Mistborn: The Hero of Ages (85 page)

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. Finall y, 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.

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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 A llomancy. She was simply the onl y child Ruin could f ind
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 hersel f Mistborn. That was precisely the combination
Ruin needed.

There were other reasons, of course. But even Ruin didn't know them.

74

DAY BROKE WITH NO MIST S.

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 of ten 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 importantl
y, 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, af ter all, a scholar, and not a warrior.

Like me, Elend thought, smiling wryly.

"The mists are gone," Yomen said.

Elend nodded. "B oth 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 b ack 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 f elt like noon.

Something is still wrong, he thought. V er y 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 alwa ys 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 hal f 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."

A tium 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.

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Each Hemalurgic spike driven through a person's body gave Ruin some small ability to inf luence
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 kee ping
and wearing a simple earring
.

75

SAZED GATHERED HIS NO TES,
carefully stacking the thin sheets of metal. Though the metal served an important function in keeping Ruin f rom modif ying 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 identif ied themselves by gender each was definitely a "he" or a "she." S o, 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 f ocus 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 f rom 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 f ool. 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 followe d?

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 belief s. Surely they w ould have seen the f laws and inconsistencies if they'd j ust 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 f ind. 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 f ind 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 f rom disease, a fortunate business deal, a chance meeting with a long lost f riend. 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 f eelings 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 wa ys. I simpl y have to decide
.

Which would it be? He sat for a few moments, thinking, feeling, and most important remembering. I sought hel p, Sazed thought. And something answered .