Suddenly urgent, Sazed pulled out a small ring—a scent tinmind—and slipped it on his thumb. The smell on the wind, it didn’t seem like that of a slaughter. It was a mustier, dirtier smell. A smell not only of death, but of corruption, unwashed bodies, and waste. He reversed the use of the tinmind, filling it instead of tapping it, and his ability to smell grew very weak—keeping him from gagging.
He continued on, carefully entering the village proper. Like most skaa villages, Urbene was organized simply. It had a group of ten large hovels built in a loose circle with a well at the center. The buildings were wood, and for thatching they used the same needle-bearing branches from the trees he’d seen. Overseers’ huts, along with a fine nobleman’s manor, stood a little farther up the valley.
If it hadn’t been for the smell—and the sense of haunted emptiness—Sazed might have agreed with his gazetteer’s description of Urbene. For skaa residences, the hovels looked well maintained, and the village lay in a quiet hollow amid the rising landscape.
It wasn’t until he got a little closer that he found the first bodies. They lay scattered around the doorway to the nearest hovel, about a half-dozen of them. Sazed approached carefully, but could quickly see that the corpses were at least several days old. He knelt beside the first one, that of a woman, and could see no visible cause of death. The others were the same.
Nervous, Sazed forced himself to reach up and pull open the door to the hovel. The stench from inside was so strong that he could smell it through his tinmind.
The hovel, like most, was only a single chamber. It was filled with bodies. Most lay wrapped in thin blankets; some sat with backs pressed up against the walls, rotting heads hanging limply from their necks. They had gaunt, nearly fleshless bodies with withered limbs and protruding ribs. Haunted, unseeing eyes sat in desiccated faces.
These people had died of starvation and dehydration.
Sazed stumbled from the hovel, head bowed. He didn’t expect to find anything different in the other buildings, but he checked anyway. He saw the same scene repeated again and again. Woundless corpses on the ground outside; many more bodies huddled inside. Flies buzzing about in swarms, covering faces. In several of the buildings he found gnawed human bones at the center of the room.
He stumbled out of the final hovel, breathing deeply through his mouth. Dozens of people, over a hundred total, dead for no obvious reason. What possibly could have caused so many of them to simply sit, hidden in their houses, while they ran out of food and water? How could they have starved when there were beasts running free? And what had killed those that he’d found outside, lying in the ash? They didn’t seem as emaciated as the ones inside, though from the level of decomposition, it was difficult to tell.
I must be mistaken about the starvation, Sazed told himself. It must have been a plague of some sort, a disease. That is a much more logical explanation. He searched through his medical coppermind. Surely there were diseases that could strike quickly, leaving their victims weakened. And the survivors must have fled. Leaving behind their loved ones. Not taking any of the animals from their pastures….
Sazed frowned. At that moment, he thought he heard something.
He spun, drawing auditory power from his hearing tinmind. The sounds were there—the sound of breathing, the sound of movement, coming from one of the hovels he’d visited. He dashed forward, throwing open the door, looking again on the sorry dead. The corpses lay where they had been before. Sazed studied them very carefully, this time watching until he found the one whose chest was moving.
By the forgotten gods… Sazed thought. The man didn’t need to work hard to feign death. His hair had fallen out, and his eyes were sunken into his face. Though he didn’t look particularly starved, Sazed must have missed seeing him because of his dirty, almost corpselike body.
Sazed stepped toward the man. “I am a friend,” he said quietly. The man remained motionless. Sazed frowned as he walked forward and laid a hand on the man’s shoulder.
The man’s eyes snapped open, and he cried out, jumping to his feet. Dazed and frenzied, he scrambled over corpses, moving to the back of the room. He huddled down, staring at Sazed.
“Please,” Sazed said, setting down his pack. “You mustn’t be afraid.” The only food he had besides broth spices was a few handfuls of meal, but he pulled some out. “I have food.”
