressed me. I don’t think many Grands would take the time to study soulstamps. They would eschew what they considered evil without ever trying to understand it. You’ve changed your mind?” “No,” Gaotona said. “I still think that what you do is, if not evil, then certainly unholy. And yet, who am I to speak? I am depending upon you to preserve us in power by means of this art we so freely call an abomination. Our hunger for power outweighs our conscience.” “True for the others,” Shai said, “but that is not your personal motive.” He raised an eyebrow at her. “You just want Ashravan back,” Shai said. “You refuse to accept that you’ve lost him. You loved him as a son—the youth that you mentored, the emperor you always believed in, even when he didn’t believe |
in himself.” Gaotona looked away, looking decidedly uncomfortable. “It won’t be him,” Shai said. “Even if I succeed, it won’t truly be him. You realize this, of course.” He nodded. “But then … sometimes a clever Forgery is as good as the real thing,” Shai said. “You are of the Heritage Faction. You surround yourself with relics that aren’t truly relics, paintings that are imitations of ones long lost. I suppose having a fake relic for an emperor won’t be so different. And you … you just want to know that you’ve done everything you could. For him.” “How do you do it?” Gaotona asked softly. “I’ve seen how you speak with the guards, how you learn even the names of the servants. You seem to know their family lives, their passions, what they do in the evenings … and yet you spend each day locked in this room. You haven’t left it for months. How do you know these things?” “People,” Shai said, rising to fetch another seal, “by nature attempt to exercise power over what is around them. We build walls to shelter us from the wind, roofs to stop the rain. We tame the elements, bend nature to our wills. It makes us feel as if we’re in control. “Except in doing so, we merely replace one influence with another. Instead of the wind affecting us, it is a wall. A man-made wall. The fingers of man’s influence are all about, touching everything. Man-made rugs, man-made food. Every single thing in the city that we touch, see, feel, experience comes as the result of some person’s influence. “We may feel in control, but we never truly are unless we understand people. Controlling our environment is no longer about blocking the wind, it’s about knowing why the serving lady was crying last night, or why a particular guard always loses at cards. Or why your employer hired you in the first place.” Gaotona looked back at her as she sat, then held out a seal to him. He hesitantly proffered an arm. “It occurs to me,” he said, “that even in our extreme care not to do so, we have underestimated you, woman.” “Good,” she said. “You’re paying attention.” She stamped him. “Now tell me, why exactly do you hate fish?” DAY SEVENTY-SIX I NEED to do it, Shai thought as the Bloodsealer cut her arm. Today. I could go today. Hidden in her other sleeve, she carried a slip of paper made to imitate the ones that the Bloodsealer often brought with him on the mornings that he came early. She’d caught sight of a bit of wax on one of them two days back. They were letters. Realization had dawned. She’d been wrong about this man all along. “Good news?” she asked him as he inked his stamp with her blood. The white-lipped man gave her a sneering glance. “From home,” Shai said. “The woman you’re writing, back in Dzhamar. She sent you a letter today? Post comes in the mornings here at the palace. They knock at |
your door, deliver a letter…” And that wakes you up, she added in her mind. That’s why you come on time those days. “You must miss her a lot if you can’t bear to leave her letter behind in your room.” The man lowered his arm and grabbed Shai by the front of her shirt. “Leave her alone, witch,” he hissed. “You … you leave her alone! None of your trickery or magics!” He was younger than she had assumed. That was a common mistake with Dzhamarians. Their white hair and skin made them seem ageless to outsiders. Shai should have known better. He was little more than a youth. She drew her lips to a line. “You talk about my trickery and magics while holding in your hands a seal inked with my blood? You’re the one threatening to send skeletals to hunt me, friend. All I can do is polish the odd table.” “Just … just … Ah!” The young man threw his hands up, then stamped the door. The guards watched with nonchalant amusement and disapproval. Shai’s words had been a calculated reminder that she was harmless while the Bloodsealer was the truly unnatural one. The guards had spent nearly three months watching her tinker about as a friendly scholar while this man drew her blood and used it for arcane horrors. I need to drop the paper, she thought to herself, lowering her sleeve, meaning to let her forgery slip out as the guards turned away. That would put her plan into motion, her escape … The real Forgery isn’t finished yet. The emperor’s soul. She hesitated. Foolishly, she hesitated. The door closed. The opportunity passed. Feeling numb, Shai walked to her bed and sat down on its edge, the forged letter still hidden in her sleeve. Why had she hesitated? Were her instincts for self-preservation so weak? I can wait a little longer, she told herself. Until Ashravan’s Essence Mark is done. She’d been saying that for days now. Weeks, really. Each day she got closer to the deadline was another chance for Frava to strike. The woman came back with other excuses to take Shai’s notes and have them inspected. They were quickly approaching the point where the other Forger wouldn’t have to sort through much in order to finish Shai’s work. At least, so he would think. The further she progressed, the more impossible she realized this project was. And the more she longed to make it work anyway. She got out her book on the emperor’s life and soon found herself looking back through his youthful years. The thought of him not living again, of all of her work being merely a sham intended to distract while she planned to escape … those thoughts were physically painful. Nights, Shai thought at herself. You’ve grown fond of him. You’re starting to see him like Gaotona does! She shouldn’t feel that way. She’d never met him. Besides, he was a despicable person. But he hadn’t always been. No, in truth, he hadn’t ever truly become despicable. |
He had been more complex than that. Every person was. She could understand him, she could see— “Nights!” she said, standing up and putting the book aside. She needed to clear her mind. When Gaotona came to the room six hours later, Shai was just pressing a seal against the far wall. The elderly man opened the door and stepped in, then froze as the wall flooded with color. Vine patterns spiraled out from Shai’s stamp like sprays of paint. Green, scarlet, amber. The painting grew like something alive, leaves springing from branches, bunches of fruit exploding in succulent bursts. Thicker and thicker the pattern grew, golden trim breaking out of nothing and running like streams, rimming leaves, reflecting light. The mural deepened, every inch imbued with an illusion of movement. Curling vines, unexpected thorns peeking from behind branches. Gaotona breathed out in awe and stepped up beside Shai. Behind, Zu stepped in, and the other two guards left and closed the door. Gaotona reached out and felt the wall, but of course the paint was dry. So far as the wall knew, it had been painted like this years ago. Gaotona knelt down, looking at the two seals Shai had placed at the base of the painting. Only the third one, stamped above, had set off the transformation; the early seals were notes on how the image was to be created. Guidelines, a revision of history, instructions. “How?” Gaotona asked. “One of the Strikers guarded Atsuko of JinDo during his visit to the Rose Palace,” Shai said. “Atsuko caught a sickness, and was stuck in his bedroom for three weeks. That was just one floor up.” “Your Forgery puts him in this room instead?” “Yes. That was before the water damage that seeped through the ceiling last year, so it’s plausible he’d have been placed here. The wall remembers Atsuko spending days too weak to leave, but having the strength for painting. A little each day, a growing pattern of vines, leaves, and berries. To pass the time.” “This shouldn’t be taking,” Gaotona said. “This Forgery is tenuous. You’ve changed too much.” “No,” Shai said. “It’s on the line … that line where the greatest beauty is found.” She put the seal away. She barely remembered the last six hours. She had been caught up in the frenzy of creation. “Still…” Gaotona said. “It will take,” Shai said. “If you were the wall, what would you rather be? Dreary and dull, or alive with paint?” “Walls can’t think!” “That doesn’t stop them from caring.” Gaotona shook his head, muttering about superstition. “How long?” “To create this soulstamp? I’ve been etching it here and there for the last month or so. It was the last thing I wanted to do for the room.” “The artist was JinDo,” he said. “Perhaps, because you are from the same people, it … But no! That’s thinking like your superstition.” Gaotona shook his head, trying to figure out why that painting would have taken, though it had always been obvious to Shai that this one would |
