The Drifter stumbled, then lunged, trying to grab Kelsier.
Kelsier, in turn, pivoted and buried his fist in the man’s stomach. The motion gave him a thrill; after sitting for so long, inactive, it was nice to be able to do something.
Drifter grunted at the punch. “All right then,” he muttered.
Kelsier brought his fists up, checked his footing, then unleashed a series of quick blows at Drifter’s face that should have dazed him.
When Kelsier pulled back—not wanting to go too far and hurt the man seriously—he found that Drifter was smiling at him.
That didn’t seem a good sign.
Somehow, Drifter shook off the hits he’d taken. He jumped forward, dodged Kelsier’s attempted punch, then ducked and slammed his fist into Kelsier’s kidneys.
It hurt. Kelsier lacked a body, but apparently his spirit could feel pain. He let out a grunt and brought up his arms to protect his face, stepping backward in the liquid light. The Drifter attacked, relentless, slamming his fists into Kelsier with no care for the damage he might be doing to himself.
Go to the ground, Kelsier’s instincts told him. He dropped one hand and tried to seize Drifter by the arm, planning to send them both down into the light to grapple.
Unfortunately, the Drifter was a little too quick. He dodged and kicked Kelsier’s legs from beneath him again, then grabbed him by the throat, slamming him repeatedly—brutally—against the bottom of the shallower part of the prison, splashing him in light that was too thin to be water, but suffocating nonetheless.
Finally Drifter hauled him up, limp. The man’s eyes were glowing. “That was unpleasant,” Drifter said, “yet somehow still satisfying. Apparently you already being dead means I can hurt you.” As Kelsier tried to grab his arm, Drifter slammed Kelsier down again, then pulled him back up, stunned.
“I’m sorry, Survivor, for the rough treatment,” Drifter continued. “But you are not supposed to be here. You did what I needed you to, but you’re a wild card I’d rather not deal with right now.” He paused. “If it’s any consolation, you should feel proud. It’s been centuries since anyone got the drop on me.”
He released Kelsier, letting him slump down and catch himself against the side of the prison, half submerged in the light. He growled, trying to pull himself up after Drifter.
Drifter sighed, then proceeded to kick at Kelsier’s leg repeatedly, shocking him with the pain of it. He screamed, holding his leg. It should have cracked from the force of those kicks, and though it had not, the pain was overwhelming.
“This is a lesson,” Drifter said, though it was difficult to hear the words through the pain. “But not the one you might think it is. You don’t have a body, and I don’t have the inclination to actually injure your soul. That pain is caused by your mind; it’s thinking about what should be happening to you, and responding.” He hesitated. “I’ll refrain from making you choke on a chunk of your own flesh.”
He walked toward the middle of the pool. Kelsier watched through eyes quivering with pain as Drifter held his hands out to the sides and closed his eyes. He stepped into the center of the pool, the deep portion, and vanished into the light.
A moment later, a figure climbed back out of the pool. Yet this time, the person was shadowy, glowing with inner light like …
Like someone in the world of the living. This pool had let Drifter transition from the world of the dead to the real world. Kelsier gaped, following Drifter with his eyes as the man strode past the pillars in the room, then stopped at the other side. Two tiny sources of metal still glowed fiercely there to Kelsier’s eyes.
Drifter selected one. It was small, as he could toss it into the air and catch it again. Kelsier could sense the triumph in that motion.
Kelsier closed his eyes and concentrated. No pain. His leg wasn’t actually hurt. Concentrate.
He managed to make some of the pain fade. He sat up in the pool, rippling light coming up to his chest. He breathed in and out, though he didn’t need the air.
Damn. The first person he’d seen in months had thrashed him, then stolen something from the chamber outside. He didn’t know what, or why, or even how the Drifter had managed to slip from one world to the next.
Kelsier crawled to the center of the pool, lowering himself down into the deep portion. He stood, his leg still aching faintly, and put his hands to the sides. He concentrated, trying to …
To what? Transition? What would that even do to him?
