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Wayne is shaken out of a king-of-the-dogs dream to find Wilg hovering high above the Seran Range over a line of lantern-lit men trudging through waist-high snow. Telsin is half out the doorway pleading with Wax to let her take their uncle from up here. *I want him dead. Another will take his place, but I want him dead.* Wax sights for a long moment, then lowers the gun: court testimony will do more than vengeance, and he wants Edwarn alive to interrogate. Climbing back inside, Wayne tangles with Telsin's feet and kicks one of the packs out the doorway; it falls a long way down and clocks one of the soldiers on the head. The lanterns swing up to scan an empty sky.

Allik swings the flier away and warns of a coming storm. Snow comes in sideways through the open doorways. A taller line of peaks loops past, and then *Harmony's Rings*, Wax says — it is here. Allik sets down. The landing is honest about itself: the flier pitches sideways, one fan wing folds back wrong, a mound of snow shoves in through a hole in the wall, and Wayne catches his face on the bulkhead.

They climb out onto a windswept rock field. Snow scours sideways like grit. The clouds peel back like a bouncer letting them in, and starlight falls on a one-story stone fortress in the middle of the mountains — the temple. Wax buries the flier under a Push of snow so Coinshots or Lurchers won't easily find the metal. The party crosses to the steps. Off to the side, Wayne pokes around a frost-shrouded shape larger than a house: the Hunters' wreck. A hand sticks out of one snowbank; nearby, a dozen more frozen corpses.

An enormous statue of the Lord Ruler stands at the top of the temple steps, long coat, a tall spear at his side, an aluminum spike driven through his right eye. Marasi recites the Lord Mistborn's testimony from memory: *once stabbed by a beggar, once stabbed by a worker, last stabbed by a prince — the spears didn't hurt him.* Wax notes that the spear in the statue's hand is aluminum-headed and expensive. Once everyone else has filed inside, Wayne lingers, kicks the spearhead a few times, twists it free, wraps it in a handkerchief, and pockets it for Sophi Tarcsel.

Inside the vestibule, the ReLuur mural — bracers on a pedestal one side, the Lord Ruler wearing them the other — confirms they have the right place. The way into the rest of the temple is a single doorway opening on a long, dark hallway. Allik fiddles with the primer cube, extracts a small nugget of ettmetal with tweezers, and feeds it into a wall socket; somewhere distant a hum starts, and translucent glass panels along the walls bloom blue, lighting the corridor — and the bodies in it. Many bodies. Frozen blood in pools. Wax kneels by the closest corpse: a Hunter mask, wood inset with glass, melded faintly to the skin at its edges. Allik's people don't grow into their masks; the Hunters do.

From the masks and the wood spike still jutting through the dead man's chest, Wax reconstructs the temple's history out loud. The Hunter expedition came north with ettmetal bombs intending to destroy the Bands. Most of the crew got here, decided they wanted the prize after all, killed the bomb-carriers (the corpses outside by the ship) — then died one by one to the traps. A few retreated, took the surviving skimmer back, sold their superiors a blizzard story, were caught planning the second attempt, and were quietly executed at home. *He does this all the time*, Wayne tells the awed Allik. *Best not to encourage him.*

The traps are pointedly built without any metal an Allomancer could grab — the killing spike in the lead Hunter's chest is solid wood. *They have traps designed to kill your kind*, Allik frets. Wax sends MeLaan ahead anyway. A spear shoots out of the wall and runs her clean through; she sighs about her wardrobe and pulls it out. *Traps are somewhat less threatening when you have an immortal along.* The plan is fixed: Wayne stays at the entrance to watch Steris and Marasi — *you keep an eye on her, you keep an eye on him* — while Wax, Allik, and Telsin follow MeLaan down the corridor. Telsin refuses to be sequestered. MeLaan strolls ahead; a swinging spiked log promptly drops out of a hidden compartment and crushes her against the wall. She shakes it off, stumbling on as her leg re-forms. *She might be even better at the Blackwatch Doublestomp than I am*, Wayne tells Steris and Marasi.