The Final Empire

by Brandon Sanderson

  “Help!” she said, continuing to Push desperately, lest she fall. The mists below her shifted and spun, like some dark ocean of damned souls.

  “You don’t have to worry too much,” Kelsier said. “It’s easier to balance in the air if you have a tripod of anchors, but you can do fine with a single anchor. Your body is used to balancing itself. Part of what you’ve been doing since you learned to walk transfers to Allomancy. As long as you stay still, hanging at the very edge of your Pushing ability, you’ll be pretty stable—your mind and body will correct any slight deviations from the base center of your anchor below, keeping you from falling to the sides.

  “If you were to Push on something else, or move too much to one side, though…well, you’d lose your anchor below, and wouldn’t be pushing directly up anymore. Then you’d have problems—you’d tip over like a lead weight on the top of a very tall pole.”

  “Kelsier…” Vin said.

  “I hope you aren’t afraid of heights, Vin,” Kelsier said. “That’s quite a disadvantage for a Mistborn.”

  “I’m…not…afraid…of…heights,” Vin said through gritted teeth. “But I’m also not accustomed to hanging in the air a hundred feet above the bloody street!”

  Kelsier chuckled, but Vin felt a force tug against her belt, pulling her through the air toward him. He grabbed her and pulled her up over the stone railing, then set her down beside him. He reached an arm over the side of the wall. A second later, the ingot shot up through the air, scraping along the side of the wall, until it flipped into his waiting hand.

  “Good job,” he said. “Now we go back down.” He tossed the ingot over his shoulder, casting it into the dark mists on the other side of the wall.

  “We’re really going outside?” Vin asked. “Outside the city walls? At night?”

  Kelsier smiled in that infuriating way of his. He walked over and climbed onto the battlements. “Varying the strength with which you Push or Pull is difficult, but possible. It’s better to just fall a bit, then Push to slow yourself. Let go and fall some more, then Push again. If you get the rhythm right, you’ll reach the ground just fine.”

  “Kelsier,” Vin said, approaching the wall. “I don’t…”

  “You’re at the top of the city wall now, Vin,” he said, stepping out into the air. He hung, hovering, balanced as he’d explained to her before. “There are only two ways down. Either you jump off, or you try and explain to that guard patrol why a Mistborn needs to use their stairwell.”

  Vin turned with concern, noting an approaching bob of lanternlight in the dark mists.

  She turned back to Kelsier, but he was gone. She cursed, bending over the side of the wall and looking down into the mists. She could hear the guards behind her, speaking softly to one another as they walked along the wall.

  Kelsier was right: She didn’t have many options. Angry, she climbed up onto the battlement. She wasn’t afraid of heights in particular, but who wouldn’t be apprehensive, standing atop the wall, looking down at her doom? Vin’s heart fluttered, her stomach twisting.

  I hope Kelsier’s out of the way, she thought, checking the blue line to make certain she was above the ingot. Then, she stepped off.

  She immediately began to plummet toward the ground. She Pushed reflexively with her steel, but her trajectory was off; she had fallen to the side of the ingot, not directly toward it. Consequently, her Push nudged her to the side even farther, and she began to tumble through the air.

  Alarmed, she Pushed again—harder this time, flaring her steel. The sudden effort launched her back upward. She arced sideways through the air, popping up into the air alongside the walltop. The passing guards spun with surprise, but their faces soon became indistinct as Vin fell back down toward the ground.

  Mind muddled by terror, she reflexively reached out and Pulled against the ingot, trying to yank herself toward it. And, of course, it obediently shot up toward her.

  I’m dead.

  Then her body lurched, pulled upward by the belt. Her descent slowed until she was drifting quietly through the air. Kelsier appeared in the mists, standing on the ground beneath her; he was—of course—smiling.

  He let her drop the last few feet, catching her, then setting her upright on the soft earth. She stood quivering for a moment, breathing in terse, anxious breaths.

  “Well, that was fun,” Kelsier said lightly.

  Vin didn’t respond.

  Kelsier sat down on a nearby rock, obviously giving her time to gather her wits. Eventually, she burned pewter, using the sensation of solidness it provided to steady her nerves.

  “You did well,” Kelsier said.

  “I nearly died.”

  “Everybody does, their first time,” Kelsier said. “Ironpulling and Steelpushing are dangerous skills. You can impale yourself with a bit of metal that you Pull into your own body, you can jump and leave your anchor too far behind, or you can make a dozen other mistakes.

  “My experience—limited though it is—has been that it’s better to get into those extreme circumstances early, when someone can watch over you. Anyway, I assume you can understand why it’s important for an Allomancer to carry as little metal on their body as possible.”

  Vin nodded, then paused, reaching up to her ear. “My earring,” she said. “I’ll have to stop wearing it.”

  “Does it have a clip on the back?” Kelsier asked.

  Vin shook her head. “It’s just a small stud, and the pin on the back bends down.”

  “Then you’ll be all right,” Kelsier said. “Metal in your body—even if only a bit of it is in your body—can’t be Pushed or Pulled. Otherwise another Allomancer could rip the metals out of your stomach while you were burning them.”

  Good to know, Vin thought.

  “It’s also why those Inquisitors can walk around so confidently with a pair of steel spikes sticking out of their heads. The metal pierces their bodies, so it can’t be affected by another Allomancer. Keep the earring—it’s small, so you won’t be able to do much with it, but you could use it as a weapon in an emergency.”

  “All right.”

  “Now, you ready to go?”

  She looked up at the wall, preparing to jump again, then nodded.

  “We’re not going back up,” Kelsier said. “Come on.”

  Vin frowned as Kelsier began to walk out into the mists. So, does he have a destination after all—or has he just decided to wander some more? Oddly, his affable nonchalance made him very difficult to read.

  Vin hurried to keep up, not wanting to be left alone in the mists. The landscape around Luthadel was barren save for scrub and weeds. Prickles and dried leaves—both dusted with ash from an earlier ashfall—rubbed against her legs as they walked. The underbrush crunched as they walked, quiet and a bit sodden with mist dew.

  Occasionally, they passed heaps of ash that had been carted out of the city. Most of the time, however, ash was thrown into the River Channerel, which passed through the city. Water broke it down eventually—or, at least, that was what Vin assumed. Otherwise the entire continent would have been buried long ago.

  Vin stayed close to Kelsier as they walked. Though she had traveled outside cities before, she had always moved as part of a group of boatmen—the skaa workers who ran narrowboats and barges up and down the many canal routes in the Final Empire. It had been hard work—most noblemen used skaa instead of horses to pull the boats along the towpath—but there had been a certain freedom to knowing that she was traveling at all, for most skaa, even skaa thieves, never left their plantation or town.

  The constant movement from city to city had been Reen’s choice; he had been obsessive about never getting locked down. He usually got them places on canal boats run by underground crews, never staying in one place for more than a year. He had kept moving, always going. As if running from something.

  They continued to walk. At night, even the barren hills and scrub-covered plains took on a forbidding air. Vin didn’t speak, though she tried to m
ake as little noise as possible. She had heard tales of what went abroad in the land at night, and the cover of the mists—even pierced by tin as it now was—made her feel as if she were being watched.

  The sensation grew more unnerving as they traveled. Soon, she began to hear noises in the darkness. They were muffled and faint—crackles of weeds, shuffles in the echoing mist.

  You’re just being paranoid! she told herself as she jumped at some half-imagined sound. Eventually, however, she could stand it no more.

  “Kelsier!” she said with an urgent whisper—one that sounded betrayingly loud to her enhanced ears. “I think there’s something out there.”

  “Hum?” Kelsier asked. He looked lost in his thoughts.

  “I think something is following us!”

  “Oh,” Kelsier said. “Yes, you’re right. It’s a mistwraith.”

  Vin stopped dead in her tracks. Kelsier, however, kept going.

  “Kelsier!” she said, causing him to pause. “You mean they’re real?”

  “Of course they are,” Kelsier said. “Where do you think all the stories came from?”

  Vin stood in dumbfounded shock.