work. “The JinDo and my people are not the same, by the way,” Shai said testily. “We may have been related long ago, but we are completely different from them now.” Grands. Just because people had similar features, Grands assumed they were practically identical. Gaotona looked across her chamber and its fine furniture that had been carved and polished. Its marble floor with silver inlay, the crackling hearth and small chandelier. A fine rug—it had once been a bed quilt with holes in it—covered the floor. The stained-glass window sparkled on the right wall, lighting the beautiful mural. The only thing that retained its original form was the door, thick but unremarkable. She couldn’t Forge that, not with that Bloodseal set into it. “You realize that you now have the finest chamber in the palace,” Gaotona said. “I doubt that,” Shai said with a sniff. “Surely the emperor’s are the nicest.” “The largest, yes. Not the nicest.” He knelt beside the painting, looking at her seals at the bottom. “You included detailed explanations of how this was painted.” “To create a realistic Forgery,” Shai said, “you must have the technical skill you are imitating, at least to an extent.” “So you could have painted this wall yourself.” “I don’t have the paints.” “But you could have. You could have demanded paints. I’d have given them to you. Instead, you created a Forgery.” “It’s what I am,” Shai said, growing annoyed at him again. “It’s what you choose to be. If a wall can desire to be a mural, Wan ShaiLu, then you could desire to become a great painter.” She slapped her stamp down on the table, then took a few deep breaths. “You have a temper,” Gaotona said. “Like him. Actually, I know exactly how that feels now, because you have given it to me on several occasions. I wonder if this … thing you do could be a tool for helping to bring awareness to people. Inscribe your emotions onto a stamp, then let others feel what it is to be you…” “Sounds great,” Shai said. “If only Forging souls weren’t a horrible offense to nature.” “If only.” “If you can read those stamps, you’ve grown very good indeed,” Shai said, pointedly changing the topic. “Almost I think you’ve been cheating.” “Actually…” Shai perked up, banishing her anger, now that it had passed the initial flare-up. What was this? Gaotona sheepishly reached into the deep pocket of his robe and withdrew a wooden box. The one where she kept her treasures, the five Essence Marks. Those revisions of her soul could change her, in times of need, into someone she could have been. Shai took a step forward, but when Gaotona opened the box, he revealed that the stamps weren’t inside. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I think giving you these now would be a little … foolish on my part. It seems that any one of them could have you free from your captivity in a moment.” “Really only two of them could manage that,” Shai said sourly, fingers |
twitching. Those soulstamps represented over eight years of her life’s work. She’d started the first on the day she ended her apprenticeship. “Hm, yes,” Gaotona said. Inside the small box lay sheets of metal inscribed with the separate smaller stamps that made up the blueprints of the revisions to her soul. “This one, I believe?” He held up one of the sheets. “Shaizan. Translated … Shai of the Fist? This would make a warrior out of you, if you stamped yourself?” “Yes,” Shai said. So he’d been studying her Essence Marks; that was how he’d grown so good at reading her stamps. “I understand only one-tenth of what is inscribed here, if that,” Gaotona said. “What I find is impressive. Truly, these must have taken years to craft.” “They are … precious to me,” Shai said, forcing herself to sit down at her desk and not fixate on the plates. If she could escape with those, she could craft a new stamp with ease. It would still take weeks, but most of her work would not be lost. But if those plates were to be destroyed … Gaotona sat down in his customary chair, nonchalantly looking through the plates. From someone else, she would have felt an implied threat. Look what I hold in my hands; look what I could do to you. From Gaotona, however, that was not it. He was genuinely curious. Or was he? As ever, she could not suppress her instincts. As good as she was, someone else could be better. Just as Uncle Won had warned. Could Gaotona have been playing her for a fool all along? She felt strongly she should trust her assessment of Gaotona. But if she was wrong, it could be a disaster. It might be anyway, she thought. You should have run days ago. “Turning yourself into a soldier I understand,” Gaotona said, setting aside the plate. “And this one as well. A woodsman and survivalist. That one looks extremely versatile. Impressive. And here we have a scholar. But why? You are already a scholar.” “No woman can know everything,” Shai said. “There is only so much time for study. When I stamp myself with that Essence Mark, I can suddenly speak a dozen languages, from Fen to Mulla’dil—even a few from Sycla. I know dozens of different cultures and how to move in them. I know science, mathematics, and the major political factions of the world.” “Ah,” Gaotona said. Just give them to me, she thought. “But what of this?” Gaotona said. “A beggar? Why would you want to be emaciated, and … is this showing that most of your hair would fall out, that your skin would become scarred?” “It changes my appearance,” Shai said. “Drastically. That’s useful.” She didn’t mention that in that aspect, she knew the ways of the streets and survival in a city underworld. Her lock-picking skills weren’t too shabby when not bearing that seal, but with it, she was incomparable. With that stamp on her, she could probably manage to climb out the tiny window—that |
Mark rewrote her past to give her years of experience as a contortionist—and climb the five stories down to freedom. “I should have realized,” Gaotona said. He lifted the final plate. “That just leaves this one, most baffling of all.” Shai said nothing. “Cooking,” he said. “Farm work, sewing. Another alias, I assume. For imitating a simpler person?” “Yes.” Gaotona nodded, putting the sheet down. Honesty. He must see my honesty. It cannot be faked. “No,” Shai said, sighing. He looked to her. “It’s … my way out,” she said. “I’ll never use it. It’s just there, if I want to.” “Way out?” “If I ever use that,” Shai said, “it will write over my years as a Forger. Everything. I will forget how to make the simplest of stamps; I will forget that I was even apprenticed as a Forger. I will become something normal.” “And you want that?” “No.” A pause. “Yes. Maybe. A part of me does.” Honesty. It was so difficult. Sometimes it was the only way. She dreamed about that simple life, on occasion. In that morbid way that someone standing at the edge of a cliff wonders what it would be like to just jump off. The temptation is there, even if it’s ridiculous. A normal life. No hiding, no lying. She loved what she did. She loved the thrill, the accomplishment, the wonder. But sometimes … trapped in a prison cell or running for her life … sometimes she dreamed of something else. “Your aunt and uncle?” he asked. “Uncle Won, Aunt Sol, they are parts of this revision. I’ve read it in here.” “They’re fake,” Shai whispered. “But you quote them all the time.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I suspect,” Gaotona said, “that a life full of lying makes reality and falsehood intermix. But if you were to use this stamp, surely you would not forget everything. How would you keep the sham from yourself?” “It would be the greatest Forgery of all,” Shai said. “One intended to fool even me. Written into that is the belief that without that stamp, applied every morning, I’ll die. It includes a history of illness, of visiting a … resealer, as you call them. A healer that works in soulstamps. From them, my false self received a remedy, one I must apply each morning. Aunt Sol and Uncle Won would send me letters; that is part of the charade to fool myself. I’ve written them already. Hundreds, which—before I use the Essence Mark on myself—I will pay a delivery service good money to send periodically.” “But what if you try to visit them?” Gaotona said. “To investigate your childhood…” “It’s all in the plate. I will be afraid of travel. There’s truth to that, as I was indeed scared of leaving my village as a youth. Once that Mark is in place, I’ll stay away from cities. I’ll think the trip to visit my relatives is too dangerous. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll never use it.” That stamp would end her. She would forget the last |
twenty years, back to when she was eight and had first begun inquiring about becoming a Forger. She’d become someone else entirely. None of the other Essence Marks did that; they rewrote some of her past, but left her with a knowledge of who she truly was. Not so with the last one. That one was to be final. It terrified her. “This is a great deal of work for something you’ll never use,” Gaotona said. “Sometimes, that is the way of life.” Gaotona shook his head. “I was hired to destroy the painting,” Shai blurted out. She wasn’t quite certain what drove her to say it. She needed to be honest with Gaotona—that was the only way her plan would work—but he didn’t need this piece. Did he? Gaotona looked up. “ShuXen hired me to destroy Frava’s painting,” Shai said. “That’s why I burned the masterpiece, rather than sneaking it out of the gallery.” “ShuXen? But … he’s the original artist! Why would he hire you to destroy one of his works?” “Because he hates the empire,” Shai said. “He painted that piece for a woman he loved. Her children gave it to the empire as a gift. ShuXen is old now, blind, barely able to move. He did not want to go to his grave knowing that one of his works was serving to glorify the Rose Empire. He begged me to burn it.” Gaotona seemed dumbfounded. He looked at her, as if trying to pierce through to her soul. Shai didn’t know why he needed to bother; this conversation had already stripped her thoroughly bare. “A master of his caliber is hard to imitate,” Shai said, “particularly without the original to work from. If you think about it, you’ll realize I needed his help to create those fakes. He gave me access to his studies and concepts; he told me how he’d gone about painting it. He coached me through the brushstrokes.” “Why not just have you return the original to him?” Gaotona asked. “He’s dying,” Shai said. “Owning a thing is meaningless to him. That painting was done for a lover. She is gone now, so he felt the painting should be as well.” “A priceless treasure,” Gaotona said. “Gone because of foolish pride.” “It was his work!” “Not any longer,” Gaotona said. “It belonged to everyone who saw it. You should not have agreed to this. Destroying a work of art like that is never right.” He hesitated. “But still, I think I can understand. What you did had a nobility to it. Your goal was the Moon Scepter. Exposing yourself to destroy that painting was dangerous.” “ShuXen tutored me in painting as a youth,” she said. “I could not deny his request.” Gaotona did not seem to agree, but he did seem to understand. Nights, but Shai felt exposed. This is important to do, she told herself. And maybe … But he did not give her the plates back. She hadn’t expected him to, not now. Not until their agreement was done—an agreement she was certain |
she would not live to see the end of, unless she escaped. They worked through the last group of new stamps. Each one took for at least a minute, as she’d been almost certain they would. She had the vision now, the idea of the final soul as it would be. Once she finished the sixth stamp for the day, Gaotona waited for the next. “That’s it,” Shai said. “All for today?” “All forever,” Shai said, tucking away the last of the stamps. “You’re done?” Gaotona asked, sitting up straight. “Almost a month early! It’s—” “I’m not done,” Shai said. “Now is the most difficult part. I have to carve those several hundred stamps in tiny detail, melding them together, then create a linchpin stamp. What I’ve done so far is like getting all of the paints ready, creating the color and figure studies. Now I have to put it all together. The last time I did this, it took the better part of five months.” “And you have only twenty-four days.” “And I have only twenty-four days,” Shai said, but felt an immediate stab of guilt. She had to run. Soon. She couldn’t wait to finish the project. “Then I will leave you to it,” Gaotona said, standing and rolling down his sleeve. DAY EIGHTY-FIVE YES, Shai thought, scrambling along the side of her bed and rifling through her stack of papers there. The table wasn’t big enough. She’d pulled her sheets tight and turned the bed into a place to set all of her stacks. Yes, his first love was from the storybook. That was why … Kurshina’s red hair … But this would be subconscious. He wouldn’t know it. Embedded deeply, then. How had she missed that? She wasn’t nearly as close to being done as she’d thought. There wasn’t time! Shai added what she’d discovered to the seal she was working on, one that combined all of the various parts of Ashravan’s romantic inclinations and experiences. She included it all: the embarrassing, the shameful, the glorious. Everything she’d been able to discover, and then a little bit more, calculated risks to fill out the soul. A flirtatious encounter with a woman whose name Ashravan could not recall. Idle fancies. A near affair with a woman now dead. This was the most difficult part of the soul for Shai to imitate, for it was the most private. Little an emperor did was ever truly secret, but Ashravan had not always been emperor. She had to extrapolate, lest she leave the soul bare, without passion. So private, so powerful. She felt closest to Ashravan as she teased out these details. Not as a voyeur; by this point, she was a part of him. She kept two books now. The formal notes of her process said she was horribly behind; that book left out details. The other book was her true one, disguised as useless piles of notes, random and haphazard. She really was behind, but not so far as her official documentation showed. Hopefully, that subterfuge would earn her a |
few extra days before Frava struck. As Shai searched for a specific note, she ran across one of her lists for escape plans. She hesitated. First, deal with the seal on the door, the note read in cipher. Second, silence the guards. Third, recover your Essence Marks, if possible. Fourth, escape the palace. Fifth, escape the city. She’d written further notes for the execution of each step. She wasn’t ignoring the escape, not completely. She had good plans. Her frantic attempt to finish the soul, however, drew most of her attention. One more week, she told herself. If I take one more week, I will finish five days before the deadline. Then I can run. DAY NINETY-SEVEN “HEY,” Hurli said, bending down. “What’s this?” Hurli was a brawny Striker who acted dumber than he was. It let him win at cards. He had two children—girls, both under the age of five—but was seeing one of the women guards on the side. Hurli secretly wished he could have been a carpenter like his father. He also would have been horrified if he’d realized how much Shai knew about him. He held up the sheet of paper he’d found on the ground. The Bloodsealer had just left. It was the morning of the ninety-sixth day of Shai’s captivity in the room, and she’d decided to put the plan into motion. She had to get out. The emperor’s seal was not yet finished. Almost. One more night’s work, and she’d have it. Her plan required one more night of waiting anyway. “Weedfingers must have dropped it,” Yil said, walking over. She was the other guard in the room this morning. “What is it?” Shai asked from the desk. “Letter,” Hurli said with a grunt. Both guards fell silent as they read. Palace Strikers were all literate. It was required of any imperial civil servant of at least the second reed. Shai sat quietly, tense, sipping a cup of lemon tea and forcing herself to breathe calmly. She made herself relax even though relaxing was the last thing she wanted to do. Shai knew the letter’s contents by heart. She’d written it, after all, then had dropped it covertly behind the Bloodsealer as he’d rushed out moments ago. Brother, the letter read. I have almost completed my task here, and the wealth I have earned will rival even that of Azalec after his work in the Southern Provinces. The captive I secure is hardly worth the effort, but who am I to question the reasoning of people paying me far too much money? I will return to you shortly. I am proud to say that my other mission here has been a success. I have identified several capable warriors, and have gathered sufficient samples from them. Hair, fingernails, and a few personal effects that will not be missed. I feel confident that we will have our personal guards very soon. It went on, the writing covering both the front and the back, so that it didn’t look suspicious. Shai had padded it with a lot of |
talk about the palace, including things that others would assume that Shai didn’t know but that the Bloodsealer would. Shai worried that the letter was too overt. Would the guards find it to be an obvious forgery? “That KuNuKam,” Yil whispered, using a native word of theirs. It roughly translated as a man who had an anus for a mouth. “That imperial KuNuKam!” Apparently, they believed it really was from him. Subtlety could be lost on soldiers. “Can I see it?” Shai asked. Hurli held it out to her. “Is he saying what I think?” the guard asked. “He’s been … gathering things from us?” “It might not mean the Strikers,” Shai said after reading the letter. “He doesn’t say.” “Why would he want hair?” Yil asked. “And fingernails?” “They can do things with pieces of you,” Hurli said, then cursed again. “You see what he does each day on the door with Shai’s blood.” “I don’t know if he could do much with hair or fingernails,” Shai said skeptically. “This is just bravado. Blood needs to be fresh, not more than a day old, for it to work in his stamps. He’s bragging to his brother.” “He shouldn’t be doing things like that,” Hurli said. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Shai said. The other two shared looks. In a few minutes, the guard change occurred. Hurli and Yil left, muttering to one another, the letter shoved in Hurli’s pocket. They weren’t likely to hurt the Bloodsealer badly. Threaten him, yes. The Bloodsealer was known to frequent teahouses in the area each evening. Almost she felt sorry for the man. She had deduced that when he got news from home, he was quick and punctual to her door. He sometimes looked excited. When he didn’t get news, he drank. This morning, he had looked sad. No news in a while, then. What happened to him tonight would not make his day any better. Yes, Shai almost felt sorry for him, but then she remembered the seal on the door and the bandage she’d tied on her arm after he’d drawn blood today. As soon as the guard change was accomplished, Shai took a deep breath, then dug back into her work. Tonight. Tonight, she would finish. DAY NINETY-EIGHT SHAI knelt on the floor amid a pattern of scattered pages, each filled with cramped script or drawings of seals. Behind her, morning opened her eyes, and sunlight seeped through the stained-glass window, spraying the room with crimson, blue, violet. A single soulstamp, carved from polished stone, rested facedown on a metal plate sitting before her. Soulstone, as a rock, looked not unlike soapstone or another fine-grained stone, but with bits of red mixed in. As if drops of blood had stained it. Shai blinked tired eyes. Was she really going to try to escape? She’d had … what? Four hours of sleep in the last three days combined? Surely escape could wait. Surely she could rest, just for today. Rest, she thought numbly, and I will not wake. She remained in place, kneeling. |
That stamp seemed the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Her ancestors had worshipped rocks that fell from the sky at night. The souls of broken gods, those chunks had been called. Master craftsmen would carve them to bring out the shape. Once, Shai had found that foolish. Why worship something you yourself created? Kneeling before her masterpiece, she understood. She felt as if she’d bled everything into that stamp. She had pressed two years’ worth of effort into three months, then had topped it off with a night of desperate, frantic carving. During that night, she’d made changes to her notes, to the soul itself. Drastic changes. She still didn’t know if they had been provoked by her final, awesome vision of the project as a whole … or if those changes had instead been faulty ideas born of fatigue and delusion. She wouldn’t know until the stamp was used. “Is it … is it done?” asked one of her guards. The two of them had moved to the far edge of the room, to sit beside the hearth and give her room on the floor. She vaguely remembered shoving aside the furniture. She’d spent part of the time pulling stacks of paper out from their place beneath the bed, then crawling under to fetch others. Was it done? Shai nodded. “What is it?” the guard asked. Nights, she thought. That’s right. They don’t even know. The common guards left each day during her conversations with Gaotona. The poor Strikers would probably find themselves assigned to some remote outpost of the empire for the rest of their lives, guarding the passes leading down to the distant Teoish Peninsula or the like. They would be quietly brushed under the rug to keep them from revealing, even accidentally, anything of what had happened here. “Ask Gaotona if you want to know,” Shai said softly. “I am not allowed to say.” Shai reverently picked up the seal, then placed both it and its plate inside a box she had prepared. The stamp nestled in red velvet, the plate—shaped like a large, thin medallion—in an indentation underneath the lid. She closed the lid, then pulled over a second, slightly larger box. Inside lay five seals, carved and prepared for her upcoming escape. If she managed it. Two of them she’d already used. If she could just sleep for a few hours. Just a few … No. I can’t use the bed anyway. Curling up on the floor sounded wonderful, however. The door began to open. Shai felt a sudden, striking moment of panic. Was it the Bloodsealer? He was supposed to be stuck in bed, having drunk himself to a stupor after being roughed up by the Strikers! For a moment, she felt a strange guilty sense of relief. If the Bloodsealer had come, she wouldn’t have a chance to escape today. She could sleep. Had Hurli and Yil not thrashed him? Shai had been sure that she’d read them correctly, and … … and, in her fatigue, she realized she’d been jumping to |
