The Alloy of Law: A Mistborn Novel (21 page)

“Whiskey and
magic,
” Wayne said.

“In other words,” Waxillium said, walking up and reading the paper over Marasi’s shoulder, “Wayne did a lot of fast talking. Nice work.”

“We need to get going!” Marasi said, urgent. “Go there, get Steris, and—”

“They won’t be there anymore,” Waxillium said, taking the paper. “Not after having several of their members captured. Wayne, did you manage to get this without the constables hearing?”

He looked offended. “What do you think?”

Waxillium nodded, rubbing his chin. “We
should
probably go soon. Get to the scene before it gets too cold.”

“But…” Marasi said. “The constables…”

“We’ll drop them an anonymous tip once I’ve seen the place,” Waxillium said.

“Won’t be needed,” Wayne added. “I set a fuse.”

“For when?”

“Nightfall.”

“Nice.”

“You can show your appreciation with a big fat nugget of a rare and expensive metal,” Wayne said.

“On the desk,” Waxillium said, folding the paper and sliding it into his vest pocket.

Wayne walked over, glancing at the apparatus set up on the desk. “I’m not sure if I want to touch any of this, mate. I’m rather fond of all of my fingers.”

“It’s not going to explode, Wayne,” he said dryly.

“You said that—”

“It happened
once,
” Waxillium said.

“Do you know how bloody annoying it is to regrow fingers, Wax?”

“If it’s on par with your complaining, then it’s likely appalling indeed.”

“I’m just sayin’,” Wayne said, scanning the desk until he found the bottle of bendalloy flakes. He snatched that, then backed away warily. “The most innocent-looking of things have a tendency to explode around you. A bloke has to be cautious.” He shook the bottle. “This isn’t much.”

“Don’t act spoiled,” Waxillium said. “That’s far more than I could have gotten you on short notice if we’d been out in the Roughs. Drop the hat. Let’s go look at this foundry your notes mention.”

“We can use my carriage, if you like,” Marasi said. To the side, Tillaume walked in, carrying a basket in one hand and a tray with tea in the other. He set the basket beside the door, then set the tray on the table and began pouring tea.

Waxillium eyed Marasi. “You want to come? I thought you said you wanted to leave the shooting to men like me.”

“You said they won’t be there,” she replied. “So there’s really no danger.”

“They still want you,” Wayne noted. “They tried to grab you at the dinner. It’ll be dangerous for you.”

“And they’d likely shoot either one of you without blinking,” she said. “So how will it be any less dangerous for you?”

“I suppose it ain’t,” Wayne admitted.

Tillaume walked over, bringing a cup of tea for Waxillium on a small tray. Wayne plucked it off with a grin, though Tillaume tried to pull the tray away.

“How convenient,” Wayne said, holding the teacup. “Wax, why didn’t you ever get me one of these chaps back in Weathering?” The butler shot him a scowl, then hurried back to the table to prepare another cup.

Waxillium considered Marasi. There was something he was missing, something important. Something about what Wayne had said …

“Why
did
they take you?” Waxillium asked Marasi. “There were better targets at that party. Women closer to the bloodlines they wanted.”

“You said she might have been a decoy to throw us off,” Wayne said, dumping some bendalloy into his teacup, then downing the entire thing in one draught.

“Yes,” Waxillium said, looking into her eyes and seeing a flash of something there. She turned away. “But if that were the case, they’d have wanted to take someone that wasn’t close to the same bloodline at all, not one who was a near cousin.” He pursed his lips, and then it clicked. “Ah. You’re illegitimate, then. Steris’s half sister, by Lord Harms, I assume.”

She blushed. “Yes.”

Wayne whistled. “Wonderful show, Wax. Usually
I
wait to call someone a bastard until the second date.” He eyed Marasi. “Third if she’s pretty.”

“I…” Waxillium felt a sudden burst of shame. “Of course. I didn’t mean…”

“It’s quite all right,” she said softly.

It made sense. Marasi and Lord Harms had grown so uncomfortable when Steris had spoken of mistresses. And then there was the specific clause about them in the contract; Steris was accustomed to infidelity on the part of a lord. That also explained why Harms was paying for the education and housing of Steris’s “cousin.”

