The Alloy of Law

Wax creeps along a grey fence tied with fraying rope in Feltrel, a red-clay ghost town that a koloss clan emptied twenty years ago. In a dusty fine suit, silver cravat and bowler hat, he is hunting Bloody Tan, a former mortician turned murderer. When a sniper fires from a hotel balcony, Wax rolls, shoots, and Pushes his own bullet on through the balcony’s sign into the man. A bowman tumbles dead off the forge roof: Lessie’s work. She arrives in a white duster, his partner in the law and the woman he loves, and glances at the letter in his pocket from Elendel, addressed to him as a lord.

Wax and Lessie split up; Wayne and Barl are searching the far side of town. Wax drops a bullet into an old cold cellar and leaps after it, lightening himself to land softly, because he is Twinborn: a Coinshot who can also store his weight in iron. He finds Tan’s gallery, a long smuggling tunnel where eight mummified victims are posed under lanterns. The tunnel rises into a roofless brick chapel to the Survivor. Tan waits there behind Lessie, who has been shot, gagged and caught in his garrote, and he lectures Wax about theatre:

“Each life is a performance.”

They count by her blinks: one, two, three. Wax fires. Tan yanks her into the bullet’s path, and Wax’s own shot kills Lessie. Then he shoots Tan in the head. The rest of the book is built on that half second.

Five months later Wax is the Sixteenth High Lord of House Ladrian. He stands on a balcony of Cett Mansion while the party behind him glows under electric lights, the talk of the city. His uncle and his sister Telsin died in a carriage accident, or so everyone believes. The house is insolvent, and he is supposed to be finding a rich wife. Instead he looks down Demoux Promenade’s blazing electric lamps toward the unfinished steel lattices of the Ironspine Building and Tekiel Tower. The mists are out, which is rare now, and he cannot resist. He swaps his dinner coat for the mistcoat in his carriage trunk, an ankle-length duster whose skirts split into tassels. Then he flies from lamp to lamp over carriages, horse-drawn and horseless, and climbs the Ironspine to its highest girder, kicking himself upward with shotgun recoil.

Gunfire draws him down among four thugs shooting at constables. He hears what sounds like a woman whimpering (it is a wounded thug), Lessie floods back, and Wax freezes. A bullet tears his coat; the constables finish the job without him. At home his butler Tillaume waits up with a candelabrum. Wax packs his shotguns, his mistcoat and his Sterrions into a trunk and tells Tillaume to put it away for good.

Six months on, the Vanishers, train robbers whose cars arrive locked and empty, have taken a second Ladrian steel shipment. Wayne is in Wax’s sitting room trying to trade a mantel clock for a bottle of whiskey. He has left Barl in charge of Weathering and followed a stolen food shipment to the city. When Lord Harms barges in with his daughter Steris and her quiet “cousin” Marasi, Wayne ducks into a speed bubble, his Slider’s pocket of fast time. He comes out as Wax’s grey-mustached uncle Maksil. Steris produces a twenty-page courtship agreement, with a conjugal schedule on page thirteen. Inside another bubble, Wayne hands Wax a cartridge dropped at the Vanishers’ latest raid, on the Coolerim Playhouse, where Steris’s cousin Armal was taken. Wax drops steel shavings in his tea, burns them, and sees no blue line to the round. It is aluminum, inert to Allomancy and made for killing Coinshots.

That night, under his newly installed electric lights, Wax maps the robberies on his late sister’s easel. His uncle’s ledgers show that House Tekiel’s first stolen “wool” shipment was smuggled aluminum. With metals and four women taken, it looks as if someone is collecting Allomancers. He prays to Harmony, thinks of Lessie, and goes back to the ledgers.

Wax goes courting by the rules. The Yomen-Ostlin wedding dinner fills a cavernous ballroom of more than a hundred tables under great chandeliers converted to electricity. Steris, in red, teaches him the prescribed hold of a courting couple and explains invitations as social weapons. When Wax observes that that sort of brooding tends to end with people getting shot, she sets him straight:

“This isn’t the Roughs, Waxillium. It is the City. We don’t do such things here.”

Later he tries crude shooting stories on her, and she excuses herself to the washroom. Wayne serves them as a Terris waiter, with a false nose and a line of earrings. Marasi studies legal justice and criminal behavior, and she has numbers ready: Wax’s frontier town had twice as many lawmen per head as her own octant. She also sees through Wayne’s disguise.

