Mistborn Trilogy - Brandon Sanderson [687]
“What is your name?” she asked the koloss.
It continued to lumber beside her. Finally, it looked at her. “Human.”
“I know you want to be human,” Vin said. “What is your name?”
“That is my name. Human. You call me Human.”
Vin frowned as they walked. That almost seemed . . . clever. She’d never taken the opportunity to talk to koloss before. She’d always assumed that they were of a homogeneous mentality—just the same stupid beast repeated over and over.
“All right, Human,” she said, curious. “How long have you been alive?”
He walked for a moment, so long that Vin thought he had forgotten the question. Finally, however, he spoke. “Don’t you see my bigness?”
“Your bigness? Your size?”
Human just kept walking.
“So you all grow at the same rate?”
He didn’t answer. Vin shook her head, suspecting that the question was too abstract for the beast.
“I’m bigger than some,” Human said. “Smaller than some—but not very many. That means I’m old.”
Another sign of intelligence, she thought, raising an eyebrow. From what Vin had seen of other koloss, Human’s logic was impressive.
“I hate you,” Human said after a short time spent walking. “I want to kill you. But I can’t kill you.”
“No,” Vin said. “I won’t let you.”
“You’re big inside. Very big.”
“Yes,” Vin said. “Human, where are the girl koloss?”
The creature walked several moments. “Girl?”
“Like me,” Vin said.
“We’re not like you,” he said. “We’re big on the outside only.”
“No,” Vin said. “Not my size. My . . .” How did one describe gender? Short of stripping, she couldn’t think of any methods. So, she decided to try a different tactic. “Are there baby koloss?”
“Baby?”
“Small ones,” Vin said.
The koloss pointed toward the marching koloss army. “Small ones,” he said, referring to some of the five-foot-tall koloss.
“Smaller,” Vin said.
“None smaller.”
Koloss reproduction was a mystery that, to her knowledge, nobody had ever cracked. Even after a year spent fighting with the beasts, she’d never found out where new ones came from. Whenever Elend’s koloss armies grew too small, she and he stole new ones from the Inquisitors.
Yet, it was ridiculous to assume that the koloss didn’t reproduce. She’d seen koloss camps that weren’t controlled by an Allomancer, and the creatures killed each other with fearful regularity. At that rate, they would have killed themselves off after a few years. Yet, they had lasted for ten centuries.
That implied a very quick rise from child to adult, or so Sazed and Elend seemed to think. They hadn’t been able to confirm their theories, and she knew their ignorance frustrated Elend greatly—especially since his duties as emperor left him little time for the studies he’d once enjoyed so much.
“If there are none smaller,” Vin asked, “then where do new koloss come from?”
“New koloss come from us,” Human finally said.
“From you?” Vin asked, frowning as she walked. “That doesn’t tell me much.”
Human didn’t say anything further. His talkative mood had apparently passed.
From us, Vin thought. They bud off of each other, perhaps? She’d heard of some creatures that, if you cut them the right way, each half would grow into a new animal. But, that couldn’t be the case with koloss—she’d seen battlefields filled with their dead, and no pieces rose to form new koloss. But she’d also never seen a female koloss. Though most of the beasts wore crude loincloths, they were—as far as she knew—all male.
Further speculation was cut off as she noticed the line ahead bunching up; the crowd was slowing. Curious, she dropped a coin and left Human behind, shooting herself over the people. The mists had retreated hours ago, and though night was again approaching, for the moment it was both light and mistless.
Therefore, as she shot through the falling ash, she easily picked out the canal up ahead. It cut unnaturally through the ground, far straighter than any river. Elend speculated that the constant ashfall would soon put an end to most of the canal systems. Without skaa laborers to dredge them on a regular basis, they would fill