Elithanathile

Kelsier held the small, fluttering piece of paper pinched between two fingers. The wind whipped and tore at the paper, but he held firm. The picture was wrong.

He’d tried at least two dozen times to draw it right, to reproduce the image that she’d always carried. The original had been destroyed, he was certain. He had nothing to remind him of her, nothing to remember her by. So he tried, poorly, to reconstruct the image that she had treasured.
A flower. That was what it had been called. A myth, a story. A dream.
“You need to stop doing that,” his companion growled. “I should stop you from drawing those.”
“Try,” Kelsier said softly, folding the small piece of paper between two fingers, then tucking it into his shirt pocket. He would try again later. The petals needed to be more tear-shaped.
Kelsier gave Gemmel a calm gaze, then smiled. That smile felt forced. How could he smile in a world without her?
Kelsier kept smiling. He’d do so until it felt natural. Until that numbness, tied in a knot within him, started to unravel and he began to feel again. If that was possible.
It is .  Please let it be .
“Drawing those pictures makes you think of the past,” Gemmel snapped. The aging man had a ragged gray beard, and the hair on his head was so unkempt, it actually looked better groomed when it was being whipped around by the wind.
“It does,” Kelsier said. “I won’t forget her.”
“She betrayed you. Move on.” Gemmel didn’t wait to see if Kelsier continued arguing. He moved away; he often stopped in the middle of arguments.
Kelsier didn’t squeeze his eyes shut as he wanted to. He didn’t scream defiance to the dying day as he wanted to. He shoved aside thoughts of Mare’s betrayal. He should never have spoken his concerns to Gemmel.
He had. That was that.
Kelsier broadened his smile. It took effort.
Gemmel glanced back at him. “You look creepy when you do that.”
“That’s because you’ve never had a real smile in your life, you old heap of ash,” Kelsier said, joining Gemmel by the short wall at the edge of the roof. They looked down on the dreary city of Mantiz, nearly drowning in ash. The people here in the far north of the Western Dominance weren’t as good at cleaning it up as they were back in Luthadel.
Kelsier had assumed there would be less ash out here — only one of the ash- mounts was nearby, this far out. It did seem that the ash fell a little less frequently. But the fact that nobody organized to clean it up meant that it felt like there was far more.
Kelsier curled his hand around the coping of the wall. He’d never liked this part of the Western Dominance. The buildings out here felt... melted. No, that was the wrong term. They felt too rounded, with no corners, and they were rarely sym- metrical — one side of the building would be higher, or more lumpy.
Still, the ash was familiar. It covered the building here just the same as everywhere, giving everything a uniform cast of black and gray. A layer of it coated streets, clung to the ridges of buildings, made heaps in alleys. Ashmount ash was sootlike, much darker than the ash from a common fire.
“Which one?” Kelsier asked, rotating his gaze among the four massive keeps that broke the city skyline. Mantiz was a large city for this dominance, though
— of course — it was nothing like Luthadel. There weren’t any other cities like
Luthadel. Still, this one was respectable.
“Keep Shezler,” Gemmel said, pointing toward a tall, slender building near the center of the city.
Kelsier nodded. “Shezler. I can get in the door easily. I’ll need a costume —
fine clothing, some jewelry. We need to find a place I can fence a bead of atium
— and a tailor who can keep his mouth shut.” Gemmel snorted.
“I’ve got a Luthadel accent,” Kelsier said. “From what I heard on the street earlier, Lord Shezler is absolutely infatuated with the Luthadel nobility. He’ll fawn over someone who presents himself right; he wants connections to society closer to the capital. I—”
“You aren’t thinking like an Allomancer,” Gemmel cut him off, his voice gruff.
“I’ll use emotional Allomancy,” Kelsier said. “Turn him to my—”
Gemmel suddenly roared, spinning on Kelsier, moving too quickly. The ragged man snagged Kelsier by the front of his shirt and shoved him to the ground, looming over him, rattling the roof tiles. “You’re Mistborn, not some street Soother working for clips! You want to be taken again? Snatched up by his minions, sent back to where you belong? Do you?”
Kelsier glared back at Gemmel as the mists began to grow in the air around them. Sometimes Gemmel seemed more beast than man. He began muttering to himself, speaking as if to a friend Kelsier couldn’t see or hear.
