The Bands of Mourning

Twenty-eight years before the main story, the teenage Waxillium is spending a year in the Terris Village, Elendel’s Terris enclave, where his grandmother Vwafendal is an elder and his sister Telsin, a year older, calls him by his Terris name, Asinthew. He trails Telsin when she skips evening recitation, then hangs back as she and three friends, Kwashim, Idashwy and Forch, a Coinshot like Wax, head out through the Tin Gate into the city. He overhears a constable warn Vwafendal that arson often covers up other crimes; she refuses his help, and Wax pockets the bullet the constable leaves behind. After recitation Tellingdwar tells him about a murder fifteen years back.

That night Wax follows a trail to an old dormitory, where a boy lies tied down and bleeding. Forch, who used the girls’ outing as his alibi, Pushes nails at Wax and drops him out of a window, but Wax has managed to swallow a little steel. He Pushes the constable’s bullet at Forch; when Forch Pushes back, Wax releases his Push on parts of the bullet so that it fires, and Forch dies. When Vwafendal and the others arrive, Wax knows they will hate him for bringing violence into the Village, and for being right, and he decides the Village is not for him. It is Wax in miniature: a stray bullet in his pocket, an instinct to follow, and the price of being right.

Twenty-eight years later Wax and Wayne help the constabulary raid Migs and his gang, and Wax heads off to marry Steris. When a man in a brown suit asks him for a moment, he skips the slow carriage and Steelpushes across Elendel to the water tower beside the Survivorist church, where his valet Drewton shaves him and changes him. It has been six months since Wax killed Lessie at the end of Shadows of Self. He is fond of Steris, who has helped him heal, but he is still struggling, and still angry at Harmony; when the brown-suited man reveals he is a kandra, Wax brushes past him.

Steris cries tears of joy as the ceremony begins. Wax feels sick, because marrying means giving up Lessie, but he will not shirk his duty. Then the water tower crashes into the church’s glass dome, and Wax grabs Steris and Pushes them clear. Nobody is seriously hurt, Steris has already booked another church two months out, and Wax admits he is glad the wedding is put off. The culprit is Wayne, who had some lads arrange an accident; he told them to flood the church, not topple a tower. He and Marasi drink to moving on, Wayne from Ranette and Marasi from Wax.

At home Wax finds the kandra, VenDell of the Sixth Generation, in his study with Wayne, Marasi and MeLaan. VenDell sets up an evanoscope and lectures on Identity, on “unkeyed” metalminds others could use, and on the myth of the Bands of Mourning, the Lord Ruler’s bracers. Another kandra, ReLuur, photographed murals of the bracers on a pedestal, a statue resembling the Lord Ruler and script in an unknown language, then came back missing a spike and unable to say what happened. Harmony, VenDell hints, is preoccupied with something big. Wax refuses, until VenDell shows him an evanotype of his sister Telsin, held prisoner in New Seran.

So Wax will go south under cover of a political event, and Steris invites herself, since a fiancée would be expected. He turns down VenDell’s offer of a new earring. Wayne, in a string of disguises, gets a notebook to Ranette, tells her he is done chasing her, and shakes her hand.

On the train south Wax opens Ranette’s package: an enormous shotgun meant to take down Thugs or koloss, and three sphere-and-cord devices. He discovers that Steris’s “history of New Seran” is a book about sex; she is mortified, then frank, then has him hunt three missing clips through the household ledgers. Marasi studies ReLuur’s notes (a beast with red skin and strange eyes) and Hemalurgy as written up by Spook, remembered now as the Lord Mistborn.

Then their car is uncoupled and a man opens fire on Marasi. Wax’s instinctive Push turns the bullet, and with his weight and a Push he drives the car back to reattach to the train. Bandits board from horseback; Steris produces three spare vials she packed just in case. Robbers blow a safe, and when a small metal cube lands near Wax his metal reserves vanish. Marasi fights from the car with Steris reloading for her. A huge Coinshot brute takes Ranette’s shotgun from Wax; Steris grabs it and fires, wounding him, and the kick throws her off the train. Wax dives after her and catches her just above the river. She is delighted.

A man with a cane drops a small cube while fleeing Marasi, and she pockets it. Wax yanks the brute off the train with Ranette’s hook, Marasi traps the last bandits in a slowness bubble, and Wayne and MeLaan, it turns out, spent the entire fight in a luggage compartment.

