The Final Empire m-1

by Brandon Sanderson

  Once you distribute the weapons, you must secure the city gates and subdue the remaining members of the Garrison. Breeze, your team will do this – march on the Garrison first, so that you can take the gates in peace.

  There are four Great Houses that retain a strong military presence in the city. I have marked them on the map. Ham, your team will deal with these. We don’t want an armed force other than our own inside the city.

  Dockson, remain behind while the initial strikes happen. More and more skaa will come to the warehouses once word gets out. Breeze and Ham’s armies will include the troops we have trained, as well as augmentations – I hope – from the skaa gathering in the streets. You will need to make certain that the regular skaa get their weapons, so that Clubs can lead the assault on the palace itself.

  The Soothing stations should already be gone – Renoux delivered the proper order to our assassin teams before he came to get you to bring you here. If you have time, send some of Ham’s Thugs to check out those stations. Breeze, your own Soothers will be needed amongst the skaa to encourage them to bravery.

  I think that’s everything. It was a fun job, wasn’t it? When you remember me, please remember that. Remember to smile. Now, move quickly.

  May you rule in wisdom.

  The map had the city divided, with the various divisions labeled with various crewmembers’ names. Vin noticed that she, along with Sazed, were left out. “I’ll go back to that group we left by our house,” Clubs said in a grumbling voice. “Bring them here to get weapons.”

  He began to hobble away. “Clubs?” Ham said, turning. “No offense, but… why did he include you as an army leader? What do you know of warfare?”

  Clubs snorted, then lifted up his trouser leg, showing the long, twisting scar that ran up the side of his calf and thigh – obviously the source of his limp. “Where do you think I got this?” he said, then began to move away.

  Ham turned back with wonder. “I don’t believe this is happening.”

  Breeze shook his head. “And I assumed that I knew something about manipulating people. This… this is amazing. The economy is on the verge of collapsing, and the nobility that survive will soon be at open warfare on the countryside. Kell showed us how to kill Inquisitors – we’ll just need to pull down the others and behead them. As for the Lord Ruler…”

  Eyes turned on Vin. She looked down at the pouch in her hand, and pulled it open. A smaller sack, obviously filled with atium beads, fell into her hand. It was followed by a small bar of metal wrapped in a sheet of paper. The Eleventh Metal.

  Vin unwrapped the paper.

  Vin, it read. Your original duty tonight was going to be to assassinate the high noblemen remaining in the city. But, well, you convinced me that maybe they should live.

  I could never figure out how this blasted metal was supposed to work. It’s safe to burn – it won’t kill you – but it doesn’t appear to do anything useful. If you’re reading this, then I failed to figure out how to use it when I faced the Lord Ruler. I don’t think it matters. The people needed something to believe in, and this was the only way to give it to them.

  Please don’t be angry at me for abandoning you. I was given an extension on life. I should have died in Mare’s place years ago. I was ready for this.

  The others will need you. You’re their Mistborn now – you’ll have to protect them in the months to come. The nobility will send assassins against our fledgling kingdom’s rulers.

  Farewell. I’ll tell Mare about you. She always wanted a daughter.

  “What does it say, Vin?” Ham asked.

  “It… says that he doesn’t know how the Eleventh Metal works. He’s sorry – he wasn’t certain how to defeat the Lord Ruler.”

  “We’ve got an entire city full of people to fight him,” Dox said. “I seriously doubt he can kill us all – if we can’t destroy him, we’ll just tie him up and toss him in a dungeon.”

  The others nodded.

  “All right!” Dockson said. “Breeze and Ham, you need to get to those other warehouses and begin giving out weapons. Spook, go fetch the apprentices – we’ll need them to run messages. Let’s go!”

  Everyone scattered. Soon, the skaa they had seen earlier burst into the warehouse, holding their torches high, looking in awe at the wealth of weaponry. Dockson worked efficiently, ordering some of the newcomers to be distributors, sending others to go gather their friends and family. Men began to gear up, gathering weapons. Everyone was busy except for Vin.

