“Not good,” she admitted. “The target club uses rifles.”
“Well, a rifle doesn’t fit in a handbag,” Waxillium said, taking a pistol out of his shoulder holster. It was small, with a slim barrel. The entire weapon was only about as long as her hand.
She took the gun hesitantly.
“The trick to shooting with a pistol is to be steady,” Waxillium said. “Use both hands, find low cover if you can and set your arms on it. Don’t shake, take your time, and be sure to sight. Pistols are much harder to hit with, but that’s partially because people tend to be wilder with them. The very nature of a rifle encourages you to take aim, while people’s first impulse with a pistol seems to be to just point vaguely and pull the trigger.”
“Yes,” she said, hefting the gun. It was deceptively heavy. “Eight of ten of constables firing a handgun at a criminal ten feet away miss.”
“Really?”
She nodded.
“Well,” Waxillium said, “I guess Wayne doesn’t need to feel so bad.”
“Hey!”
Waxillium eyed her. “I once saw him try to shoot someone three paces away. He ended up hitting the wall behind himself.”
“’S not my fault,” Wayne grumbled. “Bullets are devious buggers. They shouldn’t be allowed to bounce. Metal don’t bounce, and that’s true as titanium.”
She checked the small revolver to make sure the safety was on, then tucked it into her singed handbag.
The Vanishers’ hideout turned out to be an innocent-looking building near a canal dock. Two stories tall, it was flat-topped and wide, with numerous chimneys. Piles of dark ashes and slag were heaped along one wall of the building, and the windows looked like they hadn’t been cleaned since the Final Ascension.
“Lady Marasi,” Waxillium asked, checking the sights on his revolver, “would you be terribly offended if I suggested you wait in the carriage while we reconnoiter? The place is likely abandoned, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find a few traps left behind.”
“No,” she said, shivering. “I wouldn’t mind. I think that would be just fine.”
“I’ll wave when we’re certain the place is clear,” he said, then raised his handgun and nodded to Wayne. They ducked out of the carriage, running in a low squat to the side of the building. They didn’t go to the door. Instead, Wayne jumped—and Waxillium must have Pushed him, for the wiry man leaped a good twelve feet and landed on the roof. Waxillium followed, jumping more gracefully, landing without a sound. They moved over to the far corner, where Wayne swung down and kicked in a window. Waxillium swung in after him.
She waited a few tense minutes. The coachman didn’t say a word about any of it, though she heard him muttering “none of my business” to himself. Waxillium had paid him enough that he’d better stay quiet.
No gunshots sounded. Eventually, Waxillium opened the door to the building and waved. She hurriedly climbed from the carriage and approached.
“Well?” she asked.
“Two tripwires,” Waxillium said, “rigged with explosives. Nothing else dangerous we could find. Other than Wayne’s body odor.”
“That’s the smell of incredibleness,” Wayne called from inside.
“Come on,” Waxillium said, holding the door open for her.
She stepped in, then hesitated in the doorway. “It’s empty.”
She’d expected forges and equipment. Instead, the cavernous room was vacant, like a classroom during winter holiday. Light shone in through windows, though it was very dim. The chamber smelled of coal and fire, and there were blackened areas on the floor.
“Sleeping quarters up there,” Waxillium said, pointing at the other side of the foundry. “The main chamber here is double height for half the building, but the other side has a second story. Looked like they could house some fifty men in there, men who could act like foundry workers during the days to maintain the front.”
“Aha!” Wayne said from the darkness on the left side of the chamber. She heard a rattling, then light flooded the room as he pushed back the wall. It opened there, rolling to give large-scale access to the canal.
“How easily did that open?” Waxillium asked, trotting over. Marasi followed.
“I dunno,” Wayne said, shrugging. “Easy enough.”
Waxillium inspected the door. It slid on wheels in a small channel cut into the floor. He rubbed his fingers in the trench and brought them out, rubbing grease between them.
“They’ve been using it,” Marasi said.
“Exactly,” Waxillium said.
“So?” Wayne asked.
“If they were doing illegal things in here,” Marasi said, “they wouldn’t be wanting to open the entire side of the building with any frequency.”
“Maybe they did it to keep up the act,” Waxillium said, rising.
Marasi nodded, thoughtful. “Oh! Aluminum.”
Wayne pulled out his dueling canes, spinning. “What? Where? Who’s shooting?”
Marasi felt herself blush. “Sorry. I meant, we should check and see if we can find any aluminum droplets on the ground. You know, from forging or casting guns. That will tell us if this place is really the hideout, or if Wayne’s source was trying to lead us to a bad alloy.”
