Brandon SANDERSON - The Bands of Mourning

The priest spoke the words, but Wax couldn’t listen. All was numbness to him, teeth clenched, eyes straight ahead, muscles tense. They’d found a priest murdered in this very church. Killed by Lessie as she went mad. Couldn’t they have done something for her, instead of setting him on the hunt? Couldn’t they have told him?

Strength. He would not flee. He would not be a coward.

He held Steris’s hands, but couldn’t look at her. Instead, he turned his face upward to look out the glass dome toward the sky. Most of it was crowded out by the buildings. Skyscrapers on two sides, windows glistening in the morning sun. That water tower certainly did block the view, though as he watched, it shifted.…

Shifted?

Wax watched in horror as the legs under the enormous metal cylinder bent, as if to kneel, ponderously tipping their burden on its side. The top of the thing sheared off, spilling tons of water in a foaming wave.

He yanked Steris to him, arm firmly around her waist, then ripped off the second button down on his waistcoat and dropped it. He Pushed against this single metal button, launching himself and Steris away from the dais as the priest yelped in surprise.

Water crashed against the dome, which strained for the briefest of seconds before a section of it snapped open, hinges giving way inward to the water.

“Are you certain you’re all right, my lord?” Wax asked, helping Lord Drapen, constable-general of the Sixth Octant, down the steps toward his carriage. Water trickled beside them in little streams, joining a small river in the gutters.

“Ruined my best pistol, you realize,” Drapen said. “I’ll have to send the thing to be cleaned and oiled!”

“Bill me the expense, my lord,” Wax said, ignoring the fact that a good pistol would hardly be ruined by a little – or, well, a lot of – water. Wax turned the aging gentleman over to his coachman, sharing a resigned look, before turning and climbing back up the steps into the church. The carpet squished when he stepped on it. Or maybe that was his shoes.

He passed the priest bickering with the Erikell insurance assessor – come to do an initial report for when the church demanded payment on their policy – and entered the main dome. The one open section of glass still swung on its hinges up above, and the tipped water tower – its legs on the other side had kept it from crashing down completely – still blocked out much of the sky.

He passed overturned benches, discarded Marewill petals, and general refuse. Water dripped, the room’s only sound other than the echoing voice of the priest. Wax squished his way up to the dais. Steris sat on its edge, wet dress plastered to her body, strands of hair that had escaped from her wedding braids sticking to the sides of her face. She sat with arms crossed on her knees, staring at the floor.

Wax sat down next to her. “So, next time a flood is dumped on our heads, I’ll try to remember that jumping upward is a bad idea.” He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and squeezed it out.

“You tried to get us backward too. It merely wasn’t fast enough, Lord Waxillium.”

He grunted. “Looks like simple structural failure. If it was instead some kind of assassination attempt … well, it was an incompetent one. There wasn’t enough water in there to be truly dangerous. The worst injury was to Lord Steming, who fell and knocked his head when scrambling off his seat.”

“No more than an accident then,” Steris said. She flopped backward onto the dais, the carpet letting out a soft squish.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.” She sighed. “Do you ever wonder if perhaps the cosmere is out to overwhelm you, Lord Waxillium?”

“The cosmere? You mean Harmony?”

“No, not Him,” Steris said. “Just cosmic chance rolling the dice anytime I pass, and always hitting all ones. There seems to be a poetry to it all.” She closed her eyes. “Of course the wedding would fall apart. Several tons of water falling through the roof? Why wouldn’t I have seen that? It’s so utterly outlandish it had to happen. At least the priest didn’t get murdered this time.”

“Steris,” Wax said, resting a hand on her arm. “We’ll fix this. It will be all right.”

She opened her eyes, looking toward him. “Thank you, Lord Waxillium.”

“For what, exactly?” he asked.

“For being nice. For being willing to subject yourself to, well, me. I understand that it is not a pleasant concept.”

“Steris…”

“Do not think me self-deprecating, Lord Waxillium,” she said, sitting up and taking a deep breath, “and please do not assume I’m being morose. I am what I am, and I accept it. But I am under no illusions as to how my company is regarded. Thank you. For not making me feel as others have.”

He hesitated. How did one respond to something like that ? “It’s not as you say, Steris. I think you’re delightful.”

“And the fact that you were gritting your teeth as the ceremony started, hands gripping as tightly as a man dangling for his life from the side of a bridge?”

“I…”

“Are you saddened at the fact that our wedding is delayed? Can you truly say it, and be honest as a lawman, Lord Waxillium?”

Damn. He floundered. He knew a few simple words could defuse or sidestep the question, but he couldn’t find them, despite searching for what was an awkwardly long time – until saying anything would have sounded condescending.

“Perhaps,” he said, smiling, “I’ll just have to try something to relax me next time we attempt this.”

“I doubt going to the ceremony drunk would be productive.”

“I didn’t say I’d drink. Perhaps some Terris meditation beforehand.”

She eyed him. “You’re still willing to move forward?”

“Of course.” As long as it didn’t have to be today. “I assume you have a backup dress?”

“Two,” she admitted, letting him help her to her feet. “And I did reserve another date for a wedding two months from now. Different church – in case this one exploded.”

He grunted. “You sound like Wayne.”

“Well, things do tend to explode around you, Lord Waxillium.” She looked up at the dome. “Considering that, getting drenched must be rather novel.”

Marasi trailed around the outside of the flooded church, hands clasped behind her back, notebook a familiar weight in her jacket pocket. A few constables – all corporals – stood about looking as if they were in charge. That sort of thing was important in a crisis; statistics showed that if a uniformed authority figure was nearby, people were less likely to panic.

Of course, there was also a smaller percentage who were more likely to panic if an authority figure was nearby. Because people were people, and if there was one thing you could count on, it was that some of them would be weird. Or rather that all of them would be weird when circumstances happened to align with their own individual brand of insanity.

That said, today she hunted a very special kind of insane. She’d tried the nearby pubs first, but that was too obvious. Next she checked the gutters, one soup kitchen, and – against her better judgment – a purveyor of “novelties.” No luck, though her backside did get three separate compliments, so there was that.

Finally, running out of ideas, she went to check if he’d decided to steal the forks from the wedding breakfast. There, in a dining hall across the street from the church, she found Wayne in the kitchens wearing a white jacket and a chef’s hat. He was scolding several assistant cooks as they furiously decorated tarts with fruit glaze.