I have written much about the magics of this planet. Indeed, I could fill entire volumes with my thoughts on Allomancy, Feruchemy, and Hemalurgy. I maintain, however, that the one of these with the largest potential impact on the cosmere is Hemalurgy. Usable by anyone with the right knowledge, this dangerous creation has proven able to warp souls regardless of planet or Investiture, creating false Connections that no Shard designed or intended.
Though the planetary system is rather boring, Scadrial itself has proven intriguing time and time again. This is despite the fact that humans used to live on a relatively small portion of the planet. (A fact that began to change once the extreme environments of the Final Empire were removed.)
From the adaptations (both forced and unforced) of the humans living on her, to the vast transformations of landscape during her different eras, Scadrial remains my favorite planet for scholarly study in the cosmere. The interactions of her magics with natural physics are multitude, varied, and fascinating.
THE
ELEVENTH
METAL
This story may be read before the original Mistborn Trilogy.
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 regarded Gemmel with 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 grey 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 people were back in Luthadel.
Kelsier had assumed there would be less ash out here—only one of the ashmounts 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 symmetrical—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 grey. 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 understatement. 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 dammit, 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 hi
m.
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 of the metals inside 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, the world 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 grey 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 Allomancers 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 Kelsier 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, inspecting 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.