Shadows of Self (41 page)

Wax whipped out his Sterrion and pointed it down the corridor away from the lines, and fired three times in quick succession. The flash of gunpowder lit the room like lightning as he leveled his other gun toward the blue lines and the source of the sound.

In those flashes, he made out something in the darkness crouching nearby. It was inhuman, with bestial eyes and stark white teeth.
Rust and Ruin.
Fingers sweaty on his gun, Wax backed away from the thing, ready to fire.

He didn’t pull the trigger. You didn’t shoot something for talking to you.

“You’re certainly a jumpy one,” the voice growled.

“Who are you?”
What are you?

“Light your lantern, human,” the voice said. “And lock that door. Let’s be away from here before someone comes to investigate the gunfire.”

Wax paused to catch his breath and steady his nerves, but eventually slipped his guns back into their holsters. Whatever it was, it could have attacked him instead of speaking to him. It didn’t want him dead.

He lit the small lantern, but when he raised it, the creature had retreated into the corridor until it was just a shadow. Still unnerved, Wax flipped the latches he found on the wall, locking the hidden doorway closed from the inside.

“Come,” the voice said.

“You’re one of them,” Wax whispered, raising the lantern and following the shadowy figure, which walked on all fours. “You’re a kandra.”

“Yes.”

Wax jogged to catch up, his lanternlight finally giving him a good look at his companion. A wolfhound, easily the largest he had ever seen, of a mottled grey coloring. The pelt reminded him of the mists.

“I’ve read about you,” Wax said.

“Thrilling,” the kandra growled. “I’m so happy Sazed included me in his little book so that drunk people can curse by my name.”

“They … do that?”

“Yes.” The wolfhound growled quietly in the back of his throat. “There are … stuffed toys too.”

“Oh yeah,” Wax said. “Soonie cubs. I’ve seen those around.”

The growling grew louder, and Wax’s nervousness returned. Best not to taunt the immortal hound. He didn’t know how many of the legends of this creature were true, but if even a percentage were based in fact …

“So,” Wax said. “Guardian. You were waiting for me?”

“It was decided,” the kandra said, “that allowing a human to wander these caverns alone was unwise. I came myself. The others are busy.”

“Hunting Bleeder?”

“Counteracting her,” the kandra said, leading him to an intersection, then taking the right fork.

They walked in silence for a short time before Wax cleared his throat. “Um … do you mind explaining what you mean by that?”

The dog sighed, a discomforting sound. A talking dog was strange, but the sigh was just so
human
.

“I don’t talk much these days,” the kandra said. “I’ve … fallen out of practice, it seems. Paalm is trying to spark a revolution, using skills she learned from the Lord Ruler himself. But she is only one kandra. She has disdain for the rest of us, and therefore underestimates us in equal measure. We can do what she does, imitating people, appearing on the streets. For every ‘priest’ she has commit an atrocity, we will have dozens out tonight, preaching temperance and peace, pleading with the people not to listen to rumors.”

“Wise,” Wax said. He hadn’t considered what the other kandra might be doing, other than vaguely assuming they were tracking Bleeder. This made good sense. Could he use it, somehow, in his investigation?

As they moved deeper into the caverns, Wax noted a crusty white substance growing on the rocks, the source of the powdery residue he’d found on Bleeder’s clothing. Presumably, if he extinguished his lantern he’d be able to see the glow. He might not even need the lantern, but thinking of all this stone surrounding him—separating him from the mists above—he felt no urge to extinguish it.

The network of tunnels was far more extensive than he’d expected. He’d thought of this place only as that one cavern underneath the tomb—but that wasn’t it at all. Harmony had assembled many different refuges of people as he remade the world, placing them all in the same area that was now Elendel. How much of the city did these tunnels stretch beneath? He passed a number of them that had flooded; what was the difference between those and the ones that remained dry?

As they wound through the tunnels, they passed an opening into a different large cavern. He raised his lantern to give it a glance, then froze in place. Instead of more rough, natural rock, his light illuminated dusty tiles and pillars, with parts of the floor torn up. Past them, there was what appeared to be a small
hut
of all things.

