This from someone who is marrying Steris for the express purpose of exploiting her wealth? She felt bad for the thought. It was very difficult not to feel bitter sometimes.
She moved on quickly. “So … the alloy?”
“Yes, the alloy,” he said. “Likely a tangent I shouldn’t be indulging in. An excuse to dig up an old hobby. But since I know where the aluminum itself came from—the first theft—I wondered if, perhaps, they might be using an alloy that includes components I could trace.” He walked back over to his desk, where he picked up the revolver Wayne had given him the night before. She could see that he’d shaved some of the metal off the outside of the grip.
“Do you know much of metallurgy, Lady Marasi?” he asked.
“I’m afraid not,” she said. “I probably should.”
“Oh, don’t feel that way. As I said, this is an indulgence of mine. There are many metallurgists in the city; I could probably have sent these shavings to one of them and gotten a report more quickly, and more accurately.” He sighed, sitting back down in his chair. “I’m just accustomed to doing things myself, you see.”
“Out in the Roughs, you often didn’t have another choice.”
“True enough.” He tapped the gun against the table. “Alloys are remarkable things, Lady Marasi. Did you realize you can make an alloy with a metal that reacts to magnetism, but end up with one that doesn’t? Mix it with an equal part of something else, and you don’t get something that’s half as magnetically reactive—you get something that’s not reactive at all. When you make an alloy, you don’t just mix two metals. You make a new one.
“That’s a fundamental of Allomancy, you see. Steel is just iron with a pinch of carbon in it, but that makes all the difference. This aluminum has something else in it too—less than one percent. I think it might be ekaboron, but that’s really just a hunch. A little pinch. It works for men too, oddly. A tiny change can result in creating an entirely new person. How like metals we are.…” He shook his head, then waved for her to take a seat in a chair against the wall. “But you didn’t come to hear me blather. Come, tell me, what can I do for you?”
“It’s actually what I can do for you,” she said, sitting. “I’ve spoken to Lord Harms. I thought that because of your … Well, because House Ladrian is currently lacking in liquid assets, you see, I thought that you may not have the tools you need to seek Lady Steris. Lord Harms has agreed to bankroll you for whatever you need as you pursue her rescue.”
Waxillium seemed surprised. “That’s wonderful. Thank you.” He paused, then looked at his desk. “Do you think he’d mind paying for this…?”
“Not at all,” she said quickly.
“Well, that’s a relief. Tillaume nearly fainted when he saw what I’d spent. I think the old man’s afraid we’ll run out of tea if I keep this up. It’s so incredible that I can be the source of employment for some twenty thousand people, own two to three percent of the land in the city, and yet still be so poor in ready cash. What an odd world business is.” Waxillium leaned forward, clasping his hands, looking thoughtful. In the light of the open window, she could now see that he had bags under his eyes.
“My lord?” she asked. “Have you slept at all since the kidnapping?”
He didn’t reply.
“Lord Waxillium,” she said sternly. “You mustn’t neglect your own well-being. Running yourself to rust will do no good for anyone.”
“Lady Steris was taken on my watch, Marasi,” he said softly. “I didn’t lift a finger. I had to be goaded into it.” He shook his head, as if to drive away bad thoughts. “But you needn’t worry about me. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway, so I might as well be productive.”
“Have you come to any conclusions?” she asked, genuinely curious.
“Too many,” he said. “Often, the problem is not coming up with solutions—it’s deciding which of them actually happened and which are pure fancy. Those men, for instance. They weren’t professionals.” He paused. “I’m sorry, that probably doesn’t make any sense.”
“No, it does,” she said. “The way they kept itching to shoot the building up, they way their boss let himself be goaded into shooting Peterus…”
“Exactly,” he said. “They had experience as thieves, certainly. But they weren’t refined at it.”
“A simple way to determine the type of criminal is by whom they kill and when,” Marasi said, quoting a line from one of her textbooks. “Murders end with a hanging; thievery alone can mean escaping death. Those men, if they’d really known what they were doing, would have left quickly, glad they hadn’t needed to do any shooting.”
“So they’re street toughs,” Waxillium said. “Common criminals.”
“With very expensive weapons,” Marasi said, frowning. “Which implies an outside backer, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” Waxillium said, growing eager and leaning in. “At first, I was very confused. I was convinced this was all about the kidnappings, the thievery just a front to disguise that. Then the men last night were genuinely interested in what they were taking. It baffled me. Judging by the price of aluminum, and how much they had to spend forging those guns, they’ve spent a fortune to make a lesser amount from last night’s robbery. It didn’t make sense.”
“Unless we’re dealing with two groups working together,” Marasi said, understanding. “Someone has given funds to the bandits, allowing them to pull off these robberies. The backing group, however, demands that they kidnap certain people, making it seem like the result of random hostage-takings.”
“Yes! He—whoever the backer is—wants the kidnapped women. And the Vanishers, they get to keep whatever they steal, or perhaps a percentage of it. It is all meant to use the robberies as a cover-up, but it’s possible the bandits themselves don’t understand how they’re being used.”
Marasi frowned, biting her lip. “But that means…”
“What?”