  “You want to go look at it?” Kelsier asked.

  “Look at the mistwraith?” Vin asked. “Are you—” She stopped.

  Kelsier chuckled, strolling back to her. “Mistwraiths might be a bit disturbing to look at, but they’re relatively harmless. They’re scavengers, mostly. Come on.”

  He began to retrace their footsteps, waving her to follow. Reluctant—but morbidly curious—Vin followed. Kelsier walked at a brisk pace, leading her to the top of a relatively scrub-free hill. He crouched down, motioning for Vin to do likewise.

  “Their hearing isn’t very good,” he said as she knelt in the rough, ashen dirt beside him. “But their sense of smell—or, rather, taste—is quite acute. It’s probably following our trail, hoping that we’ll discard something edible.”

  Vin squinted in the darkness. “I can’t see it,” she said, searching the mists for a shadowed figure.

  “There,” Kelsier said, pointing toward a squat hill.

  Vin frowned, imagining a creature crouching atop the hill, watching her as she looked for it.

  Then the hill moved.

  Vin jumped slightly. The dark mound—perhaps ten feet tall and twice as long—lurched forward in a strange, shuffling gait, and Vin leaned forward, trying to get a better look.

  “Flare your tin,” Kelsier suggested.

  Vin nodded, calling upon a burst of extra Allomantic power. Everything immediately became lighter, the mists becoming even less of an obstruction.

  What she saw caused her to shiver—fascinated, revolted, and more than a little disturbed. The creature had smoky, translucent skin, and Vin could see its bones. It had dozens upon dozens of limbs, and each one looked as if it had come from a different animal. There were human hands, bovine hooves, canine haunches, and others she couldn’t identify.

  The mismatched limbs let the creature walk—though it was more of a shamble. It crawled along slowly, moving like an awkward centipede. Many of the limbs, in fact, didn’t even look functional—they jutted from the creature’s flesh in a twisted, unnatural fashion.

  Its body was bulbous and elongated. It wasn’t just a blob, though…there was a strange logic to its form. It had a distinct skeletal structure, and—squinting through tin-enhanced eyes—she thought she could make out translucent muscles and sinew wrapping the bones. The creature flexed odd jumbles of muscles as it moved, and appeared to have a dozen different ribcages. Along the main body, arms and legs hung at unnerving angles.

  And heads—she counted six. Despite the translucent skin, she could make out a horse head sitting beside that of a deer. Another head turned toward her, and she could see its human skull. The head sat atop a long spinal cord attached to some kind of animal torso, which was in turn attached to a jumble of strange bones.

  Vin nearly retched. “What…? How…?”

  “Mistwraiths have malleable bodies,” Kelsier said. “They can shape their skin around any skeletal structure, and can even re-create muscles and organs if they have a model to mimic.”

  “You mean…?”

  Kelsier nodded. “When they find a corpse, they envelop it and slowly digest the muscles and organs. Then, they use what they’ve eaten as a pattern, creating an exact duplicate of the dead creature. They rearrange the parts a little bit—excreting the bones they don’t want, while adding the ones they do want to their body—forming a jumble like what you see out there.”

  Vin watched the creature shamble across the field, following her tracks. A flap of slimy skin drooped from its underbelly, trailing along the ground. Tasting for scents, Vin thought. Following the smell of our passing. She let her tin return to normal, and the mistwraith once again became a shadowed mound. The silhouette, however, only seemed to heighten its abnormality.

  “Are they intelligent, then?” Vin asked. “If they can split up a…body and put the pieces where they want?”

  “Intelligent?” Kelsier asked. “No, not one this young. More instinctual than intelligent.”

  Vin shivered again. “Do people know about these things? I mean, other than the legends?”

  “What do you mean by ‘people’?” Kelsier asked. “A lot of Allomancers know about them, and I’m sure the Ministry does. Regular people…well, they just don’t go out at night. Most skaa fear and curse mistwraiths, but go their entire lives without actually seeing one.”

  “Lucky for them,” Vin muttered. “Why doesn’t someone do something about these things?”

  Kelsier shrugged. “They’re not that dangerous.”