Then the Vanishers come in at both ends of the hall: two or three dozen men in vests and bowler hats, led by a man in a knit mask under a Roughs hat. Marasi starts writing down descriptions. Wax quietly Pushes her notebook and Wayne’s dueling canes out of sight and plays the trembling coward. Tarson, a koloss-blooded thug, gropes Marasi and steals Wayne’s lucky hat. The leader checks the women’s faces against drawings, picks Steris, who has been fetched from the washroom, and then sends Tarson for Marasi. Lord Peterus, a retired constable, calls him a coward, and the leader shoots him dead and tells his men to have some fun.

In Wayne’s speed bubble the room freezes around the two of them. Wax pours his whole pouch of steel shavings into his wine and drinks. Once the bubble drops he shoots, taps his stored weight, Pushes outward in a ring that sweeps tables and guests clear, and stops a volley in midair. The bandits switch to aluminum. When Tarson holds Marasi behind an aluminum gun, Wax freezes again, until Marasi head-butts her captor. Wax shoots Tarson in the arm and the masked leader in the head, then flies her up to the harpists’ balcony. He crushes two bandits with a Pushed harp and tears through the chandeliers in a storm of crystal to reach Wayne, who heals a gut wound from his goldmind. Then Wax Pushes on Wayne’s metalminds and flings him bodily at the last of the bandits. Marasi, a member of the ladies’ target club, picks up a crushed bandit’s rifle and drops the final two.

Twenty-five bandits are dead and six captured. Constable-General Brettin is furious with Wax anyway. Steris has been carried off, and the masked leader’s body is gone. A man shot in the head who gets up and walks away gives Wax a suspect.

Lord Harms will pay for Steris’s rescue. Marasi calls the next morning and finds Wax awake among newly bought metallurgy equipment, working out the gun’s alloy. Together they read the pattern: the kidnapped women descend from Spook, the Lord Mistborn of three centuries before. Someone is collecting Allomantic bloodlines, very likely to breed them. Marasi admits she is not Steris’s cousin but her illegitimate half-sister.

Wayne walks into the Fourth Octant constabulary as “Captain Guffon Trenchant” of the Seventh. Right under Brettin’s nose, he works the captured Vanishers as both lawman and fellow crook. Back at the mansion Tillaume brings tea: one cup, not three. Wayne snatches it, and it is poisoned. The butler draws a gun, and Wax Pushes his steel vest button into him. While they tend to Wayne, Tillaume crawls to his basket and sets off a bomb. Wayne’s bubble buys a moment, Wax taps his weight, and the three crash through the floor to the room below. Wayne’s back is burned. Tillaume dies in his own blast.

Believed dead, they slip out by carriage to an abandoned Vanisher hideout, a foundry by a canal dock in the Fifth Octant. Marasi learns why Wayne carries canes and not guns: as a youth he robbed a man and killed him by accident, and his hands have shaken on a gun ever since. Wayne and Marasi find an expensive cigar box. Wax looks at it and asks Marasi whether she has heard of Miles Dagouter.

Miles is a former lawman of True Madil, a Twinborn Augur and Bloodmaker who Compounds gold to heal from almost anything. He now runs the Vanishers from a new hideout in a foundry beneath the Ironspine. He forbids his men to kill the beggars who saw them, because he still thinks of himself as a lawkeeper. His paymaster, a man in black silk and a turquoise vest whom he knows as Mister Suit, scolds him for his temper at the wedding. Miles promises to kill Wax.

Wax and Wayne tell Marasi what they are up against, and Wax lets her know that he knows her secret. She is a Pulser, who burns cadmium to make a bubble of slow time, and she calls the power useless. The three go out to the Outer Estates to study a robbery site where a canal runs beside the track. On the train back, a bullet tears through their carriage. Miles is in the next car, and he has jammed Wayne’s and Marasi’s doors shut. On the roof of the speeding train he heals every wound Wax gives him and makes his case:

“An alloy, Wax. The best parts of both made into one.”

Law blended with justice as he sees it: the argument gives the book its title. Miles throws Wax off the train. Wax Pushes along the rails to catch up, flicks a spent cartridge at Miles and Pushes him off instead.

