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Templeton Fig arranges the white animals in his study — albino crow, suckling boar, squirrel — and frets that he cannot sleep until he knows what has happened at the graveyard. His wife Destra, gaunt and swallowed by her nightgown, looks in to ask when he is coming to bed; he sends her away. He turns back to the boar — and his fire stops crackling. The flames hang motionless. The door thumps open and Dechamp's bloody corpse slides into the room.

Templeton screams against the far wall. Something taps at the open window. *Templeton*, a rasping voice says from the dark outside. He opens his eyes onto a black-cloaked figure with two metal spikes protruding through the cowl where the eyes should be. *You are not His*, the figure tells him. *You are mine.* It raises a cloaked arm to show a spike driven through bare white skin, and another bare arm with a fresh, bloody hole where its match should have been. Templeton babbles: *they insisted, it wasn't my fault, I don't have it, I sent it by courier* — and then, when pressed for the destination: *To Dulsing! I don't know more!* The fire returns to crackling. The figure is gone. The corpse remains. Templeton huddles down and is honestly relieved when the constables break in to arrest him.

Outside in Templeton's garden, Wayne shucks the awful, heavy cloak and heals the puncture wounds he cut in his own arms for *authenticity*, scratching off the wires that held two half-spikes hovering in front of his eyes. Marasi joins him, despairing of the trampled petunias, and tells him that no, Death doesn't actually sound *grindy*, but the accent worked well enough on Fig. Wayne notes happily that this was the fourth time he has had to impersonate Death and asks her to do the accent for him — *for next time*. She refuses. He drinks the last of Dechamp's brandy and slings the cloak over his shoulder, content: dynamite, a brawl, free booze, and frightening someone witless. Marasi tells him Dulsing is real — a tiny isolated farming settlement fifty miles northeast of New Seran, remembered only from a landmark water-rights case in her textbooks. What does the Set want with it?

Wax scouts Kelesina's first set of rooms and finds them empty; he resists ransacking the desks (innocent if found lost in a corridor, not innocent if found in her drawers) and prowls back to the atrium to wave at Steris. The next hallway runs along the outer wall with windows open to the mists, small waterfalls leaking in. As he passes, snatches of Lord Severington's amplified speech float through them: *suffer the rule … new Lord Ruler? … improper taxation … era must end.* Severington is the mayor of Bilming, the industrial port city west of Elendel — *they are spearheading it now*, Wax realises, listening.

He listens at the next set of doors and hears voices inside. One is Kelesina's. The other, muffled as if through cloth, is his uncle. Wax eases through a dark adjoining study, smacks his arm on an end table, presses his ear to the door, gun in hand. They are talking about him: he knows about the project, he has one of the coins, the diversions are not biting. Edwarn tells Kelesina to kidnap one of his friends and stage a personal grudge letter from one of Wax's old Roughs enemies, since Wax cannot resist a vendetta. Kelesina retorts that the train robbery also failed to draw him; Edwarn says recovering the device was worth the cost. *That device Irich immediately lost?* Kelesina snaps; she had told Suit she could have recovered it once Wax was off the train. Suit tells her Irich has been *punished* and that it is only a matter of time before they accidentally use Allomancy near the cube in their possession. He needs to be off to the *second site*.

A whole stack of assumptions shifts under Wax. The train robbery had not been bandits — it had been the Set hoping the cube would draw him into a manhunt and away from Edwarn; the cane-man on the train was theirs. Edwarn knows him well — too well, for an uncle he has barely seen in twenty years — and Wax wonders how many of the leads he has chased the last year were also Set plants, Ape Manton's mark on Farthing Mansion suddenly very probably among them. He also hears Kelesina mention a *miracle* Suit keeps promising and an army that will be needed to crush Elendel, and Kelesina's admission that they may have *assumed too quickly* the second kandra was disposed of when only one of ReLuur's spikes was presented to Suit for proof.

Footsteps in the hall. The aged Terriswoman steward enters in a rush; Wax drops a coin, Pushes himself up flat against the ceiling, and lets her walk straight over the coin into Kelesina's room to report that *Burl* the house Seeker has sensed metals being burned nearby. Kelesina asks where Wax is; the steward says his fiancée was sick and they have her resting in a guest room. Uncle Edwarn asks where he is *now*. Wax drops to the floor with a thump and levels his gun: *he's right here.* The steward and Kelesina spin in shock. Uncle Edwarn is not in the room at all. The only thing on the table in front of Kelesina is a boxy device.