  “That one has a human head!”

  “It probably found a corpse,” Kelsier said. “I’ve never heard of a mistwraith attacking a full-grown, healthy adult. That’s probably why everyone leaves them alone. And, of course, the high nobility have devised their own uses for the creatures.”

  Vin looked at him questioningly, but he said no more, rising and walking down the hillside. She shot one more glance at the unnatural creature, then took off, following Kelsier.

  “Is that what you brought me out here to see?” Vin asked.

  Kelsier chuckled. “Mistwraiths might look eerie, but they’re hardly worth such a long trip. No, we’re heading over there.”

  She followed his gesture, and was able to make out a change in the landscape ahead. “The imperial highroad? We’ve circled around to the front of the city.”

  Kelsier nodded. After a short walk—during which Vin glanced backward no less than three times to make certain the mistwraith hadn’t gained on them—they left the scrub and stepped onto the flat, packed earth of the imperial highroad. Kelsier paused, scanning the road in either direction. Vin frowned, wondering what he was doing.

  Then she saw the carriage. It was parked by the side of the highroad, and Vin could see that there was a man waiting beside it.

  “Ho, Sazed,” Kelsier said, walking forward.

  The man bowed. “Master Kelsier,” he said, his smooth voice carrying well in the night air. It had a higher pitch to it, and he spoke with an almost melodic accent. “I almost thought that you had decided not to come.”

  “You know me, Saze,” Kelsier said, jovially slapping the man on the shoulder. “I’m the soul of punctuality.” He turned and waved a hand toward Vin. “This apprehensive little creature is Vin.”

  “Ah, yes,” Sazed said, speaking in a slow, well-enunciated way. There was something strange about his accent. Vin approached cautiously, studying the man. Sazed had a long, flat face and a willowy body. He was even taller than Kelsier—tall enough to be a bit abnormal—and his arms were unusually long.

  “You’re a Terrisman,” Vin said. His earlobes had been stretched out, and the ears themselves contained studs that ran around their perimeter. He wore the lavish, colorful robes of a Terris steward—the garments were made of embroidered, overlapping V shapes, alternating among the three co
lors of his master’s house.

  “Yes, child,” Sazed said, bowing. “Have you known many of my people?”

  “None,” Vin said. “But I know that the high nobility prefer Terrismen stewards and attendants.”

  “Indeed they do, child,” Sazed said. He turned to Kelsier. “We should go, Master Kelsier. It is late, and we are still an hour away from Fellise.”

  Fellise, Vin thought. So, we’re going to see the impostor Lord Renoux.

  Sazed opened the carriage door for them, then closed it after they climbed in. Vin settled on one of the plush seats as she heard Sazed climb atop the vehicle and set the horses in motion.

  Kelsier sat quietly in the carriage. The window shades were closed against the mist, and a small lantern, half shielded, hung in the corner. Vin rode on the seat directly across from him—her legs tucked up underneath her, her enveloping mistcloak pulled close, hiding her arms and legs.

  She always does that, Kelsier thought. Wherever she is, she tries to be as small and unnoticeable as possible. So tense. Vin didn’t sit, she crouched. She didn’t walk, she prowled. Even when she was sitting in the open, she seemed to be trying to hide.

  She’s a brave one, though. During his own training, Kelsier hadn’t been quite so willing to throw himself off of a city wall—old Gemmel had been forced to push him.

  Vin watched him with those quiet, dark eyes of hers. When she noticed his attention, she glanced away, huddling down a little more within her cloak. Unexpectedly, however, she spoke.

  “Your brother,” she said in her soft near-whisper of a voice. “You two don’t get along very well.”

  Kelsier raised an eyebrow. “No. We never have, really. It’s a shame. We should, but we just…don’t.”

  “He’s older than you?”

  Kelsier nodded.

  “Did he beat you often?” Vin asked.

  Kelsier frowned. “Beat me? No, he didn’t beat me at all.”

  “You stopped him, then?” Vin said. “Maybe that’s why he doesn’t like you. How did you escape? Did you run, or were you just stronger than him?”