Shadows of Self

  The drop out the window was straight down, no roof to climb onto. Lessie regarded the ground warily. Waxillium shoved his fingers in his mouth and whistled sharply.

  Nothing happened.

  He whistled again.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Lessie demanded.

  “Calling my horse,” Waxillium said, then whistled again. “We can hop down into the saddle and ride away.”

  She stared at him. “You’re serious.”

  “Sure I am. We’ve been practicing.”

  A lone figure walked out onto the street below, the kid who had been following Waxillium. “Uh, Wax?” the kid called up. “Destroyer’s just standing there, drinking.”

  “Hell,” Waxillium said.

  Lessie looked at him. “You named your horse—”

  “She’s a little too placid, all right?” Waxillium snapped, climbing up onto the windowsill. “I thought the name might inspire her.” He cupped his hand, calling to the boy below. “Wayne! Bring her out here. We’re going to jump!”

  “Like hell we are,” Lessie said. “You think there’s something magical about a saddle that will keep us from breaking the horse’s back when we drop into it?”

  Waxillium hesitated. “Well, I’ve read about people doing this.…”

  “Yeah, I’ve got an idea,” Lessie said. “Next, why don’t you call out Granite Joe, and go stand out in the road and have a good old-fashioned showdown at noon.”

  “You think that would work? I—”

  “No, it won’t work,” she snapped. “Nobody does that. It’s stupid. Ruin! How did you kill Peret the Black?”

  They stared at each other a moment.

  “Well…” Waxillium started.

  “Oh hell. You caught him on the crapper, didn’t you?”

  Waxillium grinned at her. “Yeah.”

  “Did you shoot him in the back too?”

  “As bravely as any man ever shot another in the back.”

  “Huh. There might be hope for you yet.”

  He nodded toward the window. “Jump?”

  “Sure. Why not break both my legs before getting shot? Might as well go all in, Mister Cravat.”

  “I think we’ll be fine, Miss Pink Garter.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “If you’re going to identify me by my clothing choices,” he said, “then I figure I can do the same.”

  “It shall never be mentioned again,” she said, then took a deep breath. “So?”

  He nodded, flaring his metals, preparing to hold on to her and slow them as they fell—just enough to make it seem like they’d miraculously survived the jump. As he did, however, he noticed one of his blue lines moving—a faint but thick one, pointing across the street.

  The window in the mill. Sunlight glinted off something inside.

  Waxillium immediately grabbed Lessie and pulled her down. A fraction of a second later, a bullet streaked over their heads and hit the door on the other side of the room.

  “Another sharpshooter,” she hissed.

  “Your power of observation is—”

  “Shut it,” she said. “Now what?”

  Waxillium frowned, considering the question. He glanced at the bullet hole, gauging the trajectory. The sharpshooter had aimed too high; even if Waxillium hadn’t ducked, he’d likely have been all right.

  Why aim high? The moving blue line to the gun had indicated the sharpshooter running to get into position before shooting. Was it just rushed targeting? Or was there a more sinister reason? To knock me out of the sky? When I flew out the window?

  He heard footsteps on the stairs, but saw no blue lines. He cursed, scrambling over and peeking out. A group of men were creeping up the steps, and not the normal thugs from below. These men wore tight white shirts, had pencil mustaches, and were armed with crossbows. Not a speck of metal on them.

  Rusts! They knew he was a Coinshot, and Granite Joe had a kill squad ready for him.

  He ducked back into the room and grabbed Lessie by the arm. “Your informant said Granite Joe was in this building?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “He most certainly is. He likes to be close when a gang is being gathered; he likes to keep an eye on his men.”

  “This building has a basement.”

  “… So?”

  “So hang on.”

  He grabbed her in both hands and rolled onto the ground, causing her to yelp, then curse. Holding her over him, he increased his weight.

  He had a great deal of it stored in his metalmind by now, after weeks of siphoning it off. Now he drew it all out, magnifying his weight manyfold in an instant. The wooden floor cracked, then burst open beneath them.

