(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Wayne putters through Wax's ground-floor halls picking up vases and gilded picture frames, inspecting them for their suitability as offerings to a god he is on his way to meet. From the sitting room he can hear Wax and Steris talking through the New Seran plan: Wax has decided he must go, Harmony's apology or not, because his uncle Edwarn is in that photograph with his sister; tomorrow night Governor Aradel is sending a representative to a political reception in the city for the outer cities' elite and it is a perfect cover. Steris gently assumes she is coming along, on the grounds that it would look very odd for her not to.

VenDell knocks. Darriance the butler firmly puts Wayne aside and ushers the kandra in. Tickets, transcripts of everything they have managed to pry out of ReLuur (mostly incoherent), a list of New Seran nobility he has named in association with Wax's uncle — including the woman hosting the party. VenDell declines Wax's invitation to come along, on the grounds of *too much* of everything outside. He produces an old, dull earring for Wax in case he wants to speak with Harmony on the trip. Wax does not. Train departs in four hours; VenDell asks for Wayne's skeleton when he is dead and excuses himself.

Wayne, unbothered, slips out the front door with a flower behind his ear and walks down the street whistling a song he cannot yet name — *ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum*, the song of an era ending. Today he is on a quest. The flower will not do. Nor will a gilded frame, nor a vase. He picks his way down toward poorer streets where the brain has to do some thinking to keep its owner from being stabbed.

He hires a bored gondola man in a thick rich-folk accent, plays at being Waxillium Ladrian long enough to terrify the boatman with the promise of a slum errand, leaves the boat without paying, and ambles on. He works the line at Old Dent's potato cart long enough to swindle a doorman with the wallet-change shell game and steal away with a fine eelskin wallet — which on inspection turns out to be worn on the lining, no good for a god. He spends two of the urchin children's hopes by handing them a fork from the wedding breakfast that turns out to be silver, trading it at a bakery for *a bunch* of meat buns, and giving the buns to the children to redistribute — *don't eat more than four yourselves, all right?*

He tosses the silver spoon into a busker's hat and demands *The Last Breath* — the song he has been humming all day, the one the pianoforte was playing when he first met Ranette. He skids along the slick lip of the canal and falls in. Pulls himself out laughing, decides the soaking probably counts as a *travail* if nothing else does, and continues on his way. A small uniformed fine-enforcement officer is writing down the registration numbers of motorcars parked badly. Wayne cajoles, then steals his notebook, then takes off running. He outruns the conner ten streets, then ducks beside an open window where a woman is writing a letter, borrows her pen for a moment, scribbles something on the notebook's back page, hands the pen back, and goes on.

The god's temple is a small townhome down a quiet street lined with trees. He has come, today, to make peace with Ranette. He creeps up the walk, wedges the notebook between the doorknob and the door, and turns to leave. Of course, walking back down the path, he nearly runs into Ranette herself coming the other way. She finds the notebook, accuses him of having broken in, threatens to shoot him for the customary weekly count of corpses on her doorstep, and finally reads the words he wrote on the back page: *thank you and goodbye*. She softens. *You mean it?* He does. *Gotta grow up sometime, right?* She takes his hand and kisses the back of it. He even tries his luck — given Ranette's new girlfriend, he doesn't suppose there's any chance the three of them — and accepts her storm gracefully. He bows like a sixth-generation doorman and walks away whistling, eyes forward, back turned toward the past.

He cons a coachman out of a ride to the rail station in exchange for the empty wallet he tossed into the gutter, hops down at the depot, and finds Wax, Marasi, and Steris waiting beside a small hill of suitcases. *Makin' an offering to a beautiful god*, he answers when Steris asks where he has been. The train is going to be late hitched at the back; he climbs out his cabin window onto the roof anyway and lies there as Elendel slides past, watching the sky, humming the song over the tracks underneath. Ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum.