Mistborn Trilogy - Brandon Sanderson [802]
Vin remained on that rooftop for a few moments, but knew she’d find nothing. A man clever enough to escape her at the exact moment when her tin was down would also be clever enough to remain hidden until she was gone. In fact, it made her wonder why he had let her see him in the first . . .
Vin stood bolt upright, then downed a metal vial and Pushed herself off the rooftop, jumping with a furious anxiety back toward the camp.
She found the soldiers cleaning up the wreckage and bodies at the camp’s perimeter. Elend was moving among them calling out orders, congratulating the men, and generally letting himself be seen. Indeed, sight of his white-clothed form immediately brought Vin a sense of relief.
She landed beside him. “Elend, were you attacked?”
He glanced at her. “What? Me? No, I’m fine.”
Then the Allomancer wasn’t sent to distract me from an attack on Elend, she thought, frowning. It had seemed so obvious. It—
Elend pulled her aside, looking worried. “I’m fine, Vin, but there’s something else—something’s happened.”
“What?” Vin asked.
Elend shook his head. “I think this all was just a distraction—the entire attack on the camp.”
“But, if they weren’t after you,” Vin said, “and they weren’t after our supplies, then what was there to distract us from?”
Elend met her eyes. “The koloss.”
“How did we miss this?” Vin asked, sounding frustrated.
Elend stood with a troop of soldiers on a plateau, waiting as Vin and Ham inspected the burned siege equipment. Down below, he could see Fadrex City, and his own army camped outside it. The mists had retreated a short time ago. It was disturbing that from this distance he couldn’t even make out the canal—the falling ash had darkened its waters and covered the landscape to the point that everything just looked black.
At the base of the plateau’s cliffs lay the remnants of their koloss army. Twenty thousand had become ten thousand in a few brief moments as a well-laid trap had rained down destruction on the beasts while Elend’s troops were distracted. The daymists had kept his men from seeing what was going on until it was too late. Elend himself had felt the deaths, but had misinterpreted them as koloss sensing the battle.
“Caves in the back of those cliffs,” Ham said, poking at a bit of charred wood. “Yomen probably had the trebuchets stored in the caves in anticipation of our arrival, though I’d guess they were originally being built for an assault on Luthadel. Either way, this plateau was a perfect staging area for a barrage. I’d say Yomen set them up here intending to attack our army, but when we camped the koloss just beneath the plateau . . .”
Elend could still hear the screams in his head—the koloss, full of bloodlust and frothing to fight, yet unable to attack their enemies, which were high atop the plateau. The falling rocks had done a lot of damage. And then the creatures had slipped away from him. Their frustration had been too powerful, and for a time, he hadn’t been able to keep them from turning on each other. Most of the deaths had come as the koloss attacked each other. Roughly one of every two had died as they had paired off and killed each other.
I lost control of them, he thought. It had only been for a short while, and it had only happened because they hadn’t been able to get at their enemies. However, it set a dangerous precedent.
Vin, frustrated, kicked a large chunk of burned wood, sending it tumbling down the side of the plateau.
“This was a very well-planned attack, El,” Ham said, speaking in a soft voice. “Yomen must have seen us sending out extra patrols in the mornings, and correctly guessed that we were expecting an attack during those hours. So, he gave us one—then hit us where we should have been the strongest.”
“It cost him a lot, though,” Elend said. “He had to burn his own siege equipment to keep it away from us, and he has to have