“TenSoon?” he asked as the kandra continued forward.

“Come along, human.”

“Is that…”

“Yes. Many people hid in the basements of Kredik Shaw, the Lord Ruler’s palace. Sazed moved that here, as he did with all other caverns of refuge.”

Wax couldn’t pull himself away, gaping at history—no,
mythology
—come alive. The Lord Ruler’s palace. Places where the Survivor and his followers had walked.

Rusts … the
Well of Ascension itself
would be in there.

“Human,” the kandra said, insistent. “There is something I wish for you to see. Come.”

Another time,
Wax thought, turning from the entrance to lost Kredik Shaw and following TenSoon. “MeLaan said that the kandra don’t come down here often. Why not? Isn’t this your home?”

“It is a sacred place,” the wolfhound said. “Yes, it is home, but also a prison—and so much more. Under the Lord Ruler, we needed this place for freedom, to be ourselves. Outside, we were controlled, enslaved by men.”

Bitter,
Wax thought. Even after hundreds of years, this creature was pained by the life it had led. Did he blame humankind? Did Bleeder?

“We come here,” TenSoon said, “when the mood strikes us. Usually we come alone, and infrequently. There are clubs up above where we can socialize now, being ourselves. Homes. Lives. The younger generations almost never visit this place. They prefer their lives as they are now, and don’t wish to remember the past. I suppose I’m the same, though for different reasons.”

Wax nodded, walking alongside the kandra as they penetrated ever deeper into the twisting tunnels of the Homeland. They passed many empty chambers, but some that held oddities, like two with old baskets and some discarded bones on the floor.

Wax had been in his fair share of tunnels out in the Roughs, but most of those had been some kind of man-made mine. These caverns were different. Those had smelled of dust and dirt, while this place somehow felt
alive
. Of water and fungus. Of patience.

The tunnels were knobby, yet smooth, like wax pooled beneath a long-burning candle. Holy ground. Everything else in the world, so far as he knew, had been completely remade during the Catacendre. But these caverns stretched back to eternity, as old as human memory. Older.

Eventually they reached a small chamber that didn’t seem quite as organic as the others. Had it been shaped, somehow, by kandra hands? TenSoon settled down on his haunches in the entrance to the room. Wax’s light glittered off the smooth, bulbous rock of the floor, which fell away into a series of pits. Perhaps three feet across, they looked like holes dug by prospectors foolishly hunting metals out in the Roughs.

Wax glanced at TenSoon.

“I passed by here on my way to meet with you,” the kandra said in his growling, half-human voice. “I smelled something wrong.”

Smelled something? Wax couldn’t catch any odd scents—but this whole place smelled strange to him. He stepped into the room, then noted something. One of the small pits was full. Were those sheets of paper?

Yes, they were. As Wax knelt at the rim of the pit, he was surprised to find hundreds of sheets of paper inside, jagged on one edge, as if they’d been ripped from a book. They contained cramped writing, with numbered verses. The Words of Founding.

Besides the normal writing, someone had scrawled all over these in brownish-red ink.

Blood,
Wax thought.
It’s blood.

He set down his lantern, then reached down and picked up a page. Book eighty, verses twenty-seven through fifty. Verses about Harmony’s quest for Truth.

Someone, likely Bleeder, had written all over them the words
Lies, lies, lies
.

Wax dug up other sheets. Most had something written on them, a word or phrase, though many were just smeared with blood. Something bothered Wax about it all, something that made his eye twitch. He couldn’t say what it was.

I was there,
one sheet read.
Nobody,
said another.
It was,
said another. He started laying them out. TenSoon—whom he’d almost forgotten—sniffed in the doorway.

Wax glanced back. “Did you see these?”

“Yes,” TenSoon said.

“What do you make of them?”

“I … did not stay long,” the kandra said, then looked to the side. “I do not spend time in this room, human. I am not fond of it.”

This room …
Wax felt cold. Was this the prison that TenSoon had been trapped in, locked away without bones, awaiting execution?

Rusts. He was kneeling in a place that had decided the fate of the world.

