Shadows of Self (3 page)

Joe scraped at the remnants of his broken bowl, framed by splatters of red soup on the tablecloth. He managed to get some onto his spoon and lifted it to his lips. “You,” he said after sipping the soup, “should be dead.”

“You might want to look at hiring a new group of thugs,” Waxillium said. “The ones upstairs aren’t worth much.”

“I wasn’t referring to them,” Joe said. “How long have you been up here, in the Roughs, making trouble? Two years?”

“One,” Waxillium said. He’d been up here longer, but he had only recently started “making trouble,” as Joe put it.

Granite Joe clicked his tongue. “You think your type is new up here, son? Wide-eyed, with a low-slung gunbelt and bright new spurs? Come to reform us of our uncivilized ways. We see dozens like you every year. The others have the decency to either learn to be bribed, or to get dead before they ruin too much. But not you.”

He’s stalling,
Waxillium thought. Waiting for the men upstairs to run down.

“Drop your weapons!” Waxillium said, holding his gun on Joe. “Drop them or I shoot!”

The two guards didn’t move.
No metal lines on the guard on the right,
Waxillium thought.
Or on Joe himself.
The one on the left had a handgun, perhaps trusting the speed of his draw against a Coinshot. The other two had fancy hand-crossbows in their holsters, he bet. Single-shot, made of wood and ceramic. Built for killing Coinshots.

Even with Allomancy, Waxillium would never be able to kill all three of them without getting shot himself. Sweat trickled down his temple. He was tempted to just pull his trigger and shoot, but he’d be killed if he did that. And they knew it. It was a standoff, but
they
had reinforcements coming.

“You don’t belong here,” Joe said, leaning forward, elbows on his broken table. “We came here to escape folks like you. Your rules. Your assumptions. We don’t want you.”

“If that were true,” Waxillium said, surprised at how level his voice was, “then people wouldn’t come to me crying because you killed their sons. You might not need Elendel’s laws up here, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need any laws at all. And it doesn’t mean men like you should be able to do whatever you want.”

Granite Joe shook his head, standing up, hand to his holster. “This isn’t your habitat, son. Everyone has a price up here. If they don’t, they don’t fit in. You’ll die, slow and painful, just like a lion would die in that city of yours. What I’m doing today, this is a mercy.”

Joe drew.

Waxillium reacted quickly, Pushing himself off the wall lamps to his right. They were firmly anchored, so his Allomantic shove Pushed him to the left. He twisted his gun and fired.

Joe got his crossbow out and loosed a bolt, but the shot missed, zipping through the air where Waxillium had been. Waxillium’s own bullet flew true for once, hitting the female guard, who had pulled out her crossbow. She dropped, and as Waxillium crashed into the wall, he Pushed—knocking the gun out of the other guard’s hand as the man fired.

Waxillium’s Push, unfortunately, also flung his own gun out of his hand—but sent it spinning toward the second bodyguard. His gun smacked the man right in the face, dropping him.

Waxillium steadied himself, looking across the room at Joe, who seemed baffled that both his guards were down. No time to think. Waxillium scrambled toward the large, koloss-blooded man. If he could reach some metal to use as a weapon, maybe—

A weapon clicked behind him. Waxillium stopped and looked over his shoulder at Lessie, who was pointing a small hand-crossbow right at him.

“Everyone up here has a price,” Granite Joe said.

Waxillium stared at the crossbow bolt, tipped with obsidian. Where had she been carrying that? He swallowed slowly.

She put herself in danger, scrambling up the stairs with me!
he thought.
How could she have been …

But Joe had known about his Allomancy. So had she. Lessie
knew
he could spoil the thugs’ aim, when she’d joined him in running up the steps.

“Finally,” Joe said, “do you have an explanation of why you didn’t just
shoot
him in the saloon room, where the barkeep put him?”

She didn’t respond, instead studying Waxillium. “I did warn you that everyone in the saloon was in Joe’s employ,” she noted.

