The Alloy of Law (Mistborn 4)

Miles strode through the room, inspecting the Vanishers as they prepared their gear. Every bit of aluminum they had left had gone for guns and bullets. They’d use those from the start this time. At the wedding-dinner fight, it had taken the men a few moments to switch weapons. Now they knew what to anticipate. Their numbers might be fewer, but they’d be much better prepared.

He nodded to Clamps, who was watching over the men. The scarred man nodded back. He was loyal enough, though he had joined up for the thrill of robbery rather than the purpose of any cause. Of them all, only Tarson—dear, brutal Tarson—had anything resembling true loyalty.

Clamps claimed to be dedicated, though Miles knew otherwise. Well, Clamps hadn’t been the one to fire the first shot in the last mess. For all Miles’s professions about wanting to change things, his temper—and not his mind—had eventually ruled.

He should have been better than that. He was a man created to have a steady hand and an even steadier mind. Made by Trell, inspired by the Survivor, yet still weak. Miles questioned himself often. Was that the mark of a lack of dedication? He’d never done anything in his life without questioning.

He turned, studying his domain, such as it was. Thieves, murderers, and braggarts. He took a deep breath, then burned gold.

It was considered one of the least of the Allomantic metals. Far less useful than its alloy, which was in turn far less useful than one of the prime battle metals. In most cases, being a gold Misting was little better than being an aluminum Misting—a power so useless, it had become proverbial for one who did nothing.

But gold was not completely useless. Just mostly so. Upon burning it, Miles split. The change was visible only to his own senses, but for a moment, he was two people, two versions of himself. One was the man he had been. The angry lawkeeper, growing more bitter by the day. He wore a white duster over rugged clothing, with tinted spectacles to shade his eyes against the harsh sun. Dark hair kept short and greased back. No hat. He’d always hated those.

The other man was the man he’d become. Dressed in the clothing of a city worker—buttoned shirt and suspenders over dirty trousers with fraying cuffs. He walked with a slouch. When had that begun?

He could see through both pairs of eyes, think both sets of thoughts. He was two people at once, and each one loathed the other. The lawkeeper was intolerant, angry, and frustrated. He hated anything that broke with the strict order of the law, and meted out harsh punishments with no mercy. He had a special loathing for someone who had once followed the law, but had turned his back upon it.

The robber, the Vanisher, hated that the lawkeeper let others choose his rules. There was really nothing sacred about the law. It was arbitrary, created by powerful men to help them hold power. The criminal knew that secretly, deep down, the lawkeeper understood this. He was severe toward criminals because he felt so impotent. Each day, life grew worse for the good people, the people who tried, and the laws did little to help them. He was like a man swatting mosquitoes while ignoring the gash in his leg, an artery open and throbbing gushes of blood onto the floor.

Miles gasped, and extinguished his gold. He felt weary, suddenly, and slumped back against the wall. His two minders watched him with emotionless expressions.

“Go,” Miles said to them, waving a weak hand. “Check over my men. Use your Allomancy to determine if any of them accidentally left metal on their bodies. I want them clean.”

The two men looked at each other. They didn’t behave as if they cared to obey him.

“Go,” Miles said more firmly. “So long as you’re here, you should be useful.”

After another moment of hesitation, the two men walked away to do as ordered. Miles slumped down farther, back to the wall, breathing in and out.

Why do I do that to myself?

There had been considerable speculation about what a gold Misting really saw when burning his metal. A past version of himself, certainly. Was it the person he had actually been? Or was it a person he might have become, if he’d chosen another branching path of his life? That possibility had always struck him as sounding reminiscent of the mythical lost metal, atium.

Either way, he liked to think that burning his gold on occasion helped him—that each time he did it, it let him take the best of what he had been and mix it with the best of what he could be. An alloy of himself, then.

It disturbed him how much the two people he became hated each other. He could almost feel it like an oven’s heat, radiating from coal and stone.

He stood back up. Some of the men were staring at him, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t like the criminal bosses he’d often arrested in the Roughs. They had to worry about looking strong in front of their men, lest they be killed by someone who wanted to seize power.

Miles couldn’t be killed, and his men knew it. He’d once put a shotgun to his own head in front of them to prove it.

He walked over to a pile of trunks and boxes. A few were full of things Mister Suit had ordered stolen from Wax’s mansion, effects the man hoped would help them fight—or perhaps frame—the former lawkeeper. Suit had resisted killing Wax at first, for some reason.

Miles left them and walked around to the back side, where his own trunks had been deposited following the hasty evacuation of their old hideout. He picked through a few, then opened one. His white duster was inside. He took it out, shaking it, then got out a pair of sturdy Roughs trousers and a matching shirt. He slipped his tinted spectacles into the pocket, then went to change.

