Shadows of Self (Mistborn #5)(8)

The painting was worthless, but the men and woman in this room would still offer him huge sums for it.

The first one to approach him was Dowser, who ran most of the smuggling operations into the Fifth Octant. The three days of scrub on his cheeks was shadowed by a bowler that, conspicuously, he had not left in the cloakroom. A pretty woman on his arm and a sharp suit did little to clean up a man like Dowser. Winsting wrinkled his nose. Most everyone in the room was a despicable piece of trash, but the others had the decency not to look like it.

“It’s ugly as sin,” Dowser said, looking over the painting. “I can’t believe this is what you’re having us ‘bid’ on. A little cheeky, isn’t it?”

“And you’d rather I was completely forthright, Mister Dowser?” Winsting said. “You’d have me proclaim it far and wide? ‘Pay me, and in exchange you get my vote in the Senate for the next year’?”

Dowser glanced to the sides, as if expecting the constables to burst into the room at any moment.

Winsting smiled. “You’ll notice the shades of grey on her cheeks. A representation of the ashen nature of life in a pre-Catacendric world, hmmm? My finest work yet. Do you have an offer? To get the bidding started?”

Dowser said nothing. He would eventually make a bid. Each person in this room had spent weeks posturing before agreeing to this meeting. Half were crime lords like Dowser. The others were Winsting’s own counterparts, high lords and ladies from prominent noble houses, though no less corrupt than the crime lords.

“Aren’t you frightened, Winsting?” asked the woman on Dowser’s arm.

Winsting frowned. He didn’t recognize her. Slender, with short golden hair and a doe-eyed expression, she was uncommonly tall.

“Frightened, my dear?” Winsting asked. “Of the people in this room?”

“No,” she said. “That your brother will find out … what you do.”

“I assure you,” Winsting said. “Replar knows exactly what I am.”

“The governor’s own brother,” the woman said. “Asking for bribes.”

“If that truly surprises you, my dear,” Winsting said, “then you have lived too sheltered a life. Far bigger fish than I have been sold on this market. When the next catch arrives, perhaps you will see.”

That comment caught Dowser’s attention. Winsting smiled as he saw the gears clicking behind Dowser’s eyes. Yes, Winsting thought, I did just imply that my brother himself might be open to your bribery. Perhaps that would up the man’s offer.

Winsting moved over to select some shrimp and quiche from a server’s tray. “The woman with Dowser is a spy,” Winsting said softly to Flog, who was always at his elbow. “Perhaps in constabulary employ.”

Flog started. “My lord! We checked and double-checked each person attending.”

“Well you missed one,” Winsting whispered. “I’d bet my fortune on it. Follow her after the meeting. If she splits from Dowser for any reason, see that she meets with an accident.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“And Flog,” Winsting said, “do be straightforward about it. I won’t have you trying to find a place where the mists won’t be watching. Understand?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Excellent,” Winsting said, smiling broadly as he strolled over to Lord Hughes Entrone, cousin and confidant to the head of House Entrone.

Winsting spent an hour mingling, and slowly the bids started to come in. Some of the attendees were reluctant. They would rather have met him one-on-one, making their covert offers, then slipping back into Elendel’s underbelly. Crime lords and nobles alike, these all preferred to dance around a topic, not discuss it openly. But they did bid, and bid well. By the end of his first circuit of the room, Winsting had to forcibly contain his excitement. No longer would he have to limit his spending. If his brother could—

The gunshot was so unexpected, he at first assumed that one of the servers had broken something. But no. That crack was so sharp, so earsplitting. He’d never heard a gun fired indoors before; he hadn’t known just how stunning it could be.

He gaped, the drink tumbling from his fingers as he tried to find the source of the shot. Another followed, then another. It became a storm, various sides firing at one another in a cacophony of death.

Before he could cry for help, Flog had him by the arm, towing him toward the stairs down to the saferoom. One of his other bodyguards stumbled against the doorway, looking with wide eyes at the blood on his shirt. Winsting stared for too long at the dying man before Flog was able to tear him away and shove him into the stairwell.

“What’s happening?” Winsting finally demanded as a guard slammed the door behind them and locked it. The bodyguards hurried him down the dim stairway, which was weakly lit by periodic electric lights. “Who fired? What happened?”

“No way of knowing,” Flog said. Gunfire still sounded above. “Happened too fast.”

“Someone just started firing,” another guard said. “Might have been Dowser.”

“No, it was Darm,” another said. “I heard the first shot from his group.”

Either way, it was a disaster. Winsting saw his fortune dying a bloody death on the floor above them, and he felt sick as they finally reached the bottom of the stairs and a vaultlike door, which Flog pushed him through.