“You’re insane!” she said quietly.
Kelsier smiled. “I think that’s the second time today you’ve said that to me. You need to pay better attention—if you’d been listening to everyone else, you’d know that my sanity departed long ago.”
“Kelsier,” she said, looking up at the wall. “I can’t. . . . I mean, I’ve never really even used Allomancy before this evening!”
“Yes, but you’re such a quick learner,” Kelsier said, pulling something out from beneath his cloak. It appeared to be a belt. “Here, put this on. It’s got metal weights strapped to it. If something goes wrong, I’ll probably be able to catch you.”
“Probably?” Vin asked nervously, strapping on the belt.
Kelsier smiled, then dropped a large metal ingot at his feet. “Put the ingot directly below you, and remember to Steel-push, not Ironpull. Don’t stop Pushing until you reach the top of the wall.”
Then he bent down and jumped.
Kelsier shot into the air, his dark form vanishing into the curling mists. Vin waited for a moment, but he didn’t plummet back down to his doom.
All was still, even to her enhanced ears. The mists whirled playfully around her. Taunting her. Daring her.
She glanced down at the ingot, burning steel. The blue line glowed with a faint, ghostly light. She stepped over to the ingot, standing with one foot on either side of it. She glanced up at the mists, then down one last time.
Finally, she took a deep breath and Pushed against the ingot with all of her strength.
“He shall defend their ways, yet shall violate them. He will be their savior, yet they shall call him heretic. His name shall be Discord, yet they shall love him for it.”
8
Vin shot into the air. She suppressed a scream, remembering to continue Pushing despite her fear. The stone wall was a blur of motion just a few feet away from her. The ground disappeared below, and the line of blue pointing toward the ingot grew fainter and fainter.
What happens if it disappears?
She began to slow. The fainter the line grew, the more her speed decreased. After just a few moments of flight, she crept to a halt—and was left hanging in the air above a nearly invisible blue line.
“I’ve always liked the view from up here.”
Vin glanced to the side. Kelsier stood a short distance away; she had been so focused that she hadn’t noticed that she was hovering just a few feet from the top of the wall.
“Help!” she said, continuing to Push desperately, lest she fall. The mists below her shifted and spun, like some dark ocean of damned souls.
“You don’t have to worry too much,” Kelsier said. “It’s easier to balance in the air if you have a tripod of anchors, but you can do fine with a single anchor. Your body is used to balancing itself. Part of what you’ve been doing since you learned to walk transfers to Allomancy. As long as you stay still, hanging at the very edge of your Pushing ability, you’ll be pretty stable—your mind and body will correct any slight deviations from the base center of your anchor below, keeping you from falling to the sides.
“If you were to Push on something else, or move too much to one side, though . . . well, you’d lose your anchor below, and wouldn’t be pushing directly up anymore. Then you’d have problems—you’d tip over like a lead weight on the top of a very tall pole.”
“Kelsier . . .” Vin said.
“I hope you aren’t afraid of heights, Vin,” Kelsier said. “That’s quite a disadvantage for a Mistborn.”
“I’m . . . not . . . afraid . . . of . . . heights,” Vin said through gritted teeth. “But I’m also not accustomed to hanging in the air a hundred feet above the bloody street!”
Kelsier chuckled, but Vin felt a force tug against her belt, pulling her through the air toward him. He grabbed her and pulled her up over the stone railing, then set her down beside him. He reached an arm over the side of the wall. A second later, the ingot shot up through the air, scraping along the side of the wall, until it flipped into his waiting hand.
“Good job,” he said. “Now we go back down.” He tossed the ingot over his shoulder, casting it into the dark mists on the other side of the wall.
“We’re really going outside?” Vin asked. “Outside the city walls? At night?”
Kelsier smiled in that infuriating way of his. He walked over and climbed onto the battlements. “Varying the strength with which you Push or Pull is difficult, but possible. It’s better to just fall a bit, then Push to slow yourself. Let go and fall some more, then Push again. If you get the rhythm right, you’ll reach the ground just fine.”
“Kelsier,” Vin said, approaching the wall. “I don’t . . .”
“You’re at the top of the city wall now, Vin,” he said, stepping out into the air. He hung, hovering, balanced as he’d explained to her before. “There are only two ways down. Either you jump off, or you try and explain to that guard patrol why a Mistborn needs to use their stairwell.”
Vin turned with concern, noting an approaching bob of lanternlight in the dark mists.
She turned back to Kelsier, but he was gone. She cursed, bending over the side of the wall and looking down into the mists. She could hear the guards behind her, speaking softly to one another as they walked along the wall.
Kelsier was right: She didn’t have many options. Angry, she climbed up onto the battlement. She wasn’t afraid of heights in particular, but who wouldn’t be apprehensive, standing atop the wall, looking down at her doom? Vin’s heart fluttered, her stomach twisting.
I hope Kelsier’s out of the way, she thought, checking the blue line to make certain she was above the ingot. Then, she stepped off.
She immediately began to plummet toward the ground. She Pushed reflexively with her steel, but her trajectory was off; she had fallen to the side of the ingot, not directly toward it. Consequently, her Push nudged her to the side even farther, and she began to tumble through the air.
Alarmed, she Pushed again—harder this time, flaring her steel. The sudden effort launched her back upward. She arced sideways through the air, popping up into the air alongside the walltop. The passing guards spun with surprise, but their faces soon became indistinct as Vin fell back down toward the ground.
Mind muddled by terror, she reflexively reached out and Pulled against the ingot, trying to yank herself toward it. And, of course, it obediently shot up toward her.
I’m dead.
Then her body lurched, pulled upward by the belt. Her descent slowed until she was drifting quietly through the air. Kelsier appeared in the mists, standing on the ground beneath her; he was—of course—smiling.
He let her drop the last few feet, catching her, then setting her upright on the soft earth. She stood quivering for a moment, breathing in terse, anxious breaths.
“Well, that was fun,” Kelsier said lightly.
Vin didn’t respond.
Kelsier sat down on a nearby rock, obviously giving her time to gather her wits. Eventually, she burned pewter, using the sensation of solidness it provided to steady her nerves.
“You did well,” Kelsier said.
“I nearly died.”
“Everybody does, their first time,” Kelsier said. “Ironpulling and Steelpushing are dangerous skills. You can impale yourself with a bit of metal that you Pull into your own body, you can jump and leave your anchor too far behind, or you can make a dozen other mistakes.
“My experience—limited though it is—has been that it’s better to get into those extreme circumstances early, when someone can watch over you. Anyway, I assume you can understand why it’s important for an Allomancer to carry as little metal on their body as possible.”
Vin nodded, then paused, reaching up to her ear. “My earring,” she said. “I’ll have to stop wearing it.”