Brandon SANDERSON: The Eleventh Metal: A Mistborn Short Story

Lamps and limelights were lit in the night, their glow breaking out through windows into the curling mists. Gemmel hunkered beside his wall, whispering to himself again. If he heard Kelsier’s question, he ignored it.

“You should still be burning your metals,” Gemmel said as Kelsier approached.

Kelsier bit off a comment about not wanting to waste them. He’d explained that as a skaa child, he had learned to be very careful with resources. Gemmel had just laughed at that. At the time, Kelsier had assumed the laughter was due to Gemmel’s natural erratic nature.

But . . . was it because he knew the truth? That Kelsier hadn’t grown up a poor skaa on the streets? That he and his brother had lived lives of privilege, their half-breed nature kept secret from society?

He hated the nobility, true. Their balls and parties, their prim self-satisfaction, their superiority. But he couldn’t deny, not to himself, that he belonged among them. At least as much as he did among the skaa of the streets.

“Well?” Gemmel said.

Kelsier ignited some the metals inside of him, burning several of the eight metal reserves he had within. He’d heard Allomancers speak of those reserves on occasion, but had never expected to feel them himself. They were like wells of energy he could draw upon.

Burning metals inside of him. How strange it sounded – yet how natural it felt. As natural as breathing in air and drawing strength from it. Each of those eight reserves enhanced him in some way.

“All eight,” Gemmel said. “ All of them.” He’d be burning bronze to sense what Kelsier was burning.

Kelsier had only burned the four physical metals. Reluctantly, he burned the others. Gemmel nodded; now that Kelsier was burning copper, all signs of his Allomancy would have vanished to the other man. Copper, what a useful metal – it hid you from other Allomancers, and made you immune to their emotional Allomancy.

Some spoke of copper derogatorily. You couldn’t use it to fight; you couldn’t change things with it. But Kelsier had always envied his friend Trap, who was a copper Misting. It was a powerful thing to know that your emotions were not the result of outside tampering.

Of course, with copper burning, that meant he had to admit that everything he felt – the pain, the anger, and even the numbness – belonged to him alone.

“Let’s go,” Gemmel said, leaping out into the night.

The mists were almost fully formed. They came every night, sometimes thick, sometimes light. But always there. The mists moved like hundreds of streams piled atop one another. They shifted and spun, thicker, more alive than an ordinary fog.

Kelsier had always loved the mists for reasons he couldn’t describe. Marsh claimed it was because everyone else feared them, and Kelsier was too arrogant to do what everyone else did. Of course, Marsh had never seemed to fear them either. The two brothers felt something, an understanding, an awareness. The mists claimed some as their own.

Kelsier jumped down from the low roof, burning pewter to strengthen him so that the landing was solid. Then he followed Gemmel on the hard cobblestones, running on bare feet. Tin burned in his stomach; it made him more aware, made his senses stronger. The mists seemed wetter, their prickling dew cooler on his skin. He could hear rats scurrying in distant alleyways, hounds baying, a man snoring softly in a building nearby. A thousand sounds that would be inaudible to an ordinary person’s ears. At times when burning tin, it seemed a cacophony. He couldn’t burn it too strongly, lest the noises grow distracting. Just enough to let him see better; tin made the mists appear more faint to his eyes, though why that should be he did not know.

He trailed Gemmel’s shadowed form as they reached the wall around Keep Shezler and placed their backs to it. Atop that wall, guards called to one another in the night.

Gemmel nodded, then dropped a coin. The scrawny, bearded man lurched into the air a second later. He wore a mistcloak – a dark gray cloak that was formed of many tassels from the chest down. Kelsier had asked for one. Gemmel had laughed at him.

Kelsier walked up to the fallen coin. The mists nearby dipped and spun in a pattern like insects moving toward a flame – they always did that around Allomancers who were burning metals. He’d seen it happen to Marsh.

Kelsier knelt beside the coin. To his eyes, a faint blue line – almost like a spider’s silk – led from his chest to the coin. In fact, hundreds of tiny lines pointed from his chest to each nearby source of metal. Iron and steel created these lines – one for Pushing, one for Pulling. Gemmel had told him to burn all his metals, but Gemmel often made no sense. There was no reason to burn both steel and iron; the two were opposites.

He extinguished his iron, leaving only the steel. With steel, he could Push on any source of metal that was connected to him. The Push was mental, but felt much like shoving against something with his arms.

Kelsier positioned himself above the coin and Pushed on it, as Gemmel had trained him. Since the coin couldn’t go downward, Kelsier was instead thrown upward. He popped into the air some fifteen feet, then awkwardly grabbed the coping of the wall above. He grunted, hauling himself up over the edge.

A new group of blue lines sprang up at his chest, thickening. Sources of metal approaching him quickly.

Kelsier cursed, throwing out a hand and Pushing. The coins that had been flying toward him were Pushed back into the night, zipping through the mists. Gemmel walked forward, undoubtedly the source of the coins. He attacked Kelsier sometimes; their first night together, Gemmel had thrown him off a cliff.

Kelsier still couldn’t completely decide if the attacks were tests, or if the lunatic was actually trying to murder him.

“No,” Gemmel muttered. “No, I like him. He almost never complains. The other three complained all the time. This one is strong. No. Not strong enough. No. Not yet. He’ll learn.” Behind Gemmel was a pair of lumps on the wall top. Dead guards, leaking trails of blood along the stones. The blood was black in the night. The mists seemed . . . afraid of Gemmel, somehow. They didn’t spin about him as they did other Allomancers.

That was nonsense. Just his mind playing tricks on him. Kelsier stood up, and didn’t mention the attack. It wouldn’t do any good. He just had to stay aware and learn as much as he could from this man. Preferably without getting killed in the process.

“You don’t need to use your hand to Push,” Gemmel grumbled at him. “Wastes time. And you need to learn to keep your pewter burning. You shouldn’t have had such a hard time climbing up over the edge of the wall.”

“I–”

“ Don’t give me an excuse about saving your metals,” Gemmel said, inspecting the keep just ahead. “I’ve met children of the streets. They don’t conserve. If you come at one of them, they’ll use everything they have – every scrap of strength, every last trick – to take you down. They know how close to the edge they walk. Pray you never have to face one of those, pretty boy. They’ll rip you apart, chew you up, and make new reserves for themselves out of what you leave behind.”

“I was going to say,” Kelsier said calmly, “that you haven’t even told me what we’re doing tonight.”

“Infiltrating this keep,” Gemmel said, eyes narrowing.

“Why?”

“Does it matter?”

“It sure as hell does.”

“There’s something important in there,” Gemmel said. “Something we’re going to find.”

“Well, that explains everything. Thank you for being so forthcoming. Could you possibly enlighten me on the meaning of life, since you’re so great at answering questions all of a sudden?”