The Alloy of Law (Mistborn #4)(55)

“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.