Bleeder
also known as Paalm, Lessie
A kandra of the Third Generation, named Paalm by her own kind and Bleeder by herself. Older than the destruction of the old world, almost as old as the Final Empire, and — Harmony tells Wax — she has gone mad: she has torn out one of her two Blessings, broken her Contract with Harmony, and learned to hide from him. She wears Bloody Tan's face among others, uses stolen Hemalurgic spikes to take Allomantic and Feruchemical powers a kandra was never supposed to have, and is studying Elendel toward some unannounced end. MB2:SoS:Ch 7
A still-unseen killer who walks behind the Fourth Octant murders. The pattern is hers: a Steelrunner's spike torn through the chest of Idashwy in her own kitchen; a four-position firefight at Winsting's party; a sheet from Idashwy's ledger left in her skirt pocket with a single sentence scrawled across it for Wax — *Someone else moves us, lawman* — the very words Bloody Tan said before pulling Lessie into the path of Wax's bullet. MB2:SoS:Ch 6 superseded at MB2:SoS:Ch 7
Wax's partner in the Roughs and the woman he loves — squarish-faced, dark hair pulled back in a tail, a half-smile habitually pulling at one corner of her mouth. Quick with a rifle, quicker with a joke, and a few months his junior, by her account. MB2:AoL:Prologue superseded at MB2:SoS:Ch 6
Known facts
- killed-at-feltrelKilled in the ruined chapel at Feltrel by a shot from Wax's revolver, fired at Bloody Tan as Tan held her at garrote-point; Tan yanked her into the path of the bullet.MB2:AoL:Prologue
- killed-granite-joeWas originally on Granite Joe's payroll, planted to put a crossbow bolt in Waxillium Ladrian when the trap closed — and instead turned the bolt on Joe and killed him with it, choosing Wax and what he stood for over the man who had bought her.MB2:SoS:Prologue
- uses-tans-wordsLeft a torn page of Idashwy's ledger folded in her skirt pocket with a single line scrawled across it in a different hand — *Someone else moves us, lawman* — the words Bloody Tan said in Feltrel before jerking Lessie into the path of Wax's bullet. Wax reads it as a personal address.MB2:SoS:Ch 6
- returned-childhood-coinThe coin Wax cut out of Rian's arm is the misstruck Lord Mistborn coin Uncle Edwarn gave him at twelve — the one he sold off years ago to outfit himself for the Roughs — with *Why did you leave, Wax?* scratched in tiny letters across the back. She has acquired it and put it back in his pocket.MB2:SoS:Ch 8
- speaks-through-earringHas learned to do what only Harmony should be able to do — push thoughts into the mind of someone wearing a Hemalurgic spike. Speaks into Wax's head at Lady ZoBell's party in a rasping crude whisper — *They dress in painted sequins. They drink wine. They laugh, and smile, and play, and dance, and eat, and quietly kill. All actors on a stage. That's what you are too, Waxillium Ladrian.*MB2:SoS:Ch 9
- i-am-the-surgeonCalls herself *the surgeon* when Wax presses her on whether she is wolf or rabbit — she is the cutter, the one who removes what does not belong. Frames Winsting's killing as duty rather than choice (*I killed him because he had to die. I killed him because nobody else would.*) and dismisses Harmony as *a poor excuse for a god* who *moves us like pieces on a board*.MB2:SoS:Ch 10
- can-only-send-not-receivePushes thoughts into Wax's head through his Hemalurgic earring but does not seem to be able to read his thoughts in return — when Wax whispers a reply aloud her line stays on its own track, missing what he says. Wax remembers Harmony's line that hearing thoughts comes from Preservation while pushing them comes from Ruin, and concludes that whichever spike she has stolen gives her only the pushing half.MB2:SoS:Ch 10
- drives-wedge-between-faithsKills the Survivorist Father Bin while wearing the face of the Pathian missionary Larskpur — denouncing the Survivor from the pulpit before pulling down the rear drape to display the impaled priest. Wax reads it on the alley wall outside (silver paint from her getaway coach) as a deliberate move to drive the city's two great religions against one another and topple the Pathian governor with the wreckage.MB2:SoS:Ch 12
