“Wayne…” Waxillium said.
“I’m serious,” Wayne said. “Ain’t had nothing to eat since those scones.”
“We’ll get something at our stop,” Waxillium said. “First, I would like to know something from Lady Marasi.”
“Yes?”
“Well, assuming you are to remain with us, I’d like to know what kind of Allomancer you are.”
Wayne sat up with a start. “Huh?”
Marasi blushed.
“You carry a pouch of metal shavings in your handbag,” Waxillium said. “And you are always anxious to keep the handbag close. You know little about Feruchemy, but seem to understand Allomancy. You weren’t surprised when Wayne stopped time in a bubble around us—in fact, you stepped right up to the barrier, as if familiar with them. And you come from a hereditary line that is being hunted precisely because it includes a lot of Allomancers.”
“I…” she said. “Well, there really wasn’t a good opportunity…” She blushed more furiously.
“I’m surprised, and a little disappointed,” Wayne said.
“Well,” she said quickly, “I—”
“Oh, not at you,” Wayne said. “At Wax. I’d have expected that he’d put this sort of thing together on your first meeting.”
“I’m growing slow in my old age,” Waxillium said dryly.
“It’s not really very useful,” she said, looking down. “When I saw Wayne using his Slider ability, I started to get self-conscious. You see, I’m a Pulser.”
As he’d suspected. “I think that could be very useful.”
“Not really,” she said. “Speeding up time … that is amazing. But what can one do with slowing it down, and only for myself? It’s useless in a fight. Everyone else would move with great speed around me. My father was ashamed of the power. Told me to keep it quiet, much like my parentage.”
“Your father,” Waxillium said, “is someone that I’m increasingly certain is a fool. You have access to something useful. No, it won’t fit every situation, but no tool does.”
“If you say so,” she said.
A merchant came down the train aisle, selling pretzels, and Wayne all but leaped out of his chair to get one. Waxillium settled back, looking out the window, thinking.
Miles. No, he couldn’t be sure it was him. When Waxillium had shot the Vanisher boss in the face and dropped him, he’d assumed that he’d mistaken the voice. Miles wouldn’t drop to a gunshot.
Unless he’d known that he had to feign a wound, lest Waxillium recognize him. Miles was crafty enough for something like that.
It is him, Waxillium thought. He’d known it from the first time the Vanisher boss had spoken. He just hadn’t wanted to admit it.
This complicated things immensely. And, oddly, Waxillium found himself feeling overwhelmed. Twenty years as a lawkeeper, and this situation was already messier than any he’d investigated. He’d assumed that the Roughs made him strong, but there’d also been a simplicity to life out there, a simplicity he’d gotten used to.
Now he came charging in, guns raised, assuming he could handle a problem built on Elendel’s scale. He assumed he could take down a team that was so well funded it could field men with guns made of something so expensive it might as well have been gold.
Maybe we should take it to the constables, Marasi had said. But could he?
He fingered the earring in his pocket. He’d felt that Harmony wanted him to do this, to investigate. But what was Harmony but an impression in Waxillium’s mind? Confirmation bias, they called it. He felt what he expected to. That was what his logical brain said.
I wish I could feel the mists, he thought. It’s been weeks since I’ve been able to go out in them. He always felt stronger in the mists. He felt like someone was watching, when he was out in them.
I have to continue with this, he told himself. He’d tried abstaining, and it had led to Lord Peterus being shot. Waxillium’s usual method was to just take command and do what needed to be done. It was the way a lawman learned to work, out in the Roughs. We aren’t so different, Miles and I, he thought. Perhaps that was what had always frightened him so much about the man.
The train slowed, pulling into their station.
12
Wayne stepped out of the carriage, following Waxillium and Marasi. He looked up to the carriage man, tossing him a coin. “We’ll need you to wait a spell, mate. I trust it won’t be a problem.”
The carriage man looked at the coin and raised an eyebrow. “No problem at all, mate.”
“That’s quite the hat,” Wayne said.
