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Wax holds the small flier in the air by Pushing on a plate built into its deck — a launchpad clearly designed for an Allomancer's anchor — while the masked southerner fits the primer cube into a socket under the dash. A great fan under the floor starts up; Wax lets off his Push and the flier sags. *Reduce your weight!* the masked man calls. *I mean, if it is aligned with your magnificent will, O Metabolic One.* Wax taps the medallion he is wearing, and the craft levels out, the smaller fans on the pontoons whirring to push them forward. *They're not boats*, MeLaan says quietly. *They're flying ships.*

The masked man finally gives his name — Allik Neverfar — when Wax asks. Wax jumps out, drops to the forest where Steris sits ready on horseback with the packs, grabs her and Pushes them both back into the air; Allik steers the flier over to meet him. Below, a cannon coughs from Dulsing. *Just get us away from here*, Wax tells Allik, and to Telsin, who has seized his arm: *Fine. We talk.*

They settle onto the back bench. Telsin looks like a fashionable Elendel lady at a ball if you do not look at her eyes; if you do, all you find is cold. She tells him their uncle has been searching for a weapon hidden in the mountains separating the Basin from the Roughs — the *Lord Ruler's own power* — and is already on his way there on foot. If Edwarn finds it, he will take the Basin and take her back. Wax hesitates: Elendel, the governor, an expedition. Telsin presses. *We, however…* she says, looking out the doorway at a view once reserved only for Coinshots.

Wax goes to check on Marasi. MeLaan is kneeling over her on the floor, one arm liquefied into her side. She has caught a hole in Marasi's intestine, sewn it with catgut spun from her own spare guts, and patched the wound with a graft of her own flesh re-keyed to Marasi's skin. *You ate part of me?* Marasi asks faintly. *No, just what was leaking.* Marasi sits up amazed; under the bandage her side already feels like a healed bruise. She takes Wax's mistcoat to cover what MeLaan cut away, and notes the bandage on his shoulder she had not known about.

They confer over Irich's notebook. The map marks the Second Site in the mountains and, beyond it among taller peaks marked *dangerously high*, a *Temple reported to be here*. Wax traces it with his fingers. The Bands of Mourning are real, Irich thinks so and Wax does too — and with this machine they can beat their uncle to the temple.

Marasi moves up beside Allik at the controls, wearing Wax's mistcoat — he sits shivering despite the Connection medallion, the warmth one set on the dash beside him. She asks him about the Sovereign. He flinches at Wax's stare from behind. The Sovereign was their king from three centuries ago, Allik says — and was the *Lord Ruler* the northerners worshipped first. *He died*, Wax says. *Yes*, Allik agrees, *he told us that too.* Three hundred and thirty years ago — well after the Catacendre. The dates do not match.

He tells them of the Ice Death — the day, ten years before the Sovereign appeared, when the world froze. *The Catacendre*, Wax says. *Harmony remade the world. Saved it.* *Froze it*, Allik insists, shivering. The Sovereign came after, taught them this — he swaps medallions to show her a different one, which warms his hand under her palm — and gave them the Excisors and the Firemothers and Firefathers who fill medallions so the rest of his people can leave their homes. *The Lord Ruler*, Marasi whispers, *seeking redemption for what he did up here by saving the people down there.*

Wax takes the heat medallion in his hand and reads its metals himself. The inner nicrosil ring grants Investiture, turning the wearer into a temporary Feruchemist; the outer iron ring is only there for convenience. The southern craft can usually combine two attributes per medallion, rarely three; four has never worked, the attributes interfere. Wax proposes strapping thirty-two of them to one body. *Doesn't work?* he asks. Allik shakes his head. The only way to make a single device that grants every Allomantic and Feruchemical ability, Allik jokes, would be for the maker to already *have* every ability. *He did create one of these*, Wax says. *A bracer. A set. That granted all sixteen Allomantic abilities and all sixteen Feruchemical abilities.* Allik wilts.

That is why Allik came north. When the Sovereign left, he took the Bands and his closest priests south into a hidden range of mountains, built a temple, and left the priests there with the Bands to guard them until he returned — said by some of those priests, who eventually returned home with the story, to be a test his people could not help but try. Years of searching had turned up only false maps until, five or six years ago, the Hunters sent a great ship north and reportedly found the temple. Only one skimmer returned; the rest froze in a mountain blizzard. *We're going after that temple, right?* Marasi asks. Wax nods. *Damn right we are.*