Chapter One — A New CauseThree weeks.

  The needle hadn't moved.

  Aris checked it every morning, the same way he checked the clinic supplies and the Deepbloom stock, the spell tracker sitting on the small shelf above his desk where he checked it daily. Every morning the gold casing caught the early light and the needle pointed in the same direction it had pointed since the street outside the Undercourse.

  The dungeon.

  Whatever was down there wasn't moving.

  Elysse's sigil had quieted.

  Not gone. It was never gone, the geometry still present on her back, still dark, still structured. But the progression had stopped and the voices hadn't returned and Void's Hand applied twice a week kept the edges of it from finding new ground.

  She had helped around the church in the meantime.

  Swept the nave. Restocked the clinic shelves. Sat with patients who were frightened and said little but stayed until they weren't frightened anymore, which turned out to be exactly what most frightened people needed.

  Edric had not commented on this.

  He had simply set a second pce at the kitchen table and made enough soup.

  Aris was in the clinic when he heard her voice in the nave.

  He came to the doorway and watched without going in.

  She was standing in front of Edric near the statue, her armor back on, the real set, repaired and fitted correctly again. Her sword at her hip. The white hair tied back. She looked like herself, which was different from how she'd looked on Floor Six, and the difference was most of the distance between almost and actually.

  "You didn't have to do any of this," she said to Edric.

  "The door was open," Edric said. "It's always open."

  "Still."

  "Still nothing." He looked at her with the deep water expression. "You helped three patients this week who would not have let me near them. Whatever you said to them I don't know and I won't ask. But you did good work in this building."

  Elysse was quiet for a moment.

  "Thank you," she said. "For the soup especially."

  "Everyone thanks me for the soup," Edric said. "Nobody thanks me for the theology."

  She almost smiled.

  He put his hand briefly on the top of her head, the same gesture he'd given Colette on the cobblestones, simple and complete, and then he picked up his watering can and went to the garden and that was that.

  Aris was leaning in the clinic doorway when she found him.

  She stopped a few feet away and looked at him with the grey eyes doing their reading.

  "The sigil," she said.

  "Stable," he said. "As long as you don't push too hard for too long it shouldn't progress. Come back if the voices return."

  "I will."

  A pause between them.

  "I'm going to find it," she said. "Whatever put that on my back. I'm going to go back into the dungeon and find it and deal with it."

  "I know," Aris said.

  "I need a guild to do that. Resources, people, someone who knows the deeper floors." She looked at her hands briefly. "I have some leads."

  "Colette—" he started.

  "No," Elysse said. Quiet but certain. "She's already lost everything once. I don't remember what we were to each other but I can see what losing the guild did to her." She looked at him. "Whatever is in that dungeon came for me specifically. I'm not pulling her into that."

  "She'd want to be pulled in," Aris said.

  "I know," Elysse said. "That's why I'm not asking her."

  Aris looked at the floor for a moment.

  There were things he could say. Practical things, sensible things, arguments with actual merit. He didn't say any of them because he could see from her expression that she had already made the complete version of this decision and had made it carefully and it wasn't going to move.

  "Alright," he said.

  She nodded.

  She picked up the bag she'd left by the clinic door, small and practical, and walked toward the nave. At the entrance she stopped and turned back.

  "Aris."

  "Yes."

  "You pulled me off Floor Six," she said. "You carried me up. You treated a condition that nobody in this city had seen before, with a level one Eido, for three weeks, for free." She held his gaze. "I won't forget that. Whatever else I forget, I won't forget that."

  Aris said nothing.

  She walked through the nave and through the open door and out onto Cours Edren and the morning received her and that was that.

  Aris stood in the clinic doorway.

  The church was quiet. The curtains moved. The Architect's hand reached toward the floor the way it always did.

  He looked at the door.

  She's just a patient, he thought. She came in injured and she's leaving healed. That's the whole of it. That's what the clinic is for.

  He believed approximately half of this.

  He went back into the clinic and began restocking the lower shelf and did not look at the door again, mostly.

  He was reaching for the lower shelf when the door opened.

  He didn't look up immediately. The door opened often, patients mostly, occasionally Kai with something from the market.

  Then he heard the footsteps crossing the nave and something about their pace made him turn.

  Colette walked through the clinic doorway and crossed directly to him without slowing and before he had time to process what was happening she had closed the remaining distance and put her arms around him.

  Aris went completely still.

