Mistborn Trilogy (Mistborn, #1-3)

by Brandon Sanderson

It seemed that the Steel Ministry caught up with everyone eventually. Sometimes, Kelsier felt that a skaa Misting’s life wasn’t so much about surviving as it was about picking the right time to die.

The second man was tall with a strong build. As he turned, Kelsier was able to see that a thick metal spike had been pounded tip-first through each of the man’s eyes. With shafts as wide as an eye socket, the nail-like spikes were long enough that their sharp points jutted out about an inch from the back of the man’s clean-shaven skull. The flat spike ends shone like two silvery disks, sticking out of the sockets in the front, where the eyes should have been. A Steel Inquisitor.

Eventually, she spoke. “So…what does this all mean?” Kelsier smiled. “It means that you, Vin, are a very special person. You have a power that most high noblemen envy. It is a power that, had you been born an aristocrat, would have made you one of the most deadly and influential people in all of the Final Empire.” Kelsier leaned forward again. “But, you weren’t born an aristocrat. You’re not noble, Vin. You don’t have to play by their rules—and that makes you even more powerful.”

“The trick is to never stop looking. There’s always another secret.”

he glanced to the side, expecting Mare to be there next to him, as she always had been. Instead, he found only the empty air. Lonely. Silent. The mists had replaced her. Poorly.

often wished that burning tin didn’t enhance all of the senses—or, at least, not all of them at once. He needed the improved eyesight to see in the darkness, and he made good use of the improved hearing as well. However, burning tin made the night seem even more chilly to his overly sensitive skin, and his feet registered every pebble and wooden ripple they touched.

His anger was quiet, not as fierce as it had been the night he’d killed Lord Tresting. But he felt it still, felt it in the itching of his scars and in the remembered screams of the woman he loved. As far as Kelsier was concerned, any man who upheld the Final Empire also forfeited his right to live.

How could they even think of resisting the Lord Ruler? He was…well, he was the Lord. He ruled all of the world. He was the creator, protector, and punisher of mankind. He had saved them from the Deepness, then had brought the ash and the mists as a punishment for the people’s lack of faith.

Breeze nodded with a smile. “It has flair—and I do like the idea of having the noblemen kill each other.” “You always like it better when someone else does the work, Breeze,” Ham noted. “My dear friend,” Breeze replied, “the entire point of life is to find ways to get others to do your work for you. Don’t you know anything about basic economics?”

“It’s not that easy anymore, Kell,” Marsh said with a shake of his head. “Some people are different now. Others are…gone.” Kelsier let the room grow quiet. Even the hearth’s fire was starting to die out. “I miss her too.” “I’m sure that you do—but I have to be honest with you, Kell. Despite what she did…sometimes I wish that you hadn’t been the one to survive the Pits.” “I wish the same thing every day.” Marsh

The man who wants you to trust him is the one you must fear the most.

Laughter trickled out into the workroom. Not raucous laughter, such as had often sounded from Camon’s table. This was something softer—something indicative of genuine mirth, of good-natured enjoyment.

Kelsier returned a moment later, carrying his pack and a small cloth bundle. Vin regarded the bundle with curiosity, and he handed it to her with a smile. “A present.” The cloth was slick and soft in Vin’s fingers, and she quickly realized what it was. She let the gray material unroll in her fingers, revealing a Mistborn cloak. Like the garment Kelsier had worn the night before, it was tailored completely from separate, ribbonlike strips of cloth. “You look surprised,” Kelsier noted. “I…assumed that I’d have to earn this somehow.” “What’s there to earn?” Kelsier said, pulling out his own cloak. “This is who you are, Vin.”

Ministry doctrine—something rarely shared with skaa—claims that the Mistborn are descendants of the only men who remained true to the Lord Ruler during the days before his Ascension. Other legends whisper that we are something beyond even the Lord Ruler’s power, something that was born on that day when the mists first came upon the land.”

“Mistwraiths have malleable bodies,” Kelsier said. “They can shape their skin around any skeletal structure, and can even re-create muscles and organs if they have a model to mimic.” “You mean…?” Kelsier nodded. “When they find a corpse, they envelop it and slowly digest the muscles and organs. Then, they use what they’ve eaten as a pattern, creating an exact duplicate of the dead creature. They rearrange the parts a little bit—excreting the bones they don’t want, while adding the ones they do want to their body—forming a jumble like what you see out there.”

Finally, she snatched the bag of coins, quickly hiding it beneath her cloak. “I’ll stay,” she said. “But not because I trust you.” Kelsier raised an eyebrow. “Why, then?” Vin shrugged, and she sounded perfectly honest when she spoke. “Because I want to see what happens.”