Gemmel leaned closer, still muttering, his breath pungent and sharp, his eyes wide and frenzied. This man wasn’t completely sane. No. That was a gross under- statement. This man had only a fringe of sanity left to him, and even that fringe was beginning to fray.
But he was the only Mistborn who Kelsier knew, and damn it, Kelsier was going to learn from the man. It was either that or start taking lessons from some nobleman.
“Now you listen,” Gemmel said, almost pleading. “Listen for once. I’m here to teach you how to fight. Not how to talk. You already do that. We didn’t come here so you could saunter in playing nobleman, like you did in the old days. I won’t let you talk through this, I won’t. You’re Mistborn. You fight.”
“I will use whatever tool I have to.”
“You’ll fight! Do you want to be weak again, let them take you again?”
Kelsier was silent.
“You want vengeance on them? Don’t you?”
“Yes,” Kelsier growled. Something massive and dark shifted within him, a beast awakened by Gemmel’s prodding. It cut through even the numbness.
“You want to kill, don’t you? For what they did to you and yours? For taking her from you? Well, boy?”
“Yes!” Kelsier barked, flaring his metals, shoving Gemmel back.
Memories. A dark hole lined by crystals sharp as razors. Her sobs as she died. His sobs as they broke him. Crumpled him. Ripped him apart.
His screams as he remade himself.
“Yes,” he said, coming up onto his feet, pewter burning within him. He forced himself to smile. “Yes, I’ll have vengeance, Gemmel. But I’ll have it my way.”
“And what way is that?” Kelsier faltered.
It was an unfamiliar experience for him. He’d always had a plan, before. Plans upon plans. Now, without her, without anything... The spark was snuffed out, the spark that had always driven him to reach beyond what others thought possible. It had led him from plan to plan, heist to heist, riches to riches.
It was gone now, replaced by that knot of numbness. The only thing he could feel these days was rage, and that rage couldn’t guide him.
He didn’t know what to do. He hated that. He’d always known what to do. But now...
Gemmel snorted. “When I’m done with you, you’ll be able to kill a hundred men with a single coin. You’ll be able to Pull a man’s own sword from his fingers and strike him down with it. You’ll be able to crush men within their armor, and you’ll be able to cut the air like the mists themselves. You will be a god. Waste your time with emotional Allomancy when I’m finished. For now, you kill.”
The bearded man loped back to the wall and glared at the keep. Kelsier slowly reined in his anger, rubbing his chest where he’d been forced to the ground. And... something odd occurred to him. “How do you know what I was like in the old days, Gemmel?” Kelsier whispered. “Who are you?”
Lamps and limelights were lit in the night, their glow breaking out through windows into the curling mists. Gemmel hunkered beside his wall, whispering to himself again. If he heard Kelsier’s question, he ignored it.
“You should still be burning your metals,” Gemmel said as Kelsier approached. Kelsier bit off a comment about not wanting to waste them. He’d explained that as a skaa child, he had learned to be very careful with resources. Gemmel had just laughed at that. At the time, Kelsier had assumed the laughter was due to Gemmel’s natural erratic nature.
But... was it because he knew the truth? That Kelsier hadn’t grown up a poor skaa on the streets? That he and his brother had lived lives of privilege, their half- breed nature kept secret from society?
He hated the nobility, true. Their balls and parties, their prim self-satisfaction, their superiority. But he couldn’t deny, not to himself, that he belonged among them. At least as much as he did among the skaa of the streets.
“Well?” Gemmel said.
Kelsier ignited some the metals inside of him, burning several of the eight metal reserves he had within. He’d heard Allomancers speak of those reserves on occasion, but had never expected to feel them himself. They were like wells of energy he could draw upon.
Burning metals inside of him. How strange it sounded — yet how natural it felt. As natural as breathing in air and drawing strength from it. Each of those eight reserves enhanced him in some way.
“All eight,” Gemmel said. “All of them.” He’d be burning bronze to sense what Kelsier was burning.
Kelsier had only burned the four physical metals. Reluctantly, he burned the others. Gemmel nodded; now that Kelsier was burning copper, all signs of his Allomancy would have vanished to the other man. Copper, what a useful metal — it hid you from other Allomancers, and made you immune to their emotional Allomancy.
