She didn’t move, but maintained her slumped posture. He rested his arm across her shoulders and was given a glimpse of her as she looked in the real world. Full of color and life, yet somehow . . . weathered. She seemed so much older now, no longer the child he’d found scamming obligators on the streets.
He leaned down beside her. “I’m going to beat this thing, Vin. I am going take care of this.”
“And how,” Preservation said from the courtyard below the steps, “are you going to accomplish that?”
Kelsier looked up. Though he was prepared for the sight of Preservation, he still winced to see him as he was—barely even in human shape any longer, more a dissolved bunch of weaving threads of frayed smoke, giving the vague impression of a head, arms, legs.
“He’s free,” Preservation said. “That’s it. Time up. Contract due. He will take what was promised.”
“We’ll stop him.”
“Stop him? He’s the force of entropy, a universal constant. You can’t stop that any more than you can stop time.”
Kelsier stood up, leaving Vin and walking down the steps toward Preservation. He wished he could hear what Demoux was saying to this small crowd of glowing souls.
“If he can’t be stopped,” Kelsier said, “then we’ll slow him. You did it before, right? Your grand plan?”
“I . . .” Preservation said. “Yes . . . There was a plan. . . .”
“I’m free now. I can help you put it into motion.”
“Free?” Preservation laughed. “No, you’ve just entered a larger prison. Tied to this Realm, bound to it. There’s nothing you can do. Nothing I can do.”
“That—”
“He’s watching us, you know,” Preservation said, looking upward at the sky.
Kelsier followed his gaze reluctantly. The sky—misty and shifting—seemed so distant. It felt as if it had pulled back from the planet, like people in a crowd shying away from a corpse. In that vastness Kelsier saw something dark, thrashing, writhing upon itself. More solid than mist, like an ocean of snakes, obscuring the tiny sun.
He knew that vastness. Ruin was indeed watching.
“He thinks you’re insignificant,” Preservation said. “I think he finds you amusing—the soul of Ati that is still in there somewhere would laugh at this.”
“He has a soul?”
Preservation didn’t respond. Kelsier stepped up to him, passing corpses made of mists on the ground.
“If he is alive,” Kelsier said, “then he can be killed. No matter how powerful.” You’re proof of that, Fuzz. He’s killing you.
Preservation laughed, a harsh, barking noise. “You keep forgetting which of us is a god and which is just a poor dead shadow. Waiting to expire.” He waved a mostly unraveled arm, fingers made of spirals of unwound, misty strings. “Listen to them. Doesn’t it embarrass you how they talk? The Survivor? Ha! I Preserved them for millennia. What have you done for them?”
Kelsier turned toward Demoux. Preservation appeared to have forgotten that Kelsier couldn’t hear the speech. Intending to go touch Demoux, to get a view of what he looked like now, Kelsier brushed one of the corpses on the ground.
A young man. A soldier, by the looks of it. He didn’t know the boy, but he started to worry. He looked back at where Ham was standing—that figure near him would be Breeze.
What of the others?
He grew cold, then started touching corpses, looking for any he recognized. His motions became more frantic.
“What are you seeking?” Preservation asked.
“How many—” Kelsier swallowed. “How many of these were friends of mine?”
“Some,” Preservation said.
“Any members of the crew?”
“No,” Preservation said, and Kelsier let out a sigh. “No, they died during the intial break-in, days ago. Dockson. Clubs.”
A spear of ice shot through Kelsier. He tried to stand up from beside the corpse he’d been inspecting, but stumbled, trying to force out the words. “No. No, not Dox.”
Preservation nodded.
“Wh . . . When did it happen? How?”
Preservation laughed. The sound of madness. He showed little of the kindly, uncertain man who had greeted Kelsier when he’d first entered this place.
“Both were murdered by koloss as the siege broke. Their bodies were burned days ago, Kelsier, while you were trapped.”
Kelsier trembled, feeling lost. “I . . .” Kelsier said.
