But… what would Wax say?

He left me, the bastard, Wayne thought, wiping his eyes. In that moment, he hated Wax too. But then, Wayne loved him more than the hatred. He growled, and stumbled to his feet. He had no weapons; he’d dropped his dueling canes above.

He stared at Wax’s body, then knelt and felt along the man’s leg. He got ahold of something and yanked it free. The shotgun.

Wayne’s hands immediately started shaking.

“You stop that,” he hissed at them. “We’re done with that.”

He cocked the shotgun, then went looking for a way out of this tomb.

The whole temple is a decoy, Marasi thought, trembling in the cold. So where are the actual Bands?

The place was built for the Lord Ruler, who would supposedly return to claim his weapon. Where would you put that weapon?

He’d know what it looked like, Marasi thought. He built it. We think it was in the shape of bracers, but it didn’t have to be. Could be anything.

That would be smart, if you were making a weapon. These metalminds, you had to know what they did before they worked. You could protect yourself, so only someone who knew what to look for could use your weapon.

And in that case, the people who built the temple could have left the weapon where the returning Lord Ruler would see it, but everyone else would pass right by, digging farther into the temple to encounter traps, pits, and decoys—all designed to either kill them or convince them that they’d successfully robbed the place.

Where did you put the weapon? On the doorstep, under the sign of the Sovereign himself, in his very own hand. Marasi turned, frantic, searching out the oversized spearhead.

It lay right beside her, where the guard had dropped it. Waxillium had called it aluminum because he couldn’t sense it, but he hadn’t looked closely enough.

If he had, he’d have seen it was made of different interwoven metals, wavy, like the folds forged into the blade of a sword. He couldn’t Push on it, not because it was aluminum.

But because it was a metalmind, stored with more power than any they’d ever seen.

Around Wax, everything became misty and indistinct. The cavern, the rocks, the ground itself—all just mist. He could stand on it somehow.

Harmony stepped up beside Wax in the misty darkness. They fell in beside one another, walking as was natural for men to do. God looked much as Wax had always imagined Him. Tall, peaceful, hands laced before Himself. Face like a long oval, serene and human, though He towed behind Him a cloak of timelessness. Wax could see it, trailing after. Storms and winds, clouds and rain, deserts and forests, all reflected somehow in this creature’s wake. His robe was the Terris V pattern, where each V was not a color, but an age. A strata of time, like those of a deep rock uncovered.

“They say,” Wax said softly, “that You come to all people when they die.”