POV: marasi
Summary
The hired carriage rolls toward the Fifth Octant by a cautiously circuitous route, paralleling one of the great canal spokes the Lord Mistborn himself had laid out, past the Field of Rebirth with its tomb of the Last Emperor and the Ascendant Warrior on the hill. Marasi watches people flow down the sidewalks like blood cells through veins under her university microscope and reminds herself she is the one who insisted on coming. They had cut through Dampmere Park after the bombing and waved a carriage down on the far side; Wayne had acquired a broadsheet boy's cap from somewhere and is napping under it, snoring softly, his back having been freshly skinned an hour ago.
She has lost her composure twice today and is determined not to do it a third time. She presses Wax on how his uncle had died: carriage accident in the Outer Estates, his uncle and aunt and Wax's sister together on a sightseeing trip arranged to ease the family's grief after the heir cousin died of disease, the horse bolted, the hitchings snapped, the carriage went off a cliff. Wax had dismissed it as the kind of accident his risk-taking uncle invited. Now, in light of Tillaume, he wonders whether the reports sent to him were not a little too clean. The butler had stayed at the manor house the day of the accident.
Wayne cracks an eye under the cap, picks up the broadsheet-given nickname *Waxillium Dawnshot* with delight, lobbies once more for a visit to a gunsmith named Ranette in the Third Octant — redbrick, two-storey — and is shut down flatly. He sneezes and goes back to sleep. Wax hands Marasi a small palm-length pistol for her handbag and gives her her first proper handgun instruction: two hands, set the arms on cover if you can, don't shake, sight properly. Rifles encourage aim; pistols encourage spraying. She quotes her textbook back at him — eight in ten constables miss a handgun shot at ten feet — and earns a wry comparison to Wayne, who once put a bullet into the wall behind himself trying to shoot a man three paces away. *Bullets are devious buggers,* Wayne mutters from under the cap.
The foundry is just what the brief had promised: a flat-topped building by a canal dock, numerous chimneys, slag piled along one wall, windows that look like they have not been washed since the Final Ascension. Wax asks her to wait in the carriage while they sweep it. She is glad to. The coachman mutters *none of my business* and stays put; Wax has paid him well enough that he had better. Wax Pushes Wayne up onto the roof, follows him in, kicks a window, and disappears inside. Two tripwires and explosives later, Wax opens the front door and waves her in.
The cavernous lower hall is empty as a classroom in winter holiday — coal-smelling, with blackened patches on the floor and a double-height ceiling for half its span. Upstairs are the sleeping quarters for what Wax estimates to be fifty men, men who could play foundry workers by day. Wayne finds the real trick: a whole wall on rollers that opens the building onto the canal. The runner channel is freshly greased — they have been opening it routinely, which makes no sense for a secret operation unless the cover demanded it or unless they were moving something too big to carry out the front door. Wax picks dirty silver-grey flakes off the floor near one of the burn patches; he cannot Push them, so they are aluminum. The brand was honest.
Marasi walks him through her *deviations*: people seem erratic but follow patterns; find the deviations and isolate them. The opening wall is one. The windows are another — they have been blackened from inside with candle soot, the wrong soot for the wrong reason, since the windows open outward and would not get sooted by forging anyway. Whatever the gang were doing in here, they wanted nobody to see, and yet they were willing to roll back an entire wall for it. Wax goes outside to ask the local beggars what they have seen on the water at night. He leaves Marasi with the instruction to look through the sleeping quarters upstairs, and lets Wayne go up first in case there is another trap. Wayne sneers and Wax sneers back.
Upstairs in the dim loft, Wayne ambushes Marasi with an aged, distinguished voice — *he is dead, young lady; it took a hundred men to bring him down* — before he opens a window and laughs. He had missed a small stash of dynamite rigged to a chest latch; the chest itself is empty save for some faded nude cards left by a previous tenant and one Citizen Magistrates cigar box that had been used to prop the bomb's fuse. The lid has a string of pencilled numbers on the inside. Citizen Magistrates is a very expensive brand.
While he pokes through cupboards, breaking one in to reveal the nudes, Wayne tells Marasi why Wax saved his life. At sixteen in Far Dorest, he had been a small-time thief whose friends talked him up into armed robbery. He panicked, killed an innocent man — a charitable bookkeeper who transcribed letters home for mine workers who could not write — and was caught easily by Jon Deadfinger without even needing a confession beaten out of him. He was crying the whole time. He was sixteen, and he should have hanged. He has not held a gun since; his hands shake when he tries. He sends half of every wage he earns to the bookkeeper's widow and children — one of whom went to university — and they take the money and write back letters every few months telling him plainly that they have not forgiven him and never will. *Some mistakes,* he tells Marasi, *you can't fix by being sorry.*
Wax returns from talking to the beggars on the canal: the Vanishers have been moving something large in and out of the foundry onto a boat several times, always at night, bigger than ordinary cargo — machinery, probably. Wayne hands him the cigar box and gives him the dynamite to keep for later. Wax reads the brand on the lid, looks up at Wayne and sees the same recognition. The Citizen Magistrates were always the favourite of a Roughs lawkeeper they both know — Miles Dagouter, whom Marasi knows from the broadsheets as *Miles Hundredlives*. They are going on a train trip. He'll tell her some stories along the way.