POV: wax
Summary
Wax sits cross-legged on the floor of his study beside his great five-foot genealogical chart, philosophising with Marasi while they wait for Wayne. They drift from the unresolved problem of how to reconcile the Words of Founding's reference to extra metals with the older Law of Sixteen into the question of why people study law at all. He observes that lawkeeping and philosophy are both about questions, secrets, puzzles, the kind of itch he had wanted scratched in the Roughs; Marasi answers that she studies because she is fascinated by the rare people who choose to be unusually good or unusually evil regardless of their surroundings.
She presses him for the stories behind his famous arrests — Peret the Black, Taraco the bandit, Harrisel Hard — and gets the unromantic truth: he picked Peret off the lawkeeper board because he was the most dangerous, and so was worth the largest bounty, and he had not eaten in three days; Taraco was a play for a pair of new boots out of the rewards (the cobbler had been Taraco's recent victim); he had only brought Harrisel in to win a bet with Wayne. Marasi, smiling with quiet excitement, takes out a notepad and writes it all down. He encourages her to belt on revolvers and go to the Roughs herself — the Ascendant Warrior had been a woman, after all — but Marasi confesses she prefers lacy dresses and modern conveniences and the option of late-night Terris food delivery, and has no problem at all with letting men like him be the ones who do the shooting.
She does want to change the city, just not with revolvers. She hands him a paper of her own — a report she is drafting on a "broken windows" theory of crime. In one octant where Lord Joshin bought up several slum parcels and cleaned them up, crime had fallen further than in octants that had doubled their constable count. People often act in response to environment; clean a street and ordinary men commit fewer crimes. Wax is half charmed by it and half thrown by how good her arguments are.
Wayne has been eavesdropping in the doorway. He strolls in wearing a stolen constable's hat, eating scones the constables' own money paid for, with a paper in hand: the location of the Vanishers' hideout in the city — an old foundry in Longard — and the name of the recruiter Clamps. *Whiskey and magic*, he says, which Wax translates as a lot of fast talking. Wayne has even set the fuse: an anonymous tip will reach the constables at nightfall, giving them time to investigate the site before the constables sweep through. Wax hands him a nugget of bendalloy off the lab bench in payment; Wayne fingers it nervously, refusing to touch anything else on the desk on the grounds that innocent-looking things have a habit of exploding around Wax. Marasi insists on coming. They tell her they wanted her at the wedding too and she would be safer at home; she points out that they would all be shot at, and she will not stay behind for it. Wax relents.
Then it clicks for him. He looks at Marasi. The kidnappers had been comparing faces to sketches; there were closer cousins to the Steris bloodline at her table. Why her? He sees it on her face. She is Lord Harms's illegitimate daughter, Steris's half-sister rather than her cousin. It explains the rehearsed cover story, the family discomfort at the mistress clause, and Lord Harms paying for her education. Wax apologises for the bluntness of having said it aloud; she answers that she has grown comfortable with what she is. Wayne mutters that he usually waits to call a girl a bastard until the second date — third, if she's pretty.
*Huh*, Wayne says thoughtfully. *Tea's poisoned.* Then he topples to the floor. Tillaume — the butler, who had just set out tea and a wicker basket beside the door — turns from the table with an aluminum pistol levelled at Wax. Wax burns steel (he has been keeping a reserve burning in case of danger), Pushes the steel button from his own vest across the room, and drives it through the butler's chest a half-heartbeat before Tillaume pulls the trigger. The aluminum round throws no line and goes wild. Tillaume stumbles, leaves a track of blood along the bookshelf, and collapses by the doorway. Then, dying, he reaches into the basket and pulls a fuse.
The basket erupts into a blooming ball of fire — and freezes, caught in Wayne's speed bubble. The three of them stare at the slow blossom of yellow heat already eating the carpet and the doorframe. Wayne quietly informs Wax that the explosion is, as he had said, his fault. Wax canvasses the options: outrun it through the window (the launch would shred them on the sash), blow the wall out (he would Push himself backward into the blast), Push the explosion away (no good anchor in that direction, and aluminum-resistant in any case). They look down. He grabs Marasi on top of him, rolls onto his back, and dumps weeks of stored weight out of his iron metalmind in a single instant — heavier than a boulder, heavier than a building, all of it focused on one tiny patch of floor. The boards burst beneath him. They drop into the bedroom below as the fireball blooms through the room above. Wayne follows them down, lands across their backs, and takes the brunt of the flames that punch through the floor.
Wayne is alive but his Bloodmaker reserves are nearly spent from the poison and the previous night's gut wound, so the healing is slow and painful. Wax grips the burnt skin at his friend's shoulder and rips the whole crusted sheet off in one go so the pink new skin underneath can finish forming. Marasi nearly is sick; she had assumed he had meant only the burns themselves. Wayne grumbles about the destroyed duster and the lost hat the gang now owes him.
Wax does a quick search of the house, refilling his iron metalmind on the move down to half his weight. He finds Limmi and Miss Grimes unconscious but alive in the pantry — drugged and stashed safely out of the blast — and the coachman Krent standing on the lawn watching the building burn. He carries the women out to the garden where they will be found, fetches a pair of revolvers from a closet and a fresh shirt and jacket for Wayne, and slips through the back gate. Walking out, he turns the puzzle over. The Vanishers could not have suborned Tillaume in a day; the butler had been steering him away from local lawkeeping work since the day he had arrived in Elendel, and had quietly pressed him to leave the robberies alone the night before the ball. Whoever is behind the gang has had a man inside Wax's household — and an eye on him — since before he ever came home from Weathering.