Some spoke of copper derogatorily. You couldn’t use it to fight; you couldn’t change things with it. But Kelsier had always envied his friend Trap, who was a copper Misting. It was a powerful thing to know that your emotions were not the result of outside tampering.
Of course, with copper burning, that meant he had to admit that everything he felt — the pain, the anger, and even the numbness — belonged to him alone.
“Let’s go,” Gemmel said, leaping out into the night.
The mists were almost fully formed. They came every night, sometimes thick, sometimes light. But always there. The mists moved like hundreds of streams piled atop one another. They shifted and spun, thicker, more alive than an ordinary fog.
Kelsier had always loved the mists for reasons he couldn’t describe. Marsh claimed it was because everyone else feared them, and Kelsier was too arrogant to do what everyone else did. Of course, Marsh had never seemed to fear them either. The two brothers felt something, an understanding, an awareness. The mists claimed some as their own.
Kelsier jumped down from the low roof, burning pewter to strengthen him so that the landing was solid. Then he followed Gemmel on the hard cobblestones, running on bare feet. Tin burned in his stomach; it made him more aware, made his senses stronger. The mists seemed wetter, their prickling dew cooler on his skin. He could hear rats scurrying in distant alleyways, hounds baying, a man snoring softly in a building nearby. A thousand sounds that would be inaudible to an ordinary person’s ears. At times when burning tin, it seemed a cacophony. He couldn’t burn it too strongly, lest the noises grow distracting. Just enough to let him see better; tin made the mists appear more faint to his eyes, though why that should be he did not know.
He trailed Gemmel’s shadowed form as they reached the wall around Keep Shezler and placed their backs to it. Atop that wall, guards called to one another in the night.
Gemmel nodded, then dropped a coin. The scrawny, bearded man lurched into the air a second later. He wore a mistcloak — a dark gray cloak that was formed of many tassels from the chest down. Kelsier had asked for one. Gemmel had laughed at him.
Kelsier walked up to the fallen coin. The mists nearby dipped and spun in a pattern like insects moving toward a flame — they always did that around Allo- mancers who were burning metals. He’d seen it happen to Marsh.
Kelsier knelt beside the coin. To his eyes, a faint blue line — almost like a spider’s silk — led from his chest to the coin. In fact, hundreds of tiny lines pointed from his chest to each nearby source of metal. Iron and steel created these lines — one for Pushing, one for Pulling. Gemmel had told him to burn all his metals, but Gemmel often made no sense. There was no reason to burn both steel and iron; the two were opposites.
He extinguished his iron, leaving only the steel. With steel, he could Push on any source of metal that was connected to him. The Push was mental, but felt much like shoving against something with his arms.
Kelsier positioned himself above the coin and Pushed on it, as Gemmel had trained him. Since the coin couldn’t go downward, Kelsier was instead thrown upward. He popped into the air some fifteen feet, then awkwardly grabbed the coping of the wall above. He grunted, hauling himself up over the edge.
A new group of blue lines sprang up at his chest, thickening. Sources of metal approaching him quickly.
Kelsier cursed, throwing out a hand and Pushing. The coins that had been flying toward him were Pushed back into the night, zipping through the mists. Gemmel walked forward, undoubtedly the source of the coins. He attacked Kel- sier sometimes; their first night together, Gemmel had thrown him off a cliff.
Kelsier still couldn’t completely decide if the attacks were tests, or if the lunatic was actually trying to murder him.
“No,” Gemmel muttered. “No, I like him. He almost never complains. The other three complained all the time. This one is strong. No. Not strong enough. No. Not yet. He’ll learn.” Behind Gemmel was a pair of lumps on the wall top. Dead guards, leaking trails of blood along the stones. The blood was black in the night. The mists seemed... afraid of Gemmel, somehow. They didn’t spin about him as they did other Allomancers.
That was nonsense. Just his mind playing tricks on him. Kelsier stood up, and didn’t mention the attack. It wouldn’t do any good. He just had to stay aware and learn as much as he could from this man. Preferably without getting killed in the process.
“You don’t need to use your hand to Push,” Gemmel grumbled at him. “Wastes time. And you need to learn to keep your pewter burning. You shouldn’t have had such a hard time climbing up over the edge of the wall.”
