Mistborn: Secret History (Mistborn, #3.5)(35)

“No,” Kelsier said. “But close. What is happening?”

She started to stretch away. Her companions had already vanished.

“It’s ending . . .” she whispered. “All ending . . .”

And she was gone. Kelsier was left holding empty air, disturbed.

He started running again. He’d felt guilty leaving the horse behind in the forest, but surely the animal was better off there than it would have been here.

Was he too late? Was Preservation already dead?

He ran himself hard, the heft of the glass orb weighing down his pack. Perhaps it was the urgency, but his course became even more single-minded than it had been during his trip out. He didn’t want to see the failing world, the death all around him. Compared to that the exhaustion of the run was preferable, and so he sought it, running himself ragged.

He traveled for days upon days. Weeks upon weeks. Never stopping, never looking. Until . . .

Kelsier.

He jolted to a halt on a field of windswept ash. He had the distinct impression of mist in the physical world. Glowing mist. Power. He could not see that here, but he could sense it all around him.

“Fuzz?” he said, raising a hand to his forehead. Had he imagined that voice?

Not that way, Kelsier, the voice said, sounding distant. But yes, it was Preservation. We aren’t . . . aren’t . . . there. . . .

The crushing weight of fatigue hit Kelsier. Where was he? He spun about, looking for some kind of landmark, but those were difficult to find out here. The ash had buried the canals; a few weeks back he remembered swimming down through the ground to find them. Lately . . . he’d just been running. . . .

“Where?” Kelsier demanded. “Fuzz?”

So . . . tired . . .

“I know,” Kelsier whispered. “I know, Fuzz.”

Fadrex. Come to Fadrex. You are close. . . .

Fadrex City? Kelsier had been there before, in his youth. It was just south of . . .

There. Just barely visible in the Cognitive Realm, he made out the shadowy tip of Mt. Morag in the distance. That direction was north.

He turned his back toward the ashmount and ran for everything he was worth. It seemed a brief eyeblink before he reached the city and was given a welcome, warming sight. Souls.

The city was alive. Guards in the towers and on the tall rock formations surrounding the city. People in the streets, sleeping in their beds, clogging the buildings with beautiful, shining light. Kelsier walked right through the city gates, entering a wonderful, radiant city where people still fought on.

In the warmth of that glow, he knew he was not too late.

Unfortunately, his was not the only attention focused here. He had resisted looking upward during his run, but he could not help but do so now, confronting the churning, boiling mass. Shapes like black snakes slithered across one another, stretching to the horizon in all directions. It was watching. It was here.

So where was Preservation? Kelsier walked through the city, basking in the presence of other souls, recovering from his extended run. He stopped at one street corner, then spotted something. A tiny line of light, like a very long piece of hair, near his feet. He knelt, picking at it, and found that it stretched all the way along the street—impossibly thin, glowing faintly, yet too strong for him to break.

“Fuzz?” Kelsier said, following the strand, finding where it connected to another—it seemed a lattice that spread through the whole city.

Yes. I . . . I’m trying. . . .

“Nice work.”

I can’t talk to them . . . Fuzz said. I’m dying, Kelsier. . . .

“Hang on,” Kelsier said. “I’ve found something; it’s here in my pack. I took it from those creatures you mentioned. The Eyree.”

I do not sense anything, Fuzz said.

Kelsier hesitated. He didn’t want to reveal the object to Ruin. Instead he picked up the thread, which had enough slack for him to slip it into the pack and press it against the orb.

“How about that?”

Ahh . . . Yes . . .

“Can this help you somehow?”

No, unfortunately.

Kelsier felt his heart sink further.

The power . . . the power is hers. . . . But Ruin has her, Kelsier. I can’t . . . I can’t give it. . . .

“Hers?” Kelsier asked. “Vin? Is she here?”

The thread vibrated in Kelsier’s fingers like the string of an instrument. Waves came along it from one direction.

Kelsier followed them, noticing again how Preservation had covered this city with his essence. Perhaps he figured that if he was going to be strung out anyway, he should lie down like a protective blanket.

Preservation led him to a small city square clogged with glowing souls and bits of metal on the walls. They glowed so brightly, particularly in contrast to his months out alone. Was one of these souls Vin?

No, they were beggars. He moved among them, feeling at their souls with his fingertips, catching glimpses of them in the other Realm. Huddled in the ash, coughing and shivering. The fallen men and women of the Final Empire, the people even the common skaa tended to dismiss. For all his grand plans, he hadn’t made the lives of these people better, had he?

He stopped in place.

That last beggar, sitting against an old brick wall . . . there was something about him. Kelsier backed up, touching the beggar’s soul again, seeing a vision of a man with hands and face wrapped in bandages, white hair sticking out from beneath. Stark white hair, a fact not quite hidden by the ash that had been rubbed into it.