  Waxillium fell through, his fine clothing getting ripped, and dropped through the air, towing Lessie after him. Eyes squeezed closed, he Pushed the hundreds of blue lines behind him, those leading to the nails in the floor below. He blasted them downward to shatter the ground level’s floor and open the way into the basement.

  They crashed through the ground floor in a shower of dust and splinters. Waxillium managed to slow their descent with a Steelpush, but they still came down hard, smashing into a table in a basement chamber.

  Waxillium let out a puffing groan, but forced himself to twist around, shaking free of the broken wood. The basement, surprisingly, was paneled in fine hardwoods and lit by lamps shaped like curvaceous women. The table they had hit bore a rich white tablecloth, though it was now wadded in a bunch, the table legs shattered and the table itself at an angle.

  A man sat at the table’s head. Waxillium managed to stand up in the wreckage and level a gun at the fellow, who had a blocky face and dark blue-grey skin—the mark of a man with koloss heritage. Granite Joe. Waxillium appeared to have interrupted his dinner, judging by the napkin tucked into his collar and the spilled soup on the broken table in front of him.

  Lessie groaned, rolling over and brushing splinters off her clothing. Her rifle had apparently been left upstairs. Waxillium held his gun in a firm grip as he eyed the two duster-wearing bodyguards behind Granite Joe, a man and a woman—siblings, he’d heard, and crack shots. They’d been surprised by his fall, obviously, for though they’d rested hands on their weapons, they hadn’t drawn.

  Waxillium had the upper hand, with the gun on Joe—but if he did shoot, the siblings would kill him in a heartbeat. Perhaps he hadn’t thought through this line of attack quite as well as he should have.

  Joe scraped at the remnants of his broken bowl, framed by splatters of red soup on the tablecloth. He managed to get some onto his spoon and lifted it to his lips. “You,” he said after sipping the soup, “should be dead.”

  “You might want to look at hiring a new group of thugs,” Waxillium said. “The ones upstairs aren’t worth much.”

  “I wasn’t referring to them,” Joe said. “How long have you been up here, in the Roughs, making trouble? Two years?”

  “One,” Waxillium said. He’d been up here longer, but he had only recently started “making trouble,” as Joe put it.

  Granite Joe clicked his tongue. “You think your type is new up here, son? Wide-eyed, with a low-slung gunbelt and bright new spurs? Come to reform us of our uncivilized ways. We see dozens like you every year. The others have the decency to either learn to be bribed, or to get dead before they ruin too much. But not you.”

  He’s stalling, Waxillium thought. Waiting for the men upstairs to run down.

  “Drop your weapons!” Waxillium said, holding his gun on Joe. “Drop them or I shoot!”

  The two guards didn’t move. No metal lines on the guard on the right, Waxillium thought. Or on Joe himself. The one on the left had a handgun, perhaps trusting the speed of his draw against a Coinshot. The other two had fancy hand-crossbows in their holsters, he bet. Single-shot, made of wood and ceramic. Built for killing Coinshots.

  Even with Allomancy, Waxillium would never be able to kill all three of them without getting shot himself. Sweat trickled down his temple. He was tem
pted to just pull his trigger and shoot, but he’d be killed if he did that. And they knew it. It was a standoff, but they had reinforcements coming.

  “You don’t belong here,” Joe said, leaning forward, elbows on his broken table. “We came here to escape folks like you. Your rules. Your assumptions. We don’t want you.”

  “If that were true,” Waxillium said, surprised at how level his voice was, “then people wouldn’t come to me crying because you killed their sons. You might not need Elendel’s laws up here, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need any laws at all. And it doesn’t mean men like you should be able to do whatever you want.”

  Granite Joe shook his head, standing up, hand to his holster. “This isn’t your habitat, son. Everyone has a price up here. If they don’t, they don’t fit in. You’ll die, slow and painful, just like a lion would die in that city of yours. What I’m doing today, this is a mercy.”

  Joe drew.

  Waxillium reacted quickly, Pushing himself off the wall lamps to his right. They were firmly anchored, so his Allomantic shove Pushed him to the left. He twisted his gun and fired.

