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Wax rides in a hired carriage toward Lady Kelesina Shores' reception, in formal cravat and jacket, brooding over the year after he left the Village — when his uncle had taken charge of his education and paraded him through Elendel society as the new heir to the house, the year when his uncle's grip had really begun to strangle him. He wonders how much of his memory of those parties is coloured by Edwarn's presence at the elbow of it. Beside him Steris wears, unusually, a fashionable gauzy and cloudlike gown rather than her customary practical wear; she frets that he is nervous, he insists he is contemplative. The line of carriages crawls forward like cattle on a hot day; he kicks open the door, helps Steris down himself, and tells the coachman to park — and to head back to the hotel without them if he hears gunshots.

They walk the long path past the staring nobility. Steris produces a palm-sized notebook of pre-indexed conversation openers for him to use on each target on ReLuur's list, keyed to who he should approach and how to steer the talk toward the Bands, with descriptions of likely attendees at the back; he protests that he can manage small talk, she politely reminds him about the Cett party where he head-butted Lord Westweather Cett for calling him out to a duel with a Coinshot. He pockets the book, privately impressed at the work she has put into it.

A figure rustles in the shrubs along the path: a milky-eyed, ragged beggar with cologne on his breath, begging for clips for old Hoid. Steris sniffs the cologne and asks if he has been drinking it; the beggar grins, claims he owns the place. Wax tosses him a banknote and tells him to find a proper drink; the beggar shouts after them about *change* and pelts a coin after Wax's head, and Wax catches it on instinct on a blue line of steel — so not blind after all. A passing groundsman shouts the beggar away with the air of having shouted him away many times before. Wax pockets the coin without looking at it.

At the front door, the doorman insists every guest be unburdened of items of a vulgar nature — for the safety of all parties attending. Wax objects that he is a Coinshot and could kill with cufflinks, that he is a deputised constable, that the lady of the house is making a mistake; the doorman says nothing. Threatened with being made to submit to the house Lurcher to prove honesty, Wax surrenders Vindication and his backup two-shotter from his calf holster to the coat check, and takes a pasteboard ticket. Steris submits her purse to inspection, and the embarrassed servants wave them through to the ballroom.

Across the city, Wayne and Marasi mount the steps of a bank in the cantonesque classical style, on their way to the spike by way of bank records: Marasi wants to know which of the local cemetery workers earns far more than his wages would account for, on the theory that he will be the one to bribe to dig up ReLuur's body. Wayne thinks banks are magnificent — a hill built of money for everyone else to salivate at — and has put on a top hat he insists he traded Wax for, minus a rat's tail on account of the hat being dusty when he took it. He proposes to play a rich uncle with Marasi as the niece he disapproves of for keeping company with a warty, flatulent farmhand. He launches into the first banker who greets them.

Marasi cuts him off and presents her engraved constable credentials as Captain Marasi Colms, asking the banker — a round, swarthy man with a desk plaque reading MR. ERIOLA — to check whether any of the men on her list have accounts. Wayne gapes at her; the truth, in his view, is *cheating*. Eriola retreats to the records room. A clerk hand-delivers a telegram from Elendel vouching for the captain and instructing the banker to check his till after the short man leaves; Wayne grumbles about defamation at a clip every five words. Eriola reluctantly produces the ledgers and submits to a forensic-accounting lecture from Marasi on how most wealth-driven crimes can be proved out of numbers. Looking through deposits, she finds the surplus pattern not in any one suspect but in every cemetery worker on her list — all of them are skimming. *Most corpses are buried with something valuable*, she explains; *no use letting that all rot away.* While she works, Wayne balances a tower of six of the banker's desk items including the stapler, and pockets a silver letter opener.

Eriola is appalled at the suggestion that his cemetery workers are stripping the dead. Wayne downs the bottle of brandy Marasi has produced from her purse for the occasion, then surrenders the letter opener back to its drawer in exchange for the rat's tail he had left there earlier. Marasi thanks Eriola for helping her work out, not whom to arrest, but whom to *employ*, and they leave to go find a gravekeeper willing to dig.