conclusions. The door opened all the way, and someone did enter, but it was not the Bloodsealer. It was Captain Zu. “Out,” he barked at the two guards. They jumped into motion. “In fact,” Zu said, “you’re relieved for the day. I’ll watch until the shift changes.” The two saluted and left. Shai felt like a wounded elk being abandoned by the herd. The door clicked closed, and Zu slowly, deliberately, turned to look at her. “The stamp isn’t ready yet,” Shai lied. “So you can—” “It doesn’t need to be ready,” Zu said, smiling a wide, thick-lipped smile. “I believe I promised you something three months ago, thief. We have an … unsettled debt.” The room was dim, her lamp having burned low and morning only just breaking. Shai backed away from him, quickly revising her plans. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. She couldn’t fight Zu. Her mouth kept moving, keeping him distracted but also playing a part she devised for herself on the fly. “When Frava finds out you came here,” Shai said, “she will be furious.” Zu drew his sword. “Nights!” Shai said, backing up to her bed. “Zu, you don’t need to do this. You can’t do this. I have work that needs to be done!” “Another will complete your work,” Zu said, leering. “Frava has another Forger. You think you’re so clever. You probably have some wonderful escape planned for tomorrow. This time, we’re striking first. You didn’t anticipate this, did you, liar? I’m going to enjoy killing you. Enjoy it so much.” He lunged with the sword, its tip catching her blouse and ripping a line through it at her side. Shai jumped away, shouting for help. She was still playing the part, but it did not require acting. Her heart thumped, panic rising, as she rounded the bed in a scramble, putting it between herself and Zu. He smiled broadly, then jumped for her, leaping onto the bed. It promptly collapsed. During the night, while crawling under the bed to get her notes, she had Forged the wood of the frame to have deep flaws, attacked by insects, making it fragile. She’d cut the mattress underneath in wide slashes. Zu barely had time to shout as the bed broke completely away, crashing into the pit she’d opened in the floor below. The water damage to her room—the mildew she’d smelled when first entering—had been key. By reports, the wooden beams above would have rotted and the ceiling would have fallen in if they hadn’t located the leak as quickly as they had. A simple Forgery, very plausible, made it so that the floor had fallen in. Zu crashed into the empty storage room one story down. Shai stood puffing, then peered into the hole. The man lay among the broken remnants of the bed. Some of that had been stuffing and cushioning. He would probably live—she’d been intending this trap for one of the regular guards, of whom she was fond. Not exactly how I planned it, she thought, but workable. Shai |
rushed to the table and gathered her things. The box of stamps, the emperor’s soul, some extra soulstone and ink. And the two books explaining the stamps she had created in deep complexity—the official one, and the true one. She tossed the official one into the hearth as she passed. Then she stopped in front of the door, counting heartbeats. She agonized, watching the Bloodsealer’s mark as it pulsed. Finally, after a few tormenting minutes, the seal on the door flashed one last time … then faded. The Bloodsealer had not returned in time to renew it. Freedom. Shai burst out into the hallway, abandoning her home of the last three months, a room now trimmed in gold and silver. The hallway outside had been so near, yet it felt like another country entirely. She pressed the third of her prepared stamps against her buttoned blouse, changing it to match that of the palace servants, with official insignia embroidered on the left breast. She had little time to make her next move. Soon, either the Bloodsealer would make his way to her room, Zu would wake from his fall, or the guards would arrive for the shift change. Shai wanted to run down the hallway, breaking for the palace stables. She did not. Running implied one of two things—guilt or an important task. Either would be memorable. Instead, she kept her gait to a swift walk and adopted the expression of one who knew what she was doing, and so should not be interrupted. She soon entered the better-used sections of the enormous palace. No one stopped her. At a certain carpeted intersection, she stopped herself. To the right, down a long hallway, lay the entrance to the emperor’s chambers. The seal she carried in her right hand, boxed and cushioned, seemed to leap in her fingers. Why hadn’t she left it in the room for Gaotona to discover? The arbiters would hunt her less assiduously if they had the seal. She could just leave it here, in this hallway lined with portraits of ancient rulers and cluttered with Forged urns from ancient eras. No. She had brought it with her for a reason. She’d prepared tools to get into the emperor’s chambers. She’d known all along this was what she would do. If she left now, she’d never truly know if the seal worked. That would be like building a house, then never stepping inside. Like forging a sword, and never giving it a swing. Like crafting a masterpiece of art, then locking it away to never be seen again. Shai started down the long hallway. As soon as no one was directly in sight, she turned over one of those horrid urns and broke the seal on the bottom. It transformed back into a blank clay version of itself. She’d had plenty of time to find out exactly where these urns were crafted and by whom. The fourth of her prepared stamps transformed the urn into a replica of an ornate golden chamber pot. Shai strode down the hallway to |
the emperor’s quarters, then nodded to the guards, chamber pot under her arm. “I don’t recognize you,” one guard said. She didn’t recognize him either, with that scarred face and squinty look. As she’d expected. The guards set to watching her had been kept separate from the others so they couldn’t talk about their duties. “Oh,” Shai said, fumbling, looking abashed. “I am sorry, greater one. I was only assigned this task this morning.” She blushed, fishing out of her pocket a small square of thick paper, marked with Gaotona’s seal and signature. She had forged both the old-fashioned way. Very convenient, how he’d let her tell him how to maintain security on the emperor’s rooms. She got through without any further difficulty. The next three rooms of the emperor’s expansive chambers were empty. Beyond them was a locked door. She had to Forge the wood of that door into some that had been damaged by insects—using the same stamp she’d used on her bed—to get through. It didn’t take for long, but a few seconds was enough for her to kick the door open. Inside, she found the emperor’s bedroom. It was the same place she’d been led on that first day when she’d been offered this chance. The room was empty save for him, lying in that bed. He was awake, but stared sightlessly at the ceiling. The room was still. Quiet. It smelled … too clean. Too white. Like a blank canvas. Shai walked up to the side of the bed. Ashravan didn’t look at her. His eyes didn’t move. She rested fingers on his shoulder. He had a handsome face, though he was some fifteen years her senior. That was not much for a Grand; they lived longer than most. His was a strong face, despite his long time abed. Golden hair, a firm chin, a nose that was prominent. So different in features from Shai’s people. “I know your soul,” Shai said softly. “I know it better than you ever did.” No alarm yet. Shai continued to expect one any moment, but she knelt down beside the bed anyway. “I wish that I could know you. Not your soul, but you. I’ve read about you; I’ve seen into your heart. I’ve rebuilt your soul, as best I could. But that isn’t the same. It isn’t knowing someone, is it? That’s knowing about someone.” Was that a cry outside, from a distant part of the palace? “I don’t ask much of you,” she said softly. “Just that you live. Just that you be. I’ve done what I can. Let it be enough.” She took a deep breath, then opened the box and took out his Essence Mark. She inked it, then pulled up his shirt, exposing the upper arm. Shai hesitated, then pressed the stamp down. It hit flesh, and stayed frozen for a moment, as stamps always did. The skin and muscle didn’t give way until a second later, when the stamp sank a fraction of an inch. She twisted the stamp, locking it in, and pulled |