  She looked up at Sazed, who smiled at her. “Sometimes we just have to wait long enough, Mistress,” he said. “Then we find out why exactly it was that we kept believing. There is a saying that Master Kelsier was fond of.”

  “There’s always another secret,” Vin whispered. “But Saze, everyone has something to do except me. I was originally supposed to go assassinate noblemen, but Kell doesn’t want me to do that anymore.”

  “They have to be neutralized,” Sazed said, “but not necessarily murdered. Perhaps your place was simply to show Kelsier that fact?”

  Vin shook her head. “No. I have to do more, Saze.” She gripped the empty pouch, frustrated. Something crinkled inside of it.

  She looked down, opening the pouch and noticing a piece of paper that she hadn’t seen before. She pulled it out and unfolded it delicately. It was the drawing that Kelsier had shown her – the picture of a flower. Mare had always kept it with her, dreaming of a future where the sun wasn’t red, where plants were green…

  Vin looked up.

  Bureaucrat, politician, soldier… there’s something else that every kingdom needs.

  A good assassin.

  She turned, pulling out a vial of metal and drinking its contents, using the liquid to wash down a couple beads of atium.

  She walked over to the pile of weapons, picking up a small bundle of arrows. They had stone heads. She began breaking the heads off, leaving about a half inch of wood attached to them, discarding the fletched shafts.

  “Mistress?” Sazed asked with concern.

  Vin walked past him, searching through the armaments. She found what she wanted in a shirtlike piece of armor, constructed from large rings of interlocking metal. She pried a handful of these free with a dagger and pewter-enhanced fingers.

  “Mistress, what are you doing?”

  Vin walked over to a trunk beside the table, within which she had seen a large collection of powdered metals. She filled her pouch with several handfuls of pewter dust.

  “I’m worried about the Lord Ruler,” she said, taking a file from the box and scraping off a few flakes of the Eleventh Metal. She paused – eyeing the unfamiliar, silvery metal – then swallowed the flakes with a gulp from her flask. She put a couple more flakes in one of her backup metal vials.

  “Surely the rebellion can deal with him,” Sazed said. “He is not so strong without all of his servants, I think.”

  “You’re wrong,” Vin said, rising and walking toward the door. “He’s strong, Saze. Kelsier couldn’t feel him, not like I can. He didn’t know.”

  “Where are you going?” Sazed asked behind her.

  Vin paused in the doorway, turning, mist curling around her. “Inside the palace complex, there is a chamber protected by soldiers and Inquisitors. Kelsier tried to get into it twice.” She turned back toward the dark mists. “Tonight, I’m going to find out what’s inside of it.”

  36

  I have decided that I am thankful for Rashek’s hatred. It does me well to remember that there are those who abhor me. My place is not to seek popularity or love; my place is to ensure mankind’s survival.

  VIN WALKED QUIETLY TOWARD KREDIK Shaw. The sky behind her burned, the mists reflecting and diffusing the light of a thousand torches. It was like a radiant dome over the city.

  The light was yellow, the color Kelsier had always said the sun should be.

  Four nervous guards waited at the same palace doorway that she and Kelsier had attacked before. They watched her appro
ach. Vin stepped slowly, quietly, on the mist-wetted stones, her mistcloak rustling solemnly.

  One of the guards lowered a spear at her, and Vin stopped right in front of him.

  “I know you,” she said quietly. “You endured the mills, the mines, and the forges. You knew that someday they would kill you, and leave your families to starve. So, you went to the Lord Ruler – guilty but determined – and joined his guards.”

  The four men glanced at each other, confused.

  “The light behind me comes from a massive skaa rebellion,” she said. “The entire city is rising up against the Lord Ruler. I don’t blame you men for your choices, but a time of change is coming. Those rebels could use your training and your knowledge. Go to them – they gather in the Square of the Survivor.”

  “The… Square of the Survivor?” a soldier asked.

  “The place where the Survivor of Hathsin was killed earlier today.”

  The four men exchanged looks, uncertain.

