Mistborn: The Hero of Ages (44 page)

The other Allomancer stayed ahead of her. There was no playfulness to his motions, as there had been with Zane. This man was really trying to escape. Vin followed, now leaping over rooftops and streets. She gritted her teeth, frustrated at her inability to catch up. She timed each jump perf ectly, barely pausing as she chose new anchors and Pushed herself from arc to arc .

Yet, he was good. He rounded the city, forcing her to push herself to keep up.
Fine
! she f inally thought, then prepared her duralumin. She'd gotten close enough to the figure that he was no longer shadowed in mist, and she could see that he was real and corporeal, not some phantom spirit. She was incre asingly certain that this was the man she'd sensed watching her when she'd f irst come into Fadrex. Yomen had a Mistborn.

However, to f ight the man, she'd f irst need to catch him. She waited for the right moment, just when he was beginning to crest one of his arcing j umps, then extinguished her metals and burned duralumin. Then she Pushed.

A crash sounded behind her as her unnatural Push shattered the door she'd used as an anchor. She was thrown forward with a terrible burst of speed, like an arrow released from a bow. She approached her opponent with awesome speed.

And found nothing. Vin cursed, turning her tin back on. She couldn't leave it on while burning duralumin otherwise, her tin would burn away in a single flash, leaving her blinded. But, she'd effectively done the same thing by turning it off. She Pulled herself down from her duralumin Push to land maladroitly atop a nearby roof. She crouched as she scanned the misty air. Where did you go? she thought, burning bronze, trusting in her innate yet still unexplained ability to pierce copperclouds to reveal her opponent. No Allomancer could hide from Vin unless he completely turned off his metals.

Which, apparently this man had done. Again. This was the second time he'd eluded her. It bespoke a disquieting possibility. Vin had tried very hard to keep her ability to pierce copperclouds a secret, but it had been nearly four years since her discovery of it. Zane had known about it, and she couldn't know who else had guessed, based on things she could do. Her secret could very well be out . Vin remained on that roof top for a f ew moments, but knew she'd find nothing. A man clever enough to escape her at the exact moment when her tin was down would also be clever enough to remain hidden until she was gone. In fact, it made her wonder why he had let her see him in the first . . . Vin stood bolt upright, then downed a metal vial and Pushed herself off the rooftop, j umping with a furious anxiety back toward the camp.

She found the soldiers cleaning up the wreckage and bodies at the camp's perimeter. Elend was moving among them calling out orders, congratulating the men, and generally letting himself be seen. Indeed, sight of his white-clothed form immediately brought Vin a sense of relief. She landed beside him. "Elend, were you attacked?"

He glanced at her. "What? Me? No, I'm fine ."

Then the Allomancer wasn 't sent to distract me f rom an attack on Elend,
she thought, frowning. It had seemed so obvious. It

Elend pulled her aside, looking worried. "
I'm
fine, Vin, but there's something else something's happened."

"What?" Vin asked.

Elend shook his head. "I think this all was j ust a distraction the entire attack on the camp."

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"But, if they weren't after you," Vin said, "and they weren't af ter our supplies, then what was there to distract us from? "

Elend met her eyes . "The koloss."

"How did we miss
this
?" Vin asked, sounding frustrated.

Elend stood with a troop of soldiers on a plateau, waiting as Vin and Ham inspected the burned siege equipment. Down below, he could see Fadrex City, and his own army camped outside it. The mists had retreated a short time ago. It was disturbing that from this distance he couldn't even make out the canal the falling ash had darkened its waters and covered the landscape to the point that everything just looked black.

At the base of the plateau's clif fs lay the remnants of their koloss army. Twenty thousand had become ten thousand in a few brief moments as a well-laid trap had rained down destruction on the be asts while Elend's troops were distracted. The daymists had kept his men from seeing what was going on until it was too late. Elend himself had f elt the deaths, but had misinterpreted them as koloss sensing the battle.

