Page 175 of The Well of Ascension
“Come on,” she said. “I want to check on Elend.”
37
And so, I come to the focus of my argument. I apologize. Even forcing my words into steel, sitting and scratching in this frozen cave, I am prone to ramble.
Sazed glanced at the window shutters, noting the hesitant beams of light that were beginning to shine through the cracks.Morning already?he thought.We studied all night?It hardly seemed possible. He had tapped no wakefulness, yet he felt more alert—more alive—than he had in days.
Tindwyl sat in the chair beside him. Sazed’s desk was filled with loose papers, two sets of ink and pen waiting to be used. There were no books; Keepers had no need of such.
“Ah!” Tindwyl said, grabbing a pen and beginning to write. She didn’t look tired either, but she had likely dipped into her bronzemind, tapping the wakefulness stored within.
Sazed watched her write. She almost looked young again; he hadn’t seen such overt excitement in her since she had been abandoned by the Breeders some ten years before. On that day, her grand work finished, she had finally joined her fellow Keepers. Sazed had been the one to present her with the collected knowledge that had been discovered during her thirty years of cloistered childbirth.
It hadn’t taken her long to achieve a place in the Synod. By then, however, Sazed had been ousted from their ranks.
Tindwyl finished writing. “The passage is from a biography of King Wednegon,” she said. “He was one of the last leaders who resisted the Lord Ruler in any sort of meaningful combat.”
“I know who he was,” Sazed said, smiling.
She paused. “Of course.” She obviously wasn’t accustomed to studying with someone who had access to as much information as she did. She pushed the written passage over to Sazed; even with his mental indexes and self-notes, it would be faster for her to write out the passage than it would be for him to try and find it within his own copperminds.
I spent a great deal of time with the king during his final weeks,the text read.
He seemed frustrated, as one might imagine. His soldiers could not stand against the Conqueror’s koloss, and his men had been beaten back repeatedly ever since FellSpire. However, the king didn’t blame his soldiers. He thought that his problems came from another source: food.
He mentioned this idea several times during those last days. He thought that if he’d had more food, he could have held out. In this, Wednegon blamed the Deepness. For, though the Deepness had been defeated—or at least weakened—its touch had depleted Darrelnai’s food stores.
His people could not both raise food and resist the Conqueror’s demon armies. In the end, that was why they fell.
Sazed nodded slowly. “How much of this text do we have?”
“Not much,” Tindwyl said. “Six or seven pages. This is the only section that mentions the Deepness.”
Sazed sat quietly for a moment, rereading the passage. Finally, he looked up at Tindwyl. “You think Lady Vin is right, don’t you? You think the Deepness was mist.”
Tindwyl nodded.
“I agree,” Sazed said. “At the very least, what we now call ‘the Deepness’ was some sort of change in the mist.”
“And your arguments from before?”
“Proven wrong,” Sazed said, setting down the paper. “By your words and my own studies. I did not wish this to be true, Tindwyl.”
Tindwyl raised an eyebrow. “You defied the Synod again to seek after something you didn’t even want to believe?”
He looked into her eyes. “There is a difference between fearing something and desiring it. The return of the Deepness could destroy us. I did not want this information—but neither could I pass by the opportunity to discover it.”
Tindwyl looked away. “I do not believe that this will destroy us, Sazed. You have made a grand discovery, that I will admit. The writings of the man Kwaan tell us much. Indeed, if the Deepness was the mists, then our understanding of the Lord Ruler’s Ascension has been enhanced greatly.”
“And if the mists are growing stronger?” Sazed asked. “If, by killing the Lord Ruler, we also destroyed whatever force was keeping the mists chained?”
“We have no proof that the mists are coming by day,” Tindwyl said. “And on the possibility of them killing people, we have only your hesitant theories.”
Sazed glanced away. On the table, his fingers had smudged Tindwyl’s hurriedly written words. “That is true,” he said.
Tindwyl sighed softly in the dim room. “Why do you never defend yourself, Sazed?”
“What defense is there?”
