The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson
“I won’t be caught in this trap,” Wax said. “You’re the God, not me. You can find a line where You prevent the worst. You can find a line where You’re stopping the worst that is reasonable, while still letting us live our lives.”
The light ahead suddenly rolled outward, and Wax found that they’d been rounding a planet. They stood high above it, and had stepped from darkness into sunlight, which let Wax see the world below, bathed in a calm, cool light.
Beyond that hung a haze of red. All around, pressing in upon the world. He could feel it choking him, a miasma of dread and destruction.
“Perhaps,” Harmony said softly, “I have already done just as you suggest. You do not see it, because the worst never reaches you.”
“What is it?” Wax asked, trying to take in that vast redness. It beat inward, but he could see something, a thin strip of light—like a bubble around the world—stopping it.
“A representation,” Harmony said. “A crude one, perhaps.” He looked to Wax and smiled, like a father at a wide-eyed child.
“We’re not done with our conversation,” Wax said. “You let her die. You let me kill her.”
“And how long,” Harmony asked softly, “must you hate yourself for that?”
Wax clenched his jaw, but couldn’t force down the trembling that took him. He lived it again, holding her as she died. Knowing he’d killed her.
That hatred seethed inside of him. Hatred for Harmony. Hatred for the world.
And yes. Hatred for himself.
“Why?” Wax asked.
“Because you demanded it of me.”
“No I didn’t!”
“Yes. A part of you did. An eventuality I can see, one of many possible Waxilliums, all you—yet not set. Know yourself, Waxillium. Would you have had another kill her? Someone she didn’t know?”
“No,” he whispered.
“Would you have had her live on, a slave in her mind? Corrupted by that cursed spike that would forever leave her scarred, even if replaced?”
“No.” He was crying.
“And if you had known,” Harmony said, holding his eyes, “that you’d never have been able to pull that trigger unless your eyes were veiled? If you’d realized what knowledge of the truth would do to you—stilling your hand and trapping her in an endless prison of madness—what would you have asked of me?”
“Don’t tell me,” Wax whispered, squeezing his eyes shut.
The silence seemed to stretch until eternity.
“I am sorry,” Harmony said with a gentle voice, “for your pain. I am sorry for what you did, what we had to do. But I am not sorry for making you do what had to be done.”
Wax opened his eyes.
“And when I hold back, staying my hand from protecting those below,” Harmony said, “I must do it out of trust in what people can do on their own.” He glanced toward the red haze. “And because I have other problems to occupy me.”
“You didn’t tell me what it was,” Wax said.
“That is because I do not know.”
“That … frightens me.”
Harmony looked to him. “It should.”
Down below, a tiny spark flickered on one of the landmasses. Wax blinked. He’d seen it, despite the incredible distance.
“What was that?” he asked.
Harmony smiled. “Trust.”
* * *
Marasi clutched the spearhead in two hands.
And tapped everything.
Power flooded into her, lighting her up like an inferno. Snow hung motionless in the air. She stood up and reached to the belt of one of her captors, removing one of his vials of metal. She took them all, several from each guard, and drank them. She was tapping a metalmind, letting her move at a speed so fast that when she lifted her hand, she could briefly see the pocket of vacuum left behind. She smiled.
Then she burned her metals. All of them.
In that one transcendent moment, she felt herself change, expand. She felt the Lord Ruler’s own power, stored in the Bands of Mourning—the spearhead clutched in her fingers—surge through her, and she felt she would burst. It was as if an ocean of light had suddenly been pumped into her arteries and veins.
Blue lines exploded from her, first pointing at metals, then multiplying, changing, transforming. She saw through it all, everything in blue. There were no people or objects, just energy coalesced. The metals shone brilliantly, as if they were holes into someplace different. Concentrated essence, providing a pathway to power.
She was using the reserves with startling quickness. She slowed her speed, and for some reason the people beside her jumped, holding their ears. She cocked her head, then PUSHED.
The Push flung the guards a good fifty feet. That left her facing Suit and Telsin, who regarded her with horrified expressions. They were glowing energy to her, but she recognized them. They had spikes inside of them.
Convenient. Those spikes resisted Pushes, but not enough to bother Marasi now. She lifted a hand and flung both of them away by the very metals they’d used to pierce themselves.
All around, guards grabbed guns and turned on her. She swept them backward, then lifted herself off the ground, Pushing on the trace minerals in the stone beneath her.
She hung there, and was surprised to see something spinning around her. Mist? Where was it coming from?
Me, she realized.
She hovered in the sky, flush with power. In that moment, she was the Ascendant Warrior. She held the fullness of what Waxillium had barely tasted his whole life. She could be him, eclipse him. She could bring justice to entire peoples. Holding it all within her, having it and measuring it, she finally admitted the truth to herself.
This isn’t what I want.
She would not let her childhood dreams hold sway over her any longer. She smiled, then threw herself through the air in a Push toward the temple.
* * *
Steris watched her sister fly away.
