(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Seventeen years later. Lord Winsting Innate — brother of Governor Innate, head of his own house, holder of a Senate vote he is preparing to auction off — stands on the balcony of his Fourth Octant mansion in Elendel and watches the sun set behind the statues of the Ascendant Warrior and the Last Emperor in the Field of Rebirth across the canal. The evening is muggy; an evening breeze off Hammondar Bay only just keeps it bearable. Behind him, in the upper drawing room, his auction's guests are already assembled. He keeps them waiting on principle.

At his elbow stands Flog, his head bodyguard, in a Roughs hat and duster he has not earned by setting foot outside the Basin. Winsting is fond enough of Flog to keep him close, but takes the precaution of Soothing him anyway, since one can never quite be too careful with bodyguards. As he waits, the mists begin — pinprick spots in the air, then frost on a window, then river-currents rolling across the city. Flog mutters that a misty night is bad luck, that the mists are Harmony's eyes. Winsting tells him not to be a fool, adjusts his cravat, and walks in to start the auction.

The room contains two dozen carefully selected guests — crime lords and noble heads of houses with reputations dubious enough to take meetings like this, deliberately mixed so that each can see the others and feel pressure to outbid them. Most wear aluminum-lined hats to defend against emotional Allomancy; Winsting has personally assured each of them that none of the others will have brought a Soother or Rioter tonight. He has of course said nothing of his own abilities. His bartender, Blome, confirms with a head-shake that no one in the room is burning metals at the moment. Excellent. Winsting raises his hands and announces, in the language of an art auction, that the bidding for tonight's piece begins now and ends when he hears the offer he likes best. The nominal centrepiece — a painting of a reclining woman he did himself, and is getting better at — sits worthless on the central table.

Winsting notes with mild dismay that Edwarn Ladrian is not in attendance — he refuses to call him by the moniker "Mister Suit" — and wonders briefly if Edwarn has bought out one of the rivals in the room. He mingles. The smuggler Dowser approaches first, three days' scrub on his cheeks under a bowler he refused to leave in the cloakroom, with a tall short-haired woman on his arm. Dowser complains about the painting; Winsting coyly recasts the bid as money in exchange for a year's Senate vote. The woman on Dowser's arm asks, doe-eyed, whether Winsting isn't worried his brother will find out — Replar knows perfectly well, Winsting tells her, and she will see, by his hint, that "far bigger fish" than him are also on the market. He sees Dowser catch the implication that the governor himself might be open to a bribe.

He pulls Flog aside and tells him the woman is a spy — almost certainly with the constabulary — and instructs Flog to follow her after the meeting and, if she splits from Dowser, arrange an accident for her. He adds, looking sideways at the windows, that the mists are watching and Flog is not to try to do it where He can't see. Then he moves over to Lord Hughes Entrone of House Entrone and gets on with the bidding.

An hour later, with bids climbing past anything he had let himself hope for, Winsting is dizzy with success — he will no longer have to keep an eye on his spending — when a single gunshot cracks across the room. He assumes for half a second that a server has dropped something. Another shot follows, and another, and then the room is a storm of crossfire, syndicates and noble guards firing at one another in a sudden cacophony of death. He sees one of his own bodyguards in the doorway staring at the blood on his shirt. Flog grabs his arm and shoves him into the saferoom stairwell.

They wind down the dim electric-lit stairs to a vault door at the bottom. Flog locks him in and goes back up to find out who started it. Winsting sits in his small bunker — wine and amenities and rugs untouched — and frets about what the papers will do with this, what his brother will say. Eventually Flog returns. Through the peephole Winsting sees him, sees the guards arrayed behind him on the stairwell, and unlocks the door. *All of them?* Winsting asks. *Every last one*, Flog tells him, and walks in. Winsting slumps in his chair, casts around for some way to make this go away — he owns the building, he will be tied to the bodies, he will need an alibi, he will have to go to his brother. He demands Flog's opinion. The answer is a pair of hands seizing his hair, pulling his head back, and efficiently slitting his throat.