Mistborn: Secret History (Mistborn, #3.5)(38)

In a moment she was gone. It seemed the transition was too much of a shock. The others showed similar confusion, holding out their hands as if surprised to find themselves human again—though not a few seemed relieved. Kelsier watched as thousands of these figures appeared, then faded away. It was a slaughter on the other side, stones crashing down all around. One passed right through Kelsier before rolling away, breaking bodies.

He could use this, but he would need something specific. Not a skaa peasant, or even a crafty lord. He needed someone who . . .

There.

He dashed through fading spirits and dodged between the glowing souls of creatures not yet dead, making for a particular spirit who had just appeared. Bald, with tattoos circling his eyes. An obligator. This man seemed less surprised by events, and more resigned. By the time Kelsier arrived, the lanky obligator was already starting to stretch away.

“How?” Kelsier demanded, counting on the obligator to understand more about the koloss. “How did this happen to you?”

“I don’t know,” the man said.

Kelsier felt his heart sink.

“The beasts,” the man continued, “should have known better than to take an obligator! I was their keeper, and they did this to me? This world is ruined.”

Should have known better? Kelsier clutched the obligator’s shoulder as the man stretched toward nothingness. “How? Please, how is it done? Men become koloss?”

The obligator looked to him and, vanishing, said one word.

“Spikes.”

Kelsier gaped again. Around him on the misty plain, souls blazed bright, flashed, and were dumped into this Realm—before finally fading to nothing. Like human bonfires being extinguished.

Spikes. Like Inquisitor spikes?

He walked to the slumped-over corpses of the dead and knelt, inspecting them. Yes, he could see it. Metal glowed on this side, and among those corpses were little spikes—like embers, small but glowing fiercely.

They were much harder to make out on the living koloss, because of the way the soul blazed, but it seemed to him that the spikes pierced into the soul. Was that the secret? He shouted at a pair of koloss, and they looked toward him, then glanced about, confused.

The spikes transform them, Kelsier thought, like Inquisitors. Is that how they’re controlled? Through piercings in the soul?

What of madmen? Were their souls cracked open, allowing something similar? Troubled, he left the field and its dying, although the battle—or rather the slaughter—seemed to be ending.

Kelsier crossed the misty field outside Fadrex, then lingered out here alone, away from the souls of men until Vin returned, trailed by a shadow she didn’t seem to know was there this time. She passed by, then disappeared into the camp.

Kelsier settled down near one of the little tendrils of Preservation, and touched it. “He has his fingers in everything, doesn’t he, Fuzz?”

“Yes,” Preservation said, his voice frail, tiny. “See.”

Something appeared in Kelsier’s mind, a sequence of images: Inquisitors listening with heads raised toward Ruin’s voice. Vin in the creature’s shadow. A man he didn’t know sitting on a burning throne and watching Luthadel, a twisted smile on his lips.

Then, little Lestibournes. Spook wore a burned cloak that seemed too big for him, and Ruin crouched nearby, whispering with Kelsier’s own voice into the poor lad’s ear.

After him, Kelsier saw Marsh standing among falling ash, spiked eyes staring sightlessly across the landscape. He didn’t seem to be moving; the ash was piling up on his shoulders and head.

Marsh . . . Seeing his brother like that made Kelsier sick. Kelsier’s plan had required Marsh to join the obligators. He had deduced what must have happened next. Marsh’s Allomancy had been noticed, as had the fervent way he lived his life.

Passion and care. Marsh had never been as capable as Kelsier. But he had always, always been a better man.

Preservation showed him dozens of others, mostly people in power leading their followers to doom, laughing and dancing as ash piled high and crops withered in the mists. Each one was a person either pierced by metal or influenced by people around them who were pierced by metal. He should have made the connection back at the Well of Ascension, when he’d seen in the pulses that Ruin could speak to Marsh and the other Inquisitors.

Metal. It was the key to everything.

“So much destruction,” Kelsier whispered at the visions. “We can’t survive this, can we? Even if we stop Ruin, we are doomed.”

“No,” Preservation said. “Not doomed. Remember . . . hope, Kelsier. You said, I . . . I . . . am . . .”

“I am hope,” Kelsier whispered.

“I cannot save you. But we must trust.”

“In what?”

“In the man I was. In the . . . the plan . . . The sign . . . and the Hero . . .”

“Vin. He has her, Fuzz.”

“He doesn’t know as much as he thinks,” Preservation whispered. “That is his weakness. The . . . weakness . . . of all clever men . . .”

“Except me, of course.”

Preservation had enough spark left to chuckle at that, which did Kelsier some good. He stood up, dusting off his clothing. Which was somewhat pointless, seeing as how there was no dust here—not to mention no actual clothing. “Come now, Fuzz, when have you known me to be wrong?”