“Unexpected,” she said. And here she assumed she’d been prepared for anything. Marasi starting to glow, throwing people around with Allomancy as if they were dolls, then streaking away and leaving a trail of mist … well, that hadn’t been on the list. It hadn’t even made the appendix.
She looked down at poor Allik, so cold he’d stopped shivering. “I shall have to enlarge my projections of what is plausible during activities such as this, don’t you think?”
He mumbled something in his language. “Foralate men!” He waved his hand in a gesture. “Forsalvin!”
“Telling me to flee without you?” Steris said, walking over and retrieving her notebook. “Yes, running while they are all confused would be wise, but I don’t plan to leave yet.” She opened the notebook, which she’d hollowed out with Wax’s knife in the rear of the skimmer, while Marasi was talking with Allik up front and the others slept. “Did you know that when I evaluated everyone’s usefulness on this expedition, I gave myself a seven out of a hundred? Not very high, yes, but I couldn’t reasonably give myself the lowest mark possible. I do have my uses.”
She turned the large notebook, showing an extra medallion from the skimmer’s emergency store settled protectively into the gouged-out section she’d made.
She smiled at Allik, pulled it free, and pressed it into his hand. He let out a long, relieved sigh, and the blown snow that had stuck to his face melted away.
Nearby, soldiers were regaining their feet and shouting to one another.
“And now,” Steris said, “I think your earlier suggestion has merit.”
* * *
“Now what?” Wax asked Harmony. “I fade off into nothing?”
“I don’t believe it’s nothing,” God said. “There is something beyond. Though perhaps my belief is merely my own desire wishing it to be so.”
“You are not encouraging me. Aren’t You omnipotent?”
“Hardly,” Harmony said, smiling. “But I believe that parts of me could be.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.??
“It won’t until I make it do so,” Harmony said, extending His hands to either side. “In answer to your question, however, you don’t fade just yet. Though soon. Right now, you make a choice.”
Wax looked from one of the deity’s hands to the other. “Does everyone get this choice?”
“Their choices are different.” He proffered His hands to Wax, as if offering them for him to take.
“I don’t see the choice.”
“My right hand,” Harmony said, “is freedom. You can feel it, I think.”
And he could. Soaring, released from all bonds, riding upon lines of blue light. Adventure into the unknown, seeking only the fulfillment of his own curiosity. It was glorious. It was what he’d always wanted, and its lure thrummed through him.
Freedom.
Wax gasped. “What … what is the other one?”
Harmony held up His left hand, and Wax heard something. A voice?
“Wax?” it said.
Yes, a frantic voice. Feminine.
“Wax, you have to know what it does. It will heal you, Wax. Waxillium! Please…”
“That hand,” Wax said, looking at it. “That hand is duty, isn’t it?”
“No, Waxillium,” Harmony said gently. “Although that is how you’ve seen it. Duty or freedom. Burden or adventure. You were always the one who made the right choice, when others played. And so you resent it.”
“No I don’t,” Wax said.
Harmony smiled. The understanding in His face was infuriating.
“This hand,” Harmony said, “is not duty. It is but a different adventure.”
“Wax…” the voice said from below, choked with emotion. It belonged to Marasi. “You have to tap the metalmind.”
Wax reached toward the left hand, and Harmony—shockingly—pulled it away. “Are you certain?”
“I have to.”
“Do you?”
“I have to. It’s who I am.”
“Then perhaps,” Harmony said, “you should stop hating that, my son.” He extended the hand.
Wax hesitated. “Tell me one thing first.”
“If it is within my means.”
“Did she come here? When she passed?”
Harmony smiled. “She asked me to look after you.”
Wax seized the left hand with his own. He was immediately pulled toward something, like air being sucked through a hole. Warmth bathed him; then it became a fire. Pulling breath into his lungs, he screamed, heaving, throwing the boulder off. It clattered to the side, and he found himself in the low-roofed chamber beneath the temple.
Such strength! He hadn’t thrown that rock with muscles, but with steel. His body reknit even as he launched himself to his feet by Pushing on tiny traces of metal in the ground beneath him. He landed and looked down at his left hand. The one that had been dangling, broken, before his face as he died.
Clutched in it was an oversized spearhead crafted from sixteen different metals melded together. He looked up from it and toward Marasi, who regarded him with tearstained eyes, but a broad smile.
“You found it,” Wax said.
She nodded eagerly. “Just took a little old-fashioned detective work.”
“You saved me,” Wax said.
Rust and Ruin … such power. He felt as if he could level cities or build them up anew.
“Suit and your sister are outside,” Marasi said. “I left the others there. I don’t— Well, I wasn’t thinking straight. Or maybe I was thinking too much. Here.” She handed him a vial of metals.
Wax took it, then held up the Bands. “You could have done this yourself.”
“No,” Marasi said. “I couldn’t have.”
“But—”
“I couldn’t have,” Marasi said. “It just … isn’t me.” She shrugged. “Does that make sense?”
“Surprisingly, yes.” He flexed his hand around the Bands.
“Go,” Marasi said. “Do what you do best, Waxillium Ladrian.”
“Which is what? Break things?”