“Well, I’d hoped that this was mostly over with,” she explained. “Your initial count of the thieves was just under forty, and you and Wayne killed or incapacitated thirty or so of them.”
“Thirty-one,” he said absently.
“I had assumed those remaining might cut their losses and flee. Killing three-quarters of a group should be enough to disband them, one would think.”
“It would, in my experience.”
“But this is different,” she said. “The bandit boss has an outside backer offering wealth and weaponry.” She frowned. “The boss spoke of ‘payback,’ as I recall. Could he be both the boss and the backer?”
“Perhaps,” Waxillium said. “But I doubt it. Part of the point of all this would be to have someone else doing the dangerous work for you.”
“Agreed,” she said. “But the boss does seem to have his own ideology. Perhaps he was chosen because of it. Criminals often use basic rationalization skills to justify what they are doing, and a man who could capitalize on that—along with promising riches and lots of fun shooting things—would be ideal as a ‘middle manager,’ so to speak.”
Waxillium smiled broadly.
“What?” she asked.
“You realize I spent all night coming to those conclusions? You just reached them in all of … what? Ten minutes?”
She sniffed. “I had some modest help from you.”
“It might be said that I had modest help from myself, technically.”
“The voices whispering to you as a result of sleep deprivation do not count, my lord.”
His smile grew, and then he stood. “Come. Tell me what you make of this.”
Curious, she followed him to the front of the room, where she’d noticed the heap of paper. He pulled it straight, revealing a long—perhaps five-foot—piece of paper that was several feet wide. Waxillium knelt on the ground, but she had a harder time, being in skirts. So she just bent down, looking over his shoulder.
“Genealogies?” she asked, surprised. It appeared that he’d traced each of the kidnapped
women back to the Origin, starting with their names at the left of the long sheet, then working backward. It didn’t list every relative, but it included the direct ancestors and a few notable names in each generation for each hostage.
“Well?” he asked.
“I’m beginning to suspect that you are an odd man, my lord,” she said. “You spent all night doing this?”
“It did take a great deal of my time, though Wayne’s paper gave me a good head start. Fortunately, my uncle’s library had extensive genealogical resources. It was a hobby of his. But what do you think?”
“That it is a good thing you’re soon to be engaged, for a good wife would have seen that you got your rest, rather than writing all night by candlelight. That’s bad for your eyes, you know.”
“We have electricity,” he said, waving upward. “Besides, I doubt Steris will care about my sleeping habits. It’s not in the contract, you see.” There was a touch of bitterness in his tone—faint, but recognizable.
She’d said most of that to stall him for a few moments so she could read more of the names. “Allomancers,” she said. “You analyzed the family lines for Allomantic powers in their heritage. They all converge on the Lord Mistborn. Didn’t Wayne speak of this?”
“Yes,” he said. “I believe that the one behind all this is looking for Allomancers. He’s building an army. He picks the people he does because he suspects that they’re secretly Allomancers. The fact that they aren’t open about it makes it harder to recognize what he’s doing.”
“But Steris isn’t an Allomancer. I promise it.”
“That worried me for a time,” he said. “But it’s not a large issue. See, he’s picking people he thinks are probably Allomancers, but he’s bound to get it wrong a few times.” Waxillium tapped the paper. “That does make me worry for her. Once the backer discovers that she’s not what he thought she was, she’ll be in greater danger.”
Hence why you stayed up all night, she realized. You think there isn’t time.
All of this, for a woman he obviously didn’t love. It was difficult not to be jealous.
What? she thought. You’d have had yourself be taken? Foolish girl.
She did note that her own name was one of those listed. “You have my genealogy?” she said, surprised.
“Had to send out for it,” he said. “Made some clerks quite angry in the middle of the night, I’m afraid. You’re very odd.”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh. Um, I mean on the list. You see here? You’re second cousins with Steris.”
“And?”
“And, that means you’re … well, this is awkward to explain. You’re, essentially, a sixth cousin to the main bloodline here. All of the others, including Steris, were much better connected—you have bloodlines on your father’s side that dilute your connections. That makes you an odd target, compared to the others. I’m wondering if they picked you because they wanted to take someone random to break up their pattern and keep us guessing.”
“Possible,” she said carefully. “They didn’t know Steris had been sitting with us, after all.”
“Very true. But … here’s where it gets speculative. You see? I can come up with plenty of reasons why Steris was targeted. The history of Allomancers isn’t the only connection—because of the propinquity of high society, there are many other connections.
“In fact, as I look at it, the Allomancy factor is tenuous. If you’re going to train fighters, why take only women? Why bother with Allomancers in the first place, when you have the funds and means to steal all of this aluminum? They could have stopped there and been rich. And I can’t find anything to indicate, with certitude, that the other women taken were indeed Allomancers.”
They’re taking just women, Marasi thought, looking at the long lists, tying back to the Lord Mistborn. The most powerful Allomancer who ever lived. A nearly mythological figure, someone who had all sixteen Allomantic powers in one body. How powerful would he have been?
And suddenly, it made sense. “Rust and Ruin,” she whispered.