The carriage man wore a round cap of stiff felt, conical, but with a flat top and a feather on it. “We all wear ’em,” he said. “Mark of Gavil’s Carriages, you see.”
“Huh. Wanna trade?”
“What? Trade hats?”
“Sure,” Wayne said, tossing up his flimsy knit cap.
The man caught it. “I’m not sure…”
“I’ll throw in a pretzel,” Wayne said, fishing it out of his pocket.
“Er…” The man looked down at the coin in his hand, which was quite substantial. He pulled off his cap and tossed it down to Wayne. “No need. I guess … I’ll just buy another.”
“Mighty nice of you,” Wayne said, taking a bite from the pretzel as he sauntered after Waxillium. He put the cap on. It wasn’t a terribly good fit.
He hurried to catch up to the other two, who had stopped on a small hill. Wayne breathed in, smelling the humidity of the canal, the scents of wheat in the fields and flowers at their feet. Then he sneezed. He hated filling his metalmind when he was out doing stuff. He preferred to fill it in large chunks. That made him very sick, but he could sleep it off and drink a lot to pass the time.
This was worse. Filling his metalmind as much as he dared, storing up health as they went about, meant he got sick. Fast. He sneezed a lot more, his throat grew sore, and his eyes watered. He felt tired and groggy, too. But he’d need that health, so he did it.
He walked across the grass. The Outer Estates were an odd place. The Roughs were dry and dirty. The City was densely populated and—in places—grimy. Out here, things were just … nice.
A little too nice. Made his shoulders itch. This was the kind of place where a man would work in the field during the day, then go home and sit on his porch, drinking lemonade and petting his dog. Men died of boredom in places like that.
Odd, that in a place so open, he could feel even more anxious and confined than when locked in a cell.
“The last railway robbery happened here,” Waxillium said. He held out his hand to the tracks—which rounded a bend just to their left—then moved his hand along their path, as if seeing something Wayne wasn’t. He often did things like that.
Wayne yawned, then took another bite of his pretzel. “What whasdat, sir? What whazzat sir? What whassat, sir?”
“Wayne, what are you babbling about?” Waxillium turned, inspecting the canal to the right. It was wide and deep here, intended for carrying barges full of food into the city.
“Practicing my pretzel guy,” Wayne said. “He had a great accent. Must have been from one of the new rim towns, right by the southern mountains.”
Waxillium glanced at him. “That hat looks ridiculous.”
“Fortunately, I can change hats,” Wayne said in the pretzel-guy accent, “while you, sir, are stuck with that face.”
“You two sound a lot like siblings,” Marasi said, watching curiously. “Do you realize that?”
“So long as I’m the handsome one,” Wayne said.
“The tracks here bend toward the canal,” Waxillium said. “The other robberies all happened near canals as well.”
“As I recall,” Marasi noted, “most of the railway lines parallel the canals. The canals were here first, and when the tracks were laid, it made sense to follow the established paths.”
“Yes,” Waxillium said. “But it’s especially striking here. Look how close the tracks get to the canal.”
His accent is changing, Wayne thought. Only six months back in the city, and it already shows. It’s more refined in some ways, less formal in others. Did people see how their voices were like living things? Move a plant, and it would change and adapt to the environment around it. Move a person, and the way they talked would grow, adapt, evolve.
“So that machinery the Vanishers are using,” Marasi said, “you’re thinking they can’t move it far on land? They have to ship it up the canal, and pick a place near the tracks to set it up and carry out their robbery?”
Her accent … Wayne thought. She uses more elevated diction around him than around me. She tried so hard to impress Wax. Did he see it? Probably not. The man had always been oblivious about women. Even Lessie.
“Yes,” Waxillium said, hiking down the hillside. “The question is, how did this thing—whatever it is—empty the freight cars so quickly and efficiently?”
“Why is that so odd?” Wayne said, following him. “If I’d been a Vanisher, I’d have brought a whole heap of men. That would let me finish the work faster.”
