“Yes, my lord,” the butler said with a suffering tone.
Marasi stepped into the room, glancing to the side where a large sheet of paper lay on the floor, folded upon itself and covered with cramped writing. Waxillium twisted a dial, and a small metal tube on the desk shot out a thin tongue of intense flame. He briefly held his tongs in the fire, then pulled them back out and dropped their contents into a small ceramic cup. He eyed it, then grabbed a glass tube from a rack on the desk and shook it.
“Here,” he said, holding it up for her to study. There was a clear liquid in it. “Does this look blue to you?”
“Er … no? Should it?”
“Apparently not,” he said. He shook the tube again. “Huh.” He set the tube aside.
She stood silently. It was so hard not to recall the sight of him breaking through the line of tables, gun in hand as he expertly felled two of the men trying to haul her out into the night. Or the sight of him soaring through the air—gunshots exploding up from beneath, the chandeliers shattering and crystal spraying light around him—as he shot a man from midair and dropped to rescue his friend.
She was talking to a legend. And he was wearing a pair of very silly goggles.
Waxillium raised them to his forehead. “I’m trying to figure out what alloy they used in those guns.”
“The aluminum ones?” she asked, curious.
“Yes, but they’re not pure aluminum. They’re something stronger, and the grain is wrong. I’ve never seen this alloy before. And the bullets must be yet another new alloy; I’ll need to test those next. As a side note, I’m not certain if you appreciate the advantages you possess living in the City.”
“Oh, I’d say I’m aware of many of them.”
He grinned. Oddly, he looked younger today than he had on their previous meetings. “I suppose that perhaps you do. I was referring specifically to the ease of shopping you enjoy here.”
“Shopping?”
“Yes, shopping! Marvelous convenience. Out in Weathering, if I wanted a gas burner that could reach the high temperatures required for testing alloys, I had to special-order it and wait for the right railway cars to come. Then I had to hope the equipment arrived without being damaged or broken.
“Here, however, I merely needed to send a few lads out with a list. In hours, I could set up an entire lab.” He shook his head. “I feel so spoiled. And you seem hesitant about something. Is it the sulfur? I needed to test the gunpowder in the bullets, you see … and, well, I suppose I should open a window.”
I will not be nervous around him. “It’s not that, my lord Ladrian.”
“Please, feel free to call me ‘Wax’ or ‘Waxillium,’” he said, walking over to a window. She noticed that he stood to the side as he opened it, never standing directly in the line of sight of anyone outside. The cautious behavior was natural to him, and he didn’t even seem to notice what he was doing. “There’s no need to be formal with me. I have a rule—saving my life entitles you to use my given name.”
“You saved mine first, I believe.”
“Yes. But I was already in your debt, you see.”
“Because?”
“Because you gave me an excellent excuse to shoot things,” he replied, sitting down at his desk and making a few notations on a pad there. “That seems to be something I’d been needing for quite some time.” He looked up and smiled at her. “The hesitance?”
“Should we be alone in the room, Lord Waxillium?”
“Why not?” he said, sounding genuinely confused. “Is there a mass murderer hiding in the wardrobe that I somehow missed?”
“I was actually referring to propriety, my lord.”
He sat for a moment, then smacked his forehead. “I apologize. You’ll have to forgive me for being a buffoon. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to … Never mind. If you’re uncomfortable, I’ll go call Tillaume back.” He rose, striding past her.
“Lord Waxillium!” she said. “I’m not uncomfortable. I assure you. I simply didn’t want to put you in an awkward position.”
“Awkward?”
“Yes.” Now she felt like a right fool. “Please. I didn’t mean to make a fuss.”
“Very well, then,” he said. “To be honest, I really had forgotten about things like this. It’s basically nonsense, you realize.”
“Propriety is nonsense?”
“Too much in high society is built around the idea of making certain you don’t need to trust anyone,” Waxillium said. “Contracts, detailed operating reports, not being seen alone with an eligible member of the opposite gender. If you remove the foundation of trust from a relationship, then what is the point of that relationship?”
This from someone who is marrying Steris for the express purpose of exploiting her wealth? She felt bad for the thought. It was very difficult not to feel bitter sometimes.
She moved on quickly. “So … the alloy?”
“Yes, the alloy,” he said. “Likely a tangent I shouldn’t be indulging in. An excuse to dig up an old hobby. But since I know where the aluminum itself came from—the first theft—I wondered if, perhaps, they might be using an alloy that includes components I could trace.” He walked back over to his desk, where he picked up the revolver Wayne had given him the night before. She could see that he’d shaved some of the metal off the outside of the grip.
