The Bands of Mourning (Mistborn #6) - Brandon Sanderson Page 0,35
from the sphere. He tugged the cord, and was pleased to find that it locked into place, catching on the luggage rack.
Way more handy than the other designs, Wax thought, impressed. He Pushed on the switch a second time, and the mechanism disengaged, retracting the hooks with a snap. The ball fell to the couch beside Steris, and Wax pulled it into his hand by the cord.
“Clever,” Steris said. “And this relates to the conversation how?”
Wax Pushed on the sphere again, but this time didn’t engage the mechanism. Instead he held the cord tight, giving the sphere about three feet of line. It jerked to a stop in midair, hovering. He kept Pushing, upward and away from him at an angle—but also held the cord, and that kept the sphere from falling.
“People,” Wax said, “are like cords, Steris. We snake out, striking this way and that, always looking for something new. That’s human nature, to discover what is hidden. There’s so much we can do, so many places we can go.” He shifted in his seat, changing his center of gravity, which caused the sphere to rotate upward on its tether.
“But if there aren’t any boundaries,” he said, “we’d get tangled up. Imagine a thousand of these cords, zipping through the room. The law is there to keep us from ruining everyone else’s ability to explore. Without law, there’s no freedom. That’s why I am what I am.”
“Sure it does,” Wax said, smiling. “That’s part of the discovery, part of the search. Find who did it. Find the secrets, the answers.”
There was, of course, another part—the part Miles had forced Wax to admit. There was a certain perverse anger that lawmen directed at those who broke the law, almost a jealousy. How dare these people escape? How dare they go the places nobody else was allowed to?
He let the sphere drop, and Steris picked it up, looking it over with a meticulous eye. “You talk about answers, secrets, and the search. Why is it you hate politics so much?”
“Well, it might be because sitting in a stuffy room and listening to people complain is the opposite of discovery.”
“No!” Steris said. “Every meeting is a mystery, Lord Waxillium. What are their motives? What quiet lies are they telling, and what truths can you discover?” She tossed his sphere back to him, then took her suitcase and set it on the small cocktail table in the center of the cabin. “House finances are the same.”
“House finances,” he said, flatly.
“Yes!” Steris said. She fished in the suitcase, getting out a ledger. “See, look.” She flipped it open and pointed at an account.
He looked at the page, then up at her. Such excitement, he thought. But … ledgers?
“Three clips,” he said. “The tables are different by three clips. I’m sorry, Steris, it’s a meaningless amount. I don’t see—”
“It’s not meaningless,” she said, scooting over to sit beside him. “Don’t you see? The answer is here somewhere, in this book. Aren’t you even curious? The mystery of where they went?” She nodded to him, excited.
“Well, I suppose you could show me how to look,” he said. He dreaded the idea, but then, she looked so happy.
“Here,” she said, handing him a ledger, then fishing out another. “Look at goods received. Compare the dates and the payouts to the ledger! I’m going to study maintenance.”
He glanced toward the window in their door, half expecting Wayne to be out there in the hallway, snickering himself senseless at the prank. But Wayne was not there. This was no prank. Steris grabbed her own ledgers and attacked them with as much ferocity as a hungry man might a good steak.
Wax sighed, sat back, and started looking through the numbers.
6
Marasi stopped on the image of the monster.
It was evening; people chatted softly around her in the dining car, and the train rolled around a picturesque bend, but for a moment she was transfixed by that image. A sketch of violent, rough lines that somehow conveyed a terrible dread. Most of the pages in the stack VenDell had delivered contained transcripts of questions answered—or, more often, not answered—by the wounded kandra.
This was different. A wild sketch using two colors of pencil to depict a terrible visage. A burning red face, a distorted mouth, horns and spikes streaking out along the rim. But black eyes, drawn like voids on the red skin. It looked like a childhood terror ripped right out of