Mistborn Trilogy - Brandon Sanderson [935]
He stood for a long moment, deep in ash, gazing upon a landscape that had once contained villages, forests, and roads. All was now gone, burnt away. The earth had cracked in the distance, and more lava seemed to be spilling out of it.
By the First Contract, he thought with despair. He could detour to the south, continue on to Fadrex as if he’d come in a straight line from Luthadel, but for some reason, he found it hard to get up the motivation.
It was too late.
Yes, there are sixteen metals. I find it highly unlikely that the Lord Ruler did not know of them all. Indeed, the fact that he spoke of several on the plates in the storage caches meant that he knew at least of those.
I must assume that he did not tell mankind of them earlier for a reason. Perhaps he held them back to give him a secret edge, much as he kept back the single nugget of Preservation’s body that made men into Mistborn.
Or, perhaps he simply decided that mankind had enough power in the ten metals they already understood. Some things we shall never know. Part of me still finds what he did regrettable. During the thousand-year reign of the Lord Ruler, how many people were born, Snapped, lived, and died never knowing that they were Mistings, simply because their metals were unknown?
Of course, this did give us a slight advantage, at the end. Ruin had a lot of trouble giving duralumin to his Inquisitors, since they’d need an Allomancer who could burn it to kill before they could use it. And, since none of the duralumin Mistings in the world knew about their power, they didn’t burn it and reveal themselves to Ruin. That left most Inquisitors without the power of duralumin, save in a few important cases—such as Marsh—where they got it from a Mistborn. This was usually considered a waste, for if one killed a Mistborn with Hemalurgy, one could draw out only one of their sixteen powers and lost the rest. Ruin considered it much better to try to subvert them and gain access to all of their power.
72
IT BEGAN RAINING just before Vin reached Luthadel. A quiet, cold drizzle that wetted the night, but did not banish the mists.
She flared her bronze. In the distance, she could sense Allomancers. Mistborn. Chasing her. There were at least a dozen of them, homing in on her position.
She landed on the city wall, bare feet slipping just slightly on the stones. Beyond her stretched Luthadel, even now proud in its sprawl. Founded a thousand years before by the Lord Ruler, it was built atop the Well of Ascension itself. During the ten centuries of his reign, Luthadel had burgeoned, becoming the most important—and most crowded—place in all of the empire.
And it was dying.
Vin stood up straight, looking out over the vast city. Pockets of flame flared where buildings had caught fire. The flames defied the rain, illuminating the various slums and other neighborhoods like watch fires in the night. In their light, she could see that the city was a wreck. Entire swathes of the town had been torn apart, the buildings broken or burned. The streets were eerily vacant—nobody fought the fires, nobody huddled in the gutters.
The capital, once home to hundreds of thousands, seemed empty. Wind blew through Vin’s rain-wetted hair and she felt a shiver. The mists, as usual, stayed away from her—pushed aside by her Allomancy. She was alone in the largest city in the world.
No. Not alone. She could feel them approaching—Ruin’s minions. She had led them here, made them assume that she was bringing them to the atium. There would be far more of them than she could fight. She was doomed.
That was the idea.
She launched off the wall, shooting through the mist, ash, and rain. She wore her mistcloak, more out of nostalgia than utility. It was the same one she’d always had—the one that Kelsier had given her on her very first night of training.
She landed with a splash atop a building, then leaped again, bounding over the city. She wasn’t certain if it was poetic or ominous that it was raining this night. There had been another night when she