"Caves in the back of those cliffs," Ham said, poking at a bit of charred wood. "Yomen probably had the trebuchets stored in the caves in anticipation of our arrival, though I'd guess they were originally being built for an assault on Luthadel. Either way, this plateau was a perfect staging area for a barrage. I'd say Yomen set them up here intending to attack our army, but when we camped the koloss just beneath the plateau . . ."

Elend could still hear the screams in his head the koloss, full of bloodlust and frothing to f ight, yet unable to attack their enemies, which were high atop the plateau. The falling rocks had done a lot of damage. And then the creatures had slipped away from him. Their frustration had been too powerful, and for a time, he hadn't been able to keep them from turning on each other. Most of the deaths had come as the koloss attacked each other. Roughly one of every two had died as they had paired off and killed each other.

I lost control of them, he thought. It had only been for a short while, and it had only happened because they hadn't been able to get at their enemies. However, it set a dangerous precedent. Vin, frustrated, kicked a large chunk of burned wood, sending it tumbling down the side of the plateau.

"This was a
ver y
well-planned attack, El," Ham said, speaking in a soft voice. "Yomen must have seen us sending out extra patrols in the mornings, and correctly guessed that we were expecting an attack during those hours. So, he gave us one then hit us where we should have been the strongest."

"It cost him a lot, though," Elend said. "He had to burn his own siege equipment to keep it away from us, and he has to have lost hundreds of soldiers plus their mounts in the attack on our camp."

"True," Ham said. "But would you trade a couple dozen siege weapons and f ive hundred men for ten thousand koloss ? Plus, Yomen has to be worried about keeping that cavalry mobile the Survivor only knows where he got enough grain to feed those horses as long as he did. Better for him to strike now and lose them in battle than to have them starve."

Elend nodded slowly.
This makes things more di ff icult. With ten thousand fewer koloss . . .
Suddenly, the forces were much more evenly matched. Elend could maintain his siege, but storming the city would be far more risky.

He sighed. "We shouldn't have left the koloss so far outside of the main camp. We'll have to move them in."

Ham didn't seem to like that.

"They're not dangerous," Elend said. " Vin and I can control them."
Mostl y.
Ham shrugged. He moved back through the smoking wreckage, preparing to send messengers. Elend walked forward, approaching Vin, who stood at the very edge of the cliff. Being up so high still made him a bit uncomfortable. Yet, she barely even noticed the sheer drop in front of her.

"I should have been able to help you regain control of them," she said quietly, staring out into the distance. "Yomen distracted me."

"He distracted us all," Elend said. "I felt the koloss in my head, but even so, I couldn't figure out what was going on. I'd regained control of them by the time you got back, but by then, a lot of them were dead."

"Yomen has a Mistborn," Vin said.

"You're sure ?"

Vin nodded.

One more thing, he thought. He contained his frustration, however. His men needed to see him confident. "I'm giving a thousand of the koloss to you," he said. "We should have split them up earlier."

"You're stronger," Vin said.

"Not strong enough, apparently."

Vin sighed, then nodded. "Let me go down below." They'd found that proximity helped with taking control of koloss.

"I'll pull off a section of a thousand or so, then let go. Be ready to grab them as soon as I do." Vin nodded, then stepped off the side of the plateau.

I should have realized that I was getting caught up in the excitement of the f ighting,
Vin thought as she fell through the air. It seemed so obvious to her now. And, unfortunately, the results of the attack lef t her feeling even more pent-up and anxious than she had before.

She tossed a coin and landed. Even a drop of several hundred feet didn't bother her anymore. It was odd to think about. She remembered timidly standing atop the Luthadel city wall, af raid to use her Allomancy to jump off, despite Kelsier's coaxing. Now she could step off a cliff and muse thoughtfully to herself on the way down. She walked across the powdery ground. The ash came up to the top of her calves and would have been dif f icult to walk in without pewter to give her strength. The ashfalls were growing increasingly dense.

Human approached her almost immediately. She couldn't tell if the koloss was simply reacting to their bond, or if he was actually aware and interested enough to pick her out. He had a new wound on his arm, a result of the fighting. He fell into step beside her as she moved up to the other koloss, his massive form obviously having no trouble with the deep ash.