Dox. I wasn’t here for him. I could have seen him again, as he passed. Talked to him. Saved him maybe?
“He cursed you as he died, Kelsier,” Preservation said, voice harsh. “He blamed you for all this.”
Kelsier bowed his head. Another lost friend. And Clubs too . . . two good men. He’d lost too many of those in his life, dammit. Far too many.
I’m sorry, Dox, Clubs. I’m sorry for failing you.
Kelsier took that anger, that bitterness and shame, and channeled it. He’d found purpose again during his days in prison. He wouldn’t lose it now.
He stood and turned to Preservation. The god—shockingly—cringed as if frightened. Kelsier seized the god’s form, and in a brief moment was given a vision of the grandness beyond. The pervading light of Preservation that permeated all things. The world, the mists, the metals, the very souls of men. This creature was somehow dying, but his power was far from gone.
He also felt Preservation’s pain. It was the loss Kelsier had felt at Dox’s death, only magnified thousands of times over. Preservation felt every light that went out, felt them and knew them as a person he had loved.
Around the world they were dying at an accelerated pace. Too much ash was falling, and Preservation only anticipated it increasing. Armies of koloss rampaging beyond control. Death, destruction, a world on its last legs.
And . . . to the south . . . what was that? People?
Kelsier held Preservation, in awe at this creature’s divine agony. Then Kelsier pulled him close, into an embrace.
“I’m so sorry,” Kelsier whispered.
“Oh, Senna . . .” Preservation whispered. “I’m losing this place. Losing them all . . .”
“We are going to stop it,” Kelsier said, pulling back.
“It can’t be stopped. The deal . . .”
“Deals can be broken.”
“Not these kinds of deals, Kelsier. I was able to trick Ruin before, lock him away, by fooling him with our agreement. But that wasn’t a breach of contract, more leaving a hole in the agreement to be exploited. This time there are no holes.”
“Then we go out kicking and screaming,” Kelsier said. “You and me, we’re a team.”
Preservation seemed to condense, his form pulling itself together, threads reweaving. “A team. Yes. A crew.”
“To do the impossible.”
“Defy reality,” Preservation whispered. “Everyone always said you were insane.”
“And I always acknowledged that they had a point,” Kelsier said. “Thing is, while they were correct to question my sanity, they never did have the right reasoning. It’s not my ambition that should worry them.”
“Then what should?”
Kelsier smiled.
Preservation, in turn, laughed—a sound that had lost its edge, the harshness gone. “I can’t help you do . . . whatever it is you think you’re doing. Not directly. I don’t . . . think well enough anymore. But . . .”
“But?”
Preservation solidified a little further. “But I know where you’ll find someone who can.”
2
Kelsier followed a thread of Preservation, like a glowing tendril of mist, through the city. He made sure to look up periodically, confronting that force in the sky, which had boiled through the mists there and was coming to dominate in every direction.
Kelsier would not back down. He would not let this thing intimidate him again. He’d already killed one god. The second murder was always easier than the first.
The tendril of Pr
eservation led him past shadowy tenements, through a slum that somehow looked even more depressing on this side—all crammed together, the souls of men packed in frightened lumps. His crew had saved this city, but many of the people Kelsier passed didn’t seem to know it yet.
Eventually the tendril led him out broken city gates to the north, past rubble and corpses being slowly sorted. Past living armies and that fearsome army of koloss, out beyond the city and a short hike along the river to . . . the lake?
Luthadel was built not far from the lake that bore its name, though most of the city’s populace determinedly ignored that fact. Lake Luthadel wasn’t the swimming or sport kind of lake, unless you fancied bathing in a soupy sludge that was more ash than it was water—and good luck catching what few fish remained after centuries of residing next to a city full of half-starved skaa. This close to the ashmounts, keeping the river and lake navigable had demanded the full-time attention of an entire class of people, the canal workers, a strange breed of skaa who rarely mixed with those from the city proper.