“This isn’t a question of simple manpower,” Waxillium said. “The train cars were locked, and some of the later ones had guards inside. When the cars arrived at their destination, they were still locked, but empty. Beyond that, from one of the cars, many heavy ingots of iron were stolen. There’s a bottleneck at the car door—beyond a certain point, more men wouldn’t have helped. There is no way they unloaded hundreds of ingots in under five minutes using just manpower.”
“A speed bubble?” Marasi asked.
“Could have helped,” Wax said, “but not much. You’d have the same bottleneck, and you can’t fit many people in a speed bubble. Let’s say you could have six workers inside, which would be really tight. They’d have to move the iron ingots up to the edge of the speed bubble, then drop the bubble and create another—you can’t move the bubbles once they’re up—and repeat.”
Wax shook his head, hands on hips. “The cost in bendalloy would be incredible. With one nugget worth about five hundred notes, Wayne can compress about two minutes into fifteen external seconds. To compress time equal to five minutes on the outside—gaining you enough time on the inside to move all of those iron bars—you’d need to spend ten thousand notes. The bars would be worth just a fraction of that; Harmony, you could buy your own train for that kind of money. I don’t believe it. Something else is happening here.”
“Machinery of some sort,” Marasi said.
Wax nodded, walking down the hillside, scanning the ground. “Let’s see if we can find any traces they may have left behind. Maybe the machinery had wheels that left ruts or tracks.”
Wayne shoved his hands in his pockets and walked about, making a show of looking, but the whole reason he’d come to get Waxillium involved in this investigation was because he was good at this kind of stuff. If there were people involved, Wayne was quite handy. But flowers and dirt … not so much.
After a few minutes, Wayne was bored, so he wandered over to where Marasi was looking. She glanced at him. “I do have to say, Wayne … that hat does not fit you very well.”
“Yeah. I just want to keep reminding Wax he owes me a new one.”
“Why? You were the one who let the man take your old one from you.”
“He convinced me not to fight back,” Wayne grumbled. Seemed obvious to him. “And then, he shot the guy wearing it, and the guy walked away!”
“He couldn’t have known the man would survive.”
“He shoulda grabbed my hat,” Wayne said.
She smiled, looking bemused.
Most people, they didn’t understand hats, and Wayne didn’t really blame them. Until you’d had a good, lucky hat, you wouldn’t understand the value of it. “It’s actually all right,” Wayne said softly, kicking around in the weeds. “But don’t tell Wax.”
“What?”
“I needed to lose that hat,” Wayne admitted. “Otherwise, it would have been blown up in the explosion, see? It was lucky it got stolen. It could have ended up like my duster.”
“You’re a very unique individual, Wayne.”
“Technically, we all are,” he said. Then he hesitated. “Except for twins, I guess. Anyway, there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you. It’s a little personal, though.”
“How personal?” she asked.
“Well, you know, about yourself and all. The personal kind of personal. I guess.”
She looked at him, frowning, then blushed. Seemed the girl did that a lot, which was just fine by Wayne. Girls were pretty with a bit of color on them. “You don’t mean about me … and you … I mean…”
“Oh, Harmony!” Wayne laughed. “It’s not anythin’ like that, mate. Don’t worry. You’re pretty enough, particularly through the coppers, if you know what I mean.”
“The coppers?”
“Sure. Word with a lot of curves, like you. You have a pretty accent too, and some nice bounce to you in the cloud area.”
“Dare I ask what that is?”
“The white, puffy things that float high above the fruitful land where the seeds are planted.”
She blushed even further. “Wayne! That might be the most crude thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“I strives for excellence, mate. I strives for excellence. But don’t worry—like I said, you’re right nice, but you ain’t got enough punch for me. I like women what could take my face clean off with a good roundhouse.”
“You prefer women who could beat you up?”
“Sure. It’s a thing. Anyway, what I was talkin’ about was your Allomancy. See, you and I, we have opposite powers. I speed up time, you slow it. So what happens if we both use it at the same time? Eh?”
