Shadows of Self (42 page)

“That’s insane.”

“Yes,” Wax said, turning to the kandra. “It is.” He started to pace in the small room. “Speak to Harmony and find out something for me. Did Bleeder first leave because Harmony tried to take control of her at some point? Did that set her off?”

A moment of silence. “Yes,” TenSoon replied. “Harmony says He didn’t try to control her directly, but He did push her very hard to do something she didn’t want to do.”

“She’s been persistent about this idea that all people are controlled.”
Harmony … was she Bloody Tan? Was she wearing his body, even back then? Was she there when I shot Lessie?
“She sees everyone as Harmony’s puppets—in her eyes, the politicians are His mouth. She’s bringing down the government for that reason. Religion? Harmony’s eyes, to watch over the people. She works to undermine that by creating strife between the religious sects.”

“Yes…” TenSoon said. “In a way, it could be seen as a continuation of the First Contract. Serve the Lord Ruler. Bring down the force that he worked to defeat. Harmony is half of that.”

“But what am I in this?” Wax continued, only half listening to TenSoon. “Why me? Why focus on—”

No, wrong question.

What was she going to do next? Eyes, tongue … ears, maybe?
Pretend she’s a step ahead of you,
Wax told himself.
Prepare for the worst.

He looked again at the sheets on the floor. She wanted Wax out of the way. An elaborate puzzle? It was a time waster, a distraction. She’d ripped out these sheets not to tease him, but to remove him from the investigation long enough to accomplish the next phase of her plan. She’d
led
him here with that dust on her robe. She’d planted it there for that purpose.

“She knows,” Wax said softly. “She knows what you’re going to do, TenSoon. What you’ve
done
.” He felt cold, and met the kandra’s inhuman eyes. “She’s
planned
that you would send your kandra to try to win back the hearts and minds of the people. That exposes you. Her next step is to bring them down.”

*   *   *

Wayne wandered between two bonfires. Inside one, table and chair legs made sharp lines, like the shadowy limbs of corpses being burned. The mists didn’t get too close to the fires, though the smoke made a good imitator in the night. Like a beggar dressed up so nice, you only knew him for what he was when you got close enough to catch a proper whiff.

Wayne leaned in to one of the bonfires to light his cigar, though that required him to heal the skin of his arm as it burned. He smelled both of his own singed hair and of the scent of the fire. Polished furniture didn’t burn clean. He liked feeling the heat though. Made him feel alive.

He had stopped filling his metalminds, hoping he had enough health for what was coming. He couldn’t afford to be weak or sickly right now. Not with what was happening.

He leaned back away from the flames and settled the cigar between his teeth. It was a fancy type, from the governor’s own hidden stash. Wayne took a long puff before remembering that he hated the rusting things. Ah well. He hadn’t traded anything good for it. Just one of Wax’s forks.

The crowd gathering here in the square was the biggest he’d seen this night. They clumped in the bonfire light like a flock of ravens drawn to a kill. Wayne moved up to the back of the crowd and handed his cigar to someone there. He left her standing, baffled, as he dove into the crowd.

With a crowd this big, you couldn’t move
through
them, but
with
them. You hadda pull the crowd on like a good coat, snug and tight, then let the cloth give you some direction. Wayne shuffled when the people shuffled, and shouted at the proper points, giving just the right drunken slur to his speech. He gave back a friendly elbow when one nudged him, and before too long he neared the front. Here, above everyone else, a shirtless fellow in trousers and suspenders stood atop a fountain statue, holding on to the Survivor’s spear for balance, his other fist raised toward the crowd.

“They rob us blind!” the man shouted.

Aye, that’s true,
Wayne thought, shouting along with the crowd’s roar of agreement.

“They expect us to work long hours every day, but then when it ain’t convenient for them, they just cut us loose and don’t care none if we starve.”

Yeah, they do,
Wayne thought, joining in the cursing and shouting.

“They do each other favors,” the man bellowed. “They suck us dry, then gather to throw lavish parties!”

I’ve been to those parties,
Wayne thought.
Good sandwiches.

“Would the Survivor have stood for this?”

Probably not,
Wayne admitted. As the crowd surged around him, Wayne folded his arms and thought. Sure, bringing down a homicidal shapeshifter was important and all, but
rusts,
this seemed a bad time to be hanging around with conners and noblemen. Listening to this speech, he was half inclined to string
himself
up, which was really disturbing, since he was generally suicidal only in the mornings.

He was about to turn away and flow back toward the mansion to talk with MeLaan about this when something changed. A new figure climbed up onto the statue: an older, balding man who was a little thick around the waist, but in a friendly-type way. He wore ornate robes that frayed like a mistcoat at the bottom. A Survivorist priest?

The older man held up a pleading hand, and the fellow who had been shouting bowed his head in acknowledgment and stepped back. Beneath the giant image of the Survivor, his priest would be heard. Wayne felt a disturbance stir within him, like his stomach discovering he’d just fed it a bunch of rotten apples. Religion worried him. It could ask men to do things they’d otherwise never do.

“I come to you,” the priest said into the night, “understanding and sympathetic. But I implore you, do not invoke the Survivor’s name for looting and destruction. There is a way to fight back, and I will join you in it, but these are not the days of the Lord Ruler’s tyranny. You have the ability to make your voice heard. You can send advocates to the government for you.”

The crowd hushed. A few men shouted out expletives, explaining exactly what they wanted to do to the governor, but most grew quiet.

“The Survivor said that we should smile,” the priest pled. “He taught that we should not let our sorrows drag us down no matter how bad life became.”

