POV: marasi
Summary
Marasi crouches over a set of weeks-old footprints in the dust beyond the sewer door and confers with Wayne, who is studying the steep descent ahead. The gang isn't using this route regularly — they must slip in and out by another way — which means Marasi and Wayne are unlikely to be discovered if they keep going. They dim the lantern, take the path slow, and start down.
Marasi distracts herself from the drop by imagining how old the cavern system must be — older than the Ascendant Warrior, maybe; old enough that this stone slept through the Final Empire and the Catacendre both. She wonders idly if they'll wander into the Pits of Hathsin, then dismisses the thought — Wax has been to the Pits, and there was nothing magical there. The path eventually hits a near-vertical shaft, climbable but only just. Wayne anchors his climbing rope, drops it, and goes down first.
On the descent he begins a list of *ways women break the laws of physics* — by his self-assessment a thirteen out of seventeen on the misogyny scale. The first item — that women get hotter when they take off clothes, *unlike normal folks* — he revises after Marasi reminds him that women are half the world. The second — that women always weigh more once you pick them up, ergo all Feruchemists — she informs him is a joke her father was already cracking when she was a child. Wayne is genuinely horrified to be repeating Lord Harms's material; he wonders aloud if he is becoming the grumpy old one in the partnership now. Then, on her cue, he goes quiet and they continue along the tunnel below.
A point of light appears around a bend. Wayne catches her arm. Crept up to the corner they find a pair of gangsters in vests and hats playing cards on an overturned crate by lamplight; Wayne muses privately, in a pained tone, about what a tragedy it is to be dealt a one-in-a-million hand only to play it against your broke buddy on guard duty. They back away. A side tunnel splits right and leads, deceptively, to a dead end — but the wall there has a two-foot natural hole in it that opens onto the back of a midsized cavern.
Through the gap Marasi sees what months of work had promised: a warehouse cavern, dripping water and stalagmite knobs, full of armed men and women boxing goods on improvised furniture. Thirty-seven people by her count, every one of them armed, even the menial workers. The boxes she suspects of holding military supplies — including a worrying quantity of explosives. The gang has been making nuisance theft on the side as cover, but their real business is funnelling weapons toward Bilming in violation of Elendel's embargo on the Outer Cities — and the operation is almost certainly funded jointly by Outer Cities interests and the Set. *By Harmony's True Name,* she thinks, *I did it.* Wayne nudges her shoulder and quietly compliments her. He proposes that the constable-general's report should leave out the part where he whined about the sewage but keep the bad jokes in, because you have to give people what they expect or they won't believe your lies.
He picks out the well-dressed lean man at the back — likely a Cycle, possibly Metalborn, maybe the new one promoted in Miles Hundredlives' old slot. Wayne recommends a single rifle shot through the man's head, on the theory that if he is the one paying everyone else, the others have no reason to keep fighting. Marasi declines: confirmation, coordination, backup, proper authorisation. Wayne tries to invoke the Roughs badge he says Wax traded him for half a meat-and-ale bun; she remains unmoved and starts them back along the tunnel.
On the way they run into a gang guard who has stepped out to relieve himself in the same dark stretch. Wayne has him down and unconscious in under a second, but the guard manages a shout, and answering cries of alarm come up from the main cavern. Wayne looks up from the body with a grin. *My way it is.*