- lord-rulers-own-kandraMeLaan names her *the Father's own* — the kandra the Lord Ruler kept on personal commission, always out on missions, almost always in character. She quashed rebellions and overthrew kingdoms for him and likely impersonated Inquisitors as a mole, which (MeLaan thinks) is where she learned enough of Allomancy and Feruchemy to wield them through stolen Hemalurgic spikes. After the Lord Ruler's fall she transferred that fanatical loyalty to Harmony — and then, at the dawn of a new world that no longer needed missions, broke.MB2:SoS:Ch 13
- had-a-second-pathian-helperWas not alone at the Survivorist pub raid — a terrified young rioter Wax catches outside a Pathian sanctuary confirms *two* of them came into the bar dressed in Pathian robes to curse out the Survivor. Wax reads it against MeLaan's insistence that Paalm has always worked alone, and reads it together with the ZoBell ambush: she has help, almost certainly from his uncle Edwarn and the Set.MB2:SoS:Ch 14
- broke-the-eastern-dam-as-johnstThe dam-breach trial that Marasi reopens in the precinct records office reads, on the second pass, as a kandra swap-out: Johnst could not name his own children at trial, was hanged, was buried — and his grave was dug open two nights later. MeLaan confirms the second detail is the real signature: *Paalm is nothing if not dedicated to her craft*; she let them hang her body and then dug herself out.MB2:SoS:Ch 14
- perchwither-powder-on-robesThe Pathian robes Bleeder discards after killing Father Bin carry a faintly glowing powder on the hem — a clue Wax scrapes into a vial without yet knowing what it is.MB2:SoS:Ch 15
- i-will-make-you-freeWhispers *I will make you free* into Chapaou's ear as she leaves his coach at Lestib Square — the first time she frames her killings as a freeing-of-the-city rather than mere assassination.MB2:SoS:Ch 15
- mansion-attack-marksman-maskStorms the governor's mansion in a body-length scarlet coat wearing the Marksman's cracked black-and-white mask, kills the door guards and the saferoom security detail, fails to reach Innate before Wax and Wayne catch her in a speed bubble, and escapes — wounded but healing — through the saferoom's escape tunnel after putting a single shot into Drim meant for the governor.MB2:SoS:Ch 16
- tunnel-poem-and-stick-figureLeaves a calling-card in the escape tunnel from the saferoom: her bloodied red cloak discarded on the floor, and above it a stick-figure of a man scratched into the timber with a fingernail, dabs of dried blood at the eyes and mouth, three lines scrawled below it in blood — *I rip out his tongue to stop the lies / I stab out his eyes to hide from his gaze / You will be free.*MB2:SoS:Ch 16
- lessie-jabPushes Wax mid-conversation with the only question that can break him — did Harmony know what Lessie meant to him and let her die in Tan's hands to drag him back to the city where he was needed? — the jab that finally provokes him to fire.MB2:SoS:Ch 16
- motive-against-harmonyWax works it out for her in the pit-room: every murder she has committed reads as an attack on a faculty of Harmony. Politicians are his mouth and so she removes a senator's tongue; priests are his eyes and so she shoots one through them. By the same logic the kandra on the streets are his ears, and her next blow is meant for them. TenSoon consults Harmony and confirms her break with him came when he pushed her, once, very hard to do something she did not want to do. She wants to deafen God.MB2:SoS:Ch 20
- emotion-as-liberation-theoryTenSoon works out her theory of liberation while running: Vin freed koloss from the Lord Ruler by hitting them with powerful emotion, which opened a seam in their souls she could push another's control out of. Humans are not Hemalurgic constructs and so emotion can't actually pry Harmony off them — but in Paalm's eyes it can. So she means to drive the city into a rage and call that freedom.MB2:SoS:Ch 21
- wore-the-governor-from-the-startHas been wearing Innate's body for some unknown stretch of time — long enough to have set this whole night up. Wax pieces it together in the study only after spotting Wayne's chewed gum under the windowsill: she let him bloody her at the saferoom earlier so she could pull off her shirt and stanch *the governor's wound*, then walked the rest of the night in Innate's face. Drim was hers; she killed him tonight because Wax had marked her with a hit, and Drim would have known the governor had been gone.MB2:SoS:Ch 22
