POV: wayne
Summary
Wayne is not, by his own estimation, a religious man — Harmony does not pay much attention to fellows like him, the way a master painter does not wonder where his mother put the toddler drawings — but he does take comfort, now and then, in the Temple of the Common Man, which is what he calls his pub. He swings up the lane on Wax's errand, exchanges the proper liturgy with Blue the bouncer (*how watery's the beer today? — don't make trouble at the pub tonight, Wayne*), dips a finger into a trail of beer dripping from a table, marks himself on the forehead and navel, and enters.
The room is wrong. Solemn. No hymns sung in a holy slur, no celebratory noise — just heads bowed in *prayer*, which on this night means quiet exhausted talk about strikes, sixteen-hour shifts, food prices, and a governor who only cares about his reputation. He settles at a carved round table with the scripture *The sausages is rubbish* on it, lays an accent on a tad too thick when he asks the maid for whiskey, gets water with a lemon back. He moves to the altar and there, between a regular with suspenders and one with bear-fur on his forearms, lifts both their drinks, mixes the rum and the beer together with a squeeze of lemon and a pinch of sugar and ice, shakes, slides cups back. *Wow. What did you do?* He gets the priest on side and walks the room one table at a time, remaking every drink with whatever he can borrow from the table next to it, leaving each customer with something fresh. The mood lifts.
The last drink he makes is for a tall woman with large eyes and long fingers — gin, lime, sugar, soda water, and a pinch of a blue powder he traded sand for at the party earlier. The drink blushes violet in front of her. Then her cheeks do. *Well hang me — you're that immortal, ain't you?* MeLaan grins. She gives him the passphrase (*all yellow pants*), tells him the room had been ready to burst when she walked in and that he may actually have averted a riot. *It's just one pub. One outta hundreds.* What he really needs to do, he decides, is get the whole city drunk. She is fine with that as long as she goes first.
Wax and Marasi come through the door later to find the immortal demigod and Wayne mid-belching-contest, and slip into a side booth. Over the course of the next round, Wax gets his audience with MeLaan on the Paalm question. She begs off the title *Your Grace* — she is a late-generation kandra, spent the Catacendre underground as an adolescent, has never read the Words of Founding (over six hundred years old, she shrugs; *that's the thing about eternity, you get really good at procrastinating*). She prefers a *True Body* — when Marasi asks whose bones she wears, she goes transparent across the table to show a skull carved out of emerald crystal.
On Paalm herself: an *old-style* kandra, almost as good an imitator as TenSoon; *the Father's own*, the Lord Ruler's personal infiltrator, sent on mission after mission and rarely in the Homeland; loyal to him until his fall and then fanatically loyal to Harmony; insisting on missions in a world that no longer needed them, kept always in character, until something snapped. MeLaan thinks Paalm learned Allomancy and Feruchemy the same way she once impersonated Inquisitors — by spying among them.
On how to put a kandra down: gunshots and most physical damage are useless. Acid works but is horrible. Crushing the skeleton makes them hard to move. The reliable answer is to pull the spike — they revert to a mistwraith state and are done. *Just remove her remaining spike, which will basically immobilize her*; Wax presses, *don't I have to immobilise her to remove the spike?* — and gets, in return, MeLaan's very serious warning that Paalm is not a state that stays captured for long. She slides a pair of kandra-detection syringes across the table — last-resort tools, made by the more scientifically-minded among the kandra — with the inconvenient caveat that one of these injected into anyone who is not a kandra will kill them.
Wax tries to plan a way to find her in time — *catch her in a lie*, or watch for someone non-Metalborn using a power. MeLaan agrees Paalm has a plan she has not yet revealed. While Marasi transcribes the conversation, Wayne builds a six-storey tower of beer-mat coasters — three of the lower levels glued together with the gum he is chewing, as Wax points out, because the contest is never about height but about whether Wax will spot how Wayne cheats. *He always cheats somehow.* Wax divides duties: Wayne to the governor's mansion, Marasi to the precinct (with MeLaan in tow), and himself to meet them at the mansion after one stop. Each pair exchanges its own private passphrase before splitting. Out under the gas lights of the pub door Wax tells MeLaan that he hates not being able to trust people he should be able to trust — and quietly thanks her for the earring she once brought him.