He didn’t care. He was frustrated and humiliated. He needed to prove to himself that he wasn’t incapable.
He failed. No amount of concentration, visualization, or straining of muscles made him do what the Drifter had managed. He climbed from the pool, exhausted and chastened, and settled on the side.
He didn’t notice Fuzz standing there until the god spoke. “What were you doing?”
Kelsier turned. Fuzz visited infrequently these days, but when he did come, he always did it unannounced. If he spoke, he often only raved like a madman.
“Someone was just here,” Kelsier said. “A man with white hair. He somehow used this Well to pass from the world of the dead to the world of the living.”
“I see,” Fuzz said softly. “He dared that, did he? Dangerous, with Ruin straining against his bonds. But if anyone were going to try something so foolhardy, it would be Cephandrius.”
“He stole something, I think,” Kelsier said. “From the other side of the room. A bit of metal.”
“Aaah…” Fuzz said softly. “I had thought that when he rejected the rest of us, he would stop interfering. I should know better than to trust an implication from him. Half the time you can’t trust his outright promises.…”
“Who is he?” Kelsier asked.
“An old friend. And no, before you ask, you can’t do as he did and transition between Realms. Your ties to the Physical Realm have been severed. You’re a kite with no string connecting it to the ground. You cannot ride the perpendicularity across.”
Kelsier sighed. “Then why was he able to come to the world of the dead?”
“It’s not the world of the dead. It’s the world of the mind. Men—all things, truly—are like a ray of light. The floor is the Physical Realm, where that light pools. The sun is the Spiritual Realm, where it begins. This Realm, the Cognitive Realm, is the space between where that beam stretches.”
The metaphor barely made any sense to him. They all know so much, Kelsier thought, and I know so little.
Still, at least Fuzz was sounding better today. Kelsier smiled toward the god, then froze as Fuzz turned his head.
Fuzz was missing half his face. The entire left side was just gone. Not wounded, and there was no skeleton. The complete half smoked, trailing wisps of mist. Half his lips remained, and he smiled back at Kelsier, as if nothing were wrong.
“He stole a bit of my essence, distilled and pure,” Fuzz explained. “It can Invest a human, grant him or her Allomancy.”
“Your … face, Fuzz…”
“Ati thinks to finish me,” Fuzz said. “Indeed, his knife was placed long ago. I’m already dead.” He smiled again, a gruesome expression, then vanished.
Feeling wrung out, Kelsier slumped alongside the pool, lying on the stones—which actually felt a little like real stone, instead of the fluffy softness of everything else made of mist.
He hated this feeling of ignorance. Everyone else was in on some grand joke, and he was the butt. Kelsier stared up at the ceiling, bathed in the glow of the shimmering Well and its column of light. Eventually, he came to a quiet decision.
He would find the answers.
In the Pits of Hathsin, he had awakened to purpose and had determined to destroy the Lord Ruler. Well, he would awaken again. He stood up and stepped into the light, strengthened. The clash of these gods was important, that thing in the Well dangerous. There was more to all of this than he’d ever known, and because of that he had a reason to live.
Perhaps more importantly, he had a re
ason to stay sane.
2
KELSIER no longer worried about madness or boredom. Each time he grew weary of his imprisonment, he remembered that feeling—that humiliation—he’d felt at Drifter’s hands. Yes, he was trapped in a space only five or so feet across, but there was plenty to do.
First he returned to his study of the thing Beyond. He forced himself to duck beneath the light to face it and meet its inscrutable gaze—he did it until he didn’t flinch when it turned its attention on him.
Ruin. A fitting name for that vast sense of erosion, decay, and destruction.
He continued to follow the Well’s pulses. These trips gave him cryptic clues to Ruin’s motives and plots. He sensed a familiar pattern to the things it changed—for Ruin seemed to be doing what Kelsier himself had done: co-opting a religion. Ruin was manipulating the hearts of the people by changing their lore and books.