Waxillium looked up at her. He’d probably have seen it, if he hadn’t pushed himself so long through the night.
“Allomancy is genetic,” she said.
“Yes. Which is why it shows up so much in these lines.”
“Genetic. Taking all women. Waxillium, don’t you see? They’re not intending to build an army of Allomancers. They’re intending to breed one. They’re taking the women with the most direct Allomantic lines back to the Mistborn.”
Waxillium stared at his large paper, then blinked. “By the Survivor’s spear…” he whispered. “Well, at least this means Steris isn’t in immediate danger. She’s valuable to him even without being an Allomancer.”
“Yes,” Marasi said, feeling sick. “But if I’m right, then she’ll be in a different kind of danger.”
“Indeed,” Waxillium said, subdued. “I should have seen this. Wayne will never let me live it down, once he finds out.”
“Wayne,” she said, realizing she hadn’t asked after him. “Where is he?”
Waxillium checked his pocket watch. “He should be back soon. I sent him out to cause a little mischief.”
8
Wayne strode up the steps into the Fourth Octant constabulary precinct offices. His ears felt way too hot. Why was it that conners wore such uncomfortable hats? Maybe that was why they were so grouchy all the time—walking about the city, picking on respectable folk. Even after just a few weeks in Elendel, Wayne knew that was basically what constables did.
Bad hats. A bad hat could make a man right disagreeable, and that was the truth.
He burst through the double doors, slamming them open. The room inside basically looked like a big cage. A wooden railing in the front to keep people separated from the conners, desks behind for eating food or lounging and talking. His entrance caused a few of the brown-uniformed conners to sit bolt upright, some reaching for revolvers at their hips.
“Who’s in charge of this place!” Wayne bellowed.
The astounded conners stared at him, then jumped to their feet, straightening uniforms and hastily sticking on their hats. He wore one of those uniforms himself. He’d traded for it at a precinct up in the Seventh Octant. He’d left a right good shirt as a replacement, as fair a trade as any man could ask. After all, that shirt had been silk.
“Sir!” one of the conners said. “You’ll want Captain Brettin, sir!”
“Well where the hell is he?” Wayne yelled. He’d picked up the right accent from listening to just a few conners. People, they misunderstood the word “accent.” They thought accents were those things everybody else had. But that wasn’t it at all. Every person had an individual accent, a blend of where he’d lived, what he did for a living, who his friends were.
People thought Wayne imitated accents. He didn’t. He outright stole them. They were the only things he was still allowed to steal, seeing as to how he’d turned to doing good with his life and stuff like that.
Several of the conners, still confused by his arrival, pointed toward a door at the side of the room. Others saluted, as if that were really the only thing they knew how to do. Wayne huffed through his thick, drooping fake mustache and stalked over to the door.
He acted as if he were just going to throw it open, but then pretended to hesitate and knocked instead.
Brettin would outrank him, barely. Really unfortunate, Wayne thought. Here I am, twenty-five years as a constable, and still only a three-bar. He should have been promoted ages ago.
As he raised his hand to knock on the door again, it flew open, revealing Brettin’s lean face. He looked annoyed. “What is this racket and yelling—” He froze as he saw Wayne. “Who are you?”
“Captain Guffon Trenchant,” Wayne said. “Seventh Octant.”
Brettin’s eyes flicked to Wayne’s insignia, then back to his face. There was a moment of confusion, and Wayne could see panic in Brettin’s eyes. He was trying to decide if he should remember
Captain Guffon or not. The City was a big place, and—from what Wayne had overheard—Brettin was always mixing up people’s names.
“I … of course, Captain,” Brettin said. “Have … er, we met?”
Wayne blew out his mustaches. “We sat at the same table at the chairman’s dinner last spring!” He was feeling pretty good about this accent. It was a mixture of seventh-son lord and foreman of an ironworks, with just a hint of canal captain. Speaking with it felt like he’d stuffed cotton in half of his mouth and had borrowed the voice from an angry dog.
But he’d spent weeks in the city now, listening in pubs in different octants, visiting the railway tracks, chatting with people in parks. He’d collected a good number of accents, adding them to the ones he’d already stolen. Even when living in Weathering, he’d taken trips to the city to gather accents. You found the best ones here.
“I … oh, of course,” Brettin said. “Yes. Trenchant, I recognize you now. It has been a while.”
“Never mind that,” Wayne blustered. “What’s this about you having prisoners from the Vanishers Gang? Good steel, man! We had to learn about it from the broadsheets!”
“We have jurisdiction here, as the event—” Brettin hesitated, looking at the room full of intrigued constables studiously pretending not to be listening. “Step inside.”
Wayne eyed the watching men. Not a one of them had questioned him. Act like you were important, act like you were angry, and people just wanted to get out of your way. Basic psychology, that was. “Very well,” he said.
Brettin closed the door, speaking quickly and authoritatively. “They were captured in our octant and the crime they were committing was here. We have jurisdiction flat-out. I did send you all a missive.”
“A missive? Rust and Ruin, man! You know how many of those we get a day?”
“Well perhaps you should hire someone to sort through them,” Brettin said testily. “That’s what I eventually did.”
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