POV: wax
Summary
Wax brings Wayne and Marasi to a narrow brick-faced townhome on a tree-lined cobbled street in an ordinary Elendel neighbourhood — even seven months on the walnut trees lining both sides of the street still make Wax stop and look. He pounds on the door of Ranette's townhome. Ranette swings it open in a Roughs duster and laced shirt, takes one look at the two men on her porch, and slams the door without a word. They step calmly to the side. The door swings open again with a shotgun ahead of it, and a brisk count: *I'll count to ten. One. Two-three-four-five. Six-seven-eight.* They have sidled off the steps to the sidewalk by nine. The door slams.
Wayne leans against a tree, smiling, and counts off Ranette having shot him only three times. Wax corrects him to four (Callingfale, the foot, *barely counts*). Marasi is uncertain whether to be alarmed. They wait. A moment later Ranette opens the door again — *You're not leaving!* — and Wax has nearly opened the negotiation when Wayne cuts in to mention the aluminum revolver in the small of Wax's back. Wax discovers, irritated, that this is the price of admission. Ranette comes down the front walk in her duster, shotgun on her shoulder, and as a Lurcher who recognises metals by burning iron she identifies the aluminum almost instantly. She lets them in, on the condition that any finger of Wayne's that touches anything will be blown off.
Her front door has nearly a dozen locks that twist themselves shut at a wave of her hand, on ropes and pulleys her Lurcher Pulls discreetly. Door levers on each side mean she never has to put down what she is carrying. Her sitting room is a workshop, four walls of worktables, nails for hanging tools, a disturbing number of electrical cords across the floor that Marasi steps very carefully around. Ranette has moved to the city, she says, because of electricity — though for safety she does not feel half as safe here as out in the Roughs. She has set herself up under a paid Coppercloud rotation; barely half a dozen people in Elendel know where she lives, and Wax suspects Wayne has been angling this entire investigation as a path to getting through her door.
Wax explains why they have come: his butler tried to poison him, then shoot him, then blow up his study, and the man behind the man hunting him is Miles Hundredlives. Ranette stops at the name. She refuses to make Wax a new Sterrion to replace the two he has now lost, and the Ambersair he lost on the train this morning. Instead she shows him the line of hazekiller rounds she has been developing on her tables: ancient hazekiller, in the original sense — an ordinary person trained to fight Allomancers. Coinshot rounds with ceramic tips that keep flying after the metal Push rips off the casing behind; Lurcher rounds that detonate into ceramic shrapnel when Pulled against an armoured plate; Tineye rounds that crack twice as loud as ordinary ones on firing and impact, to put the enhanced senses on the floor; oversized soft-tipped knockdown rounds for Pewterarms who will keep fighting through ordinary wounds. None of the calibres are standard. She refuses, looking ill, to patent any of them; that would make everyone want them and bring everyone to her door. She has been working on a gun for Bloodmakers like Miles but it is not finished.
The aluminum revolver, she identifies as the work of a gunsmith named Nouxil she had been corresponding with until he vanished about a year ago. From inside the grip she pulls a small metal plate scratched in High Imperial characters. Wax does not read it; Marasi does, haltingly — *wasing the where of needing* — and identifies it as a call for help. That gives Wax where Miles sourced his guns and what he is doing with Nouxil still.
Ranette grudgingly directs Wax to the third cubby up at the back of the shop. He pulls out Vindication: a sleek, silvery revolver, eight chambers in Invarian steel (stronger and lighter, allowing the thinner walls between chambers); a lever on the back below the hammer that locks two of the chambers off until flipped, for two pre-loaded hazekiller rounds; an Allomancer-only safety hidden inside the grip, switchable only by Pushing or Pulling a small concealed metal line, so a nob-Allomancer cannot fire his own gun at him. It is named for the Ascendant Warrior. Wax may borrow it, on the condition that he brings back a field-test report. She warns him plainly that none of it will be enough against Miles — *the man is immortal* — and that he would need a small army. Wax answers that he intends to bring one.
While Marasi watches, Wax tries to read her: a daughter of a comfortable lord enrolled in one of the university's hardest programmes, when she could have lived comfortably on her endowment forever. She answers that she has spent most of her life being politely called useless — useless to her father because of her birth, useless as an Allomancer, useless to Steris as an embarrassment — and would rather *be of use in even a single burst of flame and sound than achieve nothing for a lifetime*. He accepts. He sends Wayne to lift shipping manifests out of the railway offices and Marasi to buy strong fishing nets, confirms Wayne still has the foundry dynamite in his coat pocket with the pressure detonators, and asks Ranette only for a room and some paper to plan in. She agrees. He hammers his sketch pad to her woodwork over her protests and gets to work.