They would have been horrified to find that here on this side, the lake—and actually the river as well—was inverted somehow. Opposite to the way the mists under his feet had a liquid feel to them, the lake rose into a solid mound, only a few inches high but harder and somehow more substantial than the ground he’d become used to walking upon.
In fact, the lake was like a low island rising from the sea of mists. What was solid and what was fluid seemed somehow reversed in this place. Kelsier stepped up to the island’s edge, the ribbon of Preservation’s essence curling past him and leading onto the island, like a mythical string showing the way home from the grand maze of Ishathon.
Kelsier stuffed his hands in his trouser pockets and kicked at the ground of the island. It was some type of dark, smoky stone.
“What?” Preservation whispered.
Kelsier jumped, then glanced at the line of light. “You . . . in there, Fuzz?”
“I’m everywhere,” Preservation said, his voice soft, frail. He sounded exhausted. “Why have you stopped?”
“This is different.”
“Yes, it congeals here,” Preservation said. “It has to do with the way men think, and where they are likely to pass. Somewhat to do with that, at least.”
“But what is it?” Kelsier said, stepping up onto the island.
Preservation said nothing further, and so Kelsier continued toward the center of the island. Whatever had “congealed” here, it was strikingly stonelike. And things grew on it. Kelsier passed scrubby plants sprouting from the otherwise hard ground—not misty, inchoate plants, but real ones full of color. They had broad brown leaves with—curiously—what seemed like mist rising from them. None of the plants reached higher than his knees, but there were still far more than he’d expected to find here.
As he passed through a field of the plants, he thought he caught something scurrying between them, rustling leaves in its passing.
The world of the dead has plants and animals? he thought. But that wasn’t what Preservation had called it. The Cognitive Realm. How did these plants grow here? What watered them?
The farther he penetrated onto this island, the darker it became. Ruin was covering up that tiny sun, and Kelsier began to miss even the faint glow that had permeated the phantom mists in the city. Soon he was traveling in what seemed like twilight.
Eventually Preservation’s ribbon grew thin, then vanished. Kelsier stopped near its tip, whispering, “Fuzz? You there?”
No response, the silence refuting Preservation’s claim earlier that he was everywhere. Kelsier shook his head. Perhaps Preservation was listening, but wasn’t there enough to give a reply. Kelsier continued forward, passing through a place where the plants had grown to waist height, mist rising from their broad leaves like steam from a hot plate.
Finally, ahead he spotted light. Kelsier pulled up. He’d fallen into a prowl naturally, led by instincts gained from a life spent on the con, literally since the day of his birth. He had no weapons. He knelt, feeling at the ground for a stone or stick, but these plants weren’t big enough to provide anything substantial, and the ground was smooth, unbroken.
Preservation had promised him help, but he wasn’t sure how much he trusted what Preservation said. Odd, that living through his own death should make him more hesitant to trust in God’s word. He took off his belt for a weapon, but it evaporated in his hands and appeared back on his waist. Shaking his head, he prowled closer, approaching near enough to the fire to pick out two people. Alive, and in this Realm, not glowing souls or misty spirits.
The man wore skaa clothing—suspenders, shirt with sleeves rolled up—and tended a small dinner fire. He had short hair and a narrow, almost pinched face. That knife at his belt, nearly long enough to be a sword, would come in very handy.
The other person, who sat on a small folding chair, might have been Terris. There were some among their population who had a skin tone almost as dark as hers, though he’d also met some people from the various southern dominances who were dark. She certainly wasn’t wearing Terris clothing—she had on a sturdy brown dress, with a large leather girdle around the waist, and wore her hair woven into tiny braids.
Two. He could handle two, couldn’t he? Even without Allomancy or weapons. Regardless, best to be careful. He hadn’t forgotten his humiliation at the hands of the Drifter. Kelsier made a careful decision, then stood up, straightened his coat, and strode into their camp.
“Well,” he proclaimed, “this has been an unusual few days, I can tell you that.”
