“If you don’t wish to speak of it,” Vin said, turning away from the kandra, “then I won’t force you.”
OreSeur was silent.
Vin breathed in the mist, its cool wetness tickling her throat and lungs. “Do you know what I love, kandra?”
“No, Mistress.”
“The mists,” she said, holding out her arms. “The power, the freedom.”
OreSeur nodded slowly. Nearby, Vin felt a faint pulsing with her bronze. Quiet, strange, unnerving. It was the same odd pulsing that she had felt atop Keep Venture a few nights before. She had never been brave enough to investigate it again.
It’s time to do something about that, she decided. “Do you know what I hate, kandra?” she whispered, falling to a crouch, checking her knives and metals.
“No, Mistress.”
She turned, meeting OreSeur’s eyes. “I hate being afraid.”
She knew that others thought her jumpy. Paranoid. She had lived with fear for so long that she had once seen it as something natural, like the ash, the sun, or the ground itself.
Kelsier had taken that fear away. She was careful, still, but she didn’t feel a constant sense of terror. The Survivor had given her a life where the ones she loved didn’t beat her, had shown her something better than fear. Trust. Now that she knew of these things, she would not quickly surrender them. Not to armies, not to assassins …
Not even to spirits.
“Follow if you can,” she whispered, then dropped off the rooftop to the street below.
She dashed along the mist-slicked street, building momentum before she had time to lose her nerve. The source of the bronze pulses was close; it came from only one street over, in a building. Not the top, she decided. One of the darkened windows on the third floor, the shutters open.
Vin dropped a coin and jumped into the air. She shot upward, angling herself by Pushing against a latch across the street. She landed in the window’s pitlike opening, arms grabbing the sides of the frame. She flared tin, letting her eyes adjust to the deep darkness within the abandoned room.
And it was there. Formed entirely of mists, it shifted and spun, its outline vague in the dark chamber. It had a vantage to see the rooftop where Vin and OreSeur had been talking.
Ghosts don’t spy on people … do they? Skaa didn’t speak of things like spirits or the dead. It smacked too much of religion, and religion was for the nobility. To worship was death for skaa. That hadn’t stopped some, of course—but thieves like Vin had been too pragmatic for such things.
There was only one thing in skaa lore that this creature matched. Mistwraiths. Creatures said to steal the souls of men foolish enough to go outside at night. But, Vin now knew what mistwraiths were. They were cousins to the kandra—strange, semi-intelligent beasts who used the bones of those they ingested. They were odd, true—but hardly phantoms, and not really even that dangerous. There were no dark wraiths in the night, no haunting spirits or ghouls.
Or so Kelsier had said. The thing standing in the dark room—its insubstantial form writhing in the mists—seemed a powerful counterexample. She gripped the sides of the window, fear—her old friend—returning.
Run. Flee. Hide.
“Why have you been watching me?” she demanded.
The thing did not move. Its form seemed to draw the mists forward, and they spun slightly, as if in an air current.
I can sense it with bronze. That means it’s using Allomancy—and Allomancy attracts the mist.
The thing stepped forward. Vin tensed.
And then the spirit was gone.
Vin paused, frowning. That was it? She had—
Something grabbed her arm. Something cold, something terrible, but something very real. A pain shot through her head, moving as if from her ear and into her mind. She yelled, but cut off as her voice failed. With a quiet groan—her arm quivering and shaking—she fell backward out of the window.
Her arm was still cold. She could feel it whipping in the air beside her, seeming to exude chill air. Mist passed like trailing clouds.
Vin flared tin. Pain, cold, wetness, and lucidity burst into her mind, and she threw herself into a twist and flared pewter just as she hit the ground.
“Mistress?” OreSeur said, darting from the shadows.
Vin shook her head, pushing herself up to her knees, her palms cool against the slick cobblestones. She could still feel the trailing chill in her left arm.
“Shall I go for aid?” the wolfhound asked.
Vin shook her head, forcing herself into a wobbling stand. She looked upward, through swirling mists, toward the black window above.
She shivered. Her shoulder was sore from where she had hit the ground, and her still bruised side throbbed, but she could feel her strength returning. She stepped away from the building, still looking up. Above her, the deep mists seemed … ominous. Obscuring.
No, she thought forcefully. The mists are my freedom; the night is my home! This is where I belong. I haven’t needed to be afraid in the night since Kelsier taught me otherwise.
She couldn’t lose that. She wouldn’t go back to the fear. Still, she couldn’t help the quick urgency in her step as she waved to OreSeur and scampered away from the building. She gave no explanation for her strange actions.
He didn’t ask for one.
Elend set a third pile of books onto the table, and it slumped against the other two, threatening to topple the entire lot to the floor. He steadied them, then glanced up.
Breeze, in a prim suit, regarded the table with amusement as he sipped his wine. Ham and Spook were playing a game of stones as they waited for the meeting to begin; Spook was winning. Dockson sat in the corner of the room, scribbling on a ledger, and Clubs sat in a deep plush chair, eyeing Elend with one of his stares.
Any of these men could be an impostor, Elend thought. The thought still seemed insane to him. What was he to do? Exclude them all from his confidence? No, he needed them too much.
The only option was to act normally and watch them. Vin had told him to try and spot inconsistencies in their personalities. He intended to do his best, but the reality was he wasn’t sure how much he would be able to see. This was more Vin’s area of expertise. He needed to worry about the armies.
Thinking of her, he glanced at the stained-glass window at the back of the study, and was surprised to see it was dark.
That late already? Elend thought.
“My dear man,” Breeze noted. “When you told us you needed to ‘go and gather a few important references,’ you might have warned us that you were planning to be gone for two full hours.”
“Yes, well,” Elend said, “I kind of lost track of time. …”
“For two hours?”
Elend nodded sheepishly. “There were books involved.”
Breeze shook his head. “If the fate of the Central Dominance weren’t at stake—and if it weren’t so fantastically enjoyable to watch Hammond lose an entire month’s earnings to the boy there—I’d have left an hour ago.”
“Yes, well, we can get started now,” Elend said.
Ham chuckled, standing up. “Actually, it’s kind of like the old days. Kell always arrived late, too—and he liked to hold his meetings at night. Mistborn hours.”
Spook smiled, his coin pouch bulging.
We still use boxings—Lord Ruler imperials—as our coinage, Elend thought. We’ll have to do something about that.