POV: marasi
Summary
Twenty-nine years later. Marasi picks her way through an Elendel sewer in trousers and knee-high work boots, rifle in one hand and a map in the other, Wayne beside her with the lantern. The stench is precisely as awful as she had imagined; her boots squelch out of the muck with each step; the only sound that beats the squelching is Wayne's complaining. He grumbles that Wax never made him crawl through sewers, only pastures, and pastures at least did not have spiders. Marasi notes that pastures probably did have spiders, he just couldn't see them. Wayne grants the point and starts an argument with himself about whether perfume-wearing constables are necessarily up to no good.
She has worked with him almost six years now, since Wax's retirement following the discovery of the Bands of Mourning. Wayne is an official constable now, not a deputised citizen; he even wears a uniform on occasion. He is also, Marasi gathers from his unusual gloom, in the slow process of being broken up with. MeLaan has told him in so many words that she intends to end it in a few weeks — she has a new assignment from the big guy and isn't going to be around. Wayne consulted Jammi Walls (a woman, Marasi gently clarifies, of ill repute) for advice and found her counsel — try harder — unhelpful, on the grounds that MeLaan says what she means. Marasi is sorry. Wayne reflects that MeLaan is roughly seven hundred years old and he is nearly forty, and that maybe nobody much wants him around lately. Marasi tells him he is the best partner she has ever had. He notes that he is her *only* partner. The exchange settles him a little.
The investigation, meanwhile, is good detective work — months of records, witness statements, money trails, and the cross-reference of two notes the city's own engineers had filed and then misplaced. Construction on a citywide underground train system has stalled in a stretch the demolitions team won't blast because seismic surveys show an unmapped cavern next door; old sewer-builders had noted an oddity in the same wall years ago and it had never been investigated. The neighbourhood above happens to be the same district where a gang of enforcers keeps appearing and disappearing as if it owns a private entrance to the underworld. Marasi is increasingly sure the gang is funded by the Set.
She thinks about the Set as she walks. Six years on and she is still chasing the answers she started chasing as a brand-new lawwoman: the cabal once run by Wax's uncle Edwarn (now revealed to involve his sister Telsin as well), the cult that follows or worships or otherwise serves a being known as Trell, whom she believes is an ancient god of his own. The closest she ever got to real answers was six years back, when the prisoners they'd taken — Wax's uncle included — were killed in an explosion. The Elendel elite, lacking evidence, have since refused to take the threat of the Set seriously at all.
At the spot marked on her map, exactly where it was supposed to be, an old iron door is set into the sewer wall — its frame freshly scraped, its handle wiped clean of the surrounding filth. Wayne compliments her detective work and asks how many old surveys it took. Too many, she says; the part of the job people never put in stories is the documents library. The door has no lock on this side, only a bar on the other; Marasi hands Wayne her rifle (he can hold a gun steady now, even if she's never seen him fire one in earnest) and asks for a knife from the supplies bag — rope, spare metals in case they meet Metalborn. Quietly she works the bar loose. The door swings inward on a rough-hewn tunnel that drops away into the dark, one of the ancient routes that pre-date the Catacendre back into the days of myth and ash and tyrants.
The two of them slip through, ease the door shut behind them as they found it, dim the lantern, and start down.