“My lord?” she asked. “Have you slept at all since the kidnapping?”
He didn’t reply.
“Lord Waxillium,” she said sternly. “You mustn’t neglect your own well-being. Running yourself to rust will do no good for anyone.”
“Lady Steris was taken on my watch, Marasi,” he said softly. “I didn’t lift a finger. I had to be goaded into it.” He shook his head, as if to drive away bad thoughts. “But you needn’t worry about me. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway, so I might as well be productive.”
“Have you come to any conclusions?” she asked, genuinely curious.
“Too many,” he said. “Often, the problem is not coming up with solutions—it’s deciding which of them actually happened and which are pure fancy. Those men, for instance. They weren’t professionals.” He paused. “I’m sorry, that probably doesn’t make any sense.”
“No, it does,” she said. “The way they kept itching to shoot the building up, they way their boss let himself be goaded into shooting Peterus…”
“Exactly,” he said. “They had experience as thieves, certainly. But they weren’t refined at it.”
“A simple way to determine the type of criminal is by whom they kill and when,” Marasi said, quoting a line from one of her textbooks. “Murders end with a hanging; thievery alone can mean escaping death. Those men, if they’d really known what they were doing, would have left quickly, glad they hadn’t needed to do any shooting.”
“So they’re street toughs,” Waxillium said. “Common criminals.”
“With very expensive weapons,” Marasi said, frowning. “Which implies an outside backer, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” Waxillium said, growing eager and leaning in. “At first, I was very confused. I was convinced this was all about the kidnappings, the thievery just a front to disguise that. Then the men last night were genuinely interested in what they were taking. It baffled me. Judging by the price of aluminum, and how much they had to spend forging those guns, they’ve spent a fortune to make a lesser amount from last night’s robbery. It didn’t make sense.”
“Unless we’re dealing with two groups working together,” Marasi said, understanding. “Someone has given funds to the bandits, allowing them to pull off these robberies. The backing group, however, demands that they kidnap certain people, making it seem like the result of random hostage-takings.”
“Yes! He—whoever the backer is—wants the kidnapped women. And the Vanishers, they get to keep whatever they steal, or perhaps a percentage of it. It is all meant to use the robberies as a cover-up, but it’s possible the bandits themselves don’t understand how they’re being used.”
Marasi frowned, biting her lip. “But that means…”
“What?”
“Well, I’d hoped that this was mostly over with,” she explained. “Your initial count of the thieves was just under forty, and you and Wayne killed or incapacitated thirty or so of them.”
“Thirty-one,” he said absently.
“I had assumed those remaining might cut their losses and flee. Killing three-quarters of a group should be enough to disband them, one would think.”
“It would, in my experience.”
“But this is different,” she said. “The bandit boss has an outside backer offering wealth and weaponry.” She frowned. “The boss spoke of ‘payback,’ as I recall. Could he be both the boss and the backer?”
“Perhaps,” Waxillium said. “But I doubt it. Part of the point of all this would be to have someone else doing the dangerous work for you.”
“Agreed,” she said. “But the boss does seem to have his own ideology. Perhaps he was chosen because of it. Criminals often use basic rationalization skills to justify what they are doing, and a man who could capitalize on that—along with promising riches and lots of fun shooting things—would be ideal as a ‘middle manager,’ so to speak.”
Waxillium smiled broadly.
“What?” she asked.
“You realize I spent all night coming to those conclusions? You just reached them in all of … what? Ten minutes?”
She sniffed. “I had some modest help from you.”
“It might be said that I had modest help from myself, technically.”
“The voices whispering to you as a result of sleep deprivation do not count, my lord.”
His smile grew, and then he stood. “Come. Tell me what you make of this.”