The Bands of Mourning (Mistborn #6) - Brandon Sanderson Page 0,105
over. Marasi’s breath caught. What she’d mistaken for a lump of blankets or pillows was moving. She glanced toward the desk in the other room, where she’d set her rifle.
The thing lurched and slammed against the bars.
Marasi gasped, jumping away, her back crashing against the stack of nearby boxes. Inside the cage, dim light reflected from a too-flat face of red and black. Dark pits of eyes.
The pictures. Marasi had forgotten the pictures that ReLuur had left. Horrible faces of red and black, with those deep, dark eyes. Images as if from a nightmare, drawn in frantic, scribbled strokes.
The monsters were real. And there was one in the cage here, swathed in thick fur, face of polished red. It regarded her, silent, then reached out between the bars with a shockingly human hand and whispered a single word through lips that somehow didn’t move.
“Please.”
* * *
Wayne turned down his saunter and added a fair measure of scramble to his step instead. This engineer, he didn’t like being here, among all these soldiers. He’d spent his life building houses and working on skyscrapers, and now here he was, basically in the middle of a bivouac!
That ship was marvelous, but he had a distinct worry. It was secret. And secret projects were the kind where little men like himself disappeared when everything was finished.
No, something’s wrong, Wayne thought, halfway across the floor of the warehouse. He didn’t stop walking, but he turned his steps in a little circle, like he was pacing. Something was wrong, but what was it?
“Wayne?” Wax hissed from the shadows nearby, crouched beside a barrel of pitch.
Wayne ignored him, continuing his loop. He … he was a scientist. No, no, an engineer. He was a working man. Learned enough, but not some fancy professor who was paid to stand all day and talk. He built things, and he hated being in this place, with all its guns. He encouraged life, and the soldiers were the opposite of that. They, they …
No, he thought again, raising hands to the sides of his head. Wrong, wrong, wrong!
Shape up, Wayne. This was your plan. You’ve gotta make it work.
What was wrong? He … He was a …
He stopped. Then reached into the pocket of his vest and took out a charcoal pencil. He held it up, inspecting it, before slipping it behind his ear. He let out a long sigh.
He was an engineer. A no-nonsense man who saw that things got done. He liked it here, as they had a military way about them—they said what they wanted, and were straight with him. Men were rewarded for hard work.
He didn’t like all those guns. And he certainly didn’t like the men in charge of this place. There was something off about them. But he held his tongue.
Relaxing, Wayne crossed the rest of the way to the door guard. False nose, mustache, a little extra air in the cheeks to fatten his face, and a perpetual squint in the right eye. Came from looking at plans all the time, he figured. But he didn’t need a monocle. Those things looked downright stupid.
He stepped up to the guard. “The lattice supports of the apricity are completely liminal!”
The man blinked at him.
“Don’t just stand there!” Wayne said, waving toward the walls of the warehouse. “Can’t you see that the forebode malefactors are starting to bow? We could have a full-blown bannock on our hands at any minute!”
“What…” the guard said. “What am I supposed to—”
“Please,” Wayne said, pushing him aside—the man let him—and pulling open the door.
The scene beyond was as Wax had described it. That was Telsin, all right. Dark hair, rugged body. Almost like a Roughs woman. He’d seen her evanotypes all over the mansion. Looked older now. Being a prisoner could do that to somebody.
Tweaked-leg and thick-neck stood beside her table, and both turned with annoyance toward him.
Now, Wayne thought, focusing on tweaked-leg, the real test.
“We’ve got a serious problem,” Wayne said. “I’ve been checking the integrity of the structure, and the caronals are completely nepheligenous out there! We are about to have a full-blown case of ximelolagnia if somebody doesn’t do something.”
The bespectacled man looked at Wayne, blinked once, then said, “Well, of course we will, you idiot. But what do we do about it?”
Wayne held back a smile, tucking it into his pocket for later use. It seemed to him that the smarter a man was, the more likely he was to pretend he knew more than he did.