The Bands of Mourning (Mistborn #6) - Brandon Sanderson Page 0,149

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.

The ship quivered, and the fans started up with a much louder sound than he had expected. Before he reached the bridge, the thing rocked, and he heard ice cracking above the sound of the fans. He leaned over to a porthole, looking out as the ground retreated.

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.

“Do we attack?” Petrine asked.

“For what purpose?”

“We could die by their weapons instead of the cold.”

Wise, those words. Perhaps they could—

A loud thump came from outside the tent. Jordis found her feet, surprisingly, though most of the others remained huddling where they lay. The front of the tent burst open and a man with a