New Seran is a city of enormous flat-topped stone terraces, streams falling off every edge as waterfalls, gondolas hanging from lines high overhead. Wax Pushes himself and Marasi to the top tier, and at the Copper Gate hotel Steris hands the owner, Aunt Gin, a list of calamities to prepare for, including a cattle stampede through the lobby.

Outside Lady Kelesina Shores’s party a beggar asking for coins for old Hoid takes Wax’s bank note and tosses back a coin as change: two metals, stamped with a man with one spiked eye and the same symbols as ReLuur’s photographs. Steris has brought a book of conversation starters; inside, a woman who knows far too much about metals cuts in on a dance, quizzes Wax about his combined powers and leaves a card with an Elendel address and no name. The informant Devlin Airs says nobles are behind a quiet building project involving Allomancers, and that civil war is coming. Kelesina panics at the sight of the coin and leaves; Steris downs an emetic and vomits on the table as a diversion.

Wayne and Marasi, meanwhile, learn that all the cemetery workers are crooked and, in disguise, bribe the gravekeeper Dechamp at the Seran New District Cemetery to dig up an unidentified body. Set gunmen open fire on the grave; Wayne is shot four times, heals in a speed bubble and beats them with his dueling canes. Then Templeton Fig, a Set underling sitting among his stuffed albino animals, watches the flames in his fireplace stop moving; Death (Wayne in disguise) taps at his window, and Fig confesses that the spike was sent to Dulsing.

Wax overhears his uncle’s voice behind a door, talking to Kelesina, and bursts in to find only two women and a box. The voice is coming from the box. Kelesina’s Terris steward disarms Wax and shoots Kelesina with his gun, framing him. MeLaan, wearing a skeleton of aluminum, runs the steward through, and Wax takes the steward’s gold bracelet, a metalmind full of healing. He finds Steris hiding in the bushes and flies her up through the mists, and above them, attracted to her, he kisses her. Framed for murder, the party flees New Seran, Wax bringing down a gondola line behind them. Smoking a cigar in the dark, he realizes he hates Harmony for what feels like a betrayal, and he chooses Dulsing over home.

On the stagecoach Marasi flips the switch on the cube and burns cadmium, and the coach lurches: the cube extends an Allomancer’s power over an area, an Allomantic grenade. Wayne finds that the gold bracelet works for him. Near Dulsing, a little farming town, they find a large, guarded building still under construction. Wax Pushes Wayne over the perimeter to cut the floodlights, and inside lies a huge damaged ship with no mast. Professor Irich, a Set scientist wasting from a muscle disease, and his academics cannot work out how it moves. The captured crew has been tortured, and Telsin is held in a separate room.

Marasi and MeLaan break into Irich’s rooms, where Marasi finds one of the monsters from ReLuur’s drawing in a cage. It holds out a human hand and begs. The face is a mask. Wayne bluffs the guards in gibberish while Wax reaches Telsin, who hugs him weeping and asks for a gun; when the brute Coinshot walks in, she shoots him at once. Marasi takes ReLuur’s spike and a second cube from Irich’s safe and frees the masked man, Allik Neverfar.

A massive firefight follows. Wayne is shot again and again as he heals, Wax is hit by an aluminum bullet, and Marasi uses the cube before she is shot in the side. Allik guides them up a rope ladder into the ship, to a compartment of bolted chairs. Putting on another medallion, he suddenly speaks their language, and he hands out iron medallions anyone can fill. The compartment is a separate small craft: Wax’s Push lifts it into the sky, Allik activates it with the cube, and wings and fans drop into place. They pick up Steris, and MeLaan heals Marasi’s wound by replicating her flesh. Allik addresses Wax with a growing list of divine titles and names the Sovereign’s temple on Irich’s map: the Sovereign came to his people after the Ice Death, the south’s name for Harmony’s remaking of the world, and taught them to make medallions. Telsin urges them to beat Suit to the weapon, and Wax heads for the temple.

On the flight Allik tells Marasi about his people’s masks, and about the Hunters, who want the Bands destroyed. A light in the mountains marks Suit’s expedition. Flying over it, Wayne, jostled by Telsin, kicks a pack overboard onto the men below. They land in snow by a bleak one-story fortress of field stones and bury the craft; a big southern airship lies abandoned nearby among dead Hunters. At the entrance stands a statue of the Sovereign, a man with one eye spiked like the face on the coin, holding a wooden spear. Wayne pries off its spearhead, thinking it valuable aluminum.

