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Wax meets his greeter in the dark. The voice belongs to a wolfhound the size of a small pony, mottled grey like the mists themselves, walking on all fours and growling out a half-human grumble about Sazed putting him in a book so drunks can curse by his name. TenSoon tells Wax to lock the hidden door behind them; the others are busy *counteracting* Paalm in the city above. For every street-corner *priest* she puts up tonight inciting riot, he says, dozens of kandra are out walking the same streets preaching peace and patience. She disdains the rest of them and so underestimates them. Wax tucks the idea away — he had assumed they were just *hunting* her — and follows the wolfhound deeper.

The Homeland is bigger than he had pictured from the one chamber under the tomb. Sazed assembled this place during the Catacendre out of every refuge in which humans hid through the World of Ash, dropped them all into one warren beneath what is now Elendel. They pass an opening into a chamber where dusty tiles and pillars frame what looks, impossibly, like a hut: the basements of Kredik Shaw, rescued whole. Wax stops in his tracks at the thought of the Well of Ascension sitting somewhere behind that door. TenSoon does not let him linger. The young kandra almost never come down here at all, he says; the older ones still come, but rarely, and alone. This is *home*, but it is also a prison.

The chamber TenSoon has brought him to has three-foot pits sunk in a smooth pooled-wax floor. One is half full of paper — hundreds of sheets, jagged-edged, ripped from a handwritten unabridged set of the Words of Founding and scrawled all over in dried blood. *Lies, lies, lies* across a page on Harmony's search for truth. Single words on others: *Freedom. Nobody. I was there.* Wax sets down his lantern and starts sorting them by category — words, fingerprints, smears — and feels suddenly cold when he realises which chamber this is. TenSoon will not enter it. *I do not spend time in this room, human.* It is the chamber in which he was once held without bones, awaiting execution by his own people, during the last days of the old world.

He asks TenSoon about Paalm: who she is, what she was. TenSoon tells him she was the Lord Ruler's pet kandra — slave to his will and the Contract both. She vanished at the end of the World of Ash, didn't come back to the Homeland, and only reappeared among the survivors after the Ascension; even then she served Harmony only at a distance, then not at all. Asked what the Ascendant Warrior — Paalm's last master — was like, TenSoon answers softly: *strong and vulnerable all at once… when she fought, she was the blade. When she loved, she was the kiss. More human than any I have known.*

Wax stands over the pages and works it out. The murders are not random. Every one is aimed at a faculty of Harmony. The senator was his mouth, so she removed a tongue. The priest was his eyes, so she shot him through them. The pages here are an elaborate decoration — left for him to play with so he would stay in the Homeland long enough for her next move above. TenSoon checks with Harmony and confirms: yes, the break came when Harmony once pushed her, hard, to do something she did not want to do. She wants to *free* the city from him by making it angry. And — Wax feels it click — the kandra on the streets tonight are Harmony's ears. *She knows what you're going to do, TenSoon. Her next step is to bring them down.*

Across the city, Wayne is working the biggest crowd of the night between two bonfires fed on chopped-up furniture. He has stopped filling his health metalmind in expectation of needing it later, swiped a fancy cigar from the governor's stash for a fork (Wax's, but Wax won't miss it), and pulled the crowd around him like a coat. He shuffles when they shuffle, shouts when they shout, and works to the front of a knot gathered round a shirtless man balanced on the Survivor's spear — a fountain statue — who is shouting about long hours and lavish parties and *would the Survivor have stood for this?* Wayne mostly agrees, while remembering the lavish parties had good sandwiches. He is about to peel away to the mansion when a round-faced Survivorist priest climbs the fountain in his mistcoat-hemmed robes and begs the crowd not to use the Survivor's name for looting — *these are not the days of the Lord Ruler; you have a democracy, you have advocates.*

The crowd actually quiets. Wayne is just about willing to buy this priest a drink — drinks bought for priests being unusually economical, since priests rarely drink theirs — when the man in the suspenders behind the priest raises his hand with something in it. Not a knife. A needle. Wayne throws a speed bubble and feels useless; he is too far away to do anything but watch the priest's flesh go translucent, the eyes droop down out of their sockets, the crystal kandra bones glitter in firelight. The man on the statue rounds on his audience: *see what they send to placate you? The Faceless Immortals serve the nobility.* And then he points right at Wayne in the crowd. *One of them is here. They send constables into our midst.* Every face at the bonfire square turns to look.