Читать онлайн «The Eleventh Metal»

Kelsier held the small, fluttering piece of paper pinched between two fingers. The wind whipped and tore at the paper, but he held firm. The picture was wrong.

He’d tried at least two dozen times to draw it right, to reproduce the image that she’d always carried. The original had been destroyed, he was certain. He had nothing to remind him of her, nothing to remember her by. So he tried, poorly, to reconstruct the image that she had treasured.

A flower. That was what it had been called. A myth, a story. A dream.

“You need to stop doing that,” his companion growled. “I should stop you from drawing those. ”

“Try,” Kelsier said softly, folding the small piece of paper between two fingers, then tucking it into his shirt pocket. He would try again later. The petals needed to be more tear-shaped.

Kelsier gave Gemmel a calm gaze, then smiled. That smile felt forced. How could he smile in a world without her?

Kelsier kept smiling. He’d do so until it felt natural. Until that numbness, tied in a knot within him, started to unravel and he began to feel again. If that was possible.

It is. Please let it be.

“Drawing those pictures makes you think of the past,” Gemmel snapped. The aging man had a ragged gray beard, and the hair on his head was so unkempt, it actually looked better groomed when it was being whipped around by the wind.

“It does,” Kelsier said. “I won’t forget her. ”

“She betrayed you. Move on. ” Gemmel didn’t wait to see if Kelsier continued arguing.

Kelsier didn’t squeeze his eyes shut as he wanted to. He didn’t scream defiance to the dying day as he wanted to. He shoved aside thoughts of Mare’s betrayal. He should never have spoken his concerns to Gemmel.

He had. That was that.

Kelsier broadened his smile. It took effort.

Gemmel glanced back at him. “You look creepy when you do that. ”

“That’s because you’ve never had a real smile in your life, you old heap of ash,” Kelsier said, joining Gemmel by the short wall at the edge of the roof. They looked down on the dreary city of Mantiz, nearly drowning in ash. The people here in the far north of the Western Dominance weren’t as good at cleaning it up as they were back in Luthadel.

Kelsier had assumed there would be less ash out here – only one of the ashmounts was nearby, this far out. It did seem that the ash fell a little less frequently. But the fact that nobody organized to clean it up meant that it felt like there was far more.

Kelsier curled his hand around the coping of the wall. He’d never liked this part of the Western Dominance. The buildings out here felt .  .  . melted. No, that was the wrong term. They felt too rounded, with no corners, and they were rarely symmetrical – one side of the building would be higher, or more lumpy.

Still, the ash was familiar. It covered the building here just the same as everywhere, giving everything a uniform cast of black and gray. A layer of it coated streets, clung to the ridges of buildings, made heaps in alleys. Ashmount ash was sootlike, much darker than the ash from a common fire.