“Do you know much of metallurgy, Lady Marasi?” he asked.
“I’m afraid not,” she said. “I probably should.”
“Oh, don’t feel that way. As I said, this is an indulgence of mine. There are many metallurgists in the city; I could probably have sent these shavings to one of them and gotten a report more quickly, and more accurately.” He sighed, sitting back down in his chair. “I’m just accustomed to doing things myself, you see.”
“Out in the Roughs, you often didn’t have another choice.”
“True enough.” He tapped the gun against the table. “Alloys are remarkable things, Lady Marasi. Did you realize you can make an alloy with a metal that reacts to magnetism, but end up with one that doesn’t? Mix it with an equal part of something else, and you don’t get something that’s half as magnetically reactive—you get something that’s not reactive at all. When you make an alloy, you don’t just mix two metals. You make a new one.
“That’s a fundamental of Allomancy, you see. Steel is just iron with a pinch of carbon in it, but that makes all the difference. This aluminum has something else in it too—less than one percent. I think it might be ekaboron, but that’s really just a hunch. A little pinch. It works for men too, oddly. A tiny change can result in creating an entirely new person. How like metals we are.…” He shook his head, then waved for her to take a seat in a chair against the wall. “But you didn’t come to hear me blather. Come, tell me, what can I do for you?”
“It’s actually what I can do for you,” she said, sitting. “I’ve spoken to Lord Harms. I thought that because of your … Well, because House Ladrian is currently lacking in liquid assets, you see, I thought that you may not have the tools you need to seek Lady Steris. Lord Harms has agreed to bankroll you for whatever you need as you pursue her rescue.”
Waxillium seemed surprised. “That’s wonderful. Thank you.” He paused, then looked at his desk. “Do you think he’d mind paying for this…?”
“Not at all,” she said quickly.
“Well, that’s a relief. Tillaume nearly fainted when he saw what I’d spent. I think the old man’s afraid we’ll run out of tea if I keep this up. It’s so incredible that I can be the source of employment for some twenty thousand people, own two to three percent of the land in the city, and yet still be so poor in ready cash. What an odd world business is.” Waxillium leaned forward, clasping his hands, looking thoughtful. In the light of the open window, she could now see that he had bags under his eyes.
“My lord?” she asked. “Have you slept at all since the kidnapping?”
He didn’t reply.
“Lord Waxillium,” she said sternly. “You mustn’t neglect your own well-being. Running yourself to rust will do no good for anyone.”
“Lady Steris was taken on my watch, Marasi,” he said softly. “I didn’t lift a finger. I had to be goaded into it.” He shook his head, as if to drive away bad thoughts. “But you needn’t worry about me. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway, so I might as well be productive.”
“Have you come to any conclusions?” she asked, genuinely curious.
“Too many,” he said. “Often, the problem is not coming up with solutions—it’s deciding which of them actually happened and which are pure fancy. Those men, for instance. They weren’t professionals.” He paused. “I’m sorry, that probably doesn’t make any sense.”
“No, it does,” she said. “The way they kept itching to shoot the building up, they way their boss let himself be goaded into shooting Peterus…”
“Exactly,” he said. “They had experience as thieves, certainly. But they weren’t refined at it.”
“A simple way to determine the type of criminal is by whom they kill and when,” Marasi said, quoting a line from one of her textbooks. “Murders end with a hanging; thievery alone can mean escaping death. Those men, if they’d really known what they were doing, would have left quickly, glad they hadn’t needed to do any shooting.”
“So they’re street toughs,” Waxillium said. “Common criminals.”
“With very expensive weapons,” Marasi said, frowning. “Which implies an outside backer, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” Waxillium said, growing eager and leaning in. “At first, I was very confused. I was convinced this was all about the kidnappings, the thievery just a front to disguise that. Then the men last night were genuinely interested in what they were taking. It baffled me. Judging by the price of aluminum, and how much they had to spend forging those guns, they’ve spent a fortune to make a lesser amount from last night’s robbery. It didn’t make sense.”
“Unless we’re dealing with two groups working together,” Marasi said, understanding. “Someone has given funds to the bandits, allowing them to pull off these robberies. The backing group, however, demands that they kidnap certain people, making it seem like the result of random hostage-takings.”
“Yes! He—whoever the backer is—wants the kidnapped women. And the Vanishers, they get to keep whatever they steal, or perhaps a percentage of it. It is all meant to use the robberies as a cover-up, but it’s possible the bandits themselves don’t understand how they’re being used.”
Marasi frowned, biting her lip. “But that means…”