Shadows of Self (45 page)

“Drunken steam,” Wax said back, latest passphrases exchanged. Innate was authentic. “Locking your guards out was foolhardy. They would have fought for you, protected you. We chased her off one time before.”

“
You
chased her off,” Innate said, walking back to his desk and picking up his pad. “The rest were useless. Even poor Drim.” He went back to his pacing, speaking the lines of his speech to himself and practicing emphasis.

Wax fumed, feeling dismissed. This was the man they struggled to protect? Wax made his way to the window. It was open, surprisingly, letting in wisps of mist. They didn’t travel far. He’d heard legends of the mists filling rooms, but that rarely happened.

He leaned against the window, looking out at the darkness, listening with half an ear to Innate’s speech. It was inflammatory and dismissive. He claimed to feel the problems the people had, but called them peasants.

This would just make things worse.
She wants that,
Wax thought.
She wants to free the city from Harmony by making it angry.

She knew what Innate was going to say. Of
course
she knew. She’d been leading them around this entire time. Every clue Wax had found so far had been carefully planted for him. So what did he do? Stop Innate’s speech? What if
that
was what she wanted?

He tapped his finger on the windowsill. Tap. Tap.

Squish.

He looked down, then blinked. A wad of chewed gum had been stuck here. Wax lifted his finger, and—as he contemplated it—something started to fall into place. Something he’d been missing. Bleeder had set this all up from the start.

Wax’s suspicions had begun because she’d deliberately alerted him by wearing Bloody Tan’s face. That had been a conscious ploy on her part, a way to start the festivities. Everything was moving on her timetable.

Bleeder had had everything already in place when this night arrived. She’d been planning this for a long time. Far longer than he’d assumed.

So where was the best place to hide?

Rusts.

Wax reached for his gun and spun.

He found himself facing down Governor Innate, who had taken out a sidearm and leveled it. “Damn it, Wax,” the governor said. “Just a few minutes more and I’d have had this. You see too far. You can always see a
little
too far.”

Wax froze there, hand on his gun. He met the governor’s eyes, and hissed out slowly. “You knew the passphrase,” Wax whispered, “but of course you did. I gave it to you. When did you kill him? How long has the city been ruled by an impostor?”

“Long enough.”

“The governor wasn’t your target. You think bigger than that—I should have seen. But Drim … He was in the saferoom when you entered below. Is that why you killed him? No. He’d have known you were gone.”

“He knew all along,” Bleeder said. “He was mine. But tonight, I killed him because of you, Wax. You’d shot me up…”

“You had on the governor’s clothing underneath the cloak,” Wax said. “Rusts! I’d bloodied you. So you needed an excuse for why the governor was covered in blood, an excuse to pull off your shirt and stanch a wound.”

She held the gun on him, immobile. The weapon didn’t register to his Allomancy. Aluminum. She was prepared, of course. But she seemed torn. She didn’t want to kill him. She’d never wanted to kill him, for some reason.

So Wax yelled for help.

It was risky, but nothing ever ended well when you obeyed the person with the gun on you. As he’d suspected, Bleeder didn’t shoot at him as the door burst open. Wax pulled out his gun and fired at Bleeder, to distract her as he dug in his gunbelt for the last needle that MeLaan had given him.

The guards turned their guns toward Wax and started firing.

Idiot,
he thought, throwing himself toward the governor’s desk for cover. Of course they’d do that. “Wait!” he said. “The governor has been taken. Don’t—”

Bleeder gunned down the guards. Wax rolled behind the desk, but still heard it as they cried out in shock, their own governor—so far as they knew—shooting them down. Wax winced, cursing. Those deaths were upon him.

“I guess the rest of the constables will be upon us soon,” Bleeder said. “They’re not free yet. Neither are you, despite how I’ve tried.…”

Wax peeked up over the desk, then ducked down again as she swung the gun toward him. The governor’s face was twisted in a mask of anger and frustration.