it back. The bright red seal glowed faintly. Ashravan blinked. Shai rose and stepped back as he sat up and looked around. Silently, she counted. “My rooms,” Ashravan said. “What happened? There was an attack. I was … I was wounded. Oh, mother of lights. Kurshina. She’s dead.” His face became a mask of grief, but he covered it a second later. He was emperor. He might have a temper, but so long as he was not enraged, he was good at covering what he felt. He turned to her, and living eyes—eyes that saw—focused on her. “Who are you?” The question twisted her insides, for all the fact that she’d expected it. “I’m a kind of surgeon,” Shai said. “You were wounded badly. I have healed you. However, what I used to do so is considered … unsavory by some parts of your culture.” “You’re a resealer,” he said. “A … a Forger?” “In a way,” Shai said. He would believe that because he wanted to. “This was a difficult type of resealing. You will have to be stamped each day, and you must keep that metal plate—the one shaped like a disc in that box—with you at all times. Without these, you die, Ashravan.” “Give it to me,” he said, holding his hand out for the stamp. She hesitated. She wasn’t certain why. “Give it to me,” he said, more forceful. She placed the stamp in his hand. “Don’t tell anyone what has happened here,” she said to him. “Neither guards nor servants. Only your arbiters know of what I have done.” The cries outside sounded louder. Ashravan looked toward them. “If no one is to know,” he said, “you must go. Leave this place and do not return.” He looked down at the seal. “I should probably have you killed for knowing my secret.” That was the selfishness he’d learned during his years in the palace. Yes, she’d gotten that right. “But you won’t,” she said. “I won’t.” And there was the mercy, buried deeply. “Go before I change my mind,” he said. She took one step toward the doorway, then checked her pocket watch—well over a minute. The stamp had taken, at least for the short term. She turned and looked at him. “What are you waiting for?” he demanded. “I just wanted one more glimpse,” she said. He frowned. The shouts grew even louder. “Go,” he said. “Please.” He seemed to know what those shouts were about, or at least he could guess. “Do better this time,” Shai said. “Please.” With that, she fled. She had been tempted, for a time, to write into him a desire to protect her. There would have been no good reason for it, at least in his eyes, and it might have undermined the entire Forgery. Beyond that, she didn’t believe that he could save her. Until his period of mourning was through, he could not leave his quarters or speak to anyone other than his arbiters. During that time, the arbiters ran the empire. They practically ran it anyway. No, |
a hasty revision of Ashravan’s soul to protect her would not have worked. Near the last door out, Shai picked up her fake chamber pot. She hefted it, then stumbled through the doors. She gasped audibly at the distant cries. “Is that about me?” Shai cried. “Nights! I didn’t mean it! I know I wasn’t supposed to see him. I know he’s in seclusion, but I opened the wrong door!” The guards stared at her, then one relaxed. “It isn’t you. Find your quarters and stay there.” Shai bobbed a bow and hastened away. Most of the guards didn’t know her, and so— She felt a sharp pain at her side. She gasped. That pain felt like it did each morning, when the Bloodsealer stamped the door. Panicked, Shai felt at her side. The cut in her blouse—where Zu had slashed her with his sword—had gone all the way through her dark undershirt! When her fingers came back, they had a couple of drops of blood on them. Just a nick, nothing dangerous. In the scramble, she hadn’t even noticed she’d been cut. But the tip of Zu’s sword … it had her blood on it. Fresh blood. The Bloodsealer had found that and had begun the hunt. That pain meant he was locating her, was attuning his pets to her. Shai tossed the urn aside and started running. Staying hidden was no longer a consideration. Remaining unremarkable was pointless. If the Bloodsealer’s skeletals reached her, she’d die. That was it. She had to reach a horse soon, then stay ahead of the skeletals for twenty-four hours, until her blood grew stale. Shai dashed through the hallways. Servants began pointing, others screamed. She almost bowled over a southern ambassador in red priest’s armor. Shai cursed, bolting around the man. The palace exits would be locked down by now. She knew that. She’d studied the security. Getting out would be nearly impossible. Always have a backup, Uncle Won said. She always did. Shai stopped in the hallway, and determined—as she should have earlier—that running for the exits was pointless. She was in a near panic, with the Bloodsealer on her trail, but she had to think clearly. Backup plan. Hers was a desperate one, but it was all she had. She started running again, skidding around a corner, doubling back the way she’d just come. Nights, let me have guessed right about him, she thought. If he’s secretly a master charlatan beyond my skill, I am doomed. Oh, Unknown God, please. This time, let me be right. Heart racing, fatigue forgotten in the moment, she eventually skidded to a stop in the hallway leading to the emperor’s rooms. There she waited. The guards inspected her, frowning, but held their posts at the end of the hallway as they’d been trained. They called to her. It was hard to keep from moving. That Bloodsealer was getting closer and closer with his horrible pets … “Why are you here?” a voice said. Shai turned as Gaotona stepped into the hallway. He’d come for the emperor |
first. The others would search for Shai, but Gaotona would come for the emperor, to be certain he was safe. Shai stepped up to him, anxious. This, she thought, is probably my worst idea ever for a backup plan. “It worked,” she said softly. “You tried the stamp?” Gaotona said, taking her arm and glancing at the guards, then pulling her aside well out of earshot. “Of all the hasty, insane, foolish—” “It worked, Gaotona,” Shai said. “Why did you come to him? Why not run while you had the chance?” “I had to know. I had to.” He looked at her, meeting her eyes. Seeing through them, into her soul, as he always did. Nights, but he would have made a wonderful Forger. “The Bloodsealer has your trail,” Gaotona said. “He has summoned those … things to catch you.” “I know.” Gaotona hesitated for only a moment, then brought out a wooden box from his voluminous pockets. Shai’s heart leaped. He handed it toward her, and she took it with one hand, but he did not let go. “You knew I’d come here,” Gaotona said. “You knew I’d have these, and that I’d give them to you. I’ve been played for a fool.” Shai said nothing. “How did you do it?” he asked. “I thought I watched you carefully. I was certain I had not been manipulated. And yet I ran here, half knowing I’d find you. Knowing you’d need these. I still didn’t realize until this very moment that you’d probably planned all of this.” “I did manipulate you, Gaotona,” she admitted. “But I had to do it in the most difficult way possible.” “Which was?” “By being genuine,” she replied. “You can’t manipulate people by being genuine.” “You can’t?” Shai asked. “Is that not how you’ve made your entire career? Speaking honestly, teaching people what to expect of you, then expecting them to be honest to you in return?” “It’s not the same thing.” “No,” she said. “It’s not. But it was the best I could manage. Everything I’ve said to you is true, Gaotona. The painting I destroyed, the secrets about my life and desires … Being genuine. It was the only way to get you on my side.” “I’m not on your side.” He paused. “But I don’t want you killed either, girl. Particularly not by those things. Take these. Days! Take them and go, before I change my mind.” “Thank you,” she whispered, pulling the box to her breast. She fished in her skirt pocket and brought out a small, thick book. “Keep this safe,” she said. “Show it to no one.” He took it hesitantly. “What is it?” “The truth,” she said, then leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “If I escape, I will change my final Essence Mark. The one I never intend to use … I will add to it, and to my memories, a kindly grandfather who saved my life. A man of wisdom and compassion whom I respected very much.” “Go, fool girl,” he said. He actually had a |
tear in his eye. If she hadn’t been on the very edge of panic, she’d have felt proud of that. And ashamed of her pride. That was how she was. “Ashravan lives,” she said. “When you think of me, remember that. It worked. Nights, it worked!” She left him, dashing down the corridor. * * * Gaotona listened to the girl go, but did not turn to watch her flee. He stared at that door to the emperor’s chambers. Two confused guards, and a passage into … what? The future of the Rose Empire. We will be led by someone not truly alive, Gaotona thought. The fruits of our foul labors. He took a deep breath, then walked past the guards and pushed open the doors to go and look upon the thing he had wrought. Just … please, let it not be a monster. * * * Shai strode down the palace hallway, holding the box of seals. She ripped off her buttoned blouse—revealing the tight, black cotton shirt she wore underneath—and tucked it into her pocket. She left on her skirt and the leggings beneath. It wasn’t so different from the clothing she’d trained in. Servants scattered around her. They knew, just from her posture, to get out of the way. Suddenly, Shai felt more confident than she had in years. She had her soul back. All of it. She took out one of her Essence Marks as she walked. She inked it with bold strikes and returned the box of seals to her skirt pocket. Then, she slammed the seal against her right bicep and locked it into place, rewriting her history, her memories, her life experience. In that fraction of a moment, she remembered both histories. She remembered two years spent locked away, planning, creating the Essence Mark. She remembered a lifetime of being a Forger. At the same time, she remembered spending the last fifteen years among the Teullu people. They had adopted her and trained her in their martial arts. Two places at once, two timelines at once. Then the former faded, and she became Shaizan, the name the Teullu had given her. Her body became leaner, harder. The body of a warrior. She slipped off her spectacles. Her eyes had been healed long ago, and she didn’t need those any longer. Gaining access to the Teullu training had been difficult; they did not like outsiders. She’d nearly been killed by them a dozen different times during her year training. But she had succeeded. She lost all knowledge of how to create stamps, all sense of scholarly inclination. She was still herself, and she remembered her immediate past—being captured, forced to sit in that cell. She retained knowledge—logically—of what she’d just done with the stamp to her arm, and knew that the life she now remembered was fake. But she didn’t feel that it was. As that seal burned on her arm, she became the version of herself that would have existed if she’d been adopted by a harsh warrior culture and lived among them for |