“I…” Waxillium swallowed. “I still think your legs are pretty.”

She met his eyes. Then she sighed, turned the crossbow, and shot Granite Joe in the neck.

Waxillium blinked as the enormous man dropped to the floor, gurgling as he bled.

“That?” Lessie said, glaring at Waxillium. “That’s all you could come up with to win me over? ‘You have nice legs’? Seriously? You are
so
doomed up here, Cravat.”

Waxillium breathed out in relief. “Oh,
Harmony
. I thought you were going to shoot me for sure.”

“Should have,” she grumbled. “I can’t believe—”

She cut off as the stairs clattered, the troop of miscreants from above having finally gathered the nerve to rush down the stairwell. A good half dozen of them burst into the room with weapons drawn.

Lessie dove for the fallen bodyguard’s gun.

Waxillium thought quickly, then did what came most naturally. He struck a dramatic pose in the rubble, one foot up, Granite Joe dead beside him, both bodyguards felled. Dust from the broken ceiling still sprinkled down, illuminated in sunlight pouring through a window above.

The thugs pulled to a stop. They looked down at the fallen corpse of their boss, then gaped toward Waxillium.

Finally, looking like children who had been caught in the pantry trying to get at the cookies, they lowered their weapons. The ones at the front tried to push through the ones at the back to get away, and the whole clamorous mess of them swarmed back up the steps, leaving the forlorn barkeep, who fled last of all.

Waxillium turned and offered his hand to Lessie, who let him pull her to her feet. She looked after the retreating group of bandits, whose boots thumped on wood in their haste to escape. In moments the building was silent.

“Huh,” she said. “You’re as surprising as a donkey who can dance, Mister Cravat.”

“It helps to have a thing,” Waxillium noted.

“Yeah. You think I should get a thing?”

“Getting a thing has been one of the most important choices I made in coming up to the Roughs.”

Lessie nodded slowly. “I have no idea what we’re talking about, but it sounds kinda dirty.” She glanced past him toward Granite Joe’s corpse, which stared lifelessly, lying in a pool of his own blood.

“Thanks,” Waxillium said. “For not murdering me.”

“Eh. I was gonna kill him eventually anyway and turn him in for the bounty.”

“Yes, well, I doubt you were planning to do it in front of his entire gang, while trapped in a basement with no escape.”

“True. Right stupid of me, that was.”

“So why do it?”

She kept looking at the body. “I’ve done plenty of things in Joe’s name I wish I hadn’t, but as far as I know, I never shot a man who didn’t deserve it. Killing you … well, seems like it would have been killing what you stood for too. Ya know?”

“I think I can grasp the concept.”

She rubbed at a bleeding scratch on her neck, where she’d brushed broken wood during their fall. “Next time, though, I hope it won’t involve making quite so big a mess. I
liked
this saloon.”

“I’ll do my best,” Waxillium said. “I intend to change things out here. If not the whole Roughs, then at least this town.”

“Well,” Lessie said, walking over to Granite Joe’s corpse, “I’m sure that if any evil pianos were thinking of attacking the city, they’ll have second thoughts now, considering your prowess with that pistol.”

Waxillium winced. “You … saw that, did you?”

“Rarely seen such a feat,” she said, kneeling and going through Joe’s pockets. “Three shots, three different notes, not a single bandit down. That takes skill. Maybe you should spend a little less time with your thing and more with your gun.”

“Now
that
sounded dirty.”

“Good. I hate being crass by accident.” She came out with Joe’s pocketbook and smiled, tossing it up and catching it. Above, in the hole Waxillium had made, an equine head poked out, followed by a smaller, teenage one in an oversized bowler hat. Where had he gotten that?

Destroyer blustered in greeting.

“Sure,
now
you come,” Waxillium said. “Stupid horse.”