The man shook his head. “There is no food,” he whispered. “We ate it all. Except…the food.” His eyes darted toward the center of the room. Toward the bones Sazed had noticed earlier. Uncooked, gnawed on, placed in a pile beneath a ragged cloth, as if to hide them.
“I didn’t eat the food,” the man whispered.
“I know,” Sazed said, taking a step forward. “But, there is other food. Outside.”
“Can’t go outside.”
“Why not?”
The man paused, then looked down. “Mist.”
Sazed glanced toward the doorway. The sun was nearing the horizon, but wouldn’t set for another hour or so. There was no mist. Not now, anyway.
Sazed felt a chill. He slowly turned back toward the man. “Mist…during the day?”
The man nodded.
“And it stayed?” Sazed asked. “It didn’t go away after a few hours?”
The man shook his head. “Days. Weeks. All mist.”
Lord Ruler! Sazed thought, then caught himself. It had been a long time since he’d sworn by that creature’s name, even in his thoughts.
But for the mist to come during the day, then to stay—if this man were to be believed—for weeks…Sazed could imagine the skaa, frightened in their hovels, a thousand years of terror, tradition, and superstition keeping them from venturing outside.
But to remain inside until they starved? Even their fear of the mist, deep-seated though it was, wouldn’t have been enough to make them starve themselves to death, would it?
“Why didn’t you leave?” Sazed asked quietly.
“Some did,” the man said, nodding as if to himself. “Jell. You know what happened to him.”
Sazed frowned. “Dead?”
“Taken by the mist. Oh, how he shook. Was a bull-headed one, you know. Old Jell. Oh, how he shook. How he writhed when it took him.”
Sazed closed his eyes. The corpses I found outside the doors.
“Some got away,” the man said.
Sazed snapped his eyes open. “What?”
The crazed villager nodded again. “Some got away, you know. They called to us, after leaving the village. Said it was all right. It didn’t take them. Don’t know why. It killed others, though. Some, it shook to the ground, but they got up later. Some it killed.”
“The mist let some survive, but it killed others?”
The man didn’t answer. He’d sat down, and now he lay back, staring unfocused at the ceiling.
“Please,” Sazed said. “You must answer me. Who did it kill and who did it let pass? What is the connection?”
The man turned toward him. “Time for food,” he said, then rose. He wandered over to a corpse, then pulled on an arm, ripping the rotted meat free. It was easy to see why he hadn’t starved to death like the others.
Sazed pushed aside nausea, striding across the room and grabbing the man’s arm as he raised the near fleshless bone to his lips. The man froze, then looked up at Sazed. “It’s not mine!” he yelped, dropping the bone and running to the back of the room.
Sazed stood for a moment. I must hurry. I must get to Luthadel. There is more wrong with this world than bandits and armies.
The wild man watched with a feral sort of terror as Sazed picked up his pack, then paused and set it down again. He pulled out his largest pewtermind. He fastened the wide metal bracer to his forearm, then turned and walked toward the villager.
“No!” the man screamed, trying to dash to the side. Sazed tapped the pewtermind, pulling out a burst of strength. He felt his muscles enlarge, his robes growing tight. He snatched the villager as the man ran passed, then held
him out, far enough away that the man couldn’t do either of them much harm.
Then he carried the man outside of the building.
The man stopped struggling as soon as they emerged into the sunlight. He looked up, as if seeing the sun for the first time. Sazed set him down, then released his pewtermind.
The man knelt, looking up at the sun, then turned to Sazed. “The Lord Ruler…why did he abandon us? Why did he go?”
“The Lord Ruler was a tyrant.”
The man shook his head. “He loved us. He ruled us. Now that he’s gone, the mists can kill us. They hate us.”
Then, surprisingly adroit, the man leaped to his feet and scrambled down the pathway out of the village. Sazed took a step forward, but paused. What would he do? Pull the man all the way to Luthadel? There was water in the well and there were animals to eat. Sazed could only hope that the poor wretch would be able to manage.