“It’s been documented,” Marasi said. “They cancel one another out. Nothing happens.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Huh,” he said, wiping his nose with his handkerchief. “Most expensive ‘nothing’ a person could find, what with us both burning rare metals.”
“I don’t know,” she said with a sigh. “My power is pretty good at doing nothing on its own. I don’t think I really understood how pathetic being a Pulser was until I saw what your power could do.”
“Oh, yours ain’t so bad.”
“Wayne, any time I use my ability—any time—I’ll be left frozen in place, looking stupid while everyone else is able to run about. You can use your power to gain extra time. I can only use mine to lose time.”
“Sure, but maybe sometime you want a certain day to come along sooner. You want it real badly, right? So you can burn some chromium, and poof, it’s here!”
“I’ve…” She looked embarrassed. “I’ve actually done that. Chromium burns way more slowly than bendalloy.”
“See! Advantages. How big can your bubbles get?”
“I can make one the size of a small room.”
“That’s way bigger than mine,” Wayne said.
“Multiply zero by a thousand, and you still get zero.”
He hesitated. “You do?”
“Er, yes,” she said. “It’s basic mathematics.”
“I thought we were talking about Allomancy. When did it become about mathematics?”
That made her blush too. You expected that out of a girl when you talked about her more attractive body parts, but not when you mentioned mathematics. She was an odd alloy, this one.
She glanced to the side, toward Waxillium. He was crouching down beside the canal.
“Now him,” Wayne said. “He likes ’em smart.”
“I have no intentions toward Lord Ladrian,” she said quickly. Too quickly.
“Pity,” Wayne said. “I think he likes you, mate.”
That might have been an exaggeration. Wayne wasn’t certain what Wax was thinking in regards to Marasi—however, the man needed to get his mind off Lessie. Lessie had been a great girl. Wonderful, and all that. But she was dead, and Wax still had that … hollow look to him
. The same one he’d displayed in the weeks after Lessie’s death. It was softer now, but still there.
A new love would help a lot. Wayne was certain of it, so he found himself quite pleased with himself as Marasi started moving, eventually wandering over to where Wax was working. She touched his arm, and he pointed at something on the ground beside the canal. Together, they inspected it.
Wayne strolled over.
“… perfectly rectangular,” Marasi was saying. “From something mechanical.”
The ground here was pressed down as if by something heavy in a square patch. It was apparently the only kind of track in the area, and didn’t seem what Wax had been intending to find. He knelt beside it, frowning, and pressed his hand into the dirt, probably to check how compact it was. He looked up at the tracks again.
“Not enough footprints,” Wax said softly. “There’s no way this was carried out with manpower. Even if there was a speed-bubble.”
“I think you’re right,” Marasi said. “If the robbery happened right there, a machine could have remained in the canal and still reached the tracks.”
Waxillium stood and dusted his hands off. “Let’s head back. I need time to think.”
* * *
Waxillium walked down the center of the passenger car, hands wet from scrubbing them in the washroom. The car thumped beneath him, fields speeding by outside.
Where would Miles be hiding? Waxillium’s mind went in loops. The City offered too many places to hide, and Miles wasn’t a typical criminal. He was a former lawkeeper. Waxillium’s normal instincts would be off.
He’ll want to scale back, Waxillium decided. He’s careful. Judicious. He spent months between stealing the aluminum and making his next robbery.
Miles had lost men and resources. He’d hide for a time. But where? Waxillium leaned against the corridor wall. This first-class railcar was made up of private compartments. He could faintly hear people talking in the one beside him. Children. It had been a long walk through six railcars to find the one with an available washroom. Wayne and Marasi were in a compartment several cars farther along.
If Marasi was right about the intended function of the kidnapped women, then a grim fate awaited them. Miles could afford to step back, let the trail grow cold. Each hour delayed would make him that much more difficult to find.
The Alloy of Law: A Mistborn Novel Page 19
