Mistborn Trilogy - Brandon Sanderson [759]
Which meant they would make excellent anchors. Flaring her pewter to keep from being crushed, Vin Pushed on the brackets, throwing herself backward.
Immediately, the Allomantic pulses behind her disappeared.
Vin shot through ash and mist, even her tight clothing flapping slightly from the wind. She quickly Pulled herself down to a rooftop and crouched, tense. The other Allomancer must have stopped burning his metals. But why would he do that? Did he know that she could pierce copperclouds? If he did, then why had he followed her so recklessly?
Vin felt a chill. There was something else that gave off Allomantic pulses in the night. The mist spirit. She hadn’t seen it in over a year. In fact, during her last encounter with it, it had nearly killed Elend—only to then restore him by making him Mistborn.
She still didn’t know how the spirit fit into all of this. It wasn’t Ruin—she had felt Ruin’s presence when she’d freed him at the Well of Ascension. They were different.
I don’t even know if this was the spirit tonight, Vin told herself. Yet, the one tailing her had vanished so abruptly. . . .
Confused, and chilled, she Pushed herself out of the city and quickly made her way back to Elend’s camp.
One final aspect of the Lord Ruler’s cultural manipulation is quite interesting: that of technology.
I have already mentioned that Rashek chose to use Khlenni architecture, which allowed him to construct large structures and gave him the civil engineering necessary to build a city as large as Luthadel. In other areas, however, he suppressed technological advancements. Gunpowder, for instance, was so frowned upon by Rashek that knowledge of its use disappeared almost as quickly as knowledge of the Terris religion.
Apparently, Rashek found it alarming that armed with gunpowder weapons, even the most common of men could be nearly as effective as archers with years of training. And so, he favored archers. The more training-dependent military technology was, the less likely it was that the peasant population would be able to rise up and resist him. Indeed, skaa revolts always failed in part for this very reason.
28
“ARE YOU SURE IT WAS THE MIST SPIRIT?” Elend asked, frowning, a half-finished letter—scribed into a steel foil sheet—sitting on his desk before him. He’d decided to sleep in his cabin aboard the narrowboat, rather than in a tent. Not only was it more comfortable, he felt more secure with walls around him, as opposed to canvas.
Vin sighed, sitting down on their bed, pulling her legs up and setting her chin on her knees. “I don’t know. I kind of got spooked, so I fled.”
“Good thing,” Elend said, shivering as he remembered what the mist spirit had done to him.
“Sazed was convinced that the mist spirit wasn’t evil,” Vin said.
“So was I,” Elend said. “If you’ll remember, I’m the one who walked right up to it, telling you that I felt it was friendly. That was right about the time it stabbed me.”
Vin shook her head. “It was trying to keep me from releasing Ruin. It thought that if you were dying, I would take the power for myself and heal you, rather than giving it up.”
“You don’t know its intentions for certain, Vin. You could be connecting coincidences in your mind.”
“Perhaps. However, it led Sazed to discover that Ruin was altering text.”
That much, at least, was true—if, indeed, Sazed’s account of the matter could be trusted. The Terrisman had been a little bit . . . inconsistent since Tindwyl had died. No, Elend told himself, feeling an instant stab of guilt. No, Sazed is trustworthy. He might be struggling with his faith, but he is still twice as reliable as the rest of us.
“Oh, Elend,” Vin said softly. “There’s so much we don’t know. Lately, I feel like my life is a book written in a language I don’t know how to read. The mist spirit is related to all this, but I can’t even begin to fathom how.”
“It’s probably on our side,” Elend said, though it was hard