Mistborn: The Final Empire (Mistborn #1)(98)

“That is wonderful,” Renoux said. “Perhaps, once you are feeling better, we should take lunch together on the garden balcony. It has been warm lately, despite the coming winter.”

“That would be very pleasant,” Vin said. Before, she’d found the impostor’s noble bearing intimidating. Yet, as she slipped into the persona of Lady Valette, she experienced the same calmness as before. Vin the thief was nothing to a man such as Renoux, but Valette the socialite was another matter.

“Very good,” Renoux said, pausing inside the entryway. “However, let us attend to that on another day—for now, you would likely prefer to rest from your journey.”

“Actually, my lord, I’d like to visit Sazed. I have some matters I must discuss with the steward.”

“Ah,” Renoux said. “You will ?nd him in the library, working on one of my projects.”

“Thank you,” Vin said.

Renoux nodded, then walked away, his dueling cane clicking against the white marble ?oor. Vin frowned, trying to decide if he was completely sane. Could someone really adopt a persona that wholly?

You do it, Vin reminded herself. When you become Lady Valette, you show a completely different side of yourself.

She turned, ?aring pewter to help her climb the northern set of stairs. She let her ?are lapse as she reached the top, returning to a normal burn. As Kelsier said, it was dangerous to ?are metals for too extended a period; an Allomancer could quickly make their body dependent.

She took a few breaths—climbing the stairs had been dif?cult, even with pewter—then walked down the corridor to the library. Sazed sat at a desk beside a small coal stove on the far side of the small room, writing on a pad of paper. He wore his standard steward’s robes, and a pair of thin spectacles sat at the end of his nose.

Vin paused in the doorway, regarding the man who had saved her life. Why is he wearing spectacles? I’ve seen him read before without them. He seemed completely absorbed by his work, periodically studying a large tome on the desk, then turning to scribble notes on his pad.

“You’re an Allomancer,” Vin said quietly.

Sazed paused, then set down his pen and turned. “What makes you say that, Mistress Vin?”

“You got to Luthadel too quickly.”

“Lord Renoux keeps several swift messenger horses in his stables. I could have taken one of those.”

“You found me at the palace,” Vin said.

“Kelsier told me of his plans, and I correctly assumed that you had followed him. Locating you was a stroke of luck, one that nearly took me too long to achieve.”

Vin frowned. “You killed the Inquisitor.”

“Killed?” Sazed asked. “No, Mistress. It takes far more power than I possess to kill one of those monstrosities. I simply…distracted him.”

Vin stood in the doorway for a moment longer, trying to ?gure out why Sazed was being so ambiguous. “So, are you an Allomancer or not?”

He smiled, then he pulled a stool out from beside the desk. “Please, sit down.”

Vin did as requested, crossing the room and sitting on the stool, her back to a massive bookshelf.

“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.”

Sazed smiled, regarding her through bespectacled eyes. “That is true, I think. Still, what proof have you that I am an Allomancer?”

“You did things that couldn’t have been done without Allomancy.”

“Oh? A Mistborn for two months, and already you know all that is possible in the world?”

Vin paused. Up until just recently, she hadn’t even known much about Allomancy. Perhaps there was more to the world than she had assumed.

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

“So,” she said slowly, “what exactly is a ‘Keeper’?”

Sazed smiled. “Now, that is a far more clever question, Mistress. Keepers are…storehouses. We remember things, so that they can be used in the future.”

“Like religions,” Vin said.

Sazed nodded. “Religious truths are my particular specialty.”

“But, you remember other things too?”

Sazed nodded.

“Like what?”

“Well,” Sazed said, closing the tome he had been studying. “Languages, for instance.”

Vin immediately recognized the glyph-covered cover. “The book I found in the palace! How did you get it?”

“I happened across it while searching for you,” the Terrisman said. “It is written in a very old language, one that hasn’t been spoken regularly in nearly a millennium.”

“But you speak it?” Vin asked.

Sazed nodded. “Enough to translate this, I think.”

“And…how many languages do you know?”

“A hundred and seventy-two,” Sazed said. “Most of them, such as Khlenni, are no longer spoken. The Lord Ruler’s unity movement of the ?fth century made certain of that. The language people now speak is actually a distant dialect of Terris, the language of my homeland.”