“Why couldn’t you have given me a little longer?” she demanded. “So close. Now I have to kill you, claim you were the kandra, and blame you for shooting my guards. That way I can still talk to the crowd, free them.…”

Yet she didn’t come for him. She still seemed upset. Best to take advantage of that.

“MeLaan, go!” Wax shouted, then Pushed on the nails in the floor, flinging himself up into the air.

One of the corpses at Bleeder’s feet grabbed her around the legs.

Wax Pushed off the wall, leaping toward Bleeder. She growled, then slapped his hand as he landed, knocking the needle free. Rusts, she was
strong
. She kicked MeLaan off as Wax dove for the fallen needle.

She became a blur. As he tried to grab the needle, Bleeder snatched it and spun around, slamming it down into MeLaan’s shoulder. It was done in an eyeblink.

Then she lurched to a stop. She seemed jarred by the motion. Her metalmind storage, at long last, had run dry.

Wax pulled out his gun and fired, lying with his back on the floor. The bullets ripped her skin, but did nothing else. Nearby, MeLaan’s shape distorted—face drooping and the skin going transparent.

Wax lay on the ground, his emptied gun pointed at Bleeder, whose skin re-formed from the wounds. They stared at one another for an extended moment before boots in the hallway outside made Bleeder curse, then dash for the window. Wax grabbed his other gun, following, then threw himself down as shots sounded outside.

He waited a moment, then glanced up, but didn’t spot her in the swirling mists. Wax cursed, rolling his arm in its socket. Rusts. That bullet hole he’d taken earlier in the night was bleeding again, and the pain was returning. He thought he’d chewed enough painkiller to keep it away.

“You all right?” he asked MeLaan, who had managed to sit up.

“Yeah,” she said, though the word was mangled by her melted face. “I made them do this to me once to test it out. I’ll be fine in a few minutes.”

“Thanks for the save,” Wax said, anxiously scanning the room for hidden compartments with his steelsight. Quivering lines in the closet. Could he be so lucky? He rushed over and yanked it open.

Wayne—tied securely and gagged—tumbled out and hit the floor with a thump. He was alive, thank Harmony. Wax knelt down, sighed in relief, and loosened the gag. Wayne looked like he’d been stabbed in the leg, and his metalminds had been stripped away so he couldn’t heal, but he was alive.

“Wax!” Wayne said. “It’s the governor. Bugger’s got the same ‘a’ as MeLaan!”

“I know,” Wax said. “You’re lucky. She probably wanted to harvest your Metalborn abilities with spikes, otherwise she’d have killed you right off. Why didn’t you warn anyone?”

“Was going to, but I needed to check first. Got too close to the window, and she rusting came right out for me. Had knocked me upside the head, stripped off my metalminds, and had me over her shoulder all in an eyeblink. Drug me up here after, real quiet-like. You get her?”

“No,” Wax said, working on Wayne’s bonds. “She ran off.”

Gunshots sounded outside.

“And you ain’t chasin’ her down?”

“Had to check on you first.”

“I’m fine,” Wayne said. “Stop untying me and look in my pocket.”

Wax felt at Wayne’s pocket, pulling out a small pouch.

“From Ranette,” Wayne said.

Wax removed a single bullet cartridge. He held it up as a tense set of constables, led by Marasi, piled into the room.

The newcomers called for an explanation. Wax left them to interrogate Wayne, instead seeking the mists once more.

23

Wax was a bullet in the night, rushing through the mists and disturbing them with his passing. He had become the hunter rather than the game, though the transition might have taken too long. He soared upward first to get a view of the area. An ever-growing crowd surrounded the governor’s mansion. Roaring. Calling for change, or perhaps just blood.

Would he bring down Bleeder only to find her victorious in a city destroyed?

He couldn’t worry about that at the moment. Instead he sought signs, clues, a story. Nobody passed, even at night, without leaving a trail. Perhaps it would be too faint for him to locate, but it would exist.