“I—”
“Don’t give me an excuse about saving your metals,” Gemmel said, inspect- ing the keep just ahead. “I’ve met children of the streets. They don’t conserve. If you come at one of them, they’ll use everything they have — every scrap of strength, every last trick — to take you down. They know how close to the edge they walk. Pray you never have to face one of those, pretty boy. They’ll rip you apart, chew you up, and make new reserves for themselves out of what you leave behind.”
“I was going to say,” Kelsier said calmly, “that you haven’t even told me what we’re doing tonight.”
“Infiltrating this keep,” Gemmel said, eyes narrowing.
“Why?”
“Does it matter?”
“It sure as hell does.”
“There’s something important in there,” Gemmel said. “Something we’re
going to find.”
“Well,  that  explains  everything.  Thank  you  for  being  so  forthcoming. Could you possibly enlighten me on the meaning of life, since you’re so great at answering questions all of a sudden?”
“Don’t know it,” Gemmel said. “I think it’s so we can die.”
Kelsier suppressed a groan, leaning against the wall. I said that, he realized, fully expecting to get some dry remark in return. Lord Ruler, I miss Dox and the crew .
Gemmel didn’t understand humor, even pathetic attempts at it. I need to get back, Kelsier thought. Back to people who care about living .  Back to my friends .
That  thought  made  him  shiver.  It  had  only  been  three  months  since the... events at the pits of Hathsin. The cuts on his arms were mostly just scars now. He scratched at them anyway.
Kelsier knew his humor was forced, his smiles more dead than alive. He didn’t know why he found it so important to hold off returning to Luthadel, but it was. He had exposed wounds, gaping holes in himself that had yet to heal over. He had to stay away. He didn’t want them to see him like this. Insecure, a man who huddled in his sleep, reliving horrors still fresh. A man with no plan or vision.
Besides, he needed to learn the things Gemmel was teaching him. He couldn’t return to Luthadel until... until he was himself again. Or at the very least a scarred version of himself, the wounds closed, the memories quieted.
“Let’s be on with it then,” Kelsier said.
Gemmel glared at him. The old lunatic didn’t like it when Kelsier tried to take control. But... well, that was what Kelsier did. Somebody had to.
Keep Shezler was constructed in the unusual architectural style typical of any area of the Western Dominance far from Luthadel. Instead of blocks and peaks, it had an almost organic feel, with four tapering towers up front. He thought that buildings out here must be constructed of stone frames with a kind of hardened mud outside, sculpted and shaped to make all those curves and knobs. The keep, like the rest of the buildings, looked unfinished to Kelsier. “Where?” Kelsier said. “Up,” Gemmel said. “Then down.” He jumped from the wall and threw a coin for himself. He Pushed against it, and his weight drove it downward. When it hit the ground, Gemmel launched higher toward the building.
Kelsier leaped and Pushed against his own coin. The two of them bounded across the space between the sculpted wall and the lit keep. Powerful limelights burned behind stained glass windows; here in the Western Dominance, those windows were often odd shapes, and no two were alike. Had these people no understanding of proper aesthetics?
Closer to the building, Kelsier began to Pull instead of Push — he switched from burning steel to burning iron, then yanked on a blue line leading to a steel window frame. That meant he was Pulled upward, as if he were on a tether. It was tricky; the ground still tugged him downward, and he also still had momentum forward, so when he Pulled he had to be careful not to slam himself into things.
With Pulling, he gained more height. He needed it, as Keep Shezler was tall, as tall as any keep in Luthadel. The two Allomancers bounded up the front facade, grabbing or leaping from the knobs and bits of stonework. Kelsier landed on an outcropping, waved his arms for a moment, then snatched hold of a statue that had been placed there for no reason he could discern. It was covered in bits of glaze of different colors.
Gemmel flew past on the right; the other Mistborn moved with a deft grace. He threw a coin to the side, which hit an outcropping. Then, by pushing on it, Gemmel nudged himself in just the right direction. He spun, mistcloak streaking the mists, then Pulled himself to a different stained glass window. He hit and hung there like an insect, fingers grabbing bits of metal and stone.
Powerful limelight shone out through the window, which shattered it into colors, spraying them across Gemmel as if he too were covered in bits of glaze. He looked up, a smile on his lips. In that light, with the mistcloak hanging beneath him, the mists dancing around him, Gemmel suddenly seemed more regal to Kelsier. Distant from the ragged madman. Something far more grand.
