Mistborn: The Final Empire (Mistborn #1)(199)

Must keep going.

His hands brushed something soft and cold as he moved. A corpse, stuck rotting between two rocks. Walin moved on. Bodies weren’t uncommon in the tight caverns; some of the corpses were fresh, most were simply bones. Often, Walin wondered if the dead ones weren’t really the lucky ones.

Must keep going.

There wasn’t really “time” in the caverns. Usually, he returned above to sleep—though the surface held taskmasters with whips, they also had food. It was meager, barely enough to keep him alive, but it was better than the starvation that would come from staying below too long.

Must keep—

He froze. He lay with his torso pinched in a tight rift in the rock, and had been in the process of wiggling his way through. However, his ?ngers—always searching, even when he was barely conscious—had been feeling the walls. And they’d found something.

His hand quivered with anticipation as he felt the crystal buds. Yes, yes, that was them. They grew in a wide, circular pattern on the wall; they were small at the edges, but got gradually bigger near the center. At the direct middle of the circular pattern, the crystals curved inward, following a pocketlike hollow in the wall. Here, the crystals grew long, each one having a jagged, sharp edge. Like teeth lining the maw of a stone beast.

Taking a breath, praying to the Lord Ruler, Walin rammed his hand into the ?st-sized, circular opening. The crystals ripped his arm, tearing long, shallow gashes in his skin. He ignored the pain, forcing his arm in further, up to his elbow, searching with his ?ngers for…

There! His ?ngers found a small rock at the center of the pocket—a rock formed by the mysterious drippings of the crystals. A Hathsin geode.

He grasped it eagerly, pulling it out, ripping his arm again as he withdrew it from the crystal-lined hole. He cradled the small rock sphere, breathing heavily with joy.

Another seven days. He would live another seven days.

Before hunger and fatigue could weaken him further, Walin began the laborious climb back upward. He squeezed through crevasses, climbed up juttings in walls. Sometimes he had to move to the right or left until the ceiling opened up, but it always did. There were really only two directions: up and down.

He kept a wary ear out for others. He had seen climbers killed before, slain by younger, stronger men who hoped to steal a geode. Fortunately, he met nobody. It was good. He was an older man—old enough to know that he never should have tried to steal food from his plantation lord.

Perhaps he had earned his punishment. Perhaps he deserved to die in the Pits of Hathsin.

But I won’t die today, he thought, ?nally smelling sweet, fresh air. It was night above. He didn’t care. The mists didn’t bother him anymore—even beatings didn’t bother him much anymore. He was just too tired to care.

Walin began to climb out of the crack—one of dozens in the small, ?at valley known as the Pits of Hathsin. Then he froze.

A man stood above him in the night. He was dressed in a large cloak that appeared to have been shredded to strips. The man looked at Walin, quiet and powerful in his black clothing. Then he reached down.

Walin cringed. The man, however, grabbed Walin’s hand and pulled him out of the crack.

“Go!” the man said quietly in the swirling mists. “Most of the guards are dead. Gather as many prisoners as you can, and escape this place. You have a geode?”

Walin cringed again, pulling his hand toward his chest.

“Good,” the stranger said. “Break it open. You’ll ?nd a nugget of metal inside—it is very valuable. Sell it to the underground in whatever city you eventually ?nd yourself; you should earn enough to live on for years. Go quickly! I don’t know how long you have until an alarm is raised.”

Walin stumbled back, confused. “Who…who are you?”

“I am what you will soon be,” the stranger said, stepping up to the rift. The ribbons of his enveloping black cloak billowed around him, mixing with the mists as he turned toward Walin. “I am a survivor.”

Kelsier looked down, studying the dark scar in the rock, listening as the prisoner scrambled away in the distance.

“And so I return,” Kelsier whispered. His scars burned, and memories returned. Memories of months spent squeezing through cracks, of ripping his arms on crystalline knives, of seeking each day to ?nd a geode…just one, so that he could live on.

Could he really go back down into those cramped, quiet depths? Could he enter the darkness again? Kelsier held up his arms, looking at the scars, still white and stark on his arms.

Yes. For her dreams, he could.

He stepped over to the rift and forced himself to climb down inside of it. Then he burned tin. Immediately, he heard a cracking sound from below.

Tin illuminated the rift beneath him. Though the crack widened, it also branched, sending out twisting rifts in all directions. Part cavern, part crack, part tunnel. He could already see his ?rst crystalline atium-hole—or what was left of it. The long, silvery crystals were fractured and broken.

Using Allomancy near atium crystals caused them to shatter. That was why the Lord Ruler had to use slaves, and not Allomancers, to collect his atium for him.



Now the real test, Kelsier thought, squeezing down further into the crack. He burned iron, and immediately he saw several blue lines pointing downward, toward atium-holes. Though the holes themselves probably didn’t have an atium geode in them, the crystals themselves gave off faint blue lines. They contained residual amounts of atium.