  His arms stayed at his sides. His expression did the thing it did when a situation had arrived faster than the category for it.

  Then he saw her face over his shoulder in the small clinic mirror.

  He stopped thinking about his arms.

  He didn't say anything immediately.

  Neither did she.

  The clinic held its quiet, the shelves and the compounds and the morning light through the small window, and Colette stood in the middle of it with her arms around a level one clinic healer from the lower district and her face doing something it didn't usually do in rooms where people could see it.

  After a moment Aris brought his arms up.

  Awkward. Not practiced. But there.

  "What happened," he said quietly.

  "She left," Colette said.

  "I know."

  "She came to find me first." A pause. "She said goodbye properly. She was kind about it." Another pause. "That almost made it worse."

  Aris said nothing.

  "She's going back in," Colette said. "Into the dungeon. After what happened to her down there she's going back in and I couldn't—" She stopped. "She's made her choice and I understand the choice and I couldn't do anything."

  "It was hers to make," Aris said.

  "I know that."

  "She made it carefully."

  "I know that too," Colette said. She pulled back and looked at the wall, composing herself with the efficiency of someone who had done it many times in many rooms. "She's one of the strongest Wanderers in Valerne. Level five. And now she's walking toward whatever wiped out my entire guild."

  "You don't know that's connected," Aris said.

  "I think it is," Colette said.

  She said it pinly. Not dramatically, not with the weight of a theory being presented. Just the ft honest statement of someone who had been sitting with a thought long enough to know it wasn't going away.

  "My party was one of the strongest in Valerne," she said. "Fifty people. The best I had. They were wiped out on Floor 46 in a single night." She looked at him. "And the one survivor came back with a sigil on her back that no one in this city had ever seen before, that the Eternal Depth had no record of, that a level four arena champion's Eido couldn't produce."

  Aris was quiet.

  "Something is down there," Colette said. "Something that isn't in any of the guild maps. And Elysse is walking toward it with a guild that doesn't know what they're walking toward."

  "She's capable—"

  "So were my fifty," Colette said.

  The clinic held that for a moment.

  Aris looked at the spell tracker on the shelf above his desk. The needle, pointing where it always pointed.

  "What do you want to do," he said.

  Colette looked at him.

  "I want to make a proposal," she said. "And I want you to hear it before you answer."

  "Alright."

  She straightened. The composure fully back, the cape settled correctly, the expression of someone presenting something they had thought about and were prepared to stand behind.

  "Form a party with me," she said.

  Aris looked at her.

  "I'm not a fighter," he said.

  "I know."

  "I treat infections. Dungeon debuffs. I harvest Deepbloom on Floor Six and I come home."

  "I know what you do," Colette said. "I also watched you get up off a pit floor three times against a level four fighter. I watched you find angles nobody else found with an Eido that everyone else would have used for clinic work and nothing else." She held his gaze. "You're not ordinary, Aris. Your Eido is proof of that."

  "I'm level one," he said.

  "So is almost everyone before they're not," she said. "I'm level two. I can't walk into a high level guild and expect to be taken seriously. I have no party, no standing, no guild backing." A pause. "Neither do you."

  "That's a very honest pitch," Aris said.

  "I don't have a better one," she said. "We're both starting from nothing. But nothing and nothing together is at least a foundation."

  She looked at him, and for a moment the composure had something underneath it that she wasn't managing back, the thing that lived beneath the guild captain register and the noble bearing and everything three years of that had built.

  "You're kind," she said, and she said it the way Elysse had said things, simply and without decoration. "I've met a lot of people in a lot of rooms and I know the difference between someone performing kindness and someone who just is." She looked slightly past him for a moment. "I'd feel comfortable with you. That's not nothing."

  Aris looked at the tracker.

  At the needle.

  At the window and the morning light and the clinic shelf he'd been restocking when the door opened.

  He thought about the church. About the east section of the roof that Kai kept mentioning. About the renovation that existed entirely in his head as a set of numbers that didn't currently add up.

  He thought about Floor Six and the Deepbloom patch and the fifty copper in a good week.

  He thought about the pattern on Elysse's back and Void's Hand stopping halfway and the specific feeling of a limit reached.

  "I'll need to talk to Edric," he said.

  Colette looked at him.

  "Is that a yes," she said.

  "It's a I'll need to talk to Edric," he said.

  Something moved through Colette's expression. Small and quick and genuine.

  "Alright," she said. "Talk to Edric."