Gemmel leaped out into the mists, then Pulled himself upward. Kelsier watched him go, surprised to find himself envious. I will learn, he told himself. I’ll be that good.
From the start, he’d been drawn to zinc and brass, Allomancy that let him play with people’s emotions. It had seemed most similar to what he’d done unaided in the past. But he was a new man, reborn in those dreadful pits. Whatever he had been, it wasn’t enough. He needed to become something more.
Kelsier threw himself upward, Pulling his way to the roof of the building. Gemmel kept going up past the roof, flying toward the tips of the four spires that adorned the front of the building. Kelsier dropped his entire bag of coins — the more metal you Pushed off, the faster and higher you could go — and flared his steel. He Pushed with everything he had, sending himself upward like an arrow.
Mists streamed around him. The colorful lights of the stained glass windows withdrew below. A spire dwindled on either side of him, growing more and more narrow. He shoved off the tin cladding on one of them to nudge himself to the right.
With a final Push of strength he crested the very tip of the spire, which had a knob on top the size of man’s head. Kelsier landed on it, flaring his pewter, which improved his physical abilities. That didn’t just make him stronger; it made him more dexterous as well. Capable of standing on one foot atop a globe a handspan wide hundreds of feet off the ground. Having performed the maneuver, he stopped and stared at his foot.
“You’re growing more confident,” Gemmel said. The other man had stopped just shy of the tip of the spire, clinging to it below Kelsier. “That’s good.”
Then with a quick motion, Gemmel leaped up and swept Kelsier’s leg from underneath him. Kelsier cried out, losing control and falling into the mists. Gemmel Pushed against the vials full of metal flakes that Kelsier — like most Allomancers — carried on his belt. That Push shoved Kelsier away from the building and out into the mists.
He plummeted, and lost rational thought for a moment. There was a primal terror to falling. Gemmel had spoken about controlling that, about learning not to fear heights or get disoriented while dropping.
Those lessons fled Kelsier’s mind. But he was falling. Fast. Through churn- ing mists, disoriented. It would take only seconds to hit the ground.
Desperate, he Pushed on those vials of metal, hoping he was pointed the right direction. They ripped from his belt and smashed downward into something. The ground.
There wasn’t much metal in them. Barely enough to slow Kelsier. He hit the ground a fraction of a second after Pushing, and the blow knocked the wind from him. His vision flashed.
He lay in a daze as something thumped to the ground beside him. Gemmel. The other man snorted in derision. “Fool.”
Kelsier groaned and pushed himself up to his hands and knees. He was alive. And remarkably, nothing seemed broken — though his side and thigh smarted something wicked. He’d have awful bruises. Pewter had kept him alive. The fall, even with the Push at the end, would have broken another man’s bones.
Kelsier stumbled to his feet and glared at Gemmel, but made no complaint. This probably was the best way to learn. At least it would be the fastest. Rationally, Kelsier would have chosen this — being thrown in, forced to learn as he went. That didn’t stop him from hating Gemmel.
“I thought we were going up,” Kelsier said. “Then down.”
“Then up again, I assume?” Kelsier asked with a sigh.
“No. Down some more.” Gemmel strode across the grounds of the keep, passing ornamental shrubbery that had become dark, mist-shrouded silhouettes in the night. Kelsier hastened up beside Gemmel, wary of another attack.
“It’s in the basement,” Gemmel muttered. “Basement, of all things. Why a basement?”
“What’s in the basement?” Kelsier asked.
“Our goal,” Gemmel said. “We had to go up high, so I could look for an entrance. I think there’s one out here in the gardens.”
“Wait, that actually sounds reasonable,” Kelsier said. “You must have hit your head on something.”
Gemmel glared at him, then shoved his hand into his pocket and pulled out a handful of coins. Kelsier readied his metals, prepared to fight back. But Gemmel turned his hand to the side and sprayed them across a pair of guards who were jogging up the path to see who was walking through the grounds at night.
The men fell, one of them yelling. Gemmel didn’t seem to care that it might reveal the two of them. He stalked on ahead.
Kelsier hesitated for a moment, glancing at the dying men. Employed by the enemy. He tried to feel something for them, but he couldn’t. That part of him had been ripped out by the Pits of Hathsin, though a different part was disturbed at how little he felt.