well over a decade. She kicked off her shoes. Her hair shortened; a scar stretched from her nose down around her right cheek. She walked like a warrior, prowling instead of striding. She reached the servants’ section of the palace just before the stables, the Imperial Gallery to her left. A door opened in front of her. Zu, tall and wide-lipped, pushed through. He had a gash on his forehead—blood seeped through the bandage there—and his clothing had been torn by his fall. He had a tempest in his eyes. He sneered as he saw her. “You’ve done it now. The Bloodsealer led us right to you. I’m going to enjoy—” He cut off as Shaizan stepped forward in a blur and smacked the heel of her hand against his wrist, breaking it, knocking the sword from his fingers. She snapped her hand upward, chopping him in the throat. Then she curled her fingers into a fist and placed a tight, short, full-knuckled punch into his chest. Six ribs shattered. Zu stumbled backward, gasping, eyes wide with absolute shock. His sword clanged to the ground. Shaizan stepped past him, pulling his knife from his belt and whipping it up to cut the tie on his cloak. Zu toppled to the floor, leaving the cloak in her fingers. Shai might have said something to him. Shaizan didn’t have the patience for witticisms or gibes. A warrior kept moving, like a river. She didn’t break stride as she whipped the cloak around and entered the hallway behind Zu. He gasped for breath. He’d live, but he wouldn’t hold a sword again for months. Movement came from the end of the hallway: white-limbed creatures, too thin to be alive. Shaizan prepared herself with a wide stance, body turned to the side, facing down the hallway, knees slightly bent. It did not matter how many monstrosities the Bloodsealer had; it did not matter if she won or lost. The challenge mattered. That was all. There were five, in the shape of men with swords. They scrambled down the hall, bones clattering, eyeless skulls regarding her without expression beyond that of their ever-grinning, pointed teeth. Some bits of the skeletals had been replaced by wooden carvings to fix bones that had broken in battle. Each creature bore a glowing red seal on its forehead; blood was required to give them life. Even Shaizan had never fought monsters like this before. Stabbing them would be useless. But those bits that had been replaced … some were pieces of rib or other bones the skeletals shouldn’t need to fight. So if bones were broken or removed, would the creature stop working? It seemed her best chance. She did not consider further. Shaizan was a creature of instinct. As the things reached her, she whipped Zu’s cloak around and tossed it over the head of the first one. It thrashed, striking at the cloak as she engaged the second creature. She caught its attack on the blade of Zu’s dagger, then stepped up so close she could smell its bones, |
and reached in just below the thing’s rib cage. She grabbed the spine and yanked, pulling free a handful of vertebrae, the tip of the sternum cutting her forearm. All of the bones of each skeletal seemed to be sharpened. It collapsed, bones clattering. She was right. With the pivotal bones removed, the thing could no longer animate. Shaizan tossed the handful of vertebrae aside. That left four of them. From what little she knew, skeletals did not tire and were relentless. She had to be quick, or they would overwhelm her. The three behind attacked her; Shaizan ducked away, getting around the first one as it pulled off the cloak. She grabbed its skull by the eye sockets, earning a deep cut in the arm from its sword as she did so. Her blood sprayed against the wall as she yanked the skull free; the rest of the creature’s body dropped to the ground in a heap. Keep moving. Don’t slow. If she slowed, she died. She spun on the other three, using the skull to block one sword strike and the dagger to deflect another. She skirted around the third, and it scored her side. She could not feel pain. She’d trained herself to ignore it in battle. That was good, because that one would have hurt. She smashed the skull into the head of another skeletal, shattering both. It dropped, and Shaizan spun between the other two. Their backhand strikes clanged against one another. Shaizan’s kick sent one of them stumbling back, and she rammed her body against the other, crushing it up against the wall. The bones pushed together, and she got hold of the spine, then yanked free some of the vertebrae. The creature’s bones fell with a racket. Shaizan wavered as she righted herself. Too much blood lost. She was slowing. When had she dropped the dagger? It must have slipped from her fingers as she slammed the creature against the wall. Focus. One left. It charged her, a sword in each hand. She heaved herself forward—getting inside its reach before it could swing—and grabbed its forearm bones. She couldn’t pull them free, not from that angle. She grunted, keeping the swords at bay. Barely. She was weakening. It pressed closer. Shaizan growled, blood flowing freely from her arm and side. She head-butted the thing. That worked worse in real life than it did in stories. Shaizan’s vision dimmed and she slipped to her knees, gasping. The skeletal fell before her, cracked skull rolling free from the force of the blow. Blood dripped down the side of her face. She’d split her forehead, perhaps cracked her own skull. She fell to her side and fought for consciousness. Slowly, the darkness retreated. Shaizan found herself amid scattered bones in an otherwise empty hallway of stone. The only color was that of her blood. She had won. Another challenge met. She howled a chant of her adopted family, then retrieved her dagger and cut off pieces of her blouse. She used them to bind her wounds. The blood |
loss was bad. Even a woman with her training would not be meeting any further challenges today. Not if they required strength. She managed to rise and retrieve Zu’s cloak—still immobilized by pain, he watched her with amazed eyes. She gathered all five skulls of the Bloodsealer’s pets and tied them in the cloak. That done, she continued down the hallway, trying to project strength—not the fatigue, dizziness, and pain she actually felt. He will be here somewhere.… She yanked open a storage closet at the end of the hall and found the Bloodsealer on the floor inside, eyes glazed by the shock of having his pets destroyed in rapid succession. Shaizan grabbed the front of his shirt and hauled him to his feet. The move almost made her pass out again. Careful. The Bloodsealer whimpered. “Go back to your swamp,” Shaizan growled softly. “The one waiting for you doesn’t care that you’re in the capital, that you’re making so much money, that you’re doing it all for her. She wants you home. That’s why her letters are worded as they are.” Shaizan said that part for Shai, who would feel guilty if she did not. The man looked at her, confused. “How do you … Ahhrgh!” He said the last part as Shaizan rammed her dagger into his leg. He collapsed as she released his shirt. “That,” Shaizan said to him softly, leaning down, “is so that I have some of your blood. Do not hunt me. You saw what I did to your pets. I will do worse to you. I’m taking the skulls, so you cannot send them for me again. Go. Back. Home.” He nodded weakly. She left him in a heap, cowering and holding his bleeding leg. The arrival of the skeletals had driven everyone else away, including guards. Shaizan stalked toward the stables, then stopped, thinking of something. It wasn’t too far off … You’re nearly dead from these wounds, she told herself. Don’t be a fool. She decided to be a fool anyway. A short time later, Shaizan entered the stables and found only a couple of frightened stable hands there. She chose the most distinctive mount in the stables. So it was that—wearing Zu’s cloak and hunkered down on his horse—Shaizan was able to gallop out of the palace gates, and not a man or woman tried to stop her. * * * “Was she telling the truth, Gaotona?” Ashravan asked, regarding himself in the mirror. Gaotona looked up from where he sat. Was she? he thought to himself. He could never tell with Shai. Ashravan had insisted upon dressing himself, though he was obviously weak from his long stay in bed. Gaotona sat on a stool nearby, trying to sort through a deluge of emotions. “Gaotona?” Ashravan asked, turning to him. “I was wounded, as that woman said? You went to a Forger to heal me, rather than our trained resealers?” “Yes, Your Majesty.” The expressions, Gaotona thought. How did she get those right? The way he frowns just before asking a question? |
The way he cocks his head when not answered immediately. The way he stands, the way he waves his fingers when he’s saying something he thinks is particularly important … “A MaiPon Forger,” the emperor said, pulling on his golden coat. “I hardly think that was necessary.” “Your wounds were beyond the skill of our resealers.” “I thought nothing was beyond them.” “We did as well.” The emperor regarded the red seal on his arm. His expression tightened. “This will be a manacle, Gaotona. A weight.” “You will suffer it.” Ashravan turned toward him. “I see that the near death of your liege has not made you any more respectful, old man.” “I have been tired lately, Your Majesty.” “You’re judging me,” Ashravan said, looking back at the mirror. “You always do. Days alight! One day I will rid myself of you. You realize that, don’t you? It’s only because of past service that I even consider keeping you around.” It was uncanny. This was Ashravan; a Forgery so keen, so perfect, that Gaotona would never have guessed the truth if he hadn’t already known. He wanted to believe that the emperor’s soul had still been there, in his body, and that the seal had simply … uncovered it. That would be a convenient lie to tell himself. Perhaps Gaotona would start believing it eventually. Unfortunately, he had seen the emperor’s eyes before, and he knew … he knew what Shai had done. “I will go to the other arbiters, Your Majesty,” Gaotona said, standing. “They will wish to see you.” “Very well. You are dismissed.” Gaotona walked toward the door. “Gaotona.” He turned. “Three months in bed,” the emperor said, regarding himself in the mirror, “with no one allowed to see me. The resealers couldn’t do anything. They can fix any normal wound. It was something to do with my mind, wasn’t it?” He wasn’t supposed to figure that out, Gaotona thought. She said she wasn’t going to write it into him. But Ashravan had been a clever man. Beneath it all, he had always been clever. Shai had restored him, and she couldn’t keep him from thinking. “Yes, Your Majesty,” Gaotona said. Ashravan grunted. “You are fortunate your gambit worked. You could have ruined my ability to think—you could have sold my soul itself. I’m not sure if I should punish you or reward you for taking that risk.” “I assure you, Your Majesty,” Gaotona said as he left, “I have given myself both great rewards and great punishments during these last few months.” He left then, letting the emperor stare at himself in the mirror and consider the implications of what had been done. For better or worse, they had their emperor back. Or, at least, a copy of him. EPILOGUE: DAY ONE HUNDRED AND ONE “AND so I hope,” Ashravan said to the assembled arbiters of the eighty factions, “that I have laid to rest certain pernicious rumors. Exaggerations of my illness were, obviously, wishful fancy. We have yet to discover who sent the assassins, but the murder |