“Actually,” Lessie said, “seems to me like staying away from you during a gunfight makes her a pretty damn
smart
horse.”

Waxillium smiled and held out his hand to Lessie. She took it, and he pulled her close. Then he lifted them out of the wreckage on a line of blue light.

PART ONE

1

SEVENTEEN YEARS LATER

Winsting smiled to himself as he watched the setting sun. It was an ideal evening to auction himself off.

“We have my saferoom ready?” Winsting asked, lightly gripping the balcony banister. “Just in case?”

“Yes, my lord.” Flog wore his silly Roughs hat along with a duster, though he’d never been outside of the Elendel Basin. The man was an excellent bodyguard, despite his terrible fashion sense, but Winsting made certain to Pull on the man’s emotions anyway, subtly enhancing Flog’s sense of loyalty. One could never be too careful.

“My lord?” Flog asked, glancing toward the chamber behind them. “They’re all here, my lord. Are you ready?”

Not turning away from the setting sun, Winsting raised a finger to hush the bodyguard. The balcony, in the Fourth Octant of Elendel, overlooked the canal and the Hub of the city—so he had a nice view of the Field of Rebirth. Long shadows stretched from the statues of the Ascendant Warrior and the Last Emperor in the green park where, according to fanciful legend, their corpses had been discovered following the Great Catacendre and the Final Ascension.

The air was muggy, slightly tempered by a cool breeze off Hammondar Bay a couple of miles to the west. Winsting tapped his fingers on the balcony railing, patiently sending out pulses of Allomantic power to shape the emotions of those in the room behind him. Or at least any foolish enough not to be wearing their aluminum-lined hats.

Any moment now …

Initially appearing as pinprick spots in the air, mist grew before him, spreading like frost across a window. Tendrils stretched and spun about one another, becoming streams—then rivers of motion, currents shifting and blanketing the city. Engulfing it. Consuming it.

“A misty night,” Flog said. “That’s bad luck, it is.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Winsting said, adjusting his cravat.

“He’s watching us,” Flog said. “The mists are His eyes, my lord. Sure as Ruin, that is.”

“Superstitious nonsense.” Winsting turned and strode into the room. Behind him, Flog shut the doors before the mists could seep into the party.

The two dozen people—along with the inevitable bodyguards—who mingled and chatted there were a select group. Not just important, but also very much at odds with one another, despite their deliberate smiles and meaningless small talk. He preferred to have rivals at events like this. Let them all see each other, and let each know the cost of losing the contest for his favor.

Winsting stepped among them. Unfortunately many did wear hats, whose aluminum linings would protect them from emotional Allomancy—though he had personally assured each attendee that none of the others would have Soothers or Rioters with them. He’d said nothing of his own abilities, of course. So far as any of them knew, he wasn’t an Allomancer.

He glanced across the room to where Blome tended bar. The man shook his head. Nobody else in the room was burning any metals. Excellent.

Winsting stepped up to the bar, then turned and raised his hands to draw everyone’s attention. The gesture exposed the twinkling diamond cuff links he wore on his stiff white shirt. The settings were wooden, of course.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “welcome to our little auction. The bidding begins now, and it ends when I hear the offer I like most.”

He said nothing more; too much talk would kill the drama. Winsting took the drink one of his servers offered and stepped out to mingle, then hesitated as he looked over the crowd. “Edwarn Ladrian is not here,” he said softly. He refused to call the man by his silly moniker, Mister Suit.

“No,” Flog said.

“I thought you said everyone had arrived!”

“Everyone who said they were coming,” Flog said. He shuffled, uncomfortable.

Winsting pursed his lips, but otherwise hid his disappointment. He’d been
certain
his offer had intrigued Edwarn. Perhaps the man had bought out one of the other crime lords in the room. Something to consider.

Winsting made his way to the central table, which held the nominal centerpiece of the evening. It was a painting of a reclining woman; Winsting had painted it himself, and he was getting better.

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