The Alloy of Law recap

Three centuries after Harmony remade a dying world, Waxillium Ladrian is a lawman from the frontier Roughs called home to Elendel to run a bankrupt noble house. He intends to give the work up, but a gang called the Vanishers is stripping railway cars and abducting noblewomen, and after they attack a dinner party he is pulled back in. With his old partner Wayne and a criminology student named Marasi Colms, Wax traces the robberies to stolen aluminum, the one metal Allomancy cannot affect, and to Miles Dagouter, once the Roughs' most celebrated lawman, who heals from any wound almost instantly and who believes Elendel's law deserves to be robbed. The kidnappings turn out to be a breeding program: the women are being taken for the Allomantic and Feruchemical bloodlines they carry. Wax breaks the operation on a moving train, outlasting Miles rather than out-shooting him, and frees the captives. Miles is executed, warning that his employers are already in the city. Wax discovers that his supposedly dead uncle Edwarn is one of them, working for an organization called the Set, and chooses to remain both a lord and a lawman.

Roughly three centuries before this book, the world was ruled by an immortal tyrant and buried under falling ash. A half-skaa thief called Kelsier raised a crew against him and died in the attempt; a young woman named Vin finished what he started. What followed nearly ended everything: two opposed gods, Ruin and Preservation, were loosed, and Vin destroyed the first of them at the cost of her own life. A Terris scholar named Sazed took up both powers together, became the god Harmony, and used them in balance to repair the planet, stopping the ashfall, quieting the mountains and restoring a normal sun and green land. He left behind the Words of Founding, the record of the old world and the instructions for the new one, and the survivors walked out of the last storage cavern into what is now called the Elendel Basin. Three hundred years on, all of that is scripture. Kelsier is worshipped as the Survivor, Vin as the Ascendant Warrior, and Harmony is a god who is known to answer. Their descendants have built cities, railways, electric light and revolvers. Allomancy and Feruchemy survive but thinned: full Mistborn are essentially gone, and most people with power are Mistings who can burn a single metal, or Twinborn who hold one Allomantic and one Feruchemical ability. The Basin's noble houses trace their lines back to that founding, and outside the Basin lie the Roughs, a frontier the city rarely thinks about.

Waxillium Ladrian spent twenty years as a lawman in the Roughs, the frontier beyond the settled Basin, with his partner Wayne. He is Twinborn: a Coinshot who Pushes on metal, and a Skimmer who can store his own weight, a combination that lets him fly on a Pushed coin and land like a dropped building. That life ended when a confrontation with a killer cost him Lessie, the woman he loved, and family duty called him back to Elendel. Six months on he is Lord Waxillium Ladrian, head of a great house left nearly bankrupt by the death of his uncle Edwarn, and he has locked his guns away. Wayne turns up anyway, unwilling to accept the retirement. Meanwhile the city is plagued by the Vanishers, a gang that stops railway cars and makes entire cargoes disappear, and who have lately begun taking hostages. At a dinner party where Wax is introduced to Steris Harms, the plain-spoken, list-making heiress his house needs him to marry, and to her cousin Marasi Colms, a criminology student far more interested in Wax's reputation than in the food, the Vanishers attack. Wax fights them, but they get away with hostages, and he is pulled straight back into the work he swore off.

Wax takes the case, formally at Lord Harms's request and informally because he cannot leave it alone. Working out of his study with Wayne, and with Marasi, whose academic knowledge of criminal statistics turns out to be genuinely useful in the field, he starts on the pattern behind the robberies: the Vanishers hit specific freight, and they have increasingly been taking women from noble families. The constabulary, whose local commander resents an amateur lord playing lawman on his ground, gives them little help. Wax calls on the gunsmith Ranette, an old acquaintance from the Roughs who tolerates him and detests Wayne, for equipment he no longer keeps at home. The trail keeps returning to aluminum, the one metal Allomancy cannot touch and therefore worth more than gold to anyone planning to fight Metalborn. Wax also begins to suspect that these are not simple robberies at all: there is too much planning, too little profit, and nobody has demanded a ransom for the women.