As usual, there was very little emotion to the koloss camp. Just a short time before, they had been screaming in bloodlust, attacking each other as stones crashed down from above. Now they simply sat in the ash, gathered in small groups, ignoring their wounds. They would have had fires going if there had been wood available. Some few dug, finding handfuls of dirt to chew on.

"Don't your people care, Human?" Vin asked.

The massive koloss looked down at her, ripped face bleeding slightly. "Care?"

"That so many of you died," Vin said. She could see corpses lying about, forgotten in the ash save for the ritual f laying that was the koloss form of burial. Several koloss still worked, moving between bodies, ripping off the skin.

"We take care of them," Human said.

"Yes," Vin said. "You pull their skin off. Why do you do that, anyw ay?"

"They are dead," Human said, as if that were enough of an explanation. To the side, a large group of koloss stood up, commanded by Elend's silent orders . They separated themselves from the main camp, trudging out into the ash. A moment later, they began to look around, no longer moving as one.

Vin reacted quickly. She turned off her metals, burned duralumin, then flared zinc in a massive Pull, Rioting the koloss emotions. As expected, they snapped under her control, j ust as Human was. Controlling this many was more dif ficult, but still well within her abilities. Vin ordered them to be calm, and to not kill, then let them return to the camp. From now on, they would remain in the back of her mind, no longer requiring Allomancy to manipulate . They were easy to ignore unless their passions grew strong. Human watched them. "We are . . . f ewer," he finally said. Vin started. "Yes," she said. "You can tell that?"

"I . . ." Human trailed off, beady little eyes watching his camp. "We fought. We died. We need more. We have too many swords." He pointed in the distance, to a large pile of metal. Wedge-shaped koloss swords that no longer had owners.

You can control a koloss population through the swords, Elend had once told her.
They f ight to get
bigger swords as they grow. Extra swords go to the younger, smaller koloss.
But nobody knows where those come f rom.

"You need koloss to use those swords, Human," Vin said.

Human nodded.

"Well," she said. " You'll need to have more children, then."

"Children?"

"More," Vin said. "More kolos s."

"You need to give us more," Human said, looking at her.

"Me?"

"You fought," he said, pointing at her shirt. There was blood there, not her own.

"Yes, I did," Vin said.

"Give us more."

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"I don't understand," Vin said. "Please, just show me."

"I can't, " Human said, shaking his head as he spoke in his slow tone. "It's not right."

"Wait," Vin said. "Not right?" It was the first real statement of values she'd gotten from a koloss . Human looked at her, and she could see consternation on his face. So, Vin gave him an Allomantic nudge. She didn't know exactly what to ask him to do, and that made her control of him weaker. Yet, she Pushed him to do as he was thinking, trusting for some reason that his mind was f ighting with his instincts . He screamed.

Vin backed away, shocked, but Human didn't attack her. He ran into the koloss camp, a massive blue monster on two legs, kicking up ash. Others backed away from him not out of f ear, for they wore their characteristic impassive faces. They simply appeared to have enough sense to stay out of the way of an enraged koloss of Human's size.

Vin followed carefully as Human approached one of the dead bodies of a koloss who still wore his skin. Human didn't rip the skin off, however, but flung the corpse over his shoulder and took of f running toward Elend's camp .

Uh, oh,
Vin thought, dropping a coin and taking to the air. She bounded af ter Human, careful not to outpace him. She considered ordering him back, but did not. He was acting unusually, true, but that was a good thing. Koloss generally didn't do anything unusual. They were predictable to a fault. She landed at the camp's guard post and waved the soldiers back. Human continued on, barreling into the camp, startling soldiers. Vin stayed with him, keeping the soldiers away. Human paused in the middle of camp, a bit of his passion wearing off. Vin nudged him again. After looking about, Human took off toward the broken section of camp, where Yomen's soldiers had attacked.

Vin followed, growing more and more curious. Human hadn't taken out his sword. Indeed, he didn't seem angry at all, just . . . intense. He arrived at a section where tents had fallen and men had died. The battle was still only a few hours old, and soldiers moved about, cleaning up. Triage tents had been set up j ust beside the battlefield. Human headed for those.