The Bands of Mourning (Mistborn #6) - Brandon Sanderson Page 0,122

skies up here, hidden in the darkness, observing and making their maps?

Most of the others slept, comfortably tapping warmth as Allik had taught them. When Marasi considered sleeping herself, she could not banish the image of falling from one of those doorways and awakening just as she hit the ground—even with the waist belts tying them all in.

Wayne gave her something else to help with the pain, though he wouldn’t say what it was. It felt good though, and she could mostly ignore her aching side. She settled into the seat beside Allik and chatted with him. She felt guilty, as that required him to wear the medallion that let him translate, but he seemed as eager to talk as she was. She could not say whether that was because he was starved for interaction following his incarceration, or if he wanted to be distracted from thinking about the friends he’d lost during his journey.

Over the next two hours, he told her more about the medallions they wore, and the legends of the Bands of Mourning. In Allik’s lore, the Lord Ruler had filled them with a great deal of every attribute—but had also crafted them to grant any person who used them the ability to draw those forth. A kind of challenge to mankind to find them, along with a warning not to. Allik didn’t seem to consider this a contradiction at all.

He also spent more time telling her about life where he was from—a place over the mountains, across the entire Southern Roughs and the wastelands beyond. A distant, wonderful place where everyone wore masks, though not everyone wore them in the same way.

Allik’s own people preferred to change masks according to their professions or moods. Not each day, certainly, but it wasn’t uncommon for them to change their mask as often as a lady in Elendel might change her hairstyle. There were other groups though. One gave a mask to each child, and those only changed once, when they reached adulthood. Allik claimed that these people—called Hunters—even grew into their masks somehow, though Marasi found that difficult to believe. Still other people, to whom he referred derisively, wore only plain, unpainted masks until they did something to earn a more ornate one.

“They are the Fallen,” he explained to her, wagging one hand before himself in a gesture she didn’t understand. “They were our kings, yah? Before the world froze. They offended the Jaggenmire, which is why everything went wrong, and—”

“Wait,” Marasi said, speaking softly so the others could sleep, “the … yayg—”

“Jaggenmire?” he asked. “It didn’t translate? You don’t have a word for it in your language, then. It’s like a god, only not.”

“Very descriptive.”

Surprisingly he lifted his mask, something she’d only seen him do that once, when he’d knelt before the masks of his friends. He didn’t seem to consider it an infraction of any sort, and kept talking. She liked being able to see his face, even if his wispy beard and mustache looked a little ridiculous—it made him look younger than he really was, unless he was lying about being twenty-two.

“It’s like…” he said, grimacing, “like a thing that runs the world, yah? When something grows, or dies, the Jaggenmire make that happen. There is Herr, and his sister Frue, who is also his wife. And she makes things stop, and he makes things go, but neither can—”

“—make life on their own,” Marasi said.

“Yah!” he said.

“Ruin and Preservation,” she said. “The old Terris gods. They’re one now. Harmony.”

“No, they were always one,” Allik said. “And always apart. Very odd, very complex. But anyway, we were talking about the Fallen, yah? They work doing anything they can to relieve their burden of failure. A compliment means a lot to them, but you have to be careful, because if you tell them they did well, they might take your compliment to heart and travel back to their people to tell everyone. Then you might be called in to testify about how good a job they did, so they can change their mask. And their language, that’s a real pain. I speak a smattering of it—always useful, so you don’t have to wear the medallion—and it makes my head spin as if I’d been flying too high for way too long.”

She smiled, listening to him go on, gesturing wildly as he spoke—which she figured was only natural, if everyone’s faces were covered all the time.

“Do you speak many languages?” she asked, as he took a breath, finally