The man at the fire scrambled backward, hand on his knife, gaping. The woman remained seated, though she reached for something at her side. A little tube with a handle on the bottom. She pointed it toward him, treating it like some kind of weapon.
“So,” Kelsier said, glancing at the sky with its shifting, writhing mass of too-solid tendrils, “anyone else bothered by the voracious force of destruction in the air above us?”
“Shadows!” the man shouted. “It’s you. You’re dead!”
“Depends on your definition of dead,” Kelsier said, strolling over to the fire. The woman trailed him with that odd weapon of hers. “What in the blazes are you burning for that fire?” He looked up at the two of them. “What?”
“How?” the man sputtered. “What? When . . .”
“. . . Why?” Kelsier added helpfully.
“Yes, why!”
“I have a very delicate constitution, you see,” Kelsier said. “And death seemed like it would be rather bad for the digestion. So I decided not to participate.”
“One doesn’t merely decide to become a shadow!” the man exclaimed. He had a faintly strange accent, one Kelsier couldn’t place. “It’s an important rite! With requirements and traditions. This . . . this is . . .” He threw his hands into the air. “This is a bother.”
Kelsier smiled, meeting the gaze of the woman, who reached for a cup of something warm on the ground beside her. With her other hand she tucked her weapon away, as if it had never been there. She was perhaps in her mid-thirties.
“The Survivor of Hathsin,” she said, musing.
“You seem to have me at a disadvantage,” Kelsier said. “One problem with notoriety, unfortunately.”
“I should assume there are many disadvantages to fame, for a thief. One doesn’t particularly wish to be recognized while trying to lift pocketbooks.”
“Considering how he’s regarded by the people of this domain,” the man said, still watching Kelsier with a wary eye, “I’d expect them to be delighted to discover him robbing them.”
“Yes,” Kelsier said dryly, “they practically lined up for the privilege. Must I repeat myself?”
She considered. “My name is Khriss, of Taldain.” She nodded toward the other man, and he reluctantly replaced his knife. “That is Nazh, a man in my employ.”
“Excellent,” Kelsier said. “Any idea why Preservation would tell me to come talk to you?”
/> “Preservation?” Nazh said, stepping up and seizing Kelsier’s arm. So, as with the Drifter, they could indeed touch Kelsier. “You’ve spoken directly with one of the Shards?”
“Sure,” Kelsier said. “Fuzz and I go way back.” He pulled his arm free of Nazh’s grip and grabbed the other folding stool from beside the fire—two simple pieces of wood that folded together, a piece of cloth between them to sit on.
He settled it across from Khriss and sat down.
“I don’t like this, Khriss,” Nazh said. “He’s dangerous.”
“Fortunately,” she replied, “so are we. The Shard Preservation, Survivor. How does he look?”
“Is that a test to see if I’ve actually spoken with him,” Kelsier said, “or a sincere question as to the creature’s status?”
“Both.”
“He’s dying,” Kelsier said, spinning Nazh’s knife in his fingers. He’d palmed it during their altercation a moment ago, and was curious to find that though it was made of metal, it didn’t glow. “He’s a short man with black hair—or he used to be. He’s been . . . well, unraveling.”
“Hey,” Nazh said, eyes narrowing at the knife. He looked at his belt, and the empty sheath. “Hey!”
“Unraveling,” Khriss said. “So a slow death. Ati doesn’t know how to Splinter another Shard? Or he hasn’t the strength? Hmm . . .”
“Ati?” Kelsier asked. “Preservation mentioned that name too.”
Khriss pointed at the sky with one finger while she sipped at her drink. “That’s him. What he’s become, at least.”
“And . . . what is a Shard?” Kelsier asked.
“Are you a scholar, Mr. Survivor?”
“No,” he said. “But I’ve killed a few.”
“Cute. Well, you’ve stumbled into something far, far bigger than you, your politics, or your little planet.”
“Bigger than you can handle, Survivor,” Nazh said, swiping back his knife as Kelsier balanced it on his finger. “You should just bow out now.”