“Break things,” Marasi said, “with style.”
He grinned, then downed the vial of metals.
29
“Waxillium’s followers have the Bands!” Suit whispered to himself as he crossed the dark, stony field. Snow had begun falling—a bitter, icy snow, nothing like the soft flakes he’d occasionally seen in the eastern Basin. “It is a crisis. They will be coming for us. We must move up our timetables!”
He chewed on the words, mulling them over as he pulled his coat tight. Warming device notwithstanding, that wind was annoying.
Would they buy his argument? No, not dire enough.
“Waxillium and his people have the Bands!” he whispered to himself. “This will undoubtedly let the kandra devise the means of creating metalminds anyone can use. We must move up our timetables and seize Elendel now, or we will find ourselves technologically outmatched!”
Yes. Yes, that was the idea. Even the most careful of the Series would be distressed by the prospect of being technologically outmaneuvered. This would convince them to give him the leeway he desired.
Anything could be an advantage. He’d wanted the Bands for himself, but in lieu of that, he’d find something else.
Suit always found the advantage.
He passed soldiers scurrying about and unloading weapons on the frozen plain of rock. They’d planned for a potential fight here, as he’d worried he might encounter more of the masked savages.
“Sir!” one of the men called. “Orders?”
He gestured toward the sky. “If anyone other than the Sequence drops from the air or approaches your position, shoot them. Then keep shooting, even after they are down.”
“Yes, sir!” the soldier said, waving to a group of his men. He turned toward an empty rack, then paused. “My rifle? Who took my rifle!”
Suit continued on past, tossing the fake Bands of Mourning into the snow and leaving the troops to—hopefully—slow down Waxillium’s minions. He eagerly marched aboard the new airship. Now this device, this was an advantage. The Bands could serve one man, make a deity out of him. A fleet of ships like this could deify an entire army.
The wooden hallway inside had gaslights set into lamps with austere metal housings. It was all distinctly plainer than the ship that had crashed in Dulsing—the wood here was unornamented, unpolished. The other ship had felt decorated like a den. This one, a warehouse.
Probably cheaper to build this way, he thought, nodding his head in approval.
Footsteps clattered above as men charged through one of the corridors on another deck, and Suit brushed the snow from his arms as a technician ran up to him, bearing the red uniform of the Set’s Hidden Guard.
“My lord,” the man said, proffering one of the medallions. “You’ll need this.”
Suit took it and rolled up his sleeve to strap it to his upper arm. “Is this ship operational?”
The man’s eyes lit up. “Yes, sir! The machinery is operational, sheltered as it was from the weather. Sir … it’s amazing. You can feel the energy pulsing off that metal. We did have to send men out to unclog the fans—a few of the Coinshots helped—and we have them moving now. Fed is down below, priming the weight-changing machinery with her Feruchemy, to lighten the ship. That should be the last step!”
“Then lift us off,” Suit said, walking toward where he assumed the bridge would be found.
“My lord Suit?” the man called after him. “Aren’t we waiting for the Sequence?”
He hesitated only briefly. Where had she gotten to?
Another advantage? he thought. He could stand being Sequence.
“She will join us aloft if she can,” he said. “Our priority is to get this ship, and its secrets, to a secure location.”
As the technician saluted and ran to obey, Suit filled his medallion, becoming lighter. So much easier than getting his spikes had been. It was hard not to feel that their experiments in Hemalurgy had been a waste, a dead end.
&n
It worked. Immediately, implications flooded his mind. Travel. Shipping. Warfare. New regions could be settled. New types of buildings and docks would be needed.
It would all flow through him.
He suppressed a smile—best to celebrate after he was safely away—but he could not stop the heady sensation. The Set had been planning for events a century or more away, putting careful plots into motion at his suggestion. He was proud of those, but truth be told, he’d rather they rule in his lifetime.
And with this, he could do so.
* * *
Jordis huddled in the tent, watching her crew die.
It had been long coming, this death. The last ember of the fire, refusing to give up its spark. During the terrible march through the dead rain, her people had been given tiny sips of warmth from a metalmind. Enough to barely keep them alive, like plants locked in a dark shed for most of the day.
But now, in this place, the cold was too pervasive—and the hardships of the march too devastating. She crawled among her crew and whispered encouragement, though she could no longer feel her fingers or toes. Most of the men and women of the ship couldn’t even nod. A few had started removing their clothing, complaining of heat. Chillfever had struck them.
Not long now. The maskless devils seemed to know this; they’d posted only a single guard at the tent. Her people could have snuck away out the back, perhaps. But what would they sneak toward? Death outside in the winds rather than death inside here?
How do the maskless survive it? she wondered. They must be devils indeed, born of the frost itself, to be so capable of withstanding the cold.
Jordis knelt beside Petrine, the enginemaster and eldest of her crew. How had the woman survived so long? She was by no means feeble, but she was past her sixth decade. Petrine lifted her hand and gripped Jordis’s arm—though her wrinkled eyes were shadowed by the mask, Jordis needed no gesture or expression to know Petrine’s emotions.