There. A group of people pulling
away
from the mansion, instead of crowding toward it. Wax landed in a storm, mistcoat flaring. This was the mansion’s garden, near a large workers’ shed. Wax studied the pattern of people moving away.

The gunfire just a moment ago,
he thought.
It wasn’t to shoot someone, but to clear the crowd.
She was out of Feruchemical speed and fleeing frantically, and had opened fire into the air to clear this pocket of people. As he listened he picked out cries of confusion, some people claiming the constables had opened fire on the crowd. Others claimed they’d seen the governor himself running, trying to escape the mansion.

Wax loaded Vindication with the single bullet Ranette had sent, placing it in one of the special chambers he could quickly spin to at will. Then he inched open the door to the shed, crouching beside the doorway so as to not present a profile. The mists were bright with torchlight this night, but that light didn’t penetrate to the dark shed. Wax searched through the shadows, until he saw something.

A bone? Yes, and draped over it cloth. He picked out a fallen cravat, a white buttoning shirt … the governor’s clothing. Bleeder had stashed another body in here, and had fled to swap into it. How fast was she? MeLaan had said that Bleeder could change faster than she could, but that nobody was as quick as TenSoon.

That didn’t tell him much. MeLaan had taken minutes, TenSoon seconds. Wax held Vindication beside his head and slipped through the doorway. If he could find Bleeder in midtransformation …

“I can still free you,” a voice whispered from the darkness inside. “Perhaps I have lost the city, but I didn’t come here for them. Not at first. I came for you.”

“Why me?” Wax asked, searching furiously through the darkness, palm sweating as he held Vindication. “Damn it, creature,
why me
?”

“I have deafened him,” Bleeder whispered. “I have cut out his tongue, pierced his eyes, but still he can act. You are his hands, Waxillium Ladrian. He may be deaf, blind, and mute … but still, with you, he can move his pawns.”

“I’m my own man, Bleeder,” Wax said, finally spotting what he thought was her silhouette, crouched at the back of the dusty chamber, beside a rack of shovels. “Perhaps I serve Harmony, but I do so because I wish it.”

“Ah,” she whispered. “Do you know, Wax, how long he cultivated you? How long he teased you, led you by the nose? How he sent you to be hardened by the Roughs, so he could draw you back in once you had aged properly, like leather being cured.…”

Wax raised Vindication, but the side of the building burst outward, showering pieces of wood across the lawn. Wax tried to draw a bead on her, but didn’t fire, and Bleeder ducked out. He had to be very careful with this shot. Ranette had sent but one bullet, and only it would matter in this fight.

Bleeder fled into the night and launched into the air. The breaking wall had been an indication, but this was confirmation. Her metalmind, drained of the speed she’d stored up, was now useless. She’d left it on the ground beside the governor’s bones, and had become a Coinshot instead.

Wax followed, Pushing on the same nails, sending himself into the sky. He could see why she’d chosen to become a Coinshot; Steelpushing lent great maneuverability and speed, and logically gave her the best chance of escaping.

There was a problem with that, of course.

Steel was
his
domain.

*   *   *

The pile of bones on the floor of the little shack proved that at least one person was having a worse night than Wayne was. He nudged the pile with his toe, then grimaced at his wounded leg. Rusting inconvenient, that was. He had to grab the wall for support.

He looked toward Marasi. “I can’t decide,” he said, “if the governor already bein’ dead means we did a really terrible job, or a really good one.”

“How,” Marasi replied, kneeling beside the corpse, “could you see this as anything
other
than terrible?”

“Well, see, we weren’t the ones what was in charge of keepin’ him alive when he died.” Wayne shrugged. “Guess anytime I find a corpse and it ain’t
my
fault they’re dead, I feel a little relieved.”

MeLaan strolled into the cottage, still wearing the body of the guardswoman—though she had moved back to speaking with her own voice now. “It’s getting rough out there. We’ll want to get back into the mansion soon.”