  Vin Rioted their emotions slightly. “You don’t have to live with the guilt anymore.”

  Finally, one of the men stepped forward and ripped the symbol off his uniform, then strode determinedly into the night. The other three paused, then followed – leaving Vin with an open entrance to the palace.

  Vin walked down the corridor, eventually passing the same guard chamber as before. She strode inside – stepping past a group of chatting guards without hurting any of them – and entered the hallway beyond. Behind her, the guards shook off their surprise and called out in alarm. They burst into the corridor, but Vin jumped and Pushed against the lantern brackets, hurling herself down the hallway.

  The men’s voices grew distant; even running, they wouldn’t be able to keep up with her. She reached the end of the corridor, then let herself drop lightly to the ground, enveloping cloak falling around her body. She continued her resolute, unhurried pace. There was no reason to run. They’d be waiting for her anyway.

  She passed through the archway, stepping into the dome-roofed central chamber. Silver murals lined the walls, braziers burned in the corners, the floor was an ebony marble.

  And two Inquisitors stood blocking her path.

  Vin strode quietly through the room, approaching the building-within-a-building that was her goal.

  “We search all this time,” said an Inquisitor in his grinding voice. “And you come to us. A second time.”

  Vin stopped, standing about twenty feet in front of the pair. They loomed, each of them nearly two feet taller than she, smiling and confident.

  Vin burned atium, then whipped her hands from beneath her cloak, tossing a double handful of arrowheads into the air. She flared steel, Pushing powerfully against the rings of metal wrapped loosely around the arrowheads’ broken hafts. The missiles shot forward, ripping across the room. The lead Inquisitor chuckled, raising a hand and Pushing disdainfully against the missiles.

  His Push ripped the unattached rings free from the hafts, shooting the bits of metal backward. The arrowheads themselves, however, continued forward – no longer Pushed from behind, but still carried by a deadly momentum.

  The Inquisitor opened his mouth in surprise as two dozen arrowheads struck him. Several punched completely through his flesh, continuing on to snap against the stone wall behind him. Several others struck his companion in the legs.

  The lead Inquisitor jerked, spasming as he collapsed. The other growled, staying on his feet, but wobbling a bit on the weakened leg. Vin dashed forward, flaring her pewter. The remaining Inquisitor moved to block her, but she reached inside her cloak and threw out a large handful of pewter dust.

  The Inquisitor stopped, confused. To his “eyes” he would see nothing but a mess of blue lines – each one leading to a speck of metal. With so many sources of metal concentrated in one place, the lines would be virtually blinding.

  The Inquisitor spun, angry, as Vin dashed past him. He Pushed against the dust, blowing it away, but as he did so, Vin whipped out a glass dagger and flipped it toward him. In the confusing mess of blue lines and atium shadows, he missed noticing the dagger, and it took him square in the thigh. He fell, cursing in a crackly voice.

  Good thing that worked, Vin thought, leaping over the groaning body of the first Inquisitor. Wasn’t sure about those eyes of theirs.

  She threw her weight against the door, flaring pewter and tossing up another handful of dust to keep the remaining Inquisitor from targeting any metals on her body. She didn’t turn back to fight the two further – not with the trouble one of the creatures had given Kelsier. Her goal this infiltration wasn’t to kill, but to gather information, then run.

  Vin burst into the building-within-a-building, nearly tripping on a rug made from some exotic fur. She frowned, scanning the chamber urgently, searching for whatever the Lord Ruler hid inside of it.

  It has to be here, she thought desperately. The clue to defeating him – the way to win this battle. She was counting on the Inquisitors being distracted by their wounds long enough for her to search out the Lord Ruler’s secret and escape.

  The room had only one exit – the entrance she’d come through – and a hearth burned in the center of the chamber. The walls were decorated with odd trappings; furs hung from most places, the pelts dyed in strange patterns. There were a few old paintings, their colors faded, their canvases yellowed.