of the empress is not something that will go ignored.” He looked over the arbiters. “Nor will it go unanswered.” Frava folded her arms, watching the copy with satisfaction, but also displeasure. What back doors did you put into his mind, little thief? Frava wondered. We will find them. Nyen was already inspecting copies of the seals. The Forger claimed that he could retroactively decrypt them, though it would take time. Perhaps years. Still, Frava would eventually know how to control the emperor. Destroying the notes had been clever on the girl’s part. Had she guessed, somehow, that Frava wasn’t really making copies? Frava shook her head and stepped up beside Gaotona, who sat in their box of the Theater of Address. She sat down beside him, speaking very softly. “They are accepting it.” Gaotona nodded, his eyes on the fake emperor. “There isn’t even a whisper of suspicion. What we did … it was not only audacious, it would be presumed impossible.” “The girl could put a knife to our throats,” Frava said. “The proof of what we did is burned into the emperor’s own body. We will need to tread carefully in coming years.” Gaotona nodded, looking distracted. Days afire, how Frava wished she could get him removed from his station. He was the only one of the arbiters who ever took a stand against her. Just before his assassination, Ashravan had been ready to do it at her prompting. Those meetings had been private. Shai wouldn’t have known of them, so the fake would not either. Frava would have to begin the process again, unless she found a way to control this duplicate Ashravan. Both options frustrated her. “A part of me can’t believe that we actually did it,” Gaotona said softly as the fake emperor moved on to the next section of his speech, a call for unity. Frava sniffed. “The plan was sound all along.” “Shai escaped.” “She will be found.” “I doubt it,” he said. “We were lucky to catch her that once. Fortunately, I do not believe we have much to worry about from her.” “She’ll try to blackmail us,” Frava said. Or she’ll try to find a way to control the throne. “No,” Gaotona said. “No, she is satisfied.” “Satisfied with escaping alive?” “Satisfied with having placed one of her creations on the throne. Once, she dared to try to fool thousands—but now she has a chance to fool millions. An entire empire. Exposing what she has done would ruin the majesty of it, in her eyes.” Did the old fool really believe that? His naiveness often presented Frava with opportunities; she’d considered letting him keep his station simply for that reason. The fake emperor continued his speech. Ashravan had liked to hear himself speak. The Forger had gotten that right. “He’s using the assassination as a means of bolstering our faction,” Gaotona said. “You hear? The implications that we need to unify, pull together, remember our heritage of strength … And the rumors, the ones the Glory Faction spread regarding him being killed |
… by mentioning them, he weakens their faction. They gambled on him not returning, and now that he has, they seem foolish.” “True,” Frava said. “Did you put him up to that?” “No,” Gaotona said. “He refused to let me counsel him on his speech. This move, though, it feels like something the old Ashravan would have done, the Ashravan from a decade ago.” “The copy isn’t perfect, then,” Frava said. “We’ll have to remember that.” “Yes,” Gaotona said. He held something, a small, thick book that Frava didn’t recognize. A rustling came from the back of the box, and a servant of Frava’s Symbol entered, passing Arbiters Stivient and Ushnaka. The youthful messenger came to Frava’s side, then leaned down. Frava gave the girl a displeased glance. “What can be so important that you interrupt me here?” “I’m sorry, Your Grace,” the woman whispered. “But you asked me to arrange your palace offices for your afternoon meetings.” “Well?” Frava asked. “Did you enter the rooms yesterday, my lady?” “No. With the business of that rogue Bloodsealer, and the emperor’s demands, and…” Frava’s frown deepened. “What is it?” * * * Shai turned and looked back at the Imperial Seat. The city rolled across a group of seven large hills; a major faction house topped each of the outer six, with the palace dominating the central hill. The horse at her side looked little like the one she’d taken from the palace. It was missing teeth and walked with its head hanging low, back bowed. Its coat looked as if it hadn’t been brushed in ages, and the creature was so underfed, its ribs poked out like the slats on the back of a chair. Shai had spent the previous days lying low, using her beggar Essence Mark to hide in the Imperial Seat’s underground. With that disguise in place, and with one on the horse, she’d escaped the city with ease. She’d removed her Mark once out, however. Thinking like the beggar was … uncomfortable. Shai loosened the horse’s saddle, then reached under it and placed a fingernail against the glowing seal there. She snapped the seal’s rim with some effort, breaking the Forgery. The horse transformed immediately, back straightening, head rising, sides swelling. It danced uncertainly, head darting back and forth, tugging against the reins. Zu’s warhorse was a fine animal, worth more than a small house in some parts of the empire. Hidden among the supplies on his back was the painting that Shai had stolen, again, from Arbiter Frava’s office. A forgery. Shai had never had cause to steal one of her own works before. It felt … amusing. She’d left the large frame cut open with a single Reo rune carved in the center on the wall behind. It did not have a very pleasant meaning. She patted the horse on the neck. All things considered, this wasn’t a bad haul. A fine horse and a painting that, though fake, was so realistic that even its owner had thought it was the original. He’s giving his speech |
right now, Shai thought. I would like to have heard that. Her gem, her crowning work, wore the mantle of imperial power. That thrilled her, but the thrill had driven her onward. Even making him live again had not been the cause of her frantic work. No, in the end, she’d pushed herself so hard because she’d wanted to leave a few specific changes embedded within the soul. Perhaps those months of being genuine to Gaotona had changed her. Copy an image over and over on a stack of paper, Shai thought, and eventually the lower sheets will bear the same image, pressed down. Deep within. She turned, taking out the Essence Mark that would transform her into a survivalist and hunter. Frava would anticipate Shai using the roads, so she would instead make her way into the deep center of the nearby Sogdian Forest. Those depths would hide her well. In a few months, she would carefully proceed out of the province and continue on to her next task: tracking down the Imperial Fool, who had betrayed her. For now, she wanted to be far away from walls, palaces, and courtly lies. Shai hoisted herself into the horse’s saddle and bid farewell to both the Imperial Seat and the man who now ruled it. Live well, Ashravan, she thought. And make me proud. * * * Late that night, following the emperor’s speech, Gaotona sat by the familiar hearth in his personal study looking at the book that Shai had given him. And marveling. The book was a copy of the emperor’s soulstamp, in detail, with notes. Everything that Shai had done lay bare to him here. Frava would not find an exploit to control the emperor, because there wasn’t one. The emperor’s soul was complete, locked tight, and all his own. That wasn’t to say that he was exactly the same as he had been. I took some liberties, as you can see, Shai’s notes explained. I wanted to replicate his soul as precisely as possible. That was the task and the challenge. I did so. Then I took the soul a few steps farther, strengthening some memories, weakening others. I embedded deep within Ashravan triggers that will cause him to react in a specific way to the assassination and his recovery. This isn’t changing his soul. This isn’t making him a different person. It is merely nudging him toward a certain path, much as a con man on the street will strongly nudge his mark to pick a certain card. It is him. The him that could have been. Who knows? Perhaps it is the him that would have been. Gaotona would never have figured it out on his own, of course. His skill was faint in this area. Even if he’d been a master, he suspected he wouldn’t have spotted Shai’s work here. She explained in the book that her intention had been to be so subtle, so careful, that no one would be able to decipher her changes. One would have to know the emperor with extreme |