With nowhere safe left, they go to Ranette, a gunsmith from the Roughs, who opens her red-brick door with a shotgun in Wax’s face. Wayne buys peace with the aluminum gun. Inside its grip she finds a hidden plea for help from Nouxil, a gunsmith who has gone missing. For the price of a field report she lends Wax her prototype revolver, Vindication, named for the Ascendant Warrior, and her new Hazekiller rounds. Marasi gets a rifle and a pair of trousers. Wax sends Marasi to buy strong fishing nets. Miles reports his failure to Suit, who names his organization, the Set, lends him two Allomancers called Push and Pull, and leaves the city. Wax works out the Vanishers’ next target: House Tekiel’s new, supposedly unrobbable freight car, the Breaknaught. Marasi comes close to saying what she feels for him, and he steers the talk away.

The sting is pure Wayne. At the station he plays an old woman, then a member of the Tekiel family, then a Tekiel guard. He stages an attack and hurls the “wounded” Wax into the Breaknaught, a safe welded onto a freight car with six-inch steel walls. He slams the door, and its twelve-hour timer seals it. That evening, from a hillside, Wayne and Marasi finally see how the trick works. The phantom train is a hand-propelled rail wagon behind a wooden engine front with a blazing lamp. A rotary gun cuts down the Tekiel guards, and a crane on a canal barge lifts the Breaknaught off the train and sets down a replica.

Miles guesses that Wax is inside. In the tunnel beneath the Ironspine he winches off the vault door, to find dynamite taped behind it on a string, and Wax pulls the string. Tarson knocks Vindication from Wax’s hand. Wayne and Marasi blow open the roof doors, and Wayne drops in to take on Tarson. Wax chases his gun up through the hole and fights Push and Pull on the Ironspine’s steel until Marasi shoots Pull. Back below, Wax springs the fishing-net trap on Miles, who blows himself free with dynamite in his own hand. The blast leaves Wax badly hurt, and Wayne takes a bullet in the arm.

Mist pours in through the broken roof, and Harmony speaks to Wax: he did do something about the Vanishers. He sent Wax. Right in front of him is his own trunk, which Tillaume had passed to Mister Suit. When Miles holds Marasi at gunpoint, Wax walks out of the mist in his mistcoat, with a pair of revolvers and a shotgun resting on each shoulder, smiling, and fires both shotguns into Miles. A Hazekiller round kills Push: when he Pushes it back, its ceramic part keeps coming. Wax frees Steris and Nouxil, brings the Vanishers’ building down with his stored weight, and sends Steris running for the constables.

Then the Prologue comes back. Tarson takes Marasi as a shield, the way Tan held Lessie, and this time Wax does not freeze. He fires from inside Wayne’s speed bubble and watches the bullet veer as it leaves. As the bubble drops, he fires again. The second bullet strikes the first and turns it into Tarson’s head, ruining Wayne’s lucky hat. Miles, still unkillable, beats Wax with his bare hands, and Wax lets him. Marasi is burning cadmium, and outside her slowness bubble hours pass while Wayne fetches the constables. They arrive at dawn and take Miles alive.

At the constabulary Wax praises Marasi’s courage. When she begins to say what she feels, he gently turns her away, with a twinge of regret. Brettin, against every expectation, grants him a citywide deputized forbearance, which lets him keep working as a lawman. Steris lets her guard down for once: she admits her own flaws and accepts his. When he tells her he means to take Brettin’s offer, she replies that every man must have his hobbies. The engagement stands.

Miles is tried, with Marasi helping the prosecution, and goes before a firing squad with his metalminds stripped. One hidden goldmind keeps him alive until the fifth volley, and he dies raving about Trell while Marasi watches. Using numbers from Miles’s cigar box, Wax tracks Mister Suit to a train and finds his uncle Edwarn, alive. Edwarn says he has Telsin and the kidnapped women. He has made his profit by buying up, for pennies, the Tekiel interests the robberies ruined, knowing the stolen goods would be recovered, and he thanks Wax for disposing of Miles. Wax swears to stop him, and Edwarn has him thrown off the back of the train, but not before Wax sweeps his uncle’s appointment book off the table.

Marasi follows a cloaked man into an alley and meets Ironeyes: Marsh, Kelsier’s brother, the figure Elendel’s legends call Death. He apologizes for tugging at her emotions and gives her a small book for Wax. At the station Wax finds Wayne, settles their bet on Suit’s identity, and shows him the appointment book. The book closes in Wax’s thoughts:

“He would see this to the end. Roughs honor.”