POV: marasi
Summary
The morning after the wedding-dinner massacre, Marasi stands on the stone-paved sidewalk outside Sixteen Ladrian Place arguing herself into knocking. The mansion has the look of any old house in the Fourth Octant — three apple trees out front pruned to fruit even ornamentally, as the Lord Mistborn himself had decreed all trees in the Basin must, an iron gate, vine-bedecked stone — but she has been quoting her own professors at herself in panic for ten minutes. She is going to call on a living legend. She is going to call on a man who saved her life. She forces herself up to the door and slams the knocker three times before she can talk herself out of it.
Tillaume answers with chilly Terris politesse and disapproves, in the way a properly trained butler can disapprove without saying anything, of an unaccompanied young woman calling on a house lord at all. He leads her to a sitting room first — its walls noticeably bare in places where pictures used to hang — and then upstairs to Wax's study on the western side of the top floor. The shutters are closed; the desk against the far wall has been turned into a small lab of tubes, burners, and racks. The room smells of smoke and sulphur. The legend himself is in shirtsleeves, a checkered black-and-grey vest, and a pair of frankly silly black goggles, holding something up with tongs over a thin tongue of flame.
Wax is testing the alloy of the aluminum revolver Wayne palmed off the constables for him. The metal is harder than pure aluminum and has the wrong grain; he suspects a one-percent pinch of ekaboron, but the gunpowder in the cartridges is going to be a separate test. A city metallurgist could read all of this for him in a working day, but doing it himself is an indulgence, an old hobby returning. Marasi finds the goggles silly in the face of how he had moved through the chandeliers last night, and finds, to her quiet annoyance, that he is much friendlier than the reports had let her assume.
He apologises for the propriety oversight when she gently raises it, offers to call Tillaume back as a chaperone, and dismisses propriety itself as upper-class machinery for not having to trust anybody. Marasi notices the spike of bitterness — Wax is, after all, marrying Steris for very nearly that reason — and lets it go. She delivers Lord Harms's offer: House Ladrian's ready cash is dry, and Lord Harms will bankroll whatever Wax needs to recover Steris. Wax is grateful; the lab equipment alone has had Tillaume worrying about line items. The richness of being able to send a clerk out with a list and have a working lab assembled in hours still surprises him; in Weathering it would have been a special order and a wait by railway.
They talk through the case. The Vanishers are competent thieves but not real professionals: the boss let himself be goaded into shooting Lord Peterus (and Marasi quotes her textbooks at him on the difference between thievery and murder), they kept itching to shoot the place up, and they have spent more on the aluminum and the custom guns than they took at the wedding. The conclusion forms naturally between them: two groups working as one — street toughs out of the city, paired with a wealthy outside backer who funds the operation in exchange for the kidnap targets and who chose the boss for his apparent ideology of payback against city wealth. Wax took most of the night to reach this. Marasi reaches it in ten minutes; she has, she sniffs, modest help from him. He notices.
Then he shows her the chart. He has spent the night tracing every kidnapped woman's line back through his uncle's genealogical library to the Lord Mistborn himself — most of them third or fourth cousins, with the strongest Allomantic heritage concentrated in a small bloodline. He had clerks angry at being roused in the night to fetch records; Marasi's name is on the chart too. She is the odd one — sixth cousin to the main line on her father's diluted side — possibly chosen at random to break the pattern. Wax thinks the backer is building an Allomantic army, except Steris is not an Allomancer at all and a few of the others may not be either, so the backer is guessing wrong on his picks.
Marasi reads the chart again. Only women. Allomancy is genetic. She sees it before he does and corrects him quietly: the backer is not raising an army. He is breeding one. He wants the Steris line for its descent from the Lord Mistborn, whether or not Steris herself has the talent. Wax goes quiet, then admits Wayne will never let him live it down once he hears that Marasi saw it first. At least, he tells himself, this means Steris is not in immediate danger — she is valuable to the backer even untrained. Marasi feels sick anyway; she will be in a different kind of danger. Wayne, Wax tells her, is currently out causing some mischief he had been sent to cause, and should be back any minute.