  Joe got his crossbow out and loosed a bolt, but the shot missed, zipping through the air where Waxillium had been. Waxillium’s own bullet flew true for once, hitting the female guard, who had pulled out her crossbow. She dropped, and as Waxillium crashed into the wall, he Pushed—knocking the gun out of the other guard’s hand as the man fired.

  Waxillium’s Push, unfortunately, also flung his own gun out of his hand—but sent it spinning toward the second bodyguard. His gun smacked the man right in the face, dropping him.

  Waxillium steadied himself, looking across the room at Joe, who seemed baffled that both his guards were down. No time to think. Waxillium scrambled toward the large, koloss-blooded man. If he could reach some metal to use as a weapon, maybe—

  A weapon clicked behind him. Waxillium stopped and looked over his shoulder at Lessie, who was pointing a small hand-crossbow right at him.

  “Everyone up here has a price,” Granite Joe said.

  Waxillium stared at the crossbow bolt, tipped with obsidian. Where had she been carrying that? He swallowed slowly.

  She put herself in danger, scrambling up the stairs with me! he thought. How could she have been …

  But Joe had known about his Allomancy. So had she. Lessie knew he could spoil the thugs’ aim, when she’d joined him in running up the steps.

  “Finally,” Joe said, “do you have an explanation of why you didn’t just shoot him in the saloon room, where the barkeep put him?”

  She didn’t respond, instead studying Waxillium. “I did warn you that everyone in the saloon was in Joe’s employ,” she noted.

  “I…” Waxillium swallowed. “I still think your legs are pretty.”

  She met his eyes. Then she sighed, turned the crossbow, and shot Granite Joe in the neck.

  Waxillium blinked as the enormous man dropped to the floor, gurgling as he bled.

  “That?” Lessie said, glaring at Waxillium. “That’s all you could come up with to win me over? ‘You have nice legs’? Seriously? You are so doomed up here, Cravat.”

  Waxillium breathed out in relief. “Oh, Harmony. I thought you were going to shoot me for sure.”

  “Should have,” she grumbled. “I can’t believe—”

  She cut off as the stairs clattered, the troop of miscreants from above having finally gathered the nerve to rush down the stairwell. A good half dozen of them burst into the room with weapons drawn.

  Lessie dove for the fallen bodyguard’s gun.

  Waxillium thought quickly, then did what came most naturally. He struck a dramatic pose in the rubble, one foot up, Granite Joe dead beside him, both bodyguards felled. Dust from the broken ceiling still sprinkled down, illuminated in sunlight pouring through a window above.

  The thugs pulled to a stop. They looked down at the fallen corpse of their boss, then gaped toward Waxillium.

  Finally, looking like children who had been caught in the pantry trying to get at the cookies, they lowered their weapons. The ones at the front tried to push through the ones at the back to get away, and the whole clamorous mess of them swarmed back up the steps, leaving the forlorn barkeep, who fled last of all.

  Waxillium turned and offered his hand to Lessie, who let him pull her to her feet. She looked after the retreating group of bandits, whose boots thumped on wood in their haste to escape. In moments the building was silent.

  “Huh,” she said. “You’re as surprising as a donkey who can dance, Mister Cravat.”

  “It helps to have a thing,” Waxillium noted.

  “Yeah. You think I should get a thing?”

  “Getting a thing has been one of the most important choices I made in coming up to the Roughs.”

  Lessie nodded slowly. “I have no idea what we’re talking about, but it sounds kinda dirty.” She glanced past him toward Granite Joe’s corpse, which stared lifelessly, lying in a pool of his own blood.

  “Thanks,” Waxillium said. “For not murdering me.”

  “Eh. I was gonna kill him eventually anyway and turn him in for the bounty.”

  “Yes, well, I doubt you were planning to do it in front of his entire gang, while trapped in a basement with no escape.”

  “True. Right stupid of me, that was.”

  “So why do it?”

  She kept looking at the body. “I’ve done plenty of things in Joe’s name I wish I hadn’t, but as far as I know, I never shot a man who didn’t deserve it. Killing you … well, seems like it would have been killing what you stood for too. Ya know?”

