Brandon Sanderson - Mistborn - The Final Empire

Vin shivered. That… thing ate Kelsier’s body. “I don’t want it around,” she said. “I’ll send it away.”

“Do not be quite so hasty, Mistress,” Sazed said. “Kandra are expensive servants — you must pay them in atium. If Kelsier bought an extended contract for one, it would be foolish to waste its services. A kandra might prove a very useful ally in the months to come.”

Vin shook her head. “I don’t care. I don’t want that thing around. Not after what it did.”

The trio fell silent. Finally, Marsh stood, sighing. “Anyway, if you will excuse me, I should go make an appearance at the keep — the new king wants me to represent the Ministry in his negotiations.”

Vin frowned. “I don’t see why the Ministry deserves any say in things.”

“The obligators are still quite powerful, Mistress,” Sazed said. “And, they are the most efficient and well-trained bureaucratic force in the Final Empire. His majesty would be wise to try and bring them to his side, and recognizing Master Marsh may help achieve this.”

Marsh shrugged. “Of course, assuming I can establish control over the Canton of Orthodoxy, the Ministry should… change during the next few years. I’ll move slowly and carefully, but by the time I’m done, the obligators won’t even realize what they’ve lost. Those other Inquisitors could present a problem, though.”

Vin nodded. “How many are there outside of Luthadel?”

“I don’t know,” Marsh said. “I wasn’t a member of the order for very long before I destroyed it. However, the Final Empire was a big place. Many speak of there being around twenty Inquisitors in the empire, but I never was able to pin anyone down on a hard number.”

Vin nodded as Marsh left. However, the Inquisitors — while dangerous — worried her far less now that she knew their secret. She was more concerned about something else.

You don’t know what I do for mankind. I was your god, even if you couldn’t see it. By killing me, you have doomed yourselves…

The Lord Ruler’s final words. At the time, she thought he’d been referring to the Final Empire as the thing he did “for mankind.” However, she wasn’t so certain anymore. There had been… fear in his eyes when he’d spoken those words, not pride.

“Saze?” she said. “What was the Deepness? The thing that the Hero from the logbook was supposed to defeat?”

“I wish that we knew, Mistress,” Sazed said.

“But, it didn’t come, right?”

“Apparently not,” Sazed said. “The legends agree that had the Deepness not been stopped, the very world would have been destroyed. Of course, perhaps these stories have been exaggerated. Maybe the danger of the ‘Deepness’ was really just the Lord Ruler himself — perhaps the Hero’s fight was simply one of conscience. He had to choose to dominate the world or to let it be free.”

That didn’t sound right to Vin. There was more. She remembered that fear in the Lord Ruler’s eyes. Terror.

He said “do,” not “did.” “What I do for mankind.” That implies that he was still doing it, whatever it was.

You have doomed yourselves…

She shivered in the evening air. The sun was setting, making it even easier to see the illuminated Keep Venture — Elend’s choice of headquarters for the moment, though he might still move to Kredik Shaw. He hadn’t decided yet.

“You should go to him, Mistress,” Sazed said. “He needs to see that you are well.”

Vin didn’t reply immediately. She stared out over the city, watching the bright keep in the darkening sky. “Were you there, Sazed?” she asked. “Did you hear his speech?”

“Yes, Mistress,” he said. “Once we discovered that there was no atium in that treasury, Lord Venture insisted that we go seek help for you. I was inclined to agree with him — neither of us were warriors, and I was still without my Feruchemical storages.”

No atium, Vin thought. After all of this, we haven’t found a speck of it. What did the Lord Ruler do with it all? Or… did someone else get to it first?

“When Master Elend and I found the army,” Sazed continued, “its rebels were slaughtering the palace soldiers. Some of them tried to surrender, but our soldiers weren’t letting them. It was a… disturbing scene, Mistress. Your Elend… he didn’t like what he saw. When he stood up there before the skaa, I thought that they would simply kill him too.”

Sazed paused, cocking his head slightly. “But… the things he said, Mistress… his dreams of a new government, his condemnation of bloodshed and chaos… Well, Mistress, I fear that I cannot repeat it. I wish I’d had my metalminds, so that I could have memorized his exact words.”

He sighed, shaking his head. “Regardless, I believe that Master Breeze was very influential in helping calm that riot. Once one group started listening to Master Elend, the others did too, and from there… well, it is a good thing that a nobleman ended up as king, I think. Master Elend brings some legitimacy to our bid for control, and I think that we will see more support from the nobility and the merchants with him at our head.”

Vin smiled. “Kell would be angry with us, you know. He did all this work, and we just turned around and put a nobleman on the throne.”

Sazed shook his head. “Ah, but there is something more important to consider, I think. We didn’t just put a nobleman on the throne — we put a good man on the throne.”

“A good man…” Vin said. “Yes. I’ve known a few of those, now.”

Vin knelt in the mists atop Keep Venture. Her splinted leg made it harder to move around at night, but most of the effort she used was Allomantic. She just had to make certain that her landings were particularly soft.

Night had come, and the mists surrounded her. Protecting her, hiding her, giving her power…

Elend Venture sat at a desk below, beneath a skylight that still hadn’t been patched from the time Vin had thrown a body through it. He didn’t notice her crouching above. Who would? Who saw a Mistborn in her element? She was, in a way, like one of the shadow images created by the Eleventh Metal. Incorporeal. Really just something that could have been.

Could have been…

The events of the last day were difficult enough to sort through; Vin hadn’t even tried to make sense of her emotions, which were a far bigger mess. She hadn’t gone to Elend yet. She hadn’t been able to.

She looked down at him, sitting in the lanternlight, reading at his desk and making scribbled notes in his little book. His meetings earlier had apparently gone well — everyone seemed willing to accept him as king. Marsh whispered that there were politics behind the support, however. The nobility saw Elend as a puppet they could control, and factions were already appearing amongst the skaa leadership.

Still, Elend finally had an opportunity to draft the law code he’d been dreaming of. He could try to create the perfect nation, try to apply the philosophies he had studied for so long. There would be bumps, and Vin suspected that he would ultimately have to settle for something far more realistic than his idealistic dream. That didn’t really matter. He would make a good king.

Of course, compared with the Lord Ruler, a pile of soot would make a good king…

She wanted to go to Elend, to drop down into the warm room, but… something kept her back. She’d been through too many recent twists in her fortune, too many emotional strains — both Allomantic and non-Allomantic. She wasn’t certain what she wanted anymore; she wasn’t certain if she were Vin or Valette, or even which of them she wished that she were.