The Mistborn Trilogy (247 page)

And yet, his faith had made him even more susceptible.
That’s what trust is,
Sazed thought.
It’s about giving someone else power over you. Power to hurt you.
That’s why he’d given up his metalminds. That’s why he had decided to sort through the religions one at a time, trying to find one that had no faults. Nothing to fail him.

It just made sense. Better to not believe, rather than be proven wrong. Sazed looked back down. Why did he think to talk to the heavens? There was nothing there.

There never had been.

Outside, in the hallway, he could hear voices. “My dear doggie,” Breeze said, “surely you’ll stay for another day.”

“No,” said TenSoon the kandra, speaking in his growling voice. “I must find Vin as soon as possible.”

Even the kandra,
Sazed thought.
Even an inhuman creature has more faith than I.

And yet, how could they understand? Sazed closed his eyes tight, feeling a pair of tears squeeze from the corners. How could anyone understand the pain of a faith betrayed? He had
believed
. And yet, when he had needed hope the most, he had found only emptiness.

He picked up the book, then snapped closed his portfolio, locking the inadequate summaries inside. He turned toward the hearth. Better to simply burn it all.

Belief
. . . He remembered a voice from the past. His own voice, speaking to Vin on that terrible day after Kelsier’s death.
Belief isn’t simply a thing for fair times and bright days, I think. What is belief
—
what is faith
—
if you don’t continue in it after failure
. . . .

How innocent he had been.

Better to trust and be betrayed,
Kelsier seemed to whisper. It had been one of the Survivor’s mottos.
Better to love and be hurt.

Sazed gripped the tome. It was such a meaningless thing. Its text could be changed by Ruin at any time.
And do I believe in that
? Sazed thought with frustration.
Do I have faith in this Ruin, but not in something better?

He stood quietly in the room, holding the book, listening to Breeze and TenSoon outside. The book was a symbol to him. It represented what he had once been. It represented failure. He glanced upward again.
Please,
he thought.
I want to believe. I really do. I just . . . I just need something. Something more than shadows and memories. Something real.

Something true. Please?

“Farewell, Soother,” TenSoon said. “Give my regards to the Announcer.” Then, Sazed heard Breeze thump away. TenSoon padded down the hallway on his quieter dog’s feet.

Announcer
. . . .

Sazed froze.

That word
. . . .

Sazed stood, stunned for a moment. Then, he threw his door open and burst into the hallway. The door slammed back against the wall, making Breeze jump. TenSoon stopped at the end of the hallway, near the stairs. He turned back, looking at Sazed.

“What did you call me?” Sazed demanded.

“The Announcer,” TenSoon said. “You are, are you not, the one who pointed out Lady Vin as the Hero of Ages? That, then, is your title.”

Sazed fell to his knees, slapping his tome—the one he had written with Tindwyl—on the floor before him. He flipped through the pages, locating one in particular, penned in his own hand.
I thought myself the Holy Witness,
it said,
the prophet foretold to discover the Hero of Ages.
They were the words of Kwaan, the man who had originally named Alendi the Hero. From these writings, which were their only clues about the original Terris religion, Sazed and the others had gleaned what little they knew of the prophecies about the Hero of Ages.

“What is this?” Breeze asked, leaning down, scanning the words. “Hum. Looks like you’ve got the wrong term, my dear doggie. Not ‘Announcer’ at all, but ‘Holy Witness.’ ”

Sazed looked up. “This is one of the passages that Ruin changed, Breeze,” he said quietly. “When I wrote it, it read differently—but Ruin altered it, trying to trick me and Vin into fulfilling his prophecies. The skaa had started to call me the Holy Witness, their own term. So Ruin retroactively changed Kwaan’s writings so that they seemed prophetic and reference me.”

“Is that so?” Breeze asked, rubbing his chin. “What did it say before?”

Sazed ignored the question, instead meeting TenSoon’s canine eyes. “How did you know?” he demanded. “How do you know the words of the ancient Terris prophecies?”

TenSoon fell back on his haunches. “It strikes me as odd, Terrisman. There’s one great inconsistency in this all, a problem
no one
has ever thought to point out. What happened to the packmen who traveled with Rashek and Alendi up to the Well of Ascension?”

Rashek. The man who had become the Lord Ruler.

Breeze stood up straight. “That’s easy, kandra,” he said, waving his cane. “Everyone knows that when the Lord Ruler took the throne of Khlennium, he
made his trusted friends into noblemen. That’s why the nobility of the Final Empire were so pampered—they were the descendants of Rashek’s good friends.”

TenSoon sat quietly.

No,
Sazed thought with wonder.
No . . . that couldn’t be!
“He
couldn’t
have made those packmen into nobles.”

“Why ever not?” Breeze asked.

“Because the nobility gained Allomancy,” Sazed said, standing. “Rashek’s friends were
Feruchemists.
If he’d made them into noblemen, then . . .”

“Then they could have challenged him,” TenSoon said. “They could have become both Allomancers and Feruchemists as he was, and had his same powers.”

“Yes,” Sazed said. “He spent ten centuries trying to breed Feruchemy
out
of the Terris population—all in fear that someday someone would be born with both Feruchemy and Allomancy! His friends who went to the Well with him would have been dangerous, since they were obviously powerful Feruchemists, and they knew what Rashek had done to Alendi. Rashek would have had to do something else with them. Something to sequester them, perhaps even kill them. . . .”