Renoux studied her, and Vin glanced away. She didn’t like it when people looked at her that way—it made her wonder how they were going to try and use her.

Vin eventually traced her pouch by steel-line to the upper branches of a tree. She Pulled it slightly, tugging it down into her hand, then made her way back out to the street. Kelsier probably would have left the pouch behind—the two dozen or so clips it contained wouldn’t have been worth his time. However, for most of her life Vin had scrounged and starved. She just couldn’t force herself to be wasteful. Even tossing coins to jump with made her uncomfortable.

People are valuable, Mistress Vin, and so—therefore—are their beliefs.

The Steel Ministry forbids the worship of anyone but the Lord Ruler, and the Inquisitors have quite diligently destroyed hundreds of religions. If someone doesn’t remember them, then they will simply disappear.”

“A lot of the street children are clever,” Kelsier said. “The ones who aren’t dead.”

As Reen had always said, results made quick friends.

The floor was scattered with corpses, their twisted limbs shadowed and haunting in the light of Dockson’s solitary lantern. They weren’t rotting yet—the attack had happened only that morning—but there was still a smell of death about the room. The scent of blood drying slowly, the scent of misery and of terror.

What am I doing? she thought frantically. She could challenge mist and Allomancy, thieves and burglaries, mistwraiths and beatings. Yet, facing these noblemen and their ladies…going amongst them in the light, visible, unable to hide…this terrified her.

And yet, it didn’t feel like they were seeing her at all. They were studying the gown, the hair, and the jewelry. Vin glanced to the other side, where a group of younger men were watching her. They saw the neckline, the pretty dress and the makeup, but they didn’t see her. None of them could see Vin, they could only see the face she had put on—the face she wanted them to see. They saw Lady Valette. It was as if Vin weren’t there. As if…she were hiding, hiding right in front of their eyes.

“That’s the funny thing about arriving somewhere, Vin,” he said with a wink. “Once you’re there, the only thing you can really do is leave again.

“I searched for two years to find a way to kill him. Men have tried everything—he ignores normal wounds, and decapitation only annoys him. A group of soldiers burned down his inn during one of the early wars. The Lord Ruler walked out as barely more than a skeleton, then healed in a matter of seconds.

“What would you think if I told you that I wasn’t an Allomancer?” Sazed asked. “I’d think that you were lying,” Vin said. “Have you known me to lie before?” “The best liars are those who tell the truth most of the time.”

There’s always another secret. Kelsier’s words.

That night, after her corpse was taken away, I Snapped.” “You went mad?” Vin asked. “No,” Kelsier said. “Snapping is an Allomantic term. Our powers are latent at first—they only come out after some traumatic event. Something intense—something almost deadly. The philosophers say that a man can’t command the metals until he has seen death and rejected it.”

SHE DECIDED TO WEAR THE RED dress. It was definitely the boldest choice, but that felt right. After all, she hid her true self behind an aristocratic appearance; the more visible that appearance was, the easier it should be for her to hide.

This is the Final Empire, Vin, she told herself as the carriage rolled away. Don’t forget the ash because you see a little silk. If those people in there knew you were skaa, they’d have you slaughtered just as easily as they did that poor boy.

Vin frowned. “The book sounded pretty critical of the Lord Ruler. He allows the nobility to read things like that?” “He doesn’t really ‘allow’ them to do such things,” Kelsier said. “More, he sometimes ignores it when they do. Banning books is tricky business, Vin—the more stink the Ministry makes about a text, the more attention it will draw, and the more people will be tempted to read it. False Dawn is a stuffy volume, and by not forbidding it, the Ministry doomed it to obscurity.”

“Lord Elend might be reading a forbidden book, but that doesn’t make him our friend. There have always been noblemen like him—young philosophers and dreamers who think that their ideas are new. They like to drink with their friends and grumble about the Lord Ruler; but, in their hearts, they’re still noblemen. They’ll never overthrow the establishment.” “But—” “No, Vin,” Kelsier said. “You have to trust me. Elend Venture doesn’t care about us or the skaa. He’s a gentleman anarchist because it’s fashionable and exciting.”

It isn’t a shadow. This dark thing that follows me, the thing that only I can see—It isn’t really a shadow. It’s blackish and translucent, but it doesn’t have a shadowlike solid outline. It’s insubstantial—wispy and formless. Like it’s made out of a dark fog. Or mist, perhaps.

