Shadows of Self recap

A year after the Vanishers, Elendel is inflamed by rising prices, labor unrest and a corrupt administration, and a killer begins working through the city, starting with the governor's brother and everyone attending his private auction. Harmony tells Waxillium Ladrian what he is hunting: a kandra, one of the god's own Faceless Immortals, has torn out a spike so that Harmony can neither see nor command her, and she can wear the face of anyone she has killed. Working with Wayne, the constable Marasi Colms and the kandra MeLaan, Wax finds that the murders are chosen to inflame the city and that Governor Innate's corruption has given her real grievances to work with. Bleeder maneuvers Wax into killing the governor himself, in the belief that he is shooting her in disguise, and then reveals that she is Paalm, the kandra Harmony set to watch over him, who lived for years as his beloved Lessie and faked her death at his hands. Wax kills her, then rejects Harmony and sets aside the earring the god spoke through, leaving Elendel without a governor and himself without his faith.

Background: three centuries ago this world was ash-choked and ruled by an immortal tyrant. A thief called Kelsier began the rebellion that unseated him and died doing it; a young woman named Vin finished it, and later destroyed the god of decay at the cost of her own life. A Terris scholar named Sazed took up the divine powers left behind, became Harmony, and remade the planet into somewhere people could live. Kelsier is now worshipped as the Survivor and Vin as the Ascendant Warrior, and Harmony still answers people occasionally. Their descendants have built the Elendel Basin into a place of railways, electric light and revolvers, where Allomancy and Feruchemy survive only thinned: single-metal Mistings, and Twinborn who hold one power of each art. Previously: Waxillium Ladrian, a Twinborn Coinshot and Skimmer, gave up twenty years as a lawman in the frontier Roughs after a killer cost him the woman he loved, Lessie, and came home to Elendel to run a bankrupt House Ladrian. A gang called the Vanishers dragged him back into the work. With his old partner Wayne and a criminology student named Marasi Colms he found that the gang's unkillable leader, Miles Hundredlives, was stealing aluminum and abducting noblewomen for their inherited Allomantic bloodlines on behalf of a hidden organization called the Set. Wax broke the operation; Miles was executed warning that his employers were already in the city. Wax then learned that his uncle Edwarn Ladrian had faked his death and joined them. He remains engaged to the relentlessly methodical Steris Harms, Marasi joined the constabulary, and Harmony has begun speaking to Wax directly.

Elendel is straining. Prices are climbing, factory workers are agitating, and the governor's administration is widely believed to be corrupt. Winsting Innate, the governor's brother, holds a private auction in his own house to sell his family's influence to the city's criminal bosses; before it can conclude, everyone inside is killed by a single intruder who moved through guarded rooms unseen. Wax, Wayne and Marasi, now a constable working under Constable-General Aradel, are brought in. Harmony tells Wax what he is hunting. A kandra, one of the Faceless Immortals who serve the god, has gone rogue. Kandra are shapeshifters who can wear the body and face of anyone they have killed, and hold their own identity in metal spikes; this one has torn out a spike, which puts her beyond Harmony's sight and beyond his command. She calls herself Bleeder. Harmony sends a second kandra, MeLaan, to work alongside Wax, which helps rather less than he hoped, because it means the enemy could be standing next to him wearing anyone's face.

Wax works the killings while the city slides further toward open unrest. Bleeder is not simply murdering people: each death is chosen, and she takes the victim's face and place afterwards, so anybody Wax questions may already be her. The pattern points at an attack on Elendel itself rather than at any one person, and each victim's loss inflames a particular grievance. Wax's engagement to Steris Harms continues around the case, and Steris, who prepares for catastrophes as a matter of routine, is markedly less rattled by any of it than the people who mock her for the habit. Wayne works the streets in borrowed accents and borrowed lives, MeLaan proves an unsettling ally who enjoys the work rather more than Wax does, and Marasi pursues the case through the constabulary's records, increasingly aware that she is a better investigator than the men around her have assumed.

The trail runs into the city's institutions. Wax visits the Village, the Terris enclave that governs itself inside Elendel, and finds that Bleeder has reached in there too; the killings touch the Terris community and the governor's office alike. He begins to understand that he is being played with rather than merely evaded. Bleeder knows him, anticipates him, and leaves things where he will find them. Harmony's involvement becomes a problem in its own right: Wax presses the god about how much he arranges and how little he says, and does not like the answers he gets about how far a god's influence reaches into the lives of the people he uses. Meanwhile evidence accumulates that Governor Innate has been taking money to manipulate the Basin's grain and land prices, which means the anger Bleeder is stoking has a genuine grievance underneath it.

Wax, Wayne and Marasi close on Bleeder's design. She is not trying to seize the city. She wants to prove a point about Harmony by showing what happens when a god's careful ordering of lives is torn open, and she intends to do it by pushing Elendel into open riot. Innate's corruption supplies the fuel. Wax loses people to her and cannot trust a face he sees. Marasi, working the political end through the constabulary's files, uncovers how far the governor's dealings go and who has been paying, which ties the city's unrest back to the Set. The constabulary begins preparing for a public appearance by the governor that will draw enormous crowds, knowing that a killer who can be anybody intends to be there.

The crisis breaks in the streets. Riots spread through the octants, the constabulary is stretched past breaking, and Wax is forced to choose between chasing Bleeder and holding the city together, with every choice costing him something she arranged in advance. Wayne and MeLaan fight through the disorder; Marasi takes responsibility for decisions well above her rank and makes them well, and Aradel backs her. Wax pursues Bleeder toward the governor, certain by now that Innate is either her final target or already dead and replaced, and completely unable to tell which.

Wax reaches the governor and shoots him, convinced he is killing Bleeder wearing Innate's face. The man he kills is the real Replar Innate, and that is exactly what Bleeder arranged: Elendel watches its most famous lawman murder its head of state, and the last of the city's confidence in its institutions goes with him. Bleeder then shows Wax who she is. She is Paalm, the kandra Harmony assigned years ago to watch over Wax in the Roughs, who assumed the identity of Lessie, became the woman he loved, and staged her own death at his hands. She tore out her spike to escape a god she could no longer bear serving, and set out to prove that a deity who arranges people's lives is a horror. Wax kills her, which is what she wanted. Harmony admits what he did, and Wax refuses him, taking out the earring the god has spoken through and putting it aside. Elendel is left with a dead governor, a collapsed administration, evidence that the Set had bought its way into the top of it, and no idea what to make of the man who fired the shot.

Wax kills Governor Replar Innate in front of witnesses, certain that he is shooting Bleeder wearing the governor's face. He is wrong. The real Innate dies, and that is precisely what Bleeder arranged: the city's most famous lawman publicly executing its head of state, on top of a corruption scandal, with the streets already rioting. Bleeder then shows Wax who she is. She is Paalm, a kandra Harmony assigned years ago to watch over Wax in the Roughs, who took on the identity of Lessie, became the woman he loved, and staged her own death at his hands to get free of the assignment. Having pulled a spike to put herself beyond Harmony's sight, she has spent the book trying to prove that a god who quietly arranges human lives is a horror rather than a comfort. Wax gives her the death she asks for. Afterwards Harmony admits the arrangement, and Wax, who has spent his life being told that being chosen was a blessing, refuses him and sets aside the earring the god has been speaking through. Elendel is left with a dead governor, a wrecked administration, exposed evidence that the Set had bought influence at the top of it, and a hero the city does not know how to think about. Marasi has proved herself well beyond her rank, Wayne and MeLaan have become close, and Wax remains engaged to Steris and estranged from his god.