The Bands of Mourning (Mistborn #6) - Brandon Sanderson Page 0,53

the Roughs,” Wax said. “The winds out there can weather the strongest granite. Are you surprised they can do the same to a man?”

She turned to him, head cocked to the side.

Wax sighed and leaned back, stretching his legs out, ankles crossed. “Have you ever been somewhere you didn’t fit in? A place where everyone else seems to get it immediately? They know what to do. They know what to say. But rusts, you have to work to untangle it all?”

“That describes my entire life,” Steris said softly.

He put his arm around her, and let her rest her head on his shoulder. “Well, that was how those parties were for me. Social situations were a chore. Everyone laughing, and me just standing there, stressed out of my mind and trying to figure out the right thing to do. I didn’t smile a lot back then. Guess I still don’t. I’d escape the parties when I could, find my way to a quiet balcony.”

“And do what? Read?”

Wax chuckled. “No. I don’t mind a book now and then, but Wayne is the real reader.”

Steris raised her head, looking surprised.

“I’m serious,” Wax said. “Granted, he likes ones with pictures now and then, but he does read. Often out loud. You should hear him do the voices to himself. Me … I’d just find a balcony that looked out over the city somewhere, and I’d stare. Listen.” He smiled. “When I was a boy, more than a few people thought I was slow because I’d sit there staring out a window.”

“Then you found your way to the Roughs.”

“I was so glad to be away from Elendel and its phoniness. You call me blunt. Well, that’s the man I want to be. That’s the man I admire. Perhaps I’m only acting like him, but it’s a sincere act. Hang me, but it is.”

Steris sat quietly for a few moments, head on his shoulder, and Wax stared out into the night. A nice night, all things considered.

“You’re wrong,” she noted, sounding drowsy. “You do smile. Most often when you’re flying on lines of steel. It’s the only time I think … I think I see … pure joy in you.…”

He looked down at her, but she’d apparently dozed off, judging by the way she was breathing. He settled back, thinking about what she’d said, until the cargo train finally pulled into the station.

10

Wax started awake to the sound of distant explosions.

He immediately scrambled to his feet, reaching for his metals, bleary-eyed and disoriented. Where was he? Crew cabin of the cargo train. It was large, with some stiff couches in the back for the engineers to catch a nap while their train was waiting to be unloaded. Steris was asleep on one, wrapped in his jacket. Wayne dozed in the corner, hat over his face.

They’d left the servants behind for now; they would come along on the next passenger train. MeLaan had chosen to ride in the back with their luggage—she had wanted to look through her bundles of bones to pick the right body for the night.

Wax downed metals and whipped out Vindication, stumbling forward toward the sounds—which, now fully awake, he wasn’t certain were explosions at all. A continuous rumble, like an earthquake, off in the distance. He stepped out into the cab proper of the engine car. This was a newer machine, one of the oil-driven ones, with no need for a coal tender.

Marasi stood near the front with the engineer, a tall fellow with bright eyes and forearms like pistons.

That rumbling … Wax frowned, lowering his gun as Marasi glanced at him. The sky was bright blue; morning had arrived. He stepped into the cabin, and could see that ahead, New Seran rose before them. The city spread across a series of enormous, flat-topped stone terraces. There were at least a dozen of them, and each was split by multiple streams, which crossed them and then dropped off the edge down to the next terrace. The sound wasn’t an earthquake or explosion, but that of waterfalls.

In places, the drop was just a little ripple—a fall of some five feet or so. But in others, majestic waterfalls plunged fifty feet or more before pounding onto the next stone platform. It looked like a man-made effect, for the various split streams and waterfalls eventually ran back together into the river, which flowed away from the city toward distant Elendel.

Wax slid Vindication into her holster, though it took two tries because he was so mesmerized