- aluminum-pistolCarries an aluminum pistol — the gun she pulls on Wax in the study returns nothing to his steelsight. She doesn't want to kill him with it. She had not wanted to kill him with the canine pack either. There is something off, that night, about her resolve to put him down — she only fires past him at the guards he yells in for help.MB2:SoS:Ch 22
- stolen-coinshot-flightShed the Steelrunner spike along with the governor's bones at the workmen's shed in the mansion garden — the stored speed had run dry and a new face was needed — and went into the night using a stolen Coinshot burn instead, leaping rooftop to rooftop to outrun Wax. A logical pick for escape, but it puts her on his ground: steel is his.MB2:SoS:Ch 23
- not-the-marksmanWax confirms during the chase what he had begun to suspect — Bleeder is not, and never was, the Marksman. She wears one of his masks during the run east to confuse him, but her behaviour is wrong. Marks sought the insides of buildings to set ambushes; she keeps to open air, never running for the slums or under cover, as if frightened of being indoors. She heads directly east toward the freedom of the outer city.MB2:SoS:Ch 24
- shot-by-wax-on-eastbridgeShot through the forehead by Wax on the roadway of Eastbridge with Ranette's one bullet — forged from Wax's Pathian earring, a piece of Harmony's body — into the second of her two spike-slots. Per MeLaan in the alley earlier, kandra are weaker than other Hemalurgic creatures; one spike permits sapience, the second permits another to take them, and she had only the first. The bullet was the second. Harmony reaches into her on impact; she screams *No!* and falls to her knees, taken at the moment of death.MB2:SoS:Ch 25
- self-terminates-in-wax-armsWith Harmony taking her again through Wax's bullet, invokes the kandra self-termination method worked out under TenSoon a century after the Catacendre — *we decided it. We won't fall again. We found a way out* — and dies bucking in Wax's arms on the bridge roadway. Before she goes she calls him *Mister Cravat*, in Lessie's voice, and tells him that she had loved him on the day he hired her — the very first day. *Ask Harmony why he sent a kandra to watch over you. Ask him if he knew I would come to love you.*MB2:SoS:Ch 26
- was-always-paalmPer TenSoon to Wax on the empty Eastbridge roadway an hour after Bleeder's death: the woman Wax knew as Lessie was always one of them. Harmony worried about him alone in the Roughs and sent Paalm — the one kandra who had shown a willingness to break their sacred prohibitions — to be his bodyguard, in the hope that the two of them would be good for one another. TenSoon himself was forbidden to tell Wax, and only learned of it a few days ago. MeLaan did not know.MB2:SoS:Ch 26
Events
- MB2:SoS:Ch 9 Forces a thought into Wax's head through the earring — the way only Harmony should be able to — in a rasping crude whisper that names the partygoers actors and Wax one of them.
- MB2:SoS:Ch 10 Wears the body of one of the penthouse waiters and shadows Wax's loop of the floor while speaking into his head through the earring; bleeds a guard from the gut when the others pile on, hurls a chair through the window and leaps twenty-plus stories into the mists.
- MB2:SoS:Ch 16 Speaks into Wax's head from a dark second-storey window across from the mansion, blurs to the front steps in the Marksman's cracked mask and a scarlet coat, kills the door guards and saferoom detail, takes a hazekiller round to the ankle and bullets through her face inside Wayne's speed bubble, and escapes wounded but healing up the saferoom's escape tunnel.
- MB2:SoS:Ch 22 Reveals herself in the governor's body, having worn his face for some indeterminate stretch — pulls an aluminum pistol on Wax, guns down the misguided guards, stabs MeLaan with the anti-kandra needle she meant for herself, then runs dry of Feruchemical speed at the worst moment and escapes through the window into the mist.
- MB2:SoS:Ch 23 Stashed at the back of the workmen's shed having swapped into a second body, drops the Innate bones and the bloody shirt onto the floor in front of Wax, pleads with him through the dark, then blasts the shed wall outward and launches into the night on a stolen Coinshot burn.