Sighing, Sazed returned to the hovel and retrieved his pack. On his way out, he paused, then pulled out one of his steelminds. Steel held one of the very most difficult attributes to store up: physical speed. He had spent months filling this particular steelmind in preparation for the possibility that someday he might need to run somewhere very, very quickly.
He put it on now.
16
Yes, he was the one who fueled the rumors after that. I could never have done what he himself did, convincing and persuading the world that he was indeed the Hero. I don’t know if he himself believed it, but he made others think that he must be the one.
Vin rarely used her quarters. Elend had assigned her spacious rooms—which was, perhaps, part of the problem. She’d spent her childhood sleeping in nooks, lairs, or alleys. Having three separate chambers was a bit daunting.
It didn’t really matter, however. During her time awake she was with either Elend or the mists. Her rooms existed for her to sleep in. Or, in this case, for her to make a mess in.
She sat on the floor in the center of her main chamber. Elend’s steward, concerned that Vin didn’t have any furniture, had insisted on decorating her rooms. This morning, Vin had pushed some of this aside, bunching up rugs and chairs on one side so that she could sit on the cool stones with her book.
It was the first real book she had ever owned, though it was just a collection of pages bound loosely at one side. That suited her just fine; the simple binding had made the book that much easier to pull apart.
She sat amid stacks of paper. It was amazing how many pages there were in the book, once she had separated them. Vin sat next to one pile, looking over its contents. She shook her head, then crawled over to another pile. She leafed through the pages, eventually selecting one.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m going mad, the words read.
Perhaps it is due to the pressure of knowing that I must somehow bear the burden of an entire world. Perhaps it is caused by the death I have seen, the friends I have lost. The friends I have been forced to kill.
Either way, I sometimes see shadows following me. Dark creatures that I don’t understand, nor do I wish to understand. They are, perhaps, some figment of my overtaxed mind?
Vin sat for a moment, rereading the paragraphs. Then she moved the sheet over to another pile. OreSeur lay on the side of the room, head on paws, eyeing her. “Mistress,” he said as she set down the page, “I have been watching you work for the last two hours, and will admit that I am thoroughly confused. What is the point of all this?”
Vin crawled over to another stack of pages. “I thought you didn’t care how I spent my time.”
“I don’t,” OreSeur said. “But I do get bored.”
“And annoyed, apparently.”
“I like to understand what is going on around me.”
Vin shrugged, gesturing toward the stacks of paper. “This is the Lord Ruler’s logbook. Well, actually, it’s not the logbook of the Lord Ruler we knew, but the logbook of the man who should have been the Lord Ruler.”
“Should have been?” OreSeur asked. “You mean he should have conquered the world, but didn’t?”
“No,” Vin said. “I mean he should have been the one who took the power at the Well of Ascension. This man, the man who wrote this book—we don’t actually know his name—was some kind of prophesied hero. Or…everyone thought he was. Anyway, the man who became the Lord Ruler—Rashek—was this hero’s packman. Don’t you remember us talking about this, back when you were imitating Renoux?”
OreSeur nodded. “I recall you briefly mentioning it.”
“Well, this is the book Kelsier and I found when we infiltrated the Lord Ruler’s palace. We thought it was written by the Lord Ruler, but it turns out it was written by the man the Lord Ruler killed, the man whose place he took.”
“Yes, Mistress,” OreSeur said. “Now, why exactly are you tearing it to pieces?”
“I’m not,” Vin said. “I just took off the binding so I could move the pages around. It helps me think.”
“I…see,” OreSeur said. “And, what exactly are you looking for? The Lord Ruler is dead, Mistress. Last I checked, you killed him.”
What am I looking for? Vin thought, picking up another page. Ghosts in the mist.
She read the words on this page slowly.
It isn’t a shadow.
