The Bands of Mourning (Mistborn #6) - Brandon Sanderson Page 0,85
whole thing aluminum?” Wax asked.
“Yup!”
“It must be worth a fortune,” Wax said, standing and putting his back to the wall. The balcony was in front of him, the hallway he’d come down to his left. The kill squad would be following soon.
“Conveniently, I’ve had a few hundred years to save up,” MeLaan said. “It—”
Wax pulled her to cover beside the wall with him; she was actually lighter than he had anticipated, considering that she had metal bones.
“What?” she asked softly.
Wax raised a coin, listening for footfalls. On the balcony before him, the Terriswoman twitched. When he heard the footstep he increased his weight a fraction, then spun around the corner and grabbed the first man’s gun in one hand, twisting it toward the floor. It fired ineffectively, and Wax pressed his other hand against the man’s chest and Pushed on the coin there.
Man and coin went flying back down the hallway toward his fellows, who leaped to the side. Wax was left with the aluminum gun, which he flipped in the air and caught, squeezing off four shots. The first pulled a little left, hitting the enemy in the arm, but he was able to place the next shots right in their chests.
All three dropped. The fourth man groaned from the floor where Wax had Pushed him.
“Damn,” MeLaan said.
“Says the woman who just ripped half her arm off.”
“It goes back on,” MeLaan said, picking up her forearm, which she slid back over the blade. Blood dribbled from where she’d broken the skin. “See? Good as new.”
Wax snorted, tucking the stolen aluminum gun into his waistband. “You can get out on your own?”
She nodded. “Want me to recover the guns you checked?”
“Can you?”
“Probably.”
“That would be wonderful.” Wax walked to the Terriswoman and checked to see that she was dead, then fished in her pockets until he came up with the gun she’d used to kill Kelesina. There was something else in her pocket as well. A metal bracelet of pure gold.
The Terriswoman took this off Kelesina, Wax thought, turning it over in his fingers as he remembered the moment earlier, when the murderer had knelt beside Kelesina’s body.
He burned steel, and his hunch proved correct. While he could sense the bracelet, the line was much thinner than it should have been. This was a metalmind, and one heavily Invested with healing power.
“Was Kelesina Terris?”
“How should I know?” MeLaan asked.
He pocketed the bracelet and grabbed the box telegraph device—which he wanted to send to Elendel for inspection—and tossed it to MeLaan. “Bring that, if you don’t mind, and meet us at the hotel. Be ready to leave the city. I doubt we’re staying the night.”
“And you were so certain we’d be out of here without a fight.”
“I never said that. I said it wouldn’t get so bad that I needed Wayne. And it didn’t.”
“A semantic technicality.”
“I’m a nobleman. Might as well learn something from my peers.” He saluted her with the small gun, then dropped off the balcony and used a coin to slow himself. “Steris?”
She crawled from a nearby shrub. “How did it go?”
“Poorly,” Wax said, looking up toward the ceiling, then removing his dinner jacket. “I may have accidentally let them implicate us in Lady Kelesina’s murder.”
“Bother,” Steris said.
“Their evidence will depend on whether they can trace the bullets back to me,” Wax said, “and whether they recover any of my prints from the area. Either way, they’ll be producing fake witnesses to try to make it look like I came down here specifically to assassinate Kelesina. Grab on.”
Steris grabbed him with, he noted, no small amount of eagerness. She really did enjoy this part. He took the bullets from his .22 and held them in one hand, then launched off the coin below to shoot them toward the ceiling. He flung the bullets toward the skylights and Pushed them in a spray to weaken a window, then raised his arm—wrapped in his jacket—over his head and crashed them through the glass and out into the swirling mists.
They landed on the roof as Wax got his bearings. Out in the mists, he felt better almost immediately, and his hand—which had been smarting where the Terriswoman smacked his gun away—stopped throbbing.
“Did you learn anything useful?” Steris asked.
“Not sure,” Wax said. “Most of what I overheard was about a rebellion against Elendel. I know Edwarn is heading somewhere important. He called it the second site? And he said something about what I think is that little cube Marasi found.”