The Alloy of Law - Brandon Sanderson [79]
Odd, that in a place so open, he could feel even more anxious and confined than when locked in a cell.
“The last railway robbery happened here,” Waxillium said. He held out his hand to the tracks—which rounded a bend just to their left—then moved his hand along their path, as if seeing something Wayne wasn’t. He often did things like that.
Wayne yawned, then took another bite of his pretzel. “What whasdat, sir? What whazzat sir? What whassat, sir?”
“Wayne, what are you babbling about?” Waxillium turned, inspecting the canal to the right. It was wide and deep here, intended for carrying barges full of food into the city.
“Practicing my pretzel guy,” Wayne said. “He had a great accent. Must have been from one of the new rim towns, right by the southern mountains.”
Waxillium glanced at him. “That hat looks ridiculous.”
“Fortunately, I can change hats,” Wayne said in the pretzel-guy accent, “while you, sir, are stuck with that face.”
“You two sound a lot like siblings,” Marasi said, watching curiously. “Do you realize that?”
“So long as I’m the handsome one,” Wayne said.
“The tracks here bend toward the canal,” Waxillium said. “The other robberies all happened near canals as well.”
“As I recall,” Marasi noted, “most of the railway lines parallel the canals. The canals were here first, and when the tracks were laid, it made sense to follow the established paths.”
“Yes,” Waxillium said. “But it’s especially striking here. Look how close the tracks get to the canal.”
His accent is changing, Wayne thought. Only six months back in the city, and it already shows. It’s more refined in some ways, less formal in others. Did people see how their voices were like living things? Move a plant, and it would change and adapt to the environment around it. Move a person, and the way they talked would grow, adapt, evolve.
“So that machinery the Vanishers are using,” Marasi said, “you’re thinking they can’t move it far on land? They have to ship it up the canal, and pick a place near the tracks to set it up and carry out their robbery?”
Her accent … Wayne thought. She uses more elevated diction around him than around me. She tried so hard to impress Wax. Did he see it? Probably not. The man had always been oblivious about women. Even Lessie.
“Yes,” Waxillium said, hiking down the hillside. “The question is, how did this thing—whatever it is—empty the freight cars so quickly and efficiently?”
“Why is that so odd?” Wayne said, following him. “If I’d been a Vanisher, I’d have brought a whole heap of men. That would let me finish the work faster.”
“This isn’t a question of simple manpower,” Waxillium said. “The train cars were locked, and some of the later ones had guards inside. When the cars arrived at their destination, they were still locked, but empty. Beyond that, from one of the cars, many heavy ingots of iron were stolen. There’s a bottleneck at the car door—beyond a certain point, more men wouldn’t have helped. There is no way they unloaded hundreds of ingots in under five minutes using just manpower.”
“A speed bubble?” Marasi asked.
“Could have helped,” Wax said, “but not much. You’d have the same bottleneck, and you can’t fit many people in a speed bubble. Let’s say you could have six workers inside, which would be really tight. They’d have to move the iron ingots up to the edge of the speed bubble, then drop the bubble and create another—you can’t move the bubbles once they’re up—and repeat.”
Wax shook his head, hands on hips. “The cost in bendalloy would be incredible. With one nugget worth about five hundred notes, Wayne can compress about two minutes into fifteen external seconds. To compress time equal to five minutes on the outside—gaining you enough time on the inside to move all of those iron bars—you’d need to spend ten thousand notes. The bars would be worth just a fraction of that; Harmony, you could buy your own train for that kind of money.