(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Wax creeps along a sagging fence in the dead town of Feltrel, revolver up, steel burning so that the blue Allomantic lines paint every nail and spent shell casing in his vision. The town has been empty for twenty years — a koloss clan settled nearby and ended it — and the only thing alive in it today is the man Wax has come for. He cultivates an out-of-place look on principle: silver cravat, cuff links, a bowler hat caked in red clay over a fine suit. Out in the Roughs the costume reads as either respect or weakness, and either reading suits him. He keeps a faint steel bubble Pushing outward in all directions, his own private deflector for any round that comes too close.

A board creaks across the street. Wax Pushes off a clutch of nails in the wall beside him, throws himself sideways, and the first bullet kicks dust where he stood. The second bends just enough on his bubble that it grazes past his ear instead of through his forehead. He sights the hotel balcony, fires through the sign, and Pushes the steel-jacketed round forward to drive it through the wood and into the gunman behind. A second shot from the smithy roof knocks him flat — but a body tumbles off the roof a moment later. Lessie picks her way back to the fence in her bloodied white duster, dry as ever, ribbing him about his fondness for the ground. He shows her the bead of red glass he took off the dead man's pocket — Donal's mark. Donal's crew has standing orders to shoot them on sight, payment for old grievances on both sides; today they happen to be hunting the same psychopath, and the day will be friendlier to nobody for it.

They split. Lessie will sweep one side of the street; Wax will try to link up with Wayne and Barl on the other. He notices her glance at the letter peeking from his shirt pocket — addressed to a Lord Waxillium Ladrian he has not been in years — and tucks it deeper. He should have burned it. He picks through the old hotel, past nests left by rats and wanderers, and slips out into an alley where a wood-framed pit yawns in the hillside. It smells of damp earth and, faintly, smoke. He lightens himself on his iron metalmind, drops in soundlessly, and follows a tunnel that runs much further than any cold cellar has business going.

A lantern hangs over the first corpse: Geormin the coachman, wired with his arms thrown wide. The body is dry as leather — mummified, but only just, prepared for a single viewing. Further on, another lantern lights Annarel the geologist, pinned sideways to the wall as if studying a stone. Six more bodies follow, each in its own pose, each in its own pool of lantern light: a man in a chair, another strung up mid-flight, a recent victim Wax does not recognise saluting his own head. This is no lair, he understands. It is a gallery, and Tan has prepared it for an audience of one.

The tunnel surfaces through a rotted trapdoor inside the ruined chapel of the Survivor, its roof long gone. Tan's voice drifts from behind a heap of rubble, calm and reverent, telling the chapel about puppets and a god with nails in his eyes and a Survivor who is life. Wax follows the voice, dust hanging in the still air, his eye twitching despite himself. He rounds the rubble. Tan stands there in a blood-spattered mortician's suit holding Lessie in front of him, gagged, pale, bleeding from her leg and arm, a garrote across her throat. She has been overpowered because she has lost blood; she meets Wax's eyes anyway.

They have done this kind of standoff before. People always try to use one of them against the other, and that has always been a mistake. Lessie blinks the count. One. Two. Three. Wax fires on three. In the same instant Tan jerks her sideways, and the round meant for the killer takes Lessie above the right eye. Blood sprays the brick wall. She crumples. Tan looks down at her in something like satisfaction and murmurs that the best performances are the ones that can only be performed once. Wax shoots him through the head.