That terrified Kelsier. His purpose expanded, as he watched the world through these pulses. He didn’t just need to understand, he needed to fight this thing. This horrible force that would end all things, if it could.
He struggled, therefore, with a desperation to understand what he saw. Why did Ruin transform the old Terris prophecies? What was the Drifter—whom Kelsier spotted in very rare pulses—doing up in the Terris Dominance? Who was this mysterious Mistborn to whom Ruin paid so much attention, and was he a threat to Vin?
When he rode the pulses, Kelsier watched for—craved—signs of the people he knew and loved. Ruin was keenly interested in Vin, and many of his pulses centered around watching her or the man she loved, that Elend Venture.
The mounting clues worried Kelsier. Armies around Luthadel. A city still in chaos. And—he hated to confront this one—it looked like the Venture boy was king. When Kelsier realized this, he was so angry he spent days away from the pulses.
They’d gone and put a nobleman in charge.
Yes, Kelsier had saved this man’s life. Against his better judgment, he’d rescued the man that Vin loved. Out of love for her, perhaps a twisted paternal sense of duty. The Venture boy hadn’t been too bad, compared to the rest of his kind. But to give him the throne? It seemed that even Dox was listening to Venture. Kelsier would have expected Breeze to ride whatever wind came his way, but Dockson?
Kelsier fumed, but he could not remain away for long. He hungered for these glimpses of his friends. Though each was only a brief flash—like a single image from eyes blinked open—he clung to them. They were reminders that outside his prison, life continued.
Occasionally he was given a glimpse of someone else. His brother, Marsh.
Marsh lived. That was a welcome discovery. Unfortunately, the discovery was tainted. For Marsh was an Inquisitor.
The two of them had never been what one would call familial. They had taken divergent paths in life, but that wasn’t the true source of the distance between them—it wasn’t even due to Marsh’s stern ways butting against Kelsier’s glibness, or Marsh’s unspoken jealousy for things Kelsier had.
No, the truth was they had been raised knowing that at any point they could be dragged before the Inquisitors and murdered for their half-blooded nature. Each had reacted differently to an entire life spent, essentially, with a death sentence: Marsh with quiet tension and caution, Kelsier with aggressive self-confidence to mask his secrets.
Both had known a single, inescapable truth. If one brother were caught, it meant the other would be exposed as a half-blood and likely killed as well. Perhaps this situation would have brought other siblings together. Kelsier was ashamed to admit that for him and Marsh, it had been a wedge. Each mention of “Stay safe” or “Watch yourself” had been colored by an undercurrent of “Don’t screw up, or you’ll get me killed.” It had been a vast relief when, after their parents’ deaths, the two of them had agreed to give up pretense and enter the underground of Luthadel.
At times Kelsier toyed with fantasies of what might have been. Could he and Marsh have integrated fully, becoming part of noble society? Could he have overcome his loathing for them and their culture?
Regardless, he wasn’t fond of Marsh. The word “fond” sounded too much of walks in a park or time spent eating pastries. One was fond of a favorite book. No, Kelsier was not fond of Marsh. But strangely, he still loved him. He was initially happy to find the man alive, but then perhaps death would have been better than what had been done to him.
It took Kelsier weeks to figure out the reason Ruin was so interested in Marsh. Ruin could talk to Marsh. Marsh and other Inquisitors, judging by the glimpses and the sensation he received of words being sent.
How? Why Inquisitors? Kelsier found no answers in the visions he saw, though he did witness an important event.
The thing called Ruin was growing stronger, and it was stalking Vin and Elend. Kelsier saw it clearly in a trip through the pulses. A vision of the boy, Elend Venture, sleeping in his tent. The power of Ruin coalescing, forming a figure, malevolent and dangerous. It waited there until Vin entered, then tried to stab Elend.
