Her shuffling earned a curse of annoyance from one of the reporters, and she finally got a sight of Innate on his podium. He moved into a longer rant against the press. Perhaps that was why the reporter had been so testy. She certainly would be.…
Marasi frowned. That guardsman who had been moving and shuffling and blocking her view had turned, and she could see a very odd expression on his face, like a grimace of pain. And he was whispering—at least his mouth was moving. Nobody else seemed to notice him, as they were focused on the speech.
So Marasi was the first one to scream as the guardsman pulled a revolver from underneath his coat and leveled it at the governor.
Wayne prowled around the dead woman’s room. It was too clean. A room where people lived should have a healthy amount of clutter. Miss Steelrunner hadn’t spent much time here.
In the other room, Wax inspected the body. Wayne left him to that; he had no interest in poking at a corpse’s insides, even if Wax claimed it was important. Wayne, instead, went looking for more interesting bits of life. His first discovery was a small cache of bottles in the cabinet under the bathroom washbasin. Various forms of alcohol, the harder stuff, each a little gone. All save one, which was empty. Wayne gave it a sniff. Port.
Not surprising, he thought. He took the whiskey and gave it a good swig. Bleh. Too much bite, and far too warm. He took another swig as he spun about in the main room. These fancy neighborhoods were too quiet. People should be shouting outside. That was right for the city. He checked the trunk beside her sleeping pallet and found it contained three outfits, each clean and carefully folded. The Terris robes were on the bottom. Creases had set; these weren’t worn often. The other two were modern designs, the one on top more daring than the one below.
He took another swig of whiskey and wandered back into the room with the corpse. Wax had removed his hat and coat, and knelt beside the body in his vest and slacks.
“You found the alcohol, I see,” Wax said. “How uncharacteristic.”
Wayne grinned, offering the bottle to Wax, who took a small swig. “Ugh,” he noted, handing it back. “This murder is troubling, Wayne.”
“I’m sure she felt so.”
“Too many questions. Why did she leave the Village, and why choose to live here? It doesn’t feel very Terris.”
“Oh, I can tell you why she was here,” Wayne said.
“Well?”
“Think of yourself as a sheltered Terriswoman in her forties,” Wayne said. “Old enough to have missed the chance to be a wild youth, and starting to wish you’d done something more daring.”
“The Terris don’t long for wildness,” Wax said, taking notes in a little book as he inspected the woman’s wound. “They aren’t daring. They’re a reserved people.”
“Ain’t we Terris?”
“We’re exceptions.”
“Everyone’s an exception to something, Wax. This girl, she left the Village and found a whole world out here. She must have had an adventurous side.”
Whiskey.
“She did,” Wax admitted. “I didn’t know her well, but she’d sneak out of the Village as a youth. That was long ago.”
“And she left again,” Wayne said, “on account of the Village being so dull as to bore the sense out of a scribe. Hell, even Steris would hate that place.”
“Wayne…”
“Our miss,” Wayne said, waving the bottle toward the dead woman, “she tried to remain conservative at first, so she got a job as a clerk, a good Terris occupation. She convinced herself that a nice apartment—where she was safe from the supposed horrors of lesser neighborhoods—was worth the expense. Simple stuff.
“But then some workers at the jeweler took her out, and she let herself drink. She liked that. Awakened memories of sneaked drinks as a youth. She wanted more, so she bought a whole mess of different kinds of spirits to try them all out. She liked port best, by the way.”
“Makes sense,” Wax said.
“Now we find her with increasingly liberal dresses, showing more skin, spending most evenings out. Give her a few more months, and she’d have turned into a right proper girl to have a good time with.”
Whiskey.
“She didn’t get a few more months,” Wax said softly. He took something from his own pocket and handed it out to Wayne. A book, bound in leather, pocket-sized. “Have a look through this.”
Wayne took it, flipping through some pages. “What is it?”
“The book that Death gave me.”
Marasi’s shout was lost in the roar as the governor ended his speech. Polite applause from the nobility, shouts and curses from most of the workers. The noise swallowed her shout like a single splash in a breaking tide.
She fumbled for her handbag as the guard in the dark coat sighted with his gun at the governor. No. There wasn’t time for her gun. She had to do something else.
She jumped for the man and slowed time.
She had metal in her this time—she’d made sure, after being embarrassed this morning. Her Allomancy created a bubble of greatly slowed-down time, enveloping herself, the would-be assassin, and a few bystanders.
She grabbed the man around the legs, but her speed bubble did the real work, trapping him inside—as everyone outside became a blur. The man squeezed his gun’s trigger, and the crack of a gunshot rang amid the strange warping of sounds that she heard inside a bubble from those outside. One of his fellow guards, also caught in her bubble, shouted in alarm.
The fired bullet hit the perimeter of the speed bubble and was deflected. It shot out over the blur of the crowd, the governor’s figure vanishing as—she assumed—he was rushed away. Marasi’s lunge wasn’t enough to topple the would-be assassin, and so she lay there half on the steps, holding on to his legs and feeling foolish, until one of his companions hit him harder, knocking him down.
She dropped the speed bubble and jumped back, the sudden roar of the crowd washing over her. The captured man struggled, shouting, as other guards piled onto him.
“So basically, with this … Hemalurgy,” Wax said, “you can make someone Metalborn.”
Wayne sniffled as he flipped through the book, and his cheeks were breaking out in some kind of rash. Storing health, Wax thought. Wayne often ended up with odd rashes when he did that. They sat in the main room of Idashwy’s apartment, away from the corpse, which they’d draped with a sheet. They’d paused briefly in their inspection to send the newsboy for the local constables.
Wax ground his teeth. Idashwy’s wound … it was just like those described in the book. Somebody had killed this woman with a spike through the chest, stealing her Feruchemical talent. The book described the process as “tearing off a chunk of someone’s soul.” Using the spike, one could effectively attach that piece of soul to one’s own, granting the powers of the deceased.
In the old days, Inquisitors had driven the spike right through the body of the one to be killed into the body of the person to gain the powers. That prevented any power from being lost. Apparently, coating the newly made spike in blood could achieve a similar effect.