POV: wax
Summary
Wax hurries down the steps of the bar-turned-hideout while Wayne hustles alongside taking credit for the brilliant plan in which Wax is always the decoy. *Ain't my fault people like to shoot at you, mate.* They reach the carriage and Wax hesitates with one foot inside — *right pretty noose, that is*, Wayne notes — until a tall slender man in a brown suit and bow tie calls *Lord Ladrian* from the cordon and tries to flag him. Wax tells him to take all the time he likes, just without him, drops a spent shell, and Pushes himself into the air over the Fourth Octant toward the wedding.
He lands on a water tower opposite the Survivorist Church — a glass-and-steel dome built in orange-slice segments so the roof can hinge open and let the mist pour down for special ceremonies — and spends a long moment up there with his eye twitching. Six months ago he pulled the trigger on the woman he had loved. He tells himself that a heart can scar over twice and steps down through a long line of carriages and acquaintances on the steps.
Inside, Steris paces in a sleek white dress and a professional braid, fretful but precise: he is late, but not very late. Wax strips for Drewton the valet and the white wedding tail-suit, while Steris — who can theoretically watch a man change without trauma, given that he's the Pathian one — turns her back when he undoes his trousers. She frets that he has given the wedding pendants to Wayne. She has, of course, ordered six copies; four did not arrive in time.
A knock. Marasi sticks her head in, then admits the man in the brown suit from the carriage, who hands over Wayne's crumpled note — *gonna go get smashed till I can't piss straight, happy weddings 'n stuff* — with the pendants wadded inside. Then he turns the skin of his face translucent, showing the skull beneath. *Holy One*, Steris whispers. *Holy pain*, Wax says — *tell Harmony to get someone else this time, I'm busy.* The kandra confesses, almost reluctantly, that part of the problem is that Harmony has been *distracted of late*. Wax tells him no, twice, and walks past him into the dome.
Out among the gathered acquaintances and distant family and house seamstresses and forgeworkers, ash girls scatter ash on the carpet around the perimeter of the dome and small braziers of green leaves send up smoke for the mist. Wax and Steris walk the slow circuit before the dais — past Steris's red-faced father giving an enthusiastic fist-raise from the front row. He looks for Wayne and does not find him; the man is the only real family he has. He looks sideways at the woman on his arm and almost stumbles: the wrong woman, of course, is the one not there. The priest begins the Larsta rite from Harmony's *Beliefs Reborn*, drawn from the Words of Founding. Wax cannot listen. The last priest in this church was found murdered, killed by Lessie when she went mad and Harmony's people set him on the hunt without telling him what she was. He finally admits to himself, hands locked white in Steris's hands, that this is not Steris's fault and not the setting's — he is not ready to let go of Lessie.
Then he looks up through the dome at the water tower he had been perching on minutes earlier — and watches its legs sag and bend, the way a thing kneels. The cylinder tips, its top shears off, tons of water arc through the air toward the dome. He yanks Steris to him by the waist, tears the second button off his waistcoat and drops it, and Pushes off the single metal bead to launch them backward off the dais as the priest yelps and the glass section above gives inward and the dome takes the wave.