Fortunately, the logbook was fascinating. Fascinating, and eerie. It was disturbing to read words that had originally been written by the Lord Ruler himself. To Kelsier the Lord Ruler was less a man, and more a…creature. An evil force that needed to be destroyed. Yet, the person presented in the logbook seemed all too mortal. He questioned and pondered—he seemed a man of depth, and even of character. Though, it would be best not to trust his narrative too closely, Kelsier thought, running his fingers across the page. Men rarely see their own actions as unjustified.

Often, he’d considered not climbing back up. But, then he would find a corpse in the caves—the body of another prisoner, a man who had gotten lost, or who had perhaps just given up. Kelsier would feel their bones and promise himself more. Each week, he’d found an atium geode. Each week he’d avoided execution by brutal beating. Except that last time. He didn’t deserve to be alive—he should have been killed. But, Mare had given him an atium geode, promising him that she’d found two that week. It wasn’t until after he’d turned it in that he’d discovered her lie. She’d been beaten to death the next day. Beaten to death right in front of him. That night, Kelsier had Snapped, coming into his powers as a Mistborn. The next night, men had died. Many men. Survivor of Hathsin. A man who shouldn’t live. Even after watching her die, I couldn’t decide if she’d betrayed me or not. Did she give me that geode out of love? Or did she do it out of guilt?

Plots behind plots, plans beyond plans. There was always another secret.

Vin nodded, then sat quietly for a moment. She hadn’t spent as much time with Dockson as she had with Kelsier and Sazed—or even Ham and Breeze. He seemed like a kind man, however. Very stable, and very clever. While most of the others contributed some kind of Allomantic power to the crew, Dockson was valuable because of his simple ability to organize.

When she’d started coming to the noblemen’s balls back on that first night—the night she’d nearly been killed—she’d thought about how fake everything seemed. How had she forgotten that original impression?

They must know everything that happens in court, she realized. If nobility call them over to witness things this simple… The more she knew about the Ministry, the more she realized how clever the Lord Ruler had been in organizing them. They witnessed every mercantile contract; Dockson and Renoux had to deal with obligators nearly every day. Only they could authorize weddings, divorces, land purchases, or ratify inheritance of titles. If an obligator hadn’t witnessed an event, it hadn’t happened, and if one hadn’t sealed a document, then it might as well not have been written.

Just like Dockson, Vin thought. Kelsier assumes the worst about Elend. But, did she really have any reason to expect otherwise? To fight a battle like Kelsier and Dockson were, it was probably more effective—and better for the psyche—to assume that all of their enemies were evil.

In the end, I must trust in myself. I have seen men who have beaten from themselves the ability to recognize truth and goodness, and I do not think I am one of them. I can still see the tears in a young child’s eyes and feel pain at his suffering. If I ever lose this, then I will know that I’ve passed beyond hope of redemption.

Ham smiled. “I ripped the arms off of my uniform coat.” “You didn’t!” Vin said with a smile. Ham nodded, looking self-satisfied. Dockson sighed, continuing to fill his cup. “Ham, those things cost money.” “Everything costs money,” Ham said. “But, what is money? A physical representation of the abstract concept of effort. Well, wearing that uniform for so long was a pretty mean effort. I’d say that this vest and I are even now.”

“Strength is a big part of fighting, but it’s not the only part. If you always hit your hardest, you’ll tire faster and you’ll give your opponent information about your limitations. A smart man hits his hardest at the end of a battle, when his opponent is weakest. And, in an extended battle—like a war—the smart soldier is the one who survives the longest. He’ll be the man who paces himself.”

“Swallow five of those beads.” “Five?” “For now,” Kelsier said. “If you need to take some more, call to me so we can stop running.” “Running?” the girl asked. “We’re not taking a canal boat?” Kelsier frowned. “Why would we need a boat?”

“If you’re always on time, it implies that you never have anything better you should be doing.

The Deepness must be destroyed. I have seen it, and I have felt it. This name we give it is too weak a word, I think. Yes, it is deep and unfathomable, but it is also terrible. Many do not realize that it is sentient, but I have sensed its mind, such that it is, the few times I have confronted it directly. It is a thing of destruction, madness, and corruption. It would destroy this world not out of spite or out of animosity, but simply because that is what it does.

She hoped she would never lose that—the sense within herself of how life had been before. It made her appreciate what she had so much more than the real nobility seemed to.

Kelsier said that he smiled so much because he felt he needed to take what joy he could in the world—to relish the moments of happiness that seemed so infrequent in the Final Empire.