He hurried on after Gemmel, who had found what appeared to be a grounds- keeping shed. When he pulled open the door, however, there were no tools, just a dark set of steps leading downward.
“Steel burning?” Gemmel asked. Kelsier nodded.
“Watch for movement,” Gemmel said, grabbing a handful of coins from his pouch. Kelsier raised a hand toward the fallen guards and Pulled on the coins Gemmel had used against them, flipping them up toward him. He’d seen Gemmel Pull on things lightly, so that they didn’t streak toward him at full strength. Kelsier hadn’t mastered that trick yet, and he had to crouch down and let the coins spray over his head into the wall of the shed. He gathered them up, then started down after an impatient Gemmel, who was watching him with displeasure.
“I was unarmed,” Kelsier explained. “Left my pouch on top of the building.” “Mistakes like that will end with you dead.”
Kelsier didn’t reply. It had been a mistake. Of course, he’d planned to fetch the coin pouch — and would have, if Gemmel hadn’t knocked him off the spire.
The light grew dim, then neared blackness as they continued down the steps. Gemmel didn’t produce a torch or lantern, but instead waved at Kelsier to go first. Another test of some sort?
Steel burning within Kelsier let him identify sources of metal by their blue lines. He paused, then dropped the handful of coins to the ground, letting them bounce down the steps. In falling, they let him see where the stairs were, and when they came to a rest that gave him an even better picture.
The blue lines weren’t really “seeing,” and he still had to walk carefully. However, the coins helped a great deal, and he did see a door latch as it drew near. Behind, he heard Gemmel grunt, and for once it seemed appreciative. “Nice trick with the coins,” the man murmured.
Kelsier smiled, approaching the door at the bottom. He felt out for it, grab- bing the metal latch. He carefully eased it open.
There was light on the other side. Kelsier crouched — despite what Gemmel might think, he’d done his share of infiltrating and quiet nighttime thefts. He wasn’t some new sprout. He had simply learned that survival for a half-breed like him meant either learning to talk or learning to sneak; fighting head-on in most situations would have been foolish.
Of course, not one of the three — fighting, talking, or sneaking — had worked that night. The night he’d been taken, a night when nobody could have betrayed him but her. But why had they taken her too? She couldn’t have—
Stop, he told himself, padding into the room in a crouch. It was full of long tables crowded with various kinds of smelting apparatus. Not the bulky smithing kind, but the small burners and delicate instruments of a master metallurgist. Lamps burned on the walls, and a large red forge glowed in the corner. Kelsier felt fresh air blow through from somewhere; the other side of the room ended in several corridors.
The room appeared empty. Gemmel entered, and Kelsier reached back to Pull the coins to him again. Some were stained with the blood of the fallen guards. Still in his crouch, he passed a desk full of writing implements and small, cloth-bound books. He glanced at Gemmel, who strode through the room without any attempt at stealth. Gemmel put his hands on his hips, looking around. “So where is he?”
“Who?” Kelsier said.
Gemmel  started  muttering  under  his  breath,  moving  through  the  room, sweeping some of the implements off the tables and sending them crashing to the floor. Kelsier slipped around the perimeter, intent on peeking into the side corridors to see if anyone was coming. He checked the first one, and found that it opened into a long, narrow room. It was occupied.
Kelsier froze, then slowly stood up. There were half a dozen people in the room, both men and women, bound by their arms to the walls. There were no cells, but the poor souls looked as if they’d been beaten within an inch of their lives. They wore only rags, and those were bloodied.
Kelsier shook himself out of his daze, then padded to the first woman in the line. He pulled off her gag. The floor was damp; probably someone had been here recently to toss buckets of water on the prisoners to keep the laboratory from stinking. A gust of wind from the distant end of the hallway that the room eventually opened into brought a breath of fresh air.
The woman grew stiff as soon as he touched her, eyes snapping open and growing wide with terror. “Please, please no...” she whispered.
“I won’t hurt you,” Kelsier said. That numbness inside of him seemed to be... changing. “Please. Who are you? What is going on here?”
The woman just stared at him. She winced when Kelsier reached up to untie her bonds, and he hesitated.