This dark thing that follows me, the thing that only I can see—it isn’t really a shadow. It is blackish and translucent, but it doesn’t have a shadowlike solid outline. It’s insubstantial—wispy and formless. Like it’s made out of black fog.
Or mist, perhaps.
Vin lowered the page. It watched him, too, she thought. She remembered reading the words over a year before, thinking that the Hero must have started to go mad. With all the pressures on him, who would have been surprised?
Now, however, she thought she understood the nameless logbook author better. She knew he was not the Lord Ruler, and could see him for what he might have been. Uncertain of his place in the world, but forced into important events. Determined to do the best he could. Idealistic, in a way.
And the mist spirit had chased him. What did it mean? What did seeing it imply for her?
She crawled over to another pile of pages. She’d spent the morning scanning through the logbook for clues about the mist creature. However, she was having trouble digging out much beyond these two, familiar passages.
She made piles of pages that mentioned anything strange or supernatural. She made a small pile with pages that referenced the mist spirit. She also had a special pile for references to the Deepness. This last one, ironically, was both the largest and least informative of the group. The logbook author had a habit of mentioning the Deepness, but not saying much about it.
The Deepness was dangerous, that much was clear. It had ravaged the land, slaying thousands. The monster had sown chaos wherever it stepped, bringing destruction and fear, but the armies of mankind had been unable to defeat it. Only the Terris prophecies and the Hero of Ages had offered any hope.
If only he had been more specific! Vin thought with frustration, riffling papers. However, the tone of the logbook really was more melancholy than it was informative. It was something that the Hero had written for himself, to stay sane, to let him put his fears and hopes down on paper. Elend said he wrote for similar reasons, sometimes. To Vin, it seemed a silly method of dealing with problems.
With a sigh, she turned to the last stack of papers—the one with pages she had yet to study. She lay down on the stone floor and began to read, searching for useful information.
It took time. Not only was she a slow reader, but her mind kept wandering. She’d read the logbook before—and, oddly, hints and phrases from it reminded her of where she’d been at the time. Two years and a world away in Fellise, still recovering from her near death at the hands of a Steel Inquisitor, she’d been forced to spend her days pretending to be Valette Renoux, a young, inexperienced country noblewoman.
Back then, she still hadn’t believed in Kelsier’s plan to overthrow the Final
Empire. She’d stayed with the crew because she valued the strange things they offered her—friendship, trust, and lessons in Allomancy—not because she accepted their goals. She would never have guessed where that would lead her. To balls and parties, to actually growing—just a bit—to become the noblewoman she had pretended to be.
But that had been a farce, a few months of make-believe. She forced her thoughts away from the frilly clothing and the dances. She needed to focus on practical matters.
And…is this practical? she thought idly, setting a page in one of the stacks. Studying things I barely comprehend, fearing a threat nobody else even cares to notice?
She sighed, folding her arms under her chin as she lay on her stomach. What was she really worried about? That the Deepness would return? All she had were a few phantom visions in the mist—things that could, as Elend implied, have easily been fabricated by her overworked mind. More important was another question. Assuming that the Deepness was real, what did she expect to do about it? She was no hero, general, or leader.
Oh, Kelsier, she thought, picking up another page. We could use you now. Kelsier had been a man beyond convention…a man who had somehow been able to defy reality. He’d thought that by giving his life to overthrow the Lord Ruler, he would secure freedom for the skaa. But, what if his sacrifice had opened the way for a greater danger, something so destructive that the Lord Ruler’s oppression was a preferable alternative?
She finally finished the page, then placed it in the stack of those that contained no useful information. Then she paused. She couldn’t even remember what she’d just read. She sighed, picking the page back up, looking at it again. How did Elend do it? He could study the same books over and over again. But, for Vin, it was hard to—
She paused. I must assume that I am not mad, the words said. I cannot, with any rational sense of confidence, continue my quest if I do not believe this. The thing following me must, therefore, be real.
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