“He was honest,” Wayne said. “I got a sense for that sort of thing.” He sneezed.
“You believed that Lessie really was a dancer, the first time we met her,” Waxillium said, rising.
“That’s different. She was a woman. Good at lying, they are. The God Beyond made’m that way.”
“I’m … not certain how I should take that,” Marasi said.
“With a pinch of copper,” Waxillium said. “And a healthy dose of skepticism. Just like anything Wayne says.” He held out his hand.
Marasi frowned, raising her palm. He dropped something into it. Some bits of metal that looked like they’d been scraped off the floor, where they’d cooled. They were silvery, light, and dirty black around the edges.
“I found them on the floor over there,” Waxillium said. “Near one of the blackened sections.”
“Aluminum?” she asked eagerly.
“Yes,” he said. “At least, I can’t Push them with Allomancy, which along with their appearance is sufficient indication.” He studied her. “You’ve got a good mind for this sort of thing.”
She blushed. Again. Rust and Ruin! she thought. I’m going to have to find a way to deal with that. “It’s about deviations, Lord Waxillium.”
“Deviations?”
“Numbers, patterns, movements. People seem erratic, but they actually follow patterns. Find the deviations, isolate the reason why they deviated, and you’ll often learn something. Aluminum on the floor. It’s a deviation.”
“And are there others, here?”
“The opening door,” she said, nodding to the side. “Those windows. They’re smeared with too much soot. If I were to guess, it was put there by burning a candle close to the glass to blacken it so nobody could peek in.”
“Maybe it was natural,” Waxillium said. “From forging.”
“Why would the windows be closed during the heat of forging? Those windows can open easily, and they open outward—so there wouldn’t be any soot on them. Not so much, at least. Either they left them closed while working in order to hide what was in here, or they darkened them intentionally.”
“Clever,” Waxillium said.
“So the question is,” she said, “what have they been moving in and out of the building through that large side door? Something important enough that they’d open it, even after going through so much trouble with the windows.”
“That part, at least, is easy,” Waxillium said. “They’ve been robbing freight cars, so they’ve been moving the cargo in.”
“Which implies they’ve been shipping it after stealing it…” Marasi said.
“Which gives us a lead,” Waxillium said with a nod. “They’ve been moving things in and out of this location via the canals. In fact, the canals might be connected to how they’re getting the cargo out of the railway cars so easily.” He strode away toward the door.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I’m going to go sniff around outside,” he said. “You two go look through the sleeping quarters. Tell me if you see any … deviations, as you put it.” He hesitated. “Let Wayne go in first. We might have missed a trap or two. Better for him to explode than you.”
“Hey!” Wayne said.
“I mean it with all fondness,” Waxillium said, slipping out through the open side of the building. Then he leaned back in. “And maybe it will blow your face off, and spare us having to look at that mug of yours.” With that, he left.
Wayne smiled. “Damn. Sure is good to see him acting more like himself again.”
“So he wasn’t always so solemn?”
“Oh, Wax has always been solemn,” Wayne said, wiping his nose with his handkerchief. “But when he’s at his best, there’s a smirk underneath. C’mon.”
He led her to the back part of the building. There was a small box by the wall, the explosives they had discovered and disarmed, she assumed. The ceiling was lower here. Wayne climbed up a stairwell, gesturing for her to wait.
She poked around, looking for anything that had been discarded, but succeeded only in making herself jump a few times when she thought she saw something from the corner of her eye. This side of the chamber was very dim.
Was Wayne taking too long? She fidgeted, then finally decided to climb the stairwell.
It was dark inside. Not pitch dark, just dark enough that she thought she should be able to see what she was doing—but couldn’t. She hesitated halfway up the stairs, then decided she was a fool and pushed forward.
“Wayne?” she said, nervous as she peeked out of the stairwell. The upper floor was lit by a few windows, darkened by soot, despite being in an area where there would be no forging or casting. That reinforced her theory. And her nervousness.
“He is dead, young lady,” an aged, distinguished voice said from the darkness. “I am sorry for your loss.”
Her heart just about stopped.
“Yes,” the voice continued, “he was simply too handsome, too clever, and too immensely remarkable in all aspects of his existence to allow to live.” Someone pushed open a window, letting in light and revealing Wayne’s face. “I’m afraid it took a hundred men to bring him down, and he killed all but one. His last words were, ‘Tell Wax … that he’s a total git … and he still owes me five notes.’”
“Wayne,” she hissed.
“Couldn’t help myself, mate,” he said, switching back to his own voice, which was completely different. “Sorry. But you shouldn’t have come up here.” He nodded to the corner, where a few sticks of something lay against the wall.
