Sazed raised an eyebrow. “Blaspheme?”
“You are not the Announcer,” the kandra said. “This is not the end.”
“Have you seen the ash up above?” Sazed said. “Or, has it stopped up the entrances to this cavern complex so soundly that nobody can escape to see that the world is falling apart?”
“We have lived a very long time, Terrisman,” one of the other kandra said. “We have seen periods where the ash fell more copiously than others.”
“Oh?” Sazed asked. “And you have, perhaps, seen the Lord Ruler die before as well?”
Some of the kandra looked uncomfortable at this, though the one at the lead shook his head. “Did TenSoon send you?”
“He did,” Sazed admitted.
“You can make no arguments other than those he has already made,” the kandra said. “Why would he think that you—an outsider—could persuade us, when he could not?”
“Perhaps because he understood something about me,” Sazed said, tapping his book with his pen. “Are you aware of the ways of Keepers, kandra?”
“My name is KanPaar,” the kandra said. “And yes, I understand what Keepers do—or, at least, what they did, before the Father was killed.”
“Then,” Sazed said, “perhaps you know that every Keeper has an area of specialty. The intention was that when the Lord Ruler finally did fall, we would already be divided into specialists who could teach our knowledge to the people.”
“Yes,” KanPaar said.
“Well,” Sazed said, rubbing fingers over his book. “My specialty was religion. Do you know how many religions there were before the Lord Ruler’s Ascension?”
“I don’t know. Hundreds.”
“We have record of five hundred and sixty-three,” Sazed said. “Though that includes sects of the same religions. In a more strict count, there were around three hundred.”
“And?” KanPaar asked.
“Do you know how many of these survived until this day?” Sazed asked.
“None?”
“One,” Sazed said, holding up a finger. “Yours. The Terris religion. Do you think it a coincidence that the religion you follow not only still exists, but also foretells this exact day?”
KanPaar snorted. “You are saying nothing new. So my religion is real, while others were lies. What does that explain?”
“That you should listen, perhaps, to members of your faith who bring you tidings.” Sazed began to flip through his book. “At the very least, I would think that you’d be interested in this book, as it contains the collected information about the Hero of Ages that I was able to discover. Since I knew little of the true Terris religion, I had to get my information from secondhand accounts—from tales and stories, and from texts written during the intermediate time.
“Unfortunately,” Sazed continued, “much of this text was changed by Ruin when he was trying to persuade the Hero to visit the Well of Ascension and set him free. Therefore, it is quite well corrupted and tainted by his touch.”
“And why would I be interested?” KanPaar asked. “You just told me that your information is corrupt and useless.”
“Useless?” Sazed asked. “No, not useless at all. Corrupt, yes. Changed by Ruin. My friend, I have a tome here filled with Ruin’s lies. You have a mind filled with the original truths. Apart, we know very little. However, if we were to compare—discovering precisely which items Ruin changed—would it not tell us exactly what his plan is? At the very least, it would tell us what he didn’t want us to focus on, I think.”
The room fell silent.
“Well,” KanPaar finally said, “I—”
“That will be enough, KanPaar,” a voice said.
Sazed paused, cocking his head. The voice hadn’t come from any of those beside the pedestals. Sazed glanced around the room, trying to discover who had spoken.
“You may leave, Seconds,” another voice said.
One of the Seconds gasped. “Leave? Leave you with this one, an outsider?”
“A descendant,” one of the voices said. “A Worldbringer. We will hear him.”
“Leave us,” said another voice.
Sazed raised an eyebrow, sitting as the Second Generationers—looking rattled—left their lecterns and quietly made their way from the room. A pair of guards pushed the doors shut, blocking the view of those kandra who had been watching outside. Sazed was left alone in the room with the phantoms who had spoken.
Sazed heard a scraping sound. It echoed through the steel-lined chamber, and then a door opened at the back of the room. From this came what he assumed was the First Generation. They looked … old. Their kandra flesh literally hung from their bodies, drooping, like translucent tree moss dripping from bone branches. They were stooped, seeming older than the other kandra he had seen, and they didn’t walk so much as shuffle.
They wore simple robes, with no sleeves, but the garments still looked odd on the creatures. In addition, beneath their translucent skin, he could see that they had white, normal skeletons. “Human bones?” Sazed asked as the elderly creatures made their way forward, walking with canes.
“Our own bones,” one of them said, speaking with a tired near-whisper of a voice. “We hadn’t the skill or knowledge to form True Bodies when this all began, and so took our original bones again when the Lord Ruler gave them to us.”
The First Generation appeared to have only ten members. They arranged themselves on the benches. And, out of respect, Sazed moved his table so that he was seated before them, like a presenter before an audience.
“Now,” he said, raising his metal scratching pen. “Let us begin—we have much work to do.”
The question remains, where did the original prophecies about the Hero of Ages come from? I now know that Ruin changed them, but did not fabricate them. Who first taught that a Hero would come, one who would be an emperor of all mankind, yet would be rejected by his own people? Who first stated he would carry the future of the world on his arms, or that he would repair that which had been sundered?
And who decided to use the neutral pronoun, so that we wouldn’t know if the Hero was a woman or a man?
69
MARSH KNELT IN A PILE of ash, hating himself and the world. The ash fell without cease, drifting onto his back, covering him, and yet he did not move.
He had been cast aside, told to sit and wait. Like a tool forgotten in the yard, slowly being covered in snow.
I was there, he thought. With Vin. Yet … I couldn’t speak to her. Couldn’t tell her anything.
Worse … he hadn’t wanted to. During his entire conversation with her, his body and mind had belonged to Ruin completely. Marsh had been helpless to resist, hadn’t been able to do anything that might have let Vin kill him.
Except for a moment. A moment near the end, when she’d almost taken control of him. A moment when he’d seen something inside of his master—his god, his self—that gave him hope.
For in that moment, Ruin had feared her.
And then, Ruin had forced Marsh to run, leaving behind his army of koloss—the army that Marsh had been ordered to let Elend Venture steal, then bring to Fadrex. The army that Ruin had eventually stolen back.