As Kelsier lost the pulse, he was left with the image of Vin deflecting the blow and saving Elend. But he was confused. Ruin had waited there specifically until Vin returned.
It hadn’t actually wanted to hurt Elend. It had just wanted Vin to see him trying.
Why?
3
“IT’S a plug,” Kelsier said.
Fuzz—Preservation, as the god had said he could be called—sat outside the prison. He was still missing half his face, and the rest of him was leaking in larger patches as well.
These days the god spent more time near the Well, for which Kelsier was grateful. He had been practicing how to pull information from the creature.
“Hmmm?” Preservation asked.
“This Well,” Kelsier said, gesturing around him. “It’s like a plug. You created a prison for Ruin, but even the most solid of burrows must have an entrance. This is that entrance, sealed with your own power to keep him out, since you two are opposites.”
“That…” Preservation said, trailing off.
“That?” Kelsier prompted.
“That’s utterly wrong.”
Damn, Kelsier thought. He’d spent weeks on that theory.
He was starting to feel an urgency. The pulses of the Well were growing more demanding, and Ruin seemed to be growing increasingly eager in its touch upon the world. Recently the light of the Well had started to act differently, condensing somehow, pulling together. Something was happening.
“We are gods, Kelsier,” Preservation said with a voice that trailed off, then grew louder, then trailed off again. “We permeate everything. The rocks are me. The people are me. And him. All things persist, but decay. Ruin … and Preservation…”
“You told me this was your power,” Kelsier said, gesturing again at the Well, trying to get the god back on topic. “That it gathers here.”
“Yes, and elsewhere,” Preservation said. “But yes, here. Like dew collects, my power gathers in that spot. It is natural. A cycle: clouds, rain, river, humidity. You cannot press so much essence into a system without it congealing here and there.”
Great. That didn’t tell him anything. He pressed further on the topic, but Fuzz grew quiet, so he tried something else. He needed to keep Preservation talking—to prevent the god from slumping into one of his quiet stupors.
“Are you afraid?” Kelsier asked. “If Ruin gets free, are you afraid he will kill you?”
“Ha,” Preservation said. “I’ve told you. He killed me long, long ago.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m sitting here talking to you.”
“And I’m talking to you. How alive are you?”
A good point.
“Death for one such as me is not like death for one such as you,” Preservation said, staring off again. “I was killed long ago, when I made the decision to break our promise. But this power I hold … it persists and it remembers. I
t wants to be alive itself. I have died, but some of me remains. Enough to know that … there were plans.…”
It was no use trying to pry out what those plans were. He didn’t remember whatever this “plan” was that he’d made.
“So it’s not a plug,” Kelsier said. “Then what is it?”
Preservation didn’t reply. He didn’t even seem to hear.
“You said to me once before,” Kelsier continued, speaking more loudly, “that the power exists to be used. That it needs to be used. Why?”
Again no answer. He was going to need to try a different tactic. “I looked at him again. Your opposite.”
Preservation stood up straight, turning his haunting, half-finished gaze upon Kelsier. Mentioning Ruin often shocked him out of his stupor.
“He is dangerous,” Preservation said. “Stay away. My power protects you. Do not taunt him.”
“Why? He’s locked up.”
“Nothing is eternal, not even time itself,” Preservation said. “I didn’t imprison him so much as delay him.”
“And the power?”
“Yes…” Preservation said, nodding.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, he will use that. I see.” Preservation started, as if realizing—or maybe just recalling—something important. “My power created his prison. My power can unlock it. But how would he find someone who would do it? Who would hold the powers of creation, then give them away…”
“Which … we don’t want them to do,” Kelsier said.
“No. It will free him!”
“And last time?” Kelsier asked.
“Last time…” Preservation blinked, and seemed to come to himself more. “Yes, last time. The Lord Ruler. I made it work last time. I’ve put her into the spot to do this, but I can hear her thoughts.… He’s been working on her.… So mixed up…”
Arcanum Unbounded: The Cosmere Collection Page 21