“Lady Marasi,” Waxillium said, taking her hand. “Perhaps my years in the Roughs affected me more than I’d assumed. There was a time when I gave
thought
to my words before speaking them. Forgive me.”

“I am what I am, Lord Waxillium,” she said. “And I have grown comfortable with it.”

“It was still crude of me.”

“You needn’t apologize.”

“Huh,” Wayne said thoughtfully. “Tea’s poisoned.”

With that, he toppled to the ground.

Marasi gasped, immediately going to his side. Waxillium spun, looking at Tillaume just as the butler turned from his supposed tea preparations and leveled a pistol at Waxillium.

There was no time for thought. Waxillium burned steel—he kept it in him when he thought he might be in danger—and Pushed on the third button of his vest. He always wore one made of steel there, to use either for restoring his metal reserves or as a weapon.

It burst from his vest, streaking across the room and striking Tillaume in the chest just as he pulled the trigger. The shot went wild. Neither the bullet nor the gun registered as metal to Waxillium’s Allomantic senses. Aluminum, then.

Tillaume stumbled to the side and dropped the gun, pulling himself along the bookshelf in an attempt to flee. He left a line of blood on the floor before collapsing at the door.

Waxillium dropped to his knees beside Wayne. Marasi had jumped at the gunshot, and was staring at the gasping butler.

“Wayne?” Waxillium said, lifting his friend’s head.

Wayne’s eyes fluttered open. “Poison. I
hate
poison. Worse than losin’ a finger, I tell you.”

“Lord Waxillium!” Marasi said, alarmed.

“Wayne will be fine,” Waxillium said, relaxing back. “So long as he can talk and he has some Feruchemical reserves, he can pull through just about anything.”

“I’m not talking about him. The butler!”

Waxillium looked up with a start, realizing that the dying Tillaume was fiddling with the basket he’d brought in—the man reached a bloodied hand into it and pulled on something.

“Wayne!” Waxillium cried. “Bubble.
Now!
”

Tillaume fell back. The basket erupted in a blossoming ball of fire.

And then froze.

“Aw, hell,” Wayne said, rolling over to look at the explosion in progress. “I warned you. I
said
things are always blowing up around you.”

“I refuse to take responsibility for this one.”

“He’s
your
butler,” Wayne said, coughing and crawling to his knees. “Blarek! It wasn’t even
good
tea.”

“It’s getting bigger!” Marasi said, alarmed as she pointed at the explosion.

The fire blast had vaporized the basket before Wayne got his bubble up. The blast wave was slowly expanding outward, burning away the carpet, destroying the doorframe and the bookshelves. The butler himself had already been engulfed.

“Damn,” Wayne said. “That’s a big one.”

“Probably meant to look like an accident with my metallurgy equipment,” Waxillium said. “Burning our bodies, covering the murder.”

“Shall we go out the windows, then?”

“That blast is going to be hard to outrun,” Waxillium said thoughtfully.

“You could do it. Just gotta Push hard enough.”

“Against what, Wayne? I don’t see any good anchors in that direction. Besides, if I launch us backward that fast, going out the window is going to shred us and rip our bodies apart.”

“Gentlemen,” Marasi said, voice growing frantic, “it’s getting
bigger
.”

“Wayne can’t stop time,” Waxillium said. “Just slow it greatly. And he can’t move the bubble once he’s made it.”

“Look,” Wayne said. “Just blow the wall out. Push against the nails in the window frames and blast open the side of the building. Then you can shoot us out that direction without us running into anything.”

“Do you even listen to yourself when you say these things?” Waxillium asked, hands on hips as he regarded his friend. “That’s
brick
and
stone
. If I Push too hard, I’ll just throw myself backward into the explosion.”

“It’s getting
really, really
close!” Marasi said.

“So make yourself heavier,” Wayne said.

“Heavy enough so that I don’t move when an entire
wall
—a well-built, extremely heavy one—is ripped off a building?”

“Sure.”

“The floor would never be able to take it,” Waxillium said. “It would shatter, and…”

He trailed off.

Both of them looked down.

Snapping into motion, Waxillium grabbed Marasi, pulling her over with a yelp. He rolled onto his back, holding her tightly atop him.