The investigation turns up how the Vanishers do it. There is no trick to the vanishing: they cut a railway car loose and take the whole thing, covering the work with Allomantic muscle and with aluminum that blinds anyone trying to track metal. Following that, Wax and Wayne find out who they are dealing with. The Vanishers are led by Miles Dagouter, once the most famous lawman in the Roughs, known as Miles Hundredlives because he has survived injuries that should have killed him over and over. He is a Compounder, burning Allomantic gold on his own gold Feruchemy to regenerate almost any wound almost instantly, which makes ordinary weapons close to useless against him. He is also entirely certain that he is in the right, arguing that Elendel's law is a fiction serving the wealthy and that the frontier he protected for decades was left to rot by the city he is now robbing. He is not working alone, and he will not say for whom.

Wax confronts Miles directly and comes off badly; nothing he shoots stays shot. Pressed, he starts asking a different question: what is a gang with an aluminum stockpile and a list of noblewomen actually building toward? Marasi, who has kept pace with the men who assumed they were escorting her, proves to be a Pulser, an Allomancer who burns cadmium to slow time inside a bubble, the exact opposite of Wayne's bendalloy bubble that speeds it up. Together the two of them can do things on a battlefield that neither could alone. Steris, whose response to danger is to produce another contingency list, turns out to be steadier than her manners suggest. Following the aluminum and the missing women, Wax works out where the Vanishers will strike next, and begins to grasp that the captives were never meant to be sold or ransomed.

Wax pieces together the purpose behind the abductions: the women have been selected for their bloodlines and gathered so that particular Allomantic and Feruchemical inheritances can be bred into a single line. Miles is an instrument hired by someone with that long a plan and that much money, and the aluminum is being stockpiled for a fight nobody has declared. Wax, Wayne and Marasi move to intercept the operation before the prisoners are shipped beyond the reach of any law, knowing that Miles cannot be killed by ordinary means and that they will be badly outnumbered when they get there.

Wax, Wayne and Marasi take the fight to the Vanishers as the gang moves its prisoners by rail. Wayne's and Marasi's opposed time bubbles let three people hold off a force that should have overwhelmed them, and Wax duels Miles in the air alongside the moving train. Unable to out-shoot a man who heals faster than he can be wounded, Wax wins by exhausting him instead: Miles's stored gold runs out, and he is taken alive. The captives are freed and the Vanishers are broken. Miles goes to a firing squad unrepentant, and his last words are a warning that the people he served are already in Elendel and will come for him. In the aftermath Wax finds proof that his uncle Edwarn Ladrian, whose death brought him home to a ruined house, is alive and belongs to a secretive organization called the Set, which has been steering everything Miles did. Wax accepts that he cannot be only a house lord: he keeps his title and his engagement to Steris, Marasi takes a post with the constabulary, and Wayne stays. Wax also learns that the god of this world has been watching him personally.

The Vanishers are destroyed in a running fight along a railway line. Wax cannot kill Miles Hundredlives with bullets, so he wears him down instead until the gold that heals him is spent, and Miles is taken alive. The captives are recovered, and the purpose behind the abductions comes out: the women were selected for the Allomantic and Feruchemical traits in their bloodlines, gathered for a breeding program rather than for ransom. Miles refuses to name his employers and goes to a firing squad unrepentant; his last words are that they are already in Elendel and will come for him. Wax then finds proof that his uncle Edwarn Ladrian faked his own death and is one of them, part of a secretive, wealthy organization called the Set whose planning is measured in generations and whose stockpiling of aluminum, the one metal Allomancy cannot touch, was never about profit. House Ladrian's immediate financial crisis eases and Wax's engagement to Steris Harms stands, arranged and unromantic but not unkind. Marasi Colms takes a post with the city constabulary instead of returning to her studies, having proved herself in the field and discovered her own Allomancy along the way. Wayne stays in Elendel. Wax gives up the pretence that he can be only a house lord and takes on both roles at once, and he is left knowing that Harmony, the god who remade the world three centuries ago, has been paying attention to him and is prepared to say so directly.