Mistborn Trilogy - Brandon Sanderson [900]
“I may not kill you yet,” he said calmly, “but that hardly means that you’re in ‘no danger,’ Lady Venture.”
Vin grunted.
“I want something from you,” he said. “Something more than what we’ve discussed. I want you to tell your husband to send his army away.”
“Why would I do that?” Vin said, face pressed against the cold stone of the floor.
“Because,” Yomen said, “you claim to want my storage cache, yet you claim to be good people. You now know that I will use the food in it wisely, to feed my people. If your Elend really is as altruistic as you claim, he certainly won’t be so selfish as to throw away lives to war, just so you can steal away our food and use it to feed your own.”
“We can grow crops,” Vin said. “We get enough light in the Central Dominance, while you don’t. The seed stock you have will be useless to you!”
“Then trade me for it.”
“You won’t talk to us!”
Yomen stepped back, releasing the pressure on her back. She rubbed her neck, sitting up, feeling frustrated. “It’s about more than the food in that cache, Yomen,” she said. “We control the other four of them. The Lord Ruler, he left clues in them. There is something to the whole group that can save us.”
Yomen snorted. “You were down there all that time, and you didn’t read the plaque that the Lord Ruler left?”
“Of course I did.”
“Then you know that there is nothing more in those caches,” Yomen said. “They’re all part of his plan, true. And for some reason that plan requires that men think he is dead. Regardless, you know now what he said. So, why take the city from me?”
Why take the city from me? The real reason itched inside of Vin. Elend had always found it an unimportant one, but to her, it held powerful appeal. “You know full well why we have to take the city,” Vin said. “As long as you have it, we have reason to conquer you.”
“It?” Yomen asked.
Ruin stepped forward, curious.
“You know what I mean. The atium. The Lord Ruler’s supply.”
“That?” Yomen asked, laughing. “This is all about the atium? Atium is worthless!”
Vin frowned. “Worthless? It’s the single most valuable commodity in the Final Empire!”
“Oh?” Yomen asked. “And how many people are there around to burn it? How many noble houses remain to play petty politics and vie for power by showing how much atium they can leach from the Lord Ruler? The value of atium was based in the economy of an empire, Lady Venture. Without the trappings of a reserve system and an upper class giving the metal implied worth, atium has no real value.” Yomen shook his head. “To a starving man, what is more important—a loaf of bread, or an entire jar of atium he can’t use, eat, or sell?”
He waved for the guards to take her. They pulled her to her feet, and she struggled, holding Yomen’s eyes.
Yomen turned away from her again. “Those lumps of metal do me no good, save—perhaps—to keep you in check. No, the food was the real resource. The Lord Ruler left me the riches I required to establish his power again. I just need to figure out what he wants me to do next.”
The soldiers finally succeeded in pulling her away.
I don’t wonder that we focused far too much on the mists during those days. But from what I now know of sunlight and plant development, I realize that our crops weren’t in as much danger from misty days as we feared. We might very well have been able to find plants to eat that did not need as much light to survive.
True, the mists did also cause some deaths in those who went out in them, but the number killed was not a large enough percentage of the population to be a threat to our survival as a species. The ash, that was our real problem. The smoke filling the atmosphere, the black flakes covering up everything beneath, the eruptions of the volcanic ashmounts . . . Those were what would kill the world.
61
“ELEND!” HAM CALLED,