POV: miles
Summary
Miles stands on the walkway above the Vanishers' new underground hideout, lighting a Citizen Magistrates cigar and breathing out the pungent smoke. He wears a pair of aluminum revolvers that gleam in the electric light, and he is drawing steadily on his goldmind, refreshing his body the way he has done for years. Tarson — arm in a sling, healing fast as a Pewterarm of koloss heritage, still wearing Wayne's hat — reports that Wax has found the old foundry. Clamps mutters that the local beggars saw too much and should be dropped in the canal. Miles refuses; killing beggars turns the underclass against you and brings the constables down faster than anything else. Wax, he says, is like a rat: wherever you least wish him to be, there you will find him.
The new hideout is windowless, lit by glaring electric lights, with electric forges and casting equipment being set up — Mister Suit's ducts and fans promise to clear the smoke. A large tunnel leads off into darkness with railway tracks already laid, the beginnings of an underground railway line Suit is building under the city. Miles dislikes how neatly he has been moved into Suit's pocket. He tells himself a few more good robberies and he can buy himself back out. His silver lighter, lit on the cigar a moment ago, carries the seal of the True Madil lawkeepers; it makes his men uncomfortable, so of course he keeps it.
Tarson passes on a rumour his men are repeating: that he and Wax are on the same side. Miles swallows the flash of anger and asks why. *You were once a lawkeeper, and all.* He is one still, Miles says, and what they are doing here is the true law, not the law of the rich. His men are forgiven their old crimes by their work. Tell them, he says to Clamps, that he is proud of them. Privately, he thinks the words may not be the right ones. Privately, he thinks of fifteen years spent in True Madil trying to protect the weak, of how nothing he did out in the Roughs ever held, because the corruption was rooted in the city, not the wilds. He offers up a private prayer to Trell that he is reading this right.
He goes in alone to meet Mister Suit: round-faced, grey-streaked beard, an expensive black silk suit and a turquoise vest, sipping tea over a broadsheet. Suit dislikes the smell of the cigar; Miles puffs anyway. Suit rebukes him for losing his temper at the wedding and shooting Lord Peterus in front of three hundred witnesses, and presses on whether Miles has some private grudge against Wax that made him goad the man into combat. Miles denies it: Wax is one of the finest men this world has known, finer than Suit or himself, but he chose the wrong side by coming home to the city's elite. Suit reminds him he is one of them himself; Miles grants he renounced the title. Miles explains Peterus: an impostor who pretended to seek justice but actually pandered to the elite, who let him come play at their parties like a favoured dog. He put him down.
Suit passes a rolled sheet across the desk — schematics for House Tekiel's new "unrobbable" freight car — and tells Miles flatly that the planning is Suit's and the execution is his. The latest captive (Steris) will be *arranged for*; Wax would have been better off taken off the list, but he was not, and so Wax needs to be dealt with today, by Miles personally, since the bomb in the mansion failed.
The chapter cuts to a train rolling out into the Outer Estates. Wax is explaining Miles to Marasi. Miles is a Twinborn who shares gold across Allomancy and Feruchemy and so Compounds it: a tenfold multiplier on stored health, never sick, never tired, virtually immortal so long as he has gold. He once, by reputation, took a point-blank shotgun blast to the face and walked away. Wax explains the cost of Feruchemy for the rest of them — he has been walking around at half weight since the bombing and has barely refilled a fraction of what he expended; Wayne will have to spend weeks in bed sickly after this to fill his Bloodmaker reserves back up. Miles simply does not have those constraints.
Wax reminisces about the old three-town alliance he had with Miles of True Madil and Jon Deadfinger of Far Dorest — neither man fond of Wayne — and the code that bound the three of them: lawkeeping out in the Roughs could twist a man if he was not careful, and they were not supposed to let it. They didn't speak of it. They were supposed to never give in. Wayne remembers Miles talking about Elendel as a brutal man would. Wax had hoped he'd keep his demons asleep.
Wax tries to talk Marasi into stepping out before this gets worse, given what Miles is. She refuses on the grounds that there is nowhere safer than near him, and her father's estates and Lord Harms's are equally obvious. She suggests, gently, that they take what they have to the constables; private investigation past a certain point is technically illegal. Wax cuts her off — he made a promise to Lord Harms about Steris and that is that. Then he tells her he has read her: the metal-shavings pouch in her handbag, her instinctive step toward the boundary of Wayne's bubble, her hereditary line. She is a Pulser, the opposite of Wayne's Slider — she slows time around herself. She concedes, embarrassed; her father had told her it was a useless power and to keep it quiet, much like her parentage. Wax tells her her father is increasingly a fool, and that any tool, used in the right situation, is useful.
Wayne all but vaults a passing pretzel merchant for food. Wax sits back as the train slows for their station, fingering his Pathian earring in his pocket. He has known since the first time the masked boss spoke at the wedding that it was Miles; he simply had not wanted to admit it. When he shot the masked man in the head and the body fell, he had been all too willing to believe he had misidentified the voice — but Miles is crafty enough to feign a wound to escape recognition. The situation is messier than anything he handled in two decades in the Roughs. He wishes he could feel the mists. He always felt stronger in them.