He heard a muffled sound. Glancing to the side, he saw a second woman, older and matronly. Her skin had been all but flayed from beatings. Her eyes, however, were not nearly as frantic as those of the younger woman. Kelsier moved over and removed her gag.
“Please,” the woman said. “Free us. Or kill us.”
“What is this place?” Kelsier hissed, working on her arm bonds.
“He’s searching for half-breeds,” she said. “To test his new metals on.” “New metals?”
“I don’t know,” the woman said, tears on her cheeks. “I’m just skaa, we all are. I don’t know why he picks us. He talks about things. Metals, unknown metals. I don’t think he’s completely sane. The things he does... he says they are to bring out our Allomantic side... but my lord, I’ve no noble blood. I can’t...”
“Hush,” Kelsier said, freeing her. Something was burning through that deep knot of numbness inside of him. Something that was like the anger he felt, but somehow different. It was more. It made him want to weep, yet it was warm.
Freed, the woman stared at her hands, wrists scraped raw from the bindings. Kelsier turned to the other poor captives. Most were awake now. There wasn’t hope in their eyes. They just stared ahead, dull.
Yes, he could feel it.
How can we stand a world like this? Kelsier thought, moving to help another captive. Where things like this happen? The most appalling tragedy was that he knew this sort of horror was common. Skaa were disposable. There was nobody to protect them. Nobody cared.
Not even him. He’d spent most of his life ignoring such acts of brutality. Oh, he’d pretended to fight back. But he’d really just been about enriching himself. All of those plans, all of those heists, all of his grand visions. All about him. Him alone.
He freed another of the captives, a young, dark-haired woman. She looked like Mare. After being freed, she just huddled down on the ground in a ball. Kelsier stood over her, feeling powerless.
Nobody fights, he thought. Nobody thinks they can fight. But they’re wrong. We can fight.... I can fight.
Gemmel strode into the room. He looked over the skaa and barely seemed to notice them. He was still muttering to himself. He had taken just a few steps into the room when a voice yelled from the laboratory.
“What is going on here?”
Kelsier recognized that voice. Oh, he’d never heard it specifically before — but he recognized the arrogance in it, the self-assuredness. The contempt. He found himself rising, brushing past Gemmel, stepping back into the lab.
A man in a fine suit, white shirt buttoned to the neck, stood in the laboratory. His hair was short, after the most current trends, and his suit looked to have been shipped in from Luthadel — it certainly was tailored after the most fashionable styles.
He looked at Kelsier, imperious. And Kelsier found himself smiling. Really smiling, for the first time since the Pits. Since the betrayal.
The nobleman sniffed, then raised a hand and tossed a coin at Kelsier. After a brief moment of surprise, Kelsier Pushed on it right as Lord Shezler did. Both were thrown backward, and Shezler’s eyes widened in shock.
Kelsier slammed back against the wall. Shezler was Mistborn. No matter. A new kind of anger rose within Kelsier even as he grinned. It burned like a metal, that emotion did. An unknown, glorious metal.
He could fight back. He would fight back.
The nobleman yanked on his belt, dropping it — and his metals — from his waist. He whipped a dueling cane from his side and jumped forward, moving too quickly. Kelsier flared his pewter, then his steel, and Pushed on the apparatus on one of the tables, flinging it at Shezler.
The man snarled, raising an arm and Pushing some of it away. Again, the two Pushes — one from Kelsier, one from his foe — struck one another, and they were both slammed backward. Shezler steadied himself against a table, which shook. Glass broke and metal tools clattered to the ground.
“Have you any idea what all of that is worth?” Shezler growled, lowering his arm and advancing.
“Your soul, apparently,” Kelsier whispered.
Shezler prowled forward, coming close, then struck with the cane. Kelsier backed away. He felt his pocket jerk, and he Pushed, shoving the coins out of his coat as Shezler Pushed on them. A second later, and they would have cut through Kelsier’s stomach — as it was, they ripped out of his pocket, then shot backward toward the wall of the room.
His coat’s buttons started to shake, though they only had some metal leaf on them. He pulled off the coat, removing the last bit of metal he was carrying. Gemmel should have warned me about that! The leaf had barely registered to his senses, but still he felt a fool. The older man was right; Kelsier wasn’t thinking like an Allomancer. He focused too much on appearance and not enough on what might kill him.
