POV: wax
Summary
Wax bounds up alongside the Malwish warship and is met by a skimmer that takes him and Max up to its deck. He hands his loaned medallion back to the masked airmen — a quiet reminder that he is Twinborn and does not need it — and follows them into a long corridor of dark wood that bows outward at the centre like a tube. Waiting at the end is the man with the most intricately inlaid mask aboard, wooden carved and worked with six different metals around the eyes: the captain, and apparently more than the captain.
He introduces himself as Admiral Daal and welcomes Wax to his *former* ship, *Blessed Thief* — former because he has been chosen as the new Malwish Consortium ambassador to Elendel, a phrase that does its own work in the conversation. Ambassador Jonnes is being recalled home for having become *too familiar*. He greets Wax in the same breath as both *Once-Bearer* and *taker* of the Bands of Mourning; Wax reminds him that the Bands were delivered into kandra custody by agreement, to be held by no nation. There is a small frozen silence.
Max interrupts it by needing the potty. Daal makes them wait long enough to register the rudeness and then leads them past more silent masked sailors to a tiny restroom that Max declares charming. With Wax standing outside the closed door, Daal uses the lull to deliver his real opening. The Basin's anti-air guns can reach perhaps a thousand feet straight up. Some of his ships fly high enough that the air thins to deadly. *One wonders what would have happened if our peoples had met during a more warlike era — one quick bombing campaign and your city would fold like an old flag.* He insists he is not here to start one. He represents a Consortium increasingly persuaded that the Basin has been taking advantage of Southern *lenient nature*. The Bands, above all, are theirs and ought to be repatriated. He needles Wax over the kandra *demon immortals* who cannot kill, over the Allomancer soldiers whose only verifiable specimen happens to be the senator outside the toilet door. Wax refuses to be drawn, tells him to take it up with the governor, the legislature and God, and silently catalogues the contradiction between the official Malwish line on medallions and what Allik keeps letting slip about them — three skimmers and a few medallions delivered, the means of production withheld, no Feruchemical-strength or mental-speed soldiers visible in their army, no Allomancer medallions in their navy.
Max returns wet-handed and proud. Daal marches them back to the open doors. *Good for me, yah,* he says of the meeting. *It shows me which stories to believe.* *And which are those?* *The true ones, of course.* Wax throws himself out into the air with Max whooping on his back, slows them with Pushes, and bounces back across the rooftops to Ahlstrom Tower.
At the penthouse he locks the door behind him and mixes himself a drink. Steris, finishing putting Tindwyl down for her nap, joins him at the bar, slipping her hand around his waist. Max reports loudly that he got to poop on an airship and traded for some white toilet paper just the way Uncle Wayne taught him; she meets it with maternal enthusiasm. Wax tells her the airship's headline: new ambassador, dislikes them, wants the Bands back, vague threats. *Delightful day for that.* He confirms her prediction on the unification timetable. She works the other side of it: the Senate will read today's Supremacy Bill vote as the proper response to Malwish imperialism, a nation forged out of squabbling cities. *Conquest by another name,* Wax says, and admits the local whiskey has turned out better than the Roughs varieties he used to disparage it against.
Then she produces a small letter that arrived while he was gone — *Meet us at the mansion at 3:00. Exciting news. — Marasi* — and they share the look. *Do we bring Max?* *How likely is it to involve explosions?* Max stays with Kath for his history tutor; Wax goes to wash up.