The mood of the crowd was shifting. They shuffled instead of shouted. Wayne relaxed. Well, maybe religion
was
good for something other than fancy clothes and weird hats. If that priest defused this group, Wayne would buy him a drink, he would. And buying drinks for priests was great, because they usually wouldn’t drink theirs, so you got two for yourself to …

Wait. Why was that fellow in the suspenders—the one who had talked before—sneaking up behind the priest? Raising his hand, as if to—

“No!” Wayne shouted, shoving through the crowd toward the fountain. He froze time, which caused quite a mess of confusion in the people around him, but it didn’t do much. All that let him do was stand there feeling helpless, knowing the priest was too far away to save. The fellow in the suspenders stood just behind the gentle old man, hand raised, knife glittering in the firelight.

Except that wasn’t no knife. It was a
needle
.

Wayne dropped his speed bubble. The needle plunged down, striking the priest in the back. The round-faced man jerked upright, and then his flesh started to
melt
. It turned translucent, his eyes drooping out of their sockets, crystal bones beneath glittering in the light of the bonfires.

“Look!” the bare-chested man said. “See what they send to try to placate you? The Faceless Immortals serve the nobility! This was no priest, but one of their minions. They want you to believe you’re free, that their democracy works for you, but all that surrounds you is lies!”

Wayne gaped as the priest—no, the kandra—struggled to stand upright and speak, but that made it worse. The protesters shouted, their rowdiness back with renewed strength, save for near Wayne, where the people were still confused as to why time had stopped for them.

A woman in a dirty skirt eyed him. “Hey, aren’t you that guy from the Roughs?”

Wayne grimaced, backing away. On the fountain, the leader spotted him and interrupted his diatribe. He pointed right at Wayne. “One of them is here!” he shouted. “They send constables into our midst! They’re all around, controlling you!”

Basically the entire crowd turned to look at Wayne.

Well, hell.

for any person in the room. Had I not bested the tribes at the Pits of Eltania? Was I not the first to bring back tales of the slopes of the Ashmounts, now gone green with vegetation? And wasn’t it I that had domesticated the fabled long-necked horses of the Plains of Kaermeron?

“I shall not lower this gun,” said the man, “until you pay for your crimes.”

My enhanced senses picked up a faint tremor in the man’s speech. I noticed the almost imperceptible flicks of his eyes to the right and left. This wasn’t one of the Cobblesguilder henchmen as I’d at first thought. He was a man looking for revenge, and he wasn’t entirely sure if I was the one from whom he should exact it.

“Let us talk this through peaceably,” I suggested. I gently removed Lady Lavont’s trembling fingers from my arm. “All will be solved, my lady,” I said, detecting a faint gasp in her breathing as my fingers brushed hers for so short a moment.

Mustaches straightened. “You killed my brother three years back in the Roughs near Covingtar,” he said.

I needed time to think on his accusation, so I stepped forward, raised my hands in the air, and said, “As you can see, I am unarmed.” I turned in a circle, displaying to the crowd that I in fact held no sidearm. And yes, bravely, I turned my back on Mustaches, trusting in his uncertainty of my identity.

As I turned, I thought through my predicament. It was true that some three years back I had found myself in the vicinity of Covingtar. But had I killed someone’s brother there? No doubt I had left many a man brotherless, but never intentionally. The very thought of killing a man for the express purpose of leaving another man brotherless is highly repugnant to me.

“I am not the man you seek,” I said, raising my glass for another sip because, by the Faceless, if I was going to die I would do it drinking a fine Chamblis Montreau 328.

The gun barrel shook more. If my gambit failed, I would sport yet another bullet scar on my strapping abdomen. Skin and muscle would heal, but the finely-woven shirt had been a gift from the daughter of the owner of Gilles & Gilles—on the corner of Canton Avenue and Troncheau Way—tailors of exquisite and tasteful dress shirts for fashionable and high society types. I did not wish it to be spoiled with my worthy blood.

“Then who are you?” asked Mustaches, his gun’s barrel dropping more. The moment of danger was not yet over, but my own breathing evened out. My enhanced senses found Mustache’s gazelle-quick heartbeat slowing to a more reasonable pace.

“Gentleman Jak,” I said with humility. “Surely you have heard of me.”

“So you ain’t that Waxillium Ladrian fellow?”

“By the Survivor, no!” My anger rose without warning. Many a man had met the righteous end of my knuckles for such a comment, but here in the barely civilized reaches of the Outer Cities, I knew I musn’t punish this ill-informed yokel for his folly.

“My good man, no,” I said more calmly and letting out a generous laugh. He shakily reholstered his pistol. A crooked smile began beneath those knifelike mustaches of his. I approached him like I would a prairie lion, but heartbeats later I was slapping him on the back like an old friend (and narrowly avoiding the end of one of his mustaches piercing me through the right earlobe, a hole that no doubt would make the honorable Handerwym jealous of the metalminds I might hang there).

“A drink,” I roared. “A drink for my friend! For I too would pull a gun on Waxillium Ladrian were I to meet him in person!”

Danger averted, Lady Lavont came again to my side, a tinkle of laughter on her lips. Then I noticed over the crowd two pairs of waving arms that I immediately recognized as Handerwym’s. In trying to get my attention over the pressing crowd in the room, he shook his arms in so aggravated a fashion that one of his metalminds flew from his wrist and landed like an Outer Cities cataract diver into the sparkle punch, spraying red droplets all in a mottle upon Lady Lavont’s pastel satin evening gown.

My dependable steward’s convulsing could only be interpreted one way. During my diversion with Mustaches, the Lord Mistborn’s only remaining buttons had been stolen, swapped for the indistinguishable duplicates, and neither I nor Handerwym had been in a position to intercept the perpetrators.

I needed my enhanced senses to seek out the thieves, but I had just used my last modicum of tin to help defuse Mustaches’ desire to bring me face to face with Old Ironeyes.