The explosion was taking up most of their field of vision now, having consumed a large portion of the room. It swelled closer and closer, glowing with angry yellow light, like a bubbling, bursting pastry expanding in an enormous oven.

“What are we—” Marasi said.

“Hold on!” Waxillium said.

He amplified his weight.

Feruchemy didn’t work like Allomancy. The two categories of power were often lumped together, but in many ways, they were opposites. In Allomancy, the power came from the metal itself, and there was a limit to how much you could do at once. Wayne couldn’t compress time beyond a certain amount; Waxillium could Push only so hard on a piece of metal.

Feruchemy was powered by a sort of cannibalism, where you consumed part of yourself for later use. Make yourself weigh half as much for ten days, and you could make yourself one and a half times as heavy for a near-equal amount of time. Or you could make yourself twice as heavy for half that time. Or four times as heavy for a quarter of that time.

Or extremely heavy for a few brief moments.

Waxillium drew into himself weight he’d stored in his metalminds across days spent going around at three-quarters weight. He became heavy as a boulder, then as heavy as a building, then
heavier
. All this weight was focused on one small section of the floor.

The wood crunched, then burst, exploding downward. Waxillium dropped out of Wayne’s bubble of speed and hit real time, the shift jostling him. The next few moments were a blur. He heard the awesome sound of the explosion above—it hit with a wave of force. He released his metalmind and Pushed against the nails in the floor below them, trying to slow himself and Marasi.

He didn’t have enough time to do it well. They crashed into the floor of the next story down, and something heavy landed on them, driving the breath from Waxillium’s lungs. There was glaring brightness and a burst of heat.

Then it was over.

Waxillium lay dazed, ears ringing. He groaned, then realized that Marasi was clinging to him, shaking. He held her close for a moment, blinking. Were they still in danger? What had fallen on them?

Wayne,
he thought. He forced himself to move, rolling over and setting Marasi aside. The floor beneath them had been crushed practically to splinters, the nails flattened to little disks. Part of his downward Push must have been while he still had the increased weight.

They were covered with chips of wood and plaster dust. The ceiling was a wreck, sections of wood smoldering, bits of ash and debris wafting down. There was nothing left of the hole he’d broken; the blast had consumed it and the floor around it.

Wincing, he moved Wayne. His friend had fallen on them and blocked the brunt of the explosion from above. His duster had been shredded, his back exposed, blackened and burned, blood dribbling down his sides.

Marasi raised a hand to her mouth. She was still trembling, her dark brown hair tangled, eyes wide.

No,
Waxillium thought, uncertain if he should try to turn his friend over or not.
Please, no.
Wayne had used a portion of his health to recover from the poison. And last night, he’d said he only had enough left for one bullet wound.…

Anxious, he felt at Wayne’s neck. There was a faint pulse. Waxillium closed his eyes and let out a deep breath. As he watched, the wounds on Wayne’s back began to draw closed. It was a slow process. A Bloodmaker using Feruchemical healing was limited by how fast he wanted the power to work—recovering quickly required a much greater expenditure of health. If Wayne didn’t have much left, he’d need to work at a slow pace.

Waxillium left him to it. Wayne would be suffering great pain, but there was nothing he could do. Instead, he took Marasi’s arm. She was still trembling.

“It’s all right,” Waxillium said, his voice sounding odd and muffled because of the explosion’s effect on his hearing. “Wayne is healing. Are you injured?”

“I…” She looked dazed. “Two in three sufferers of great trauma are unable to correctly identify their own injuries as a result of stress or the body’s own natural coping mechanisms covering the pain.”

“Tell me if any of this hurts,” Waxillium said, feeling at her ankles, then legs, then arms for breaks. He carefully prodded her sides for broken ribs, though it was difficult through the thick cloth of her dress.

She slowly came out of her daze, then looked at him and pulled him close, tucking her head against his chest. He hesitated, then wrapped his arms around her and held her as she steadied her breath, obviously trying to get hold of her emotions.

Behind them, Wayne started coughing. He stirred, then groaned and lay still, letting the healing continue. They’d fallen into a spare bedroom. The building was burning, but not too badly. Likely the constables would soon be called.