“No,” TenSoon said. “He didn’t kill them. You call the Father a monster, but he was not an evil man. He didn’t kill his friends, though he did recognize the threat their powers posed to him. So, he offered them a bargain, speaking directly to their minds while he was holding the power of creation.”

“What bargain?” Breeze asked, obviously confused.

“Immortality,” TenSoon said quietly. “In exchange for their Feruchemy. They gave it up, along with something else.”

Sazed stared at the creature in the hallway, a creature who thought like a man but had the form of a beast. “They gave up their humanity,” Sazed whispered.

TenSoon nodded.

“They live on?” Sazed asked, stepping forward. “The Lord Ruler’s companions? The very Terrismen who climbed to the Well with him?”

“We call them the First Generation,” TenSoon said. “The founders of the kandra people. The Father transformed every living Feruchemist into a mistwraith, beginning that race. His good friends, however, he returned to sentience with a few Hemalurgic spikes. You’ve done your work poorly, Keeper. I expected that you’d drag this out of me
long
before I had to leave.”

I’ve been a fool,
Sazed thought, blinking away tears.
Such a fool.

“What?” Breeze asked, frowning. “What’s going on? Sazed? My dear man, why are you so flustered? What do this creature’s words mean?”

“They mean hope,” Sazed said, pushing into his room, hurriedly throwing some of his clothing into a travel pack.

“Hope?” Breeze asked, peeking in.

Sazed looked back, toward where Breeze stood. The kandra had walked up, and stood behind him in the hallway. “The Terris religion, Breeze,” Sazed said. “The thing my sect was founded for, the thing my people have spent lifetimes searching to discover. It lives on. Not in written words that can be corrupted or changed. But in the minds of men who actually practiced it.
The Terris faith is not dead!
”

There was one more religion to add to his list. His quest was not yet over.

“Quickly, Keeper,” TenSoon said. “I was prepared to go without you, since everyone agreed that you had stopped caring about these things. However, if you will come, I will show you the way to my Homeland—it is along the path I must travel to find Vin. Hopefully, you will be able to convince the First Generation of the things I have not.”

“And that is?” Sazed asked, still packing.

“That the end has arrived.”

Ruin tried many times to get spikes into other members of the crew. Though some of what happened makes it seem like it was easy for him to gain control of people, it really was not.

Sticking the metal in just the right place—at the right time—was incredibly difficult, even for a subtle creature like Ruin. For instance, he tried very hard to spike both Elend and Yomen. Elend managed to avoid it each time, as he did on the field outside of the small village that contained the next-to-last storage cache.

Ruin did actually manage to get a spike into Yomen, once. Yomen, however, removed the spike before Ruin got a firm grip on him. It was much easier for Ruin to get a hold on people who were passionate and impulsive than it was for him to hold on to people who were logical and prone to working through their actions in their minds.

“WHAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND
,” Vin said, “is why you chose me. You had a thousand years and hundreds of thousands of people to choose from. Why lead
me
to the Well of Ascension to free you?”

She was in her cell, sitting on her cot—which now lay legless on the floor, having collapsed when she removed the screws. She’d asked for a new one. She’d been ignored.

Ruin turned toward her. He came often, wearing Reen’s body, still indulging himself in what Vin could only assume was a kind of gloating. As he often did, however, he ignored her question. Instead, he turned to the east, eyes seeming as if they could see directly through the cell wall.

“I wish you could see it,” he said. “The ashfalls have grown beautiful and deep, as if the sky itself has shattered, raining down shards of its corpse in flakes of black. You feel the ground tremble?”

Vin didn’t respond.

“Those quakes are the earth’s final sighs,” Ruin said. “Like an old man, moaning as he dies, calling for his children so that he can pass on his last bits of wisdom.
The very ground is pulling itself apart. The Lord Ruler did much of this himself. You can blame him, if you wish.”

Vin perked up. She didn’t draw attention to herself by asking more questions, but instead just let Ruin ramble on. Again, she noted just how
human
some of his mannerisms seemed.

“He thought he could solve the problems himself,” Ruin continued. “He rejected me, you know.”

And that happened exactly a thousand years ago,
Vin thought.
A thousand years has passed since Alendi failed in his quest; a thousand years since Rashek took the power for himself and became the Lord Ruler. That’s part of the answer to my question. The glowing liquid at the Well of Ascension
—
it was gone by the time I finished freeing Ruin. It must have disappeared after Rashek used it too.

A thousand years. Time for the Well to regenerate its power? But what was that power? Where did it come from?

“The Lord Ruler didn’t really save the world,” Ruin continued. “He just postponed its destruction—and, in doing so, he helped me. That’s the way it must always be, as I told you. When men think they are helping the world, they actually do more harm than good. Just like you. You tried to help, but you just ended up freeing me.”

Ruin glanced at her, then smiled in a fatherly way. She didn’t react.

“The ashmounts,” Ruin continued, “the dying landscape, the broken people—those were all Rashek’s. The twisting of men to become koloss, kandra, and Inquisitor, all his . . .”

“But, you hated him,” Vin said. “He didn’t free you—so you had to wait another thousand years.”

“True,” Ruin said. “But a thousand years is not much time. Not much time at all. Besides, I couldn’t refuse to help Rashek. I help everyone, for my power is a tool—the only tool by which things can change.”