  “I think I can grasp the concept.”

  She rubbed at a bleeding scratch on her neck, where she’d brushed broken wood during their fall. “Next time, though, I hope it won’t involve making quite so big a mess. I liked this saloon.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Waxillium said. “I intend to change things out here. If not the whole Roughs, then at least this town.”

  “Well,” Lessie said, walking over to Granite Joe’s corpse, “I’m sure that if any evil pianos were thinking of attacking the city, they’ll have second thoughts now, considering your prowess with that pistol.”

  Waxillium winced. “You … saw that, did you?”

  “Rarely seen such a feat,” she said, kneeling and going through Joe’s pockets. “Three shots, three different notes, not a single bandit down. That takes skill. Maybe you should spend a little less time with your thing and more with your gun.”

  “Now that sounded dirty.”

  “Good. I hate being crass by accident.” She came out with Joe’s pocketbook and smiled, tossing it up and catching it. Above, in the hole Waxillium had made, an equine head poked out, followed by a smaller, teenage one in an oversized bowler hat. Where had he gotten that?

  Destroyer blustered in greeting.

  “Sure, now you come,” Waxillium said. “Stupid horse.”

  “Actually,” Lessie said, “seems to me like staying away from you during a gunfight makes her a pretty damn smart horse.”

  Waxillium smiled and held out his hand to Lessie. She took it, and he pulled her close. Then he lifted them out of the wreckage on a line of blue light.

  PART ONE

  1

  SEVENTEEN YEARS LATER

  Winsting smiled to himself as he watched the setting sun. It was an ideal evening to auction himself off.

  “We have my saferoom ready?” Winsting asked, lightly gripping the balcony banister. “Just in case?”

  “Yes, my lord.” Flog wore his silly Roughs hat along with a duster, though he’d never been outside of the Elendel Basin. The man was an excellent bodyguard, despite his terrible fashion sense, but Winsting made certain to Pull on the man’s emotions anyway, subtly enhancing Flog’s sense of loyalty. One could never be too careful.

  “My lord?” Flog asked, glancing toward the chamber behind them. “They’re all here, my lord. Are you ready?”

  Not turning away fro
m the setting sun, Winsting raised a finger to hush the bodyguard. The balcony, in the Fourth Octant of Elendel, overlooked the canal and the Hub of the city—so he had a nice view of the Field of Rebirth. Long shadows stretched from the statues of the Ascendant Warrior and the Last Emperor in the green park where, according to fanciful legend, their corpses had been discovered following the Great Catacendre and the Final Ascension.

  The air was muggy, slightly tempered by a cool breeze off Hammondar Bay a couple of miles to the west. Winsting tapped his fingers on the balcony railing, patiently sending out pulses of Allomantic power to shape the emotions of those in the room behind him. Or at least any foolish enough not to be wearing their aluminum-lined hats.

  Any moment now …

  Initially appearing as pinprick spots in the air, mist grew before him, spreading like frost across a window. Tendrils stretched and spun about one another, becoming streams—then rivers of motion, currents shifting and blanketing the city. Engulfing it. Consuming it.

  “A misty night,” Flog said. “That’s bad luck, it is.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Winsting said, adjusting his cravat.

  “He’s watching us,” Flog said. “The mists are His eyes, my lord. Sure as Ruin, that is.”

  “Superstitious nonsense.” Winsting turned and strode into the room. Behind him, Flog shut the doors before the mists could seep into the party.

  The two dozen people—along with the inevitable bodyguards—who mingled and chatted there were a select group. Not just important, but also very much at odds with one another, despite their deliberate smiles and meaningless small talk. He preferred to have rivals at events like this. Let them all see each other, and let each know the cost of losing the contest for his favor.

  Winsting stepped among them. Unfortunately many did wear hats, whose aluminum linings would protect them from emotional Allomancy—though he had personally assured each attendee that none of the others would have Soothers or Rioters with them. He’d said nothing of his own abilities, of course. So far as any of them knew, he wasn’t an Allomancer.