Wax stretched down, grabbing more of the sheets. It seemed like Bleeder had ripped apart an entire set of the Words of Founding—the unabridged version. Old edition too, judging by the fact that it had been handwritten instead of printed.

“You really knew her, didn’t you?” Wax asked. “The Ascendant Warrior?”

“I knew her,” TenSoon said softly. “Near the end, I spent over an hour without my spikes, and so my memories degraded. However, most of what I lost was from the time right before my fall. Most of my memories of her are crisp.”

Wax hesitated with stacks of pages in his hands. “What was she like? As a person, I mean.”

“She was strong and vulnerable all at once,” TenSoon whispered. “She was my last master, and my greatest. She had a way of pouring everything of herself into what she did. When she fought, she was the blade. When she loved, she was the kiss. In that regard, she was far more … human than any I have known.”

Wax found himself nodding as he settled the pages about him, in stacks based on whether they had words or not. The ones with fingerprints he set in their own stack. Perhaps they would be useful. Probably not. Bleeder
was
a shapeshifter, after all.

TenSoon eventually padded up to him. “They look,” TenSoon said, inspecting the sheets, “like they might say something if you string them together.”

“Yeah,” Wax said, dissatisfied.

“What is wrong?”

“It’s too much,” Wax said, waving his hand at it. “Too convoluted, too sensational. Why would she write on a bunch of pages, then rip them out and leave them here?”

“Because she’s mad.”

“No,” Wax said. “She’s not that kind of mad. The way she’s been working is too deliberate, too focused. Her
motives
might be insane, but her
methods
have been careful.” How could he explain it? This case had his instincts fighting with one another.

He tried again. “When someone leaves something like this behind, it means one of two things. They’re sloppy, or they’re trying too hard. She’s not sloppy, but I don’t think she’s trying to be cute either, dangling clues and playing games. When I talked to her…”

“You
spoke
with Paalm?” TenSoon demanded, his ears perking up. “When?”

“Earlier tonight,” Wax said. “There was something regretful about her. She claimed to not be playing games, but this seems like a game. A thousand discarded pages, left to be put back together and form a clue?” He shook his head. “I don’t buy it. Madness or not, she had to know that other kandra would eventually find this.”

“Very well,” TenSoon said, settling back down. “But she spoke to you as
herself,
not an imitation?”

“Yes. Is that odd? You’re doing it right now, and MeLaan seems to be acting no specific role either.”

“We are not Paalm,” TenSoon said. “As long as I’ve known her, she’s been subject to the performance. I was like that too, years ago. I didn’t know who I was if I was not imitating someone.”

Wax looked across the sheets.
Freedom,
one of them said in a scrawl across the page.
Will give you freedom whether you,
said another, only half of a thought.

“What was she like?” Wax asked. “Who
is
she, Guardian?”

“Hard to say,” TenSoon replied. “Paalm was the Lord Ruler’s pet kandra, a slave to his will and the contract we made with him. She ignored events surrounding the end of the World of Ash; she vanished, didn’t return to the Homeland. I assumed her dead, until she appeared among the survivors. Even then she separated herself from us, though she served Harmony as we all did. Until … nothing. Absence.”

“Freedom,” Wax said, tapping the page. “She talked about that with me. What does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” TenSoon said, voice even more a growl than before. “She has betrayed everything we are. But then, so did I. So perhaps we are a pair, she and I. Two of the oldest monsters remaining on this planet, now that many of the Seconds have taken the escape of ending their own lives.”

“Freedom…” Wax whispered. “Someone else moves us.… She left a note for me in the governor’s mansion. She removed a politician’s tongue, to stop his lies. Killed a priest through the eyes, to stop him from looking. Seeing. For who? For what?”

She had been the Lord Ruler’s kandra, moved about and danced at his whims. And then … Harmony’s servant? She lived with his voice inside her head, knowing all along that he could take control of her. How would that feel?

Would it make you remove one of your spikes? Would you be trying to bring that freedom to everyone? Misguided, in your insanity, certain that the world needed saving?

Wax stood up slowly. “It’s about Harmony.”

“Lawman?”

“She’s trying to bring down God Himself.”