Kelsier continued to back away, watching his opponent, determined not to make another mistake. He’d been in street brawls before, but not many. He’d tried to avoid them — brawling had been an old habit of Dockson’s. For once, he wished he’d been less refined in that particular area.
He edged along one of the tables, waiting for Gemmel to come in from the side. The man didn’t enter. He probably didn’t intend to.
This was all about finding Shezler, Kelsier realized. So that I could fight another Mistborn . There was something important in that... It suddenly made sense.
Kelsier growled, and was surprised to hear the sound coming from him. That glowing anger inside of him wanted vengeance, but also something more. Something greater. Not just revenge against those who had hurt him, but against the entirety of noble society.
In that moment, Shezler — arrogantly striding forward, more concerned for his equipment than the lives of his skaa — became a focus for it all.
Kelsier attacked.
He didn’t have a weapon. Gemmel had spoken of glass knives, but had never given one to Kelsier. So, he snatched up a shard of broken glass from the floor, heedless of the cuts on his fingers. Pewter let him ignore pain as he jumped toward Shezler, going for his throat.
He probably shouldn’t have won. Shezler was the more accomplished and practiced Allomancer — but it was obvious he was unaccustomed to fighting someone as strong as he was. He battered at Kelsier with the dueling cane. But with pewter Kelsier could ignore that as well, and instead he punched his shard of glass into the man’s neck — three times.
In seconds it was over. Kelsier stumbled back, aches beginning to register. Shezler might have broken some of his bones with his battering; the man had pewter too, after all. The nobleman lay in his own blood though, twitching. Pew- ter could save you from a lot of things, but not a slit throat.
The man choked on his own blood. “No,” he hissed. “I can’t... not me... I can’t die...”
“Anyone can die,” Kelsier whispered, dropping the bloodied shard of glass. “Anyone.”
And a thought, a seed of a plan, began to form in his mind. “That was too quick,” Gemmel said.
Kelsier looked up, blood dripping from the tips of his fingers. Shezler croaked a final attempt at breath, then fell still.
“You need to learn Pushes and Pulls,” Gemmel said. “Dancing through the
air, fighting as a real Mistborn does.”
“He was a real Mistborn.”
“He was a scholar,” Gemmel said, walking forward. He kicked at the corpse.
“I picked a weak one first. Won’t be so easy next time.”
Kelsier walked back into the room with the skaa. He freed them, one by one. He couldn’t do much more for them, but he promised that he’d see them safely out of the keep’s grounds. Maybe he could get them in touch with the local under- ground; he’d been in the city long enough to have a few contacts.
Once he had them all freed, he turned to find them looking toward him in a huddled group. Some of the life seemed to have rekindled in their eyes, and more than a few were peeking into the room where Shezler’s corpse lay on the floor. Gemmel was picking through a notebook on one of the tables.
“Who are you?” asked the matronly woman he’d spoken to earlier.
Kelsier shook his head, still looking toward Gemmel. “I’m a man who has lived through things he shouldn’t have.”
“Those scars...”
Kelsier looked down at his arms, sliced with hundreds of tiny scars from the
Pits. Removing his coat had exposed them.
“Come on,” Kelsier said to the people, resisting the urge to cover up his arms. “Let’s get you to safety. Gemmel, what in the Lord Ruler’s name are you doing?” The older man grunted, leafing through a book. Kelsier trotted into the room and glanced at it.
Theories and suppositions regarding the existence of an Eleventh Metal, the scrawl on the page read. Personal notes. Antillius Shezler.
Gemmel shrugged and dropped the book to the table. Then he carefully and meticulously selected a fork from the fallen tools and other scattered laboratory remains. He smiled and chuckled to himself. “Now that is a fork.” He shoved it into his pocket.
Kelsier took the book. In moments, he was ushering the wounded skaa away from the keep, where soldiers were prowling the yards, trying to figure out what was happening.
Once they were out into the streets again, Kelsier turned back to the glowing building, which was lit with bright colors and beautiful windows. He listened in the curling mists as the guards’ shouting became frantic.
The numbness was gone. He’d found something to replace it. His focus had returned. The spark was back. He’d been thinking too small.
A plan began to bud, a plan he barely dared consider for its audacity. Vengeance. And more.
He turned into the night, into the waiting mists, and went to find someone to make him a mistcloak.