POV: wax
Summary
Wax is alone in the dark waters of the bay, struggling to stay above the swell, when Wayne's blast erupts to his right. The whole sky goes white at once. The shock crosses the air and then the water in two heavy concussions. For a single instant in the dazzle Wax thinks he sees a figure ahead of him — a calm bald Terrisman standing on the surface of the sea with one hand stretched out toward the wave, dulling it before it can reach him — a thing Wax does not entirely understand and is not given long to study. The image is gone before he can hold it. Then there is only afterimage and the slap of debris coming down around him in the choppy black, and the smell of fire on water, and the cold reaching for him through the gaps in his clothes.
The water closes in. He hit it hard enough to break at least one leg, the bone shifting whenever he tries to kick. His coat is dragging him down. The hopes of a city are sitting on his shoulders like a load of stones. He understands what Wayne has just done — the maths of it, the *generosity* of it, the unfussiness of it — and the understanding nearly takes him under faster than the leg does. He has to hold on. He has to. *Farewell, my friend,* he whispers, choking on it. Thank you, Wayne, you absolute rusting marvel of a man. The waters have no opinion. They are choppy, and they want him.
He forces himself to keep swimming. He burns steel just to keep his head turned to the right side of the swell. He burns something else too — something deep within him, that he cannot name, that keeps him warm where the cold of the bay should have stopped his heart by now. (Harmony had wondered, when Wayne drank the vial aboard the ship, whether Wax himself had already breathed in some trace of lerasium during the harmonium-split accident earlier in the week. He had.) The unfamiliar reserve is a kindness he does not have the strength to wonder about. He uses it. Even so, with broken bone and grief and exhaustion all working against him, he begins to slip. He goes under once and comes up coughing. The mist keeps its careful distance and does not help. He is, he registers without any particular interest, going to drown in the same dark water that has just swallowed his friend.
Then there is a light.
It is small — barely a thing — but it does not waver in the mist the way a lantern at this distance ought to. It moves with purpose, holding its place against the swell, neither hurrying nor losing him. It resolves, as he watches it come, into an actual lantern on the bow of an actual little boat. The boat motors right up to him as if it had always known where to look. A man stands up on the deck in coachman's whites, gloves and all, his bearing perfectly composed in the rocking — the same posture he uses at the curb outside the Ladrian townhouse on a workday morning — and reaches a hand down to him over the water.
Hoid greets him with the line he uses every workday morning at the curb: *your carriage, sir.*