POV: wax
Summary
Six months on, Wax stands at his bedroom mirror tying his own silver cravat — the first high lord Tillaume has ever waited upon who can — and the butler has, as usual, brought tea Wax did not ask for. The cravat is part of an old habit: green satin vest, emerald cuff links, one steel button among the wooden ones, the same out-of-place clothes he used to wear in the Roughs. The land had been wild, he tells Tillaume, but he hadn't needed to be. Chimes ring; Lord Harms is early, true to his reputation. Wax sets out down the hallway over the rug his uncle had favoured, past the deep dark wood and heavy stone the old Lord Ladrian had loved; six months in, the mansion still feels like someone else's.
Miss Grimes catches him at the gallery balustrade with motherly enthusiasm about today's match and his late mother's hopes, the kind of detail Wax cannot return because he hardly ever wrote home. At the top of the stairs he doubles back to delay the meeting, then asks her for any house business that needs his ear. She brings up, reluctantly, that the house has lost another shipment of steel — its second to the so-called Vanishers — and waves him off the details when he can already feel his old lawkeeper's brain climbing back in. Kip hands him a signet-sealed letter on the staircase: an invitation to the Yomen-Ostlin wedding dinner. He passes it to Limmi at the sitting-room door with an instruction to draft an affirmative answer and hold it until he says otherwise — then pushes open the door expecting his guests.
Wayne is in their place, hat tipped back, leather duster on, dueling canes propped by the couch, holding up one of the mantel clocks and offering to trade it for a bottle of whiskey. He has left Barl watching Weathering, which Wax considers indefensible, and refuses to send for Miles Dagouter because Miles, Wayne says, prefers shooting people to checking whether they did anything. He waves a small notepad and pencil and starts deadpan-questioning Wax about his whereabouts the previous midnight; he is in Elendel on the trail of a railway-shipment robbery and intends to interrogate the victim, who, suspiciously, is Wax. The chimes ring again. Wax tries to bundle him out the back; the door opens.
Lord Harms, his stern daughter Steris, and her quiet cousin Marasi step into the room. Without missing a beat Wayne reinvents himself as "Uncle Maksil," voice gruffened of its rural accent, a realistic-looking fake moustache plastered on his upper lip, his Roughs duster and dueling canes already neatly folded on the floor across the room. He has done the costume inside a speed bubble in the half-second Wax had his head turned — a trick of his bendalloy Allomancy, paired with his Feruchemical knack for healing.
Steris has no patience for small talk. She walks Wax through her assessment of the situation with brutal clarity: his uncle's reputation, his own Roughs reputation, his nearly destitute house. Her own family has the wealth and lacks the name; her father has no male heir. So she has drawn up an agreement. The "agreement" is a twenty-page courtship contract: a courtship phase calibrated to last eight months for proper social momentum, conjugal frequencies on page thirteen, mistress protocols on page fourteen (including a clause for her own coachman should it come to that, but only after legitimate heirs). She is a Survivorist; Wax follows the Path; she finds Pathianism dull. While Steris reads, Lord Harms coughs into his hand and tries to steer her toward less personal topics. Marasi stays demurely silent, but her cousin Armal — the playhouse-robbery hostage no one has heard from — comes up the moment Steris mentions her favourite theatre. Marasi lights up on the topic. She knows the broadsheets cold, recites the phantom-railcar trick, points out that the Vanishers have lately added passenger-car robberies and started taking women as hostages. Lord Harms cuts her off; Wax says he'd rather hear her out.
"Uncle Maksil" cuts the moment short by opening a speed bubble around himself and Wax at the tea stand. Inside the suddenly silent room he drops the accent, pronounces Steris very firmly insane and Marasi rather cute, and the guests immovable statues on the couch. He has come, he says, because of the bullet. He sets it on the tray. He has something else, too, and he says it more carefully: this is not about Lessie. The bubble collapses. Wax pockets the round, coughs to cover the sped-up audio leakage, and pours tea.
The conversation drifts back to the Vanishers. Marasi explains the phantom-railcar trick again for Wax — engineers stop in panic, the phantom vanishes, and at the end of the line a freight car is empty with no sign of forced entry. The recent passenger-car robberies have all included a hostage, threats made if anyone follows; the hostage so far has always been a woman. Steris notices the cartridge Wax is rolling between his fingers. He closes his fist around it and shoots Wayne a look. Wayne mouths back: *Push on it.*
He empties a pinch of steel shavings from his sleeve into his tea, drinks, and burns. Every metal in the room sprouts the familiar blue line. Every metal except the round in his fingers. It is aluminum, Allomantically inert and obscenely expensive. The bullet is built to kill Coinshots and Lurchers — built, that is, to kill him. He sees the Harms party out the door with the Yomen-Ostlin dinner agreed as their public debut, and turns on Wayne.
Wayne admits he traded the round out of a constable that morning for a cobblestone. He lays out the case as he sees it: eight robberies, four women taken, no bodies, no ransoms. Wax answers with his old lawkeeper's brain on full burn — the robberies are misdirection, look at the hostages, look at any easy-to-miss item that might have been the actual target, check for protection money. He gives Wayne the reading and refuses, repeatedly, to take the case. Wayne pockets the bullet warning and leaves him with one parting jab on the way out the door: he is still wearing his metalminds, still keeping steel in his sleeve, and there is a fresh gun catalogue open on the side table. A man, Wayne says, is meant to help people. It's what Wax does.