Inside, MeLaan walks ahead, triggering and enduring every trap, and Wax, Allik and Telsin follow. Wax works out the pattern; the last trap is a frozen block of acid. At the entrance Steris shows Marasi her chart of everyone’s usefulness, with herself at seven out of a hundred, and admits that she loves Wax. Then Edwarn arrives under a parley flag, offers a truce, knows which symbols to Push, and the door slides open on a dais like the mural’s, holding only broken glass.

Edwarn signals, and Wax guesses the mole is Telsin. Brother and sister fire at once; only her aluminum bullet hits. She shoots him again, and he escapes through a trap into a pit. Telsin and Edwarn drain Wayne’s and Marasi’s metals; Wayne escapes; Telsin injects MeLaan so that she loses her shape, and takes her spikes. Marasi sees a Hemalurgic spike in Edwarn’s ribs. Bleeding, Wax falls into another chamber of dead Hunters and a pedestal of bracers. Edwarn tracks his blood and reveals that Telsin recruited him. Wax positions himself so that springing a trap would kill them both; Edwarn springs it anyway, and the ceiling comes down on Wax.

Outside, soldiers call Telsin Lady Sequence. Edwarn, with three Hemalurgic boons, tries the bracers: drained. Telsin tries them after a vial of metals: nothing, another decoy. Marasi notices that Wayne has traded ReLuur’s spike for the spearhead in her purse. Under the rubble Wax works out what the real Bands are, and dies before he can say it, as Wayne weeps.

Wayne, who does not use guns, takes up Wax’s shotgun, full of hatred, and wills his hands still. Marasi works out that the trapped temple is a decoy and the spearhead is the real thing.

Dead, Wax walks a world of mist with Harmony and rails at his inaction. The book names what is underneath:

“Hatred for Harmony. Hatred for the world. And yes. Hatred for himself.”

Harmony shows him the planet and something he is holding off, a red haze he admits he does not understand, and helps Wax let go of his self-hatred over Lessie, who, Wax learns, asked Harmony to look after him. Offered freedom or another adventure, he chooses to go back.

Marasi taps the Bands. With impossible speed she takes vials from the guards, Pushes soldiers, Edwarn and Telsin away, and soars into the sky with mists streaming from her, like the Ascendant Warrior. It is not what she wants. Steris gives the freezing Allik the spare warming medallion she has hidden in her notebook. Wax throws off the rubble, healed by the spearhead Marasi has put in his hand, and she tells him to finish the job meant for him.

Suit flees aboard the Hunters’ ship, while Allik and Steris save Captain Jordis’s freezing Malwish crew with warming medallions and guns. Wax bursts from the temple trailing mist, able to tear the ship down, and does not: he is a lawman, not an executioner. Suit claims to have armed a bomb and demands a duel without the Bands, so Wax stows them and keeps only the aluminum gun. Telsin scrambles for the small craft, and Wayne shoots her. Suit turns out to be a Leecher as well, but Wax, out of steel, punches his uncle out, and MeLaan, a formless mass, absorbs her returned spikes and becomes herself.

Suit ends up tied to the statue’s spear, gagged and Leeched. Jordis and Wax both claim the ship and the Bands, and Steris brokers it: the Malwish keep the ship, the kandra keep the Bands, and trade opens. Telsin has slipped away; flying home, Wayne admits he knew she could heal and let her go once he had the spikes, a second chance of the kind Wax once gave him. The ship lands atop Ahlstrom Tower, and Allik gives Marasi his mask. In the penthouse below, a Survivorist priest is waiting, and Wax asks Steris to marry him, not for politics but for love and companionship. They are married that night.

Two weeks on, Governor Aradel is preparing for war with the outer cities, and Suit still has not talked. A being with red eyes visits his cell, praises his silence and sets off a bomb that kills them both. The explosion wakes Wax in the penthouse. He picks up the beggar’s coin, nicrosil and copper, a coppermind, and taps it. Through the eyes of a traveller, one of them spiked, he enters a freezing village whose people have burned their masks. A woman lifts her cloth mask, and the traveller whispers “Survive.” On the traveller’s arm Wax sees a network of scars. The Sovereign was Kelsier.