- MB2:SoS:Ch 24 Runs east across Elendel in the Marksman's red-and-white mask, gets cornered on Eastbridge, leaps to the top of the eastern suspension tower, and pulls the mask off to show Wax Lessie's face.
- MB2:SoS:Ch 25 Wears Lessie's face, voice and mannerisms on top of the bridge tower; pleads, threatens, pities; eventually Pushes Vindication out of Wax's hand and shoots him in the leg with her aluminum pistol as they fall together.
- MB2:SoS:Ch 25 Stands in Lessie's face on the bridge roadway, gun on Wax, unable to fire. Takes Ranette's bullet in the forehead — Wax's earring forged into a second spike she had been so careful not to wear — and screams as Harmony takes her again.
- MB2:SoS:Ch 26 Held in Wax's lap on the bridge roadway in Lessie's body, tells him she will not be Harmony's again, invokes the kandra self-termination method, and dies talking to him in Lessie's voice.
- MB2:AoL:Prologue Joins Wax behind the fence at the smithy; later found wounded in Bloody Tan's hands inside the ruined chapel
- MB2:SoS:Prologue Climbs in through the saferoom window with a rifle, splits the bounty with Wax, plays the planted assassin, and at the last moment puts the crossbow bolt into Granite Joe instead of Wax.
- MB2:SoS:Ch 26 The face and voice Paalm dies wearing in Wax's arms on the bridge roadway, calling him *Mister Cravat* with Lessie's dancing-donkey joke and telling him she had loved him on the day he hired her.
Backreferences
- summaryMB2:AoL:Prologue
- factWaxillium Ladrian
- factBloody Tan
- summaryMB2:AoL:Ch 1
- summaryMB2:AoL:Ch 2
- summaryMB2:AoL:Ch 3
- summaryMB2:AoL:Ch 5
- summaryMB2:AoL:Ch 6
- summaryMB2:AoL:Ch 12
- summaryMB2:AoL:Ch 19
- summaryMB2:AoL:Ch 20
- summaryMB2:BoM:Ch 1
- factWaxillium Ladrian
- factWaxillium Ladrian
- summaryMB2:BoM:Ch 5
- summaryMB2:BoM:Ch 16
- summaryMB2:BoM:Ch 16
- factWaxillium Ladrian
- factWaxillium Ladrian
- summaryMB2:BoM:Ch 28
- factWaxillium Ladrian
- summaryMB2:BoM:Epilogue
- summaryMB2:BoM:Epilogue
- factMarasi
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 6
- factTrellium
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 10
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 11
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 11
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 15
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 15
- factVenDell
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 19
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 24
- factWayne
- factWaxillium Ladrian
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 58
- summaryMB2:TLM:Ch 62
- summaryMB2:SoS:Prologue
- factWaxillium Ladrian
- factWaxillium Ladrian
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 2
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 6
- factBleeder
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 7
- factThe Contract
- factHarmony
- factThird Generation
- factBlessing
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 8
- factThe Defective Coin
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 9
- factMeLaan
- factRian
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 10
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 11
- factThe Set
- factHarms Mansion
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 12
- factWaxillium Ladrian
- factLarskpur
- factFeder Tower
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 13
- factTemple of the Common Man
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 14
- factBleeder
- factSoothing Parlour
- factChapaou
- factThe Eastern Dam
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 15
- factBleeder
- factMistress Halex
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 16
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 16
- factBleeder
- factDrim
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 17
- factMeLaan
- factEdwarn Ladrian
- factPerchwither
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 18
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 18
- factMarasi
- factClaude Aradel
- factEastbridge
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 19
- factRanette
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 20
- factkandra
- factTenSoon
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 21
- factBleeder
- factPaalm's Hemalurgic Canines
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 22
- factReplar Innate
- factDrim
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 23
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 24
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 24
- factBleeder
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 25
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 25
- factWax's Pathian Earring
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 26
- summaryMB2:SoS:Ch 26
- factBleeder
- factBleeder
- factBleeder
- summaryMB2:SoS:Epilogue
- summaryMB2:SoS:Epilogue
- factTrell
- factClaude Aradel
- factTrell's Spike