  Vin searched quickly, urgently, looking for anything that could prove to be a weapon against the Lord Ruler. Unfortunately, she saw nothing useful; the room felt foreign, but unremarkable. In fact, it had a comfortable hominess, like a study or den. It was packed full of strange objects and decorations – like the horns of some foreign beast and a strange pair of shoes with very wide, flat bottoms. It was the room of a pack rat, a place to keep memories of the past.

  She jumped as something moved near the center of the room. A pivoting chair stood by the hearth, and it spun slowly, revealing the wizened old man who sat in it. Bald, with liver-spotted skin, he appeared to be in his seventies. He wore rich, dark clothing, and he frowned angrily at Vin.

  That’s it, Vin thought. I’ve failed – there’s nothing here. Time to get out.

  Just as she was spinning to dash away, however, rough hands grabbed her from behind. She cursed, struggling as she glanced down at the Inquisitor’s bloodied leg. Even with pewter, he shouldn’t have been able to walk on it. She tried to twist away, but the Inquisitor had her in a powerful grasp.

  “What is this?” the old man demanded, standing.

  “I’m sorry, Lord Ruler,” the Inquisitor said deferentially.

  Lord Ruler! But… I saw him. He was a young man.

  “Kill her,” the old man said, waving his hand.

  “My lord,” the Inquisitor said. “This child is… of special interest. Might I keep her for a time?”

  “What special interest?” the Lord Ruler said, sighing as he sat again.

  “We wish to petition you, Lord Ruler,” said the Inquisitor. “Regarding the Canton of Orthodoxy.”

  “This again?” the Lord Ruler said wearily.

  “Please, my lord,” said the Inquisitor. Vin continued to struggle, flaring her pewter. The Inquisitor pinned her arms to her sides, however, and her backward kicking did very little good. He’s so strong! she thought with frustration.

  And then, she remembered it. The Eleventh Metal, its power sitting within her, forming an unfamiliar reserve. She looked up, glaring at the old man. This had better work. She burned the Eleventh Metal.

  Nothing happened.

  Vin struggled in frustration, her heart sinking. And then she saw him. Another man, standing right beside the Lord Ruler. Where had he come from? She hadn’t seen him enter.

  He had a full beard and wore a thick, woolen outfit with a fur-lined cloak. It wasn’t rich clothing, but it was well constructed. He stood quietly, seeming… content. He smiled happily.

  Vin cocked her head. There was something familiar about the man. His features looked very similar to those o
f the man who had killed Kelsier. However, this man was older and… more alive.

  Vin turned to the side. There was another unfamiliar man beside her, a young nobleman. He was a merchant, from the looks of his suit – and a very wealthy one at that.

  What is going on?

  The Eleventh Metal burned out. Both newcomers vanished like ghosts.

  “Very well,” said the elderly Lord Ruler, sighing. “I agree to your request. We will meet in several hours’ time – Tevidian has already requested a gathering to discuss matters outside the palace.”

  “Ah,” said the second Inquisitor. “Yes… it will be good for him to be there. Good indeed.”

  Vin continued to squirm as the Inquisitor pushed her to the ground, then lifted his hand, gripping something she couldn’t see. He swung, and pain flashed through her head.

  Despite her pewter, all went black.

  Elend found his father in the north entryway – a smaller, less daunting entrance to Keep Venture, though only when compared with the majestic grand hall.

  “What’s going on?” Elend demanded, pulling on his suit coat, his hair disheveled from sleep. Lord Venture stood with his guard captains and canalmasters. Soldiers and servants scattered through the white-and-brown hallway, rushing about with an air of apprehensive fright.

  Lord Venture ignored Elend’s question, calling for a messenger to ride for the east river docks.

  “Father, what’s happening?” Elend repeated.

  “Skaa rebellion,” Lord Venture snapped.

  What? Elend thought as Lord Venture waved for another group of soldiers to approach. Impossible. A skaa rebellion in Luthadel itself… it was unthinkable. They didn’t have the disposition to try such a bold move, they were just…

  Valette is skaa, he thought. You have to stop thinking like other noblemen, Elend. You have to open your eyes.