He’d been worried about hiding, worried that he’d be recognized and branded an outlaw. Well, an outlaw was what he had become. If this was the path he had chosen, he could at least walk it with pride.

Let them see me for what I am.

He would not turn from his course. It was too late to change one’s aim when the hammer was already falling. But it wasn’t too late to straighten his back.

* * *

Waxillium stared at the wall of Ranette’s sitting room. One side was piled with furniture, where she’d put things out of the way to make a handier pathway between her workshop and her bedroom. The other half of the room was strewn with boxes of various kinds of ammunition, bits of scrap metal, and cast barrels for gun making. There was dust everywhere. Very like her. He’d asked her for a way to prop up his paper pad, expecting her to find him an easel. She’d absently handed him some nails and pointed toward a hammer. So he’d just hung it on the wall, wincing as he drove the nails into the fine wood.

He stepped up, using a pencil to scribble a note to himself in the corner. The pile of shipping manifests that Wayne had brought lay to the side. Apparently, Wayne had left a gun he’d borrowed from Ranette in place of the manifests, considering it a fair trade. It had probably never occurred to him that a group of train engineers would be completely baffled to find their manifests gone and a pistol in their place.

Miles will strike at Carlo’s Bend, Wax thought, tapping the paper.

It had been easy to locate a shipment of aluminum. House Tekiel, tired of being robbed, was indeed making a large fuss over their new vault-style railway car. Wax could understand the reasoning; the Tekiels were best known as bankers, and their business relied on security and asset protection. The robberies been become a major embarrassment to them. They were intending to recover in a visible way.

It was almost like a dare to Miles and his Vanishers. Wax made another notation on his paper. The Tekiel shipment would follow a very direct route toward Doxonar. He’d mapped it, noting locations where the railway tracks wound close to one of the canals.

I won’t be able to watch where we’re going, Wax thought, making another notation. I need to know exactly how far from the previous stop Carlo’s Bend is.…

There wasn’t much time to prepare. He fingered the earring in his left hand, running his thumb along its smooth side as he thought.

The door opened. Wax didn’t look up, but the sound of the footsteps was enough to tell him it was Marasi. Soft shoes. Ranette and Wayne both wore boots.

Marasi cleared her throat.

“Nets?” Wax asked, distractedly writing the number 35.17 on the paper.

“I found some, finally,” she said, walking up beside him, looking over the notations. “You can make sense of this?”

“For the most part. Except Wayne’s doodles.”

“They … appear to be pictures of you. Unflatteringly ugly ones.”

“That’s the part that doesn’t make sense,” Waxillium said. “Everyone knows I’m irreparably handsome.” He smiled to himself. That was one of Lessie’s phrases. Irreparably handsome. She’d always claimed he’d look better with a nice scar on his face, after good Roughs fashion.

Marasi smiled too, though her eyes were on his notations and scribbling. “The phantom railcar?” she asked, pointing to his drawing of a ghostly train coming down the tracks, alongside a diagram of how it had probably been made.

“Yes,” he said. “Most of the attacks happened on misty nights, apparently to make it much easier to hide the fact that the phantom ‘train’ is really just a false front with a large headlamp, attached to a moving rail platform.”

“You’re certain?”

“Reasonably,” Waxillium said. “They’re using the canals to attack, and so they need some sort of diversion to keep eyes off what is sneaking up behind.”

She pursed her lips, thoughtful.

“Was Wayne out there?” Waxillium asked.

“Yes, he’s bothering Ranette. I … honestly left the room because I worried she’d shoot him.”

Waxillium smiled.

“I picked up a broadsheet when I was out,” she said. “The constables have found the old hideout.”

“Already?” Waxillium said. “Wayne said we had until dark.”

“It’s dark already.”

“It is? Hell.” Waxillium checked his watch. They had less time than he’d thought. “It still shouldn’t be in the papers yet. The police found the hideout early.”

Marasi nodded toward his sketches. “This indicates that you know where the Vanishers will strike. I don’t want to pound a brittle metal, Lord Waxillium, but we really should tell the constables that fact.”

“I think I know where the attack will happen. If we let the constables know, they’ll flood the area and scare off Miles.”

“Wax,” she said, stepping closer. “I understand that independent spirit; it’s part of what makes you what you are. But we’re not in the Roughs. You don’t have to do this all by yourself.”

“I don’t intend to. I’ll involve the constables, I promise. Miles, however, is not an ordinary criminal. He knows what the constables will try, and he will watch for them. This has to be done at the right time, in the right way.” Waxillium tapped his notations on the wall. “I know Miles. I know how he thinks. He’s like me.”

Almost too much so.

“That means he can anticipate you too.”

“He undoubtedly will. I’ll anticipate him better.”

The moment Waxillium had drawn his gun and fired back against the Vanishers, he’d started down this path. Once he got his teeth into something, he didn’t let go.