depth to even suspect what had happened. With the notes, Gaotona could see it. Ashravan’s near death would send him into a period of deep introspection. He would seek his journal, reading again and again the accounts of his youthful self. He would see what he had been, and would finally, truly seek to recover it. Shai indicated the transformation would be slow. Over a period of years, Ashravan would become the man that he’d once seemed destined to be. Tiny inclinations buried deep within the interactions of his seals would nudge him toward excellence instead of indulgence. He would start thinking of his legacy, as opposed to the next feast. He would remember his people, not his dinner appointments. He would finally push the factions for the changes that he, and many before him, had noticed needed to be made. In short, he would become a fighter. He would take that single—but so hard—step across the line from dreamer to doer. Gaotona could see it, in these pages. He found himself weeping. Not for the future or for the emperor. These were the tears of a man who saw before himself a masterpiece. True art was more than beauty; it was more than technique. It was not just imitation. It was boldness, it was contrast, it was subtlety. In this book, Gaotona found a rare work to rival that of the greatest painters, sculptors, and poets of any era. It was the greatest work of art he had ever witnessed. Gaotona held that book reverently for most of the night. It was the creation of months of fevered, intense artistic transcendence—forced by external pressure, but released like a breath held until the brink of collapse. Raw, yet polished. Reckless, but calculated. Awesome, yet unseen. So it had to remain. If anyone discovered what Shai had done, the emperor would fall. Indeed, the very empire might shake. No one could know that Ashravan’s decision to finally become a great leader had been set in motion by words etched into his soul by a blasphemer. As morning broke, Gaotona slowly—excruciatingly—stood up beside his hearth. He clutched the book, that matchless work of art, and held it out. Then he dropped it into the flames. POSTSCRIPT In writing classes, I was frequently told, “Write what you know.” It’s an adage writers often hear, and it left me confused. Write what I know? How do I do that? I’m writing fantasy. I can’t know what it’s like to use magic—for that matter, I can’t know what it’s like to be female, but I want to write from a variety of viewpoints. As I matured in skill, I began to see what this phrase meant. Though in this genre we write about the fantastic, the stories work best when there is solid grounding in our world. Magic works best for me when it aligns with scientific principles. Worldbuilding works best when it draws from sources in our world. Characters work best when they’re grounded in solid human emotion and experience. Being a writer, then, is as |
much about observation as it is imagination. I try to let new experiences inspire me. I’ve been lucky enough in this field that I am able to travel frequently. When I visit a new country, I try to let the culture, people, and experiences there shape themselves into a story. Once when I visited Taiwan, I was fortunate enough to visit the National Palace Museum, with my editor Sherry Wang and translator Lucie Tuan along to play tour guides. A person can’t take in thousands of years of Chinese history in a matter of a few hours, but we did our best. Fortunately, I had some grounding in Asian history and lore already. (I lived for two years in Korea as an LDS missionary, and I then minored in Korean during my university days.) Seeds of a story started to grow in my mind from this visit. What stood out most to me were the stamps. We sometimes call them “chops” in English, but I’ve always called them by their Korean name of tojang. In Mandarin, they’re called yìnjiàn. These intricately carved stone stamps are used as signatures in many different Asian cultures. During my visit to the museum, I noticed many of the familiar red stamps. Some were, of course, the stamps of the artists—but there were others. One piece of calligraphy was covered in them. Lucie and Sherry explained: Ancient Chinese scholars and nobility, if they liked a work of art, would sometimes stamp it with their stamp too. One emperor in particular loved to do this, and would take beautiful sculptures or pieces of jade—centuries old—and have his stamp and perhaps some lines of his poetry carved into them. What a fascinating mind-set. Imagine being a king, deciding that you particularly liked Michelangelo’s David, and so having your signature carved across the chest. That’s essentially what this was. The concept was so striking, I began playing with a stamp magic in my head. Soulstamps, capable of rewriting the nature of an object’s existence. I didn’t want to stray too close to Soulcasting from the Stormlight world, and so instead I used the inspiration of the museum—of history—to devise a magic that allowed rewriting an object’s past. The story grew from that starting place. As the magic aligned a great deal with a system I’d been developing for Sel, the world where Elantris takes place, I set the story there. (I also had based several cultures there on our-world Asian cultures, so it fit wonderfully.) You can’t always write what you know—not exactly what you know. You can, however, write what you see. POSTSCRIPT This short story has a rather interesting backstory. If we flash back to January 2006, we find me having been dating Emily (who would eventually become my wife) for about two months. On one of our dates, Emily told me something amazing. One of her eighth-grade students—a girl named Matisse—had done a book report on Elantris. Now, Matisse didn’t know that her teacher was dating me. She didn’t even know that Emily knew me. It was |
just a bizarre coincidence. This report she did was incredible. Instead of a simple write-up, she created a worldbook about Sel; it had sketches and bios of the characters, strips of Elantrian cloth stapled in as examples, and little pouches filled with materials from the book. Emily showed it to me, and it completely blew me away. Back then, I was still very new to being a published writer, and seeing the work that Matisse had put into her report was one of the most striking moments of my early career. I wanted to do something special as a thank-you for Matisse, who still didn’t know that her teacher was dating one of her favorite authors. I decided to write a little companion story to Elantris. In any novel, there are events you decide to leave out for pacing reasons. I knew what was going on inside the city of Elantris when the attack by the Dakhor came. In the back of my mind, I also knew that the children were saved and protected by Dashe and Ashe the seon. I didn’t want them to fall like the others; Karata had worked so hard to protect them, and letting the children not have to suffer through the slaughter at New Elantris was my gift to her. I decided to write a little story to deal with all of this. And because Matisse had inspired me, I decided that I would name a character after her. The Matisse in the story doesn’t act like the real Matisse. I didn’t know the real Matisse; I’d never met her. Now, though, I’ve met her a number of times—she comes to my signings on occasion. She even gave us the original Elantris book-report book as a wedding gift. Looking back at this story, I think it might be a tad on the sentimental side. I hope that it doesn’t come off as too melodramatic. (Read outside the context of the Elantris novel, I think that it might.) But for what the story is, I’m quite pleased with it. PROLOGUE GAOTONA ran his fingers across the thick canvas, inspecting one of the greatest works of art he had ever seen. Unfortunately, it was a lie. “The woman is a danger.” Hissed voices came from behind him. “What she does is an abomination.” Gaotona tipped the canvas toward the hearth’s orange-red light, squinting. In his old age, his eyes weren’t what they had once been. Such precision, he thought, inspecting the brushstrokes, feeling the layers of thick oils. Exactly like those in the original. He would never have spotted the mistakes on his own. A blossom slightly out of position. A moon that was just a sliver too low in the sky. It had taken their experts days of detailed inspection to find the errors. “She is one of the best Forgers alive.” The voices belonged to Gaotona’s fellow arbiters, the empire’s most important bureaucrats. “She has a reputation as wide as the empire. We need to execute her as an example.” “No.” Frava, leader of the arbiters, |
had a sharp, nasal voice. “She is a valuable tool. This woman can save us. We must use her.” Why? Gaotona thought again. Why would someone capable of this artistry, this majesty, turn to forgery? Why not create original paintings? Why not be a true artist? I must understand. “Yes,” Frava continued, “the woman is a thief, and she practices a horrid art. But I can control her, and with her talents we can fix this mess we have found ourselves in.” The others murmured worried objections. The woman they spoke of, Wan ShaiLu, was more than a simple con artist. So much more. She could change the nature of reality itself. That raised another question. Why would she bother learning to paint? Wasn’t ordinary art mundane compared to her mystical talents? So many questions. Gaotona looked up from his seat beside the hearth. The others stood in a conspiratorial clump around Frava’s desk, their long, colorful robes shimmering in the firelight. “I agree with Frava,” Gaotona said. The others glanced at him. Their scowls indicated they cared little for what he said, but their postures told a different tale. Their respect for him was buried deep, but it was remembered. “Send for the Forger,” Gaotona said, rising. “I would hear what she has to say. I suspect she will be more difficult to control than Frava claims, but we have no choice. We either use this woman’s skill, or we give up control of the empire.” The murmurs ceased. How many years had it been since Frava and Gaotona had agreed on anything at all, let alone on something so divisive as making use of the Forger? One by one, the other three arbiters nodded. “Let it be done,” Frava said softly. THE SCADRIAN SYSTEM THE inner system here is basically empty, save for the planet Scadrial, which is fortuitous—considering the vast changes the system has undergone because of the influence of its Shards. The remarkable thing about Scadrial is how well humankind has flourished on it, despite these repeated cataclysms. Surely other planets in the cosmere have seen worse disasters, but on none of them will you find a thriving, technologically advanced society as exists on Scadrial. Indeed, I am convinced that without the Lord Ruler’s oppression of technology on the planet for a thousand years, Scadrial would have eclipsed all others in scientific learning and progress—all on its own, without the interaction between societies we enjoy in Silverlight. Scadrial, another dishardic planet, is characterized by a host of unique features. It is one of only two places in the cosmere where humankind does not predate the arrival of Shards. Indeed, I am convinced from my studies that the planet itself did not exist before its Shards, Ruin and Preservation, arrived in the system. They picked a star with no relevant planets in orbit, specifically choosing this location because it was empty, so they could place there whatever they wished. Yes, the Shards undoubtedly used humans from Yolen as a model (indeed, both of the Vessels for these Shards were |
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