“Now, you ready to go?”
She looked up at the wall, preparing to jump again, then nodded.
“We’re not going back up,” Kelsier said. “Come on.”
Vin frowned as Kelsier began to walk out into the mists. So, does he have a destination after all—or has he just decided to wander some more? Oddly, his affable nonchalance made him very difficult to read.
Vin hurried to keep up, not wanting to be left alone in the mists. The landscape around Luthadel was barren save for scrub and weeds. Prickles and dried leaves—both dusted with ash from an earlier ashfall—rubbed against her legs as they walked. The underbrush crunched as they walked, quiet and a bit sodden with mist dew.
Occasionally, they passed heaps of ash that had been carted out of the city. Most of the time, however, ash was thrown into the River Channerel, which passed through the city. Water broke it down eventually—or, at least, that was what Vin assumed. Otherwise the entire continent would have been buried long ago.
Vin stayed close to Kelsier as they walked. Though she had traveled outside cities before, she had always moved as part of a group of boatmen—the skaa workers who ran narrow-boats and barges up and down the many canal routes in the Final Empire. It had been hard work—most noblemen used skaa instead of horses to pull the boats along the towpath—but there had been a certain freedom to knowing that she was traveling at all, for most skaa, even skaa thieves, never left their plantation or town.
The constant movement from city to city had been Reen’s choice; he had been obsessive about never getting locked down. He usually got them places on canal boats run by underground crews, never staying in one place for more than a year. He had kept moving, always going. As if running from something.
They continued to walk. At night, even the barren hills and scrub-covered plains took on a forbidding air. Vin didn’t speak, though she tried to make as little noise as possible. She had heard tales of what went abroad in the land at night, and the cover of the mists—even pierced by tin as it now was—made her feel as if she were being watched.
The sensation grew more unnerving as they traveled. Soon, she began to hear noises in the darkness. They were muffled and faint—crackles of weeds, shuffles in the echoing mist.
You’re just being paranoid! she told herself as she jumped at some half-imagined sound. Eventually, however, she could stand it no more.
“Kelsier!” she said with an urgent whisper—one that sounded betrayingly loud to her enhanced ears. “I think there’s something out there.”
“Hum?” Kelsier asked. He looked lost in his thoughts.
“I think something is following us!”
“Oh,” Kelsier said. “Yes, you’re right. It’s a mistwraith.”
Vin stopped dead in her tracks. Kelsier, however, kept going.
“Kelsier!” she said, causing him to pause. “You mean they’re real?”
“Of course they are,” Kelsier said. “Where do you think all the stories came from?”
Vin stood in dumbfounded shock.
“You want to go look at it?” Kelsier asked.
“Look at the mistwraith?” Vin asked. “Are you—” She stopped.
Kelsier chuckled, strolling back to her. “Mistwraiths might be a bit disturbing to look at, but they’re relatively harmless. They’re scavengers, mostly. Come on.”
He began to retrace their footsteps, waving her to follow. Reluctant—but morbidly curious—Vin followed. Kelsier walked at a brisk pace, leading her to the top of a relatively scrub-free hill. He crouched down, motioning for Vin to do likewise.
“Their hearing isn’t very good,” he said as she knelt in the rough, ashen dirt beside him. “But their sense of smell—or, rather, taste—is quite acute. It’s probably following our trail, hoping that we’ll discard something edible.”
Vin squinted in the darkness. “I can’t see it,” she said, searching the mists for a shadowed figure.
“There,” Kelsier said, pointing toward a squat hill.
Vin frowned, imagining a creature crouching atop the hill, watching her as she looked for it.
Then the hill moved.
Vin jumped slightly. The dark mound—perhaps ten feet tall and twice as long—lurched forward in a strange, shuffling gait, and Vin leaned forward, trying to get a better look.
“Flare your tin,” Kelsier suggested.
Vin nodded, calling upon a burst of extra Allomantic power. Everything immediately became lighter, the mists becoming even less of an obstruction.
What she saw caused her to shiver—fascinated, revolted, and more than a little disturbed. The creature had smoky, translucent skin, and Vin could see its bones. It had dozens upon dozens of limbs, and each one looked as if it had come from a different animal. There were human hands, bovine hooves, canine haunches, and others she couldn’t identify.
The mismatched limbs let the creature walk—though it was more of a shamble. It crawled along slowly, moving like an awkward centipede. Many of the limbs, in fact, didn’t even look functional—they jutted from the creature’s flesh in a twisted, unnatural fashion.
Its body was bulbous and elongated. It wasn’t just a blob, though . . . there was a strange logic to its form. It had a distinct skeletal structure, and—squinting through tin-enhanced eyes—she thought she could make out translucent muscles and sinew wrapping the bones. The creature flexed odd jumbles of muscles as it moved, and appeared to have a dozen different rib cages. Along the main body, arms and legs hung at unnerving angles.
And heads—she counted six. Despite the translucent skin, she could make out a horse head sitting beside that of a deer. Another head turned toward her, and she could see its human skull. The head sat atop a long spinal cord attached to some kind of animal torso, which was in turn attached to a jumble of strange bones.
Vin nearly retched. “What . . .? How . . .?”
“Mistwraiths have malleable bodies,” Kelsier said. “They can shape their skin around any skeletal structure, and can even re-create muscles and organs if they have a model to mimic.”
“You mean . . .?”
Kelsier nodded. “When they find a corpse, they envelop it and slowly digest the muscles and organs. Then, they use what they’ve eaten as a pattern, creating an exact duplicate of the dead creature. They rearrange the parts a little bit—excreting the bones they don’t want, while adding the ones they do want to their body—forming a jumble like what you see out there.”
Vin watched the creature shamble across the field, following her tracks. A flap of slimy skin drooped from its underbelly, trailing along the ground. Tasting for scents, Vin thought. Following the smell of our passing. She let her tin return to normal, and the mistwraith once again became a shadowed mound. The silhouette, however, only seemed to heighten its abnormality.
“Are they intelligent, then?” Vin asked. “If they can split up a . . . body and put the pieces where they want?”
“Intelligent?” Kelsier asked. “No, not one this young. More instinctual than intelligent.”
Vin shivered again. “Do people know about these things? I mean, other than the legends?”