He didn't remember the last two floors.

  That was the honest truth of it he had clear memories of the third floor, of taking the long passage around the eastern alcove with her across his back and his knees doing something that felt permanent, and then the memories became unreliable. Impressions rather than events. The gate clerk's face. The morning air of Valerne hitting him like cold water. The cobblestones of Cours Edren under his hands at some point, which meant he'd gone down and gotten back up, though he couldn't reconstruct when.

  The church door. He remembered the church door.

  And then Edric's hands taking her weight, redistributing it, the particular competence of someone who had been moving injured people for thirty years taking over without requiring explanation or instruction.

  After that, cloth. The smell of the clinic. The specific wooden texture of the bench he'd sat on for so many years it had a shape that fit him.

  He was sitting on that bench now.

  Someone Edric, presumably, though he hadn't been fully present for it had wrapped his ribs in linen and dealt with the forehead and the shin and the arm, and the various other items on the damage inventory had been cleaned and covered in the efficient, practiced way of a man who had done this many times and asked questions after. Aris had a strip of cloth around his left hand and another across his collarbone and he felt, structurally, like a building that had been repaired in a hurry and would need more thorough attention when everyone had time.

  He was also, he realized, braced.

  He'd been bracing since somewhere around Floor Three the anticipatory tension of knowing what was coming, the specific quality of waiting for a scolding from someone whose disappointment mattered. He'd catalogued the arguments against him preemptively, the way he always did: Floor Six. Solo. Below your established range. Brought back an unknown critically injured person. Fought a Hollow Guard. Destroyed a significant section of the antechamber ceiling. Ribs. The list was long. The list was, objectively, bad.

  He waited for Edric to begin.

  Edric sat down beside him.

  Looked at him for a moment with the expression Aris couldn't fully read something layered in it, worry underneath and something else above it, something quieter.

  Then he said:

  "You chose the path of God."

  Not an accusation. Not a preamble to one. Just a statement, delivered with the same weight Edric gave to things he meant completely.

  "She was on the floor," Aris said, because he didn't know what else to say.

  "Yes." Edric was quiet for a moment. "And you brought her home." He looked at the nave, toward the Architect's statue at the far end, toward the figure lying at its base. "That is not a small thing, Aris. A life is not a small thing. Whatever it cost you to carry it here that cost was paid in the right direction."

  Aris looked at the cloth on his hands.

  He'd been prepared for the scolding. He hadn't been prepared for this, which was somehow harder to sit with not because it was unwelcome but because it was accurate, and accurate things from Edric had a way of landing somewhere he didn't have adequate armor for.

  "I broke the dagger," he said.

  "I know. I found it in your pocket."

  "It was on the altar every morning."

  "It was." Edric's voice was gentle. "And this morning it was in a dungeon floor doing what a blade is for. I think that's a reasonable end for it."

  Aris didn't answer.

  She was lying beneath the Architect's statue.

  Edric had placed her there Aris understood why, practically: the nave floor was flat and clean and the stone was cool, good for someone running the kind of internal heat that severe injury produced. But there was something about the image that sat with him regardless of the practicality. The carved figure above her, one hand extended downward, reaching and her below it, white hair spread on the stone, the destroyed armor removed now and stacked against the wall, her wounds wrapped in the field dressings Edric had applied on arrival.

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  She looked younger without the armor. He hadn't expected that.

  Edric stood and moved to the center of the nave, and Aris watched him settle into the specific stillness that preceded it the same stillness as morning prayer, the same quality of a person locating something inside themselves before reaching for it.

  Then Edric's Eido rose.

  It came slowly not with the sudden pressure of Void's emergence, but gradually, assembling itself from the air around Edric's shoulders in a way that felt considered, deliberate, like something that had learned patience from its host. Green, where Void was dark a warm, living green, the color of things that grew in good light. Its form was slight and elongated, angular in the way of something that had been constructed rather than born, its proportions suggesting a figure without committing to one fully.

  An angelic doll. That was the word for it the jointed quality of its limbs, the smoothness of its construction, beautiful in the specific way of something made very carefully by someone who understood craft. Its face was serene and closed and did not change.

  And from its fingers all of them, from every fingertip threads.

  Green threads, the same living color as the Eido itself, extending outward into the air and finding her wounds with a precision that didn't look like searching. They knew where to go. Each thread located a wound and settled against it, not piercing, not forcing laying across the injury the way a hand lays across something to calm it, and then tightening, slowly, drawing the edges of the wound together with a gentleness that the word sealed didn't quite capture. More like persuaded.

  Aris watched it work.

  He'd seen Edric's Eido many times every patient who needed more than conventional medicine received it, which in the lower district parish was most of them. He'd watched it close infected wounds and ease dungeon exposure and deal with things that the guild healers charged three months of wages to address. He knew what it could do.

  He'd never seen it work on something this extensive.

  The threads multiplied as Edric's focus deepened more of them, finding more injuries, the minor ones and the major ones and the things underneath the visible ones that the dressings hadn't reached. The Eido's jointed hands moved with a precision that suggested it understood the body it was working on in complete detail, every thread placed with intent, nothing wasted.

  The name came to Aris as he watched it.

  Marionette.

  He'd never asked what Edric called it. Had assumed there was a name, the way there was always a name, but had never needed to know it. Watching the threads now, watching the way they connected Edric's will to her wounds through the Eido's articulated fingers, the way every movement was guided and deliberate and nothing happened without the thread that preceded it

  Marionette felt right.

  He filed this away without examining why it felt like more than just a name.

  After a while, Edric sat back down.

  Not finished the threads were still working, would work for some time yet, the Eido maintaining its position above her with the patient focus of something that had one task and would complete it. But the acute phase was done, the worst of it addressed, the bleeding stopped at the source.

  Edric looked tired. Not dramatically just the tiredness of sustained concentration, the cost of the Eido's output over an extended period. He sat on the bench beside Aris and was quiet for a moment.

  "Her internal injuries," he said finally, "are significant. She has two cracked ribs of her own. The wound at her side was very close to something it shouldn't have been close to." He paused. "She will recover. It will take time."

  "How much time?"

  "Days before she's coherent. Weeks before she should move."

  Aris absorbed this.

  "I don't know who she is," he said.

  "I know."

  "She was on Floor Six. Alone. In that condition." He looked at the armor stacked against the wall the quality of it, even destroyed, visible from here. "That armor is guild-issued. Good guild."

  "Yes," Edric said. "It is."

  They sat with that for a moment.

  Then Edric looked at him the full look, the one that took inventory not of injuries but of the person underneath them and said:

  "Aris. You carried her from Floor Six."

  "I know."

  "In your condition." He said it without emphasis, which was its own kind of emphasis. "With damaged ribs and a torn arm and blood loss and"

  "I know, Edric."

  "I am not scolding you." A pause. "I am trying to understand the mechanics of it."

  Aris opened his mouth. Closed it.

  The honest answer was that he didn't know either. He remembered the intention I have to get her to Edric and he remembered the steps, individually, floor by floor, and the sum of them didn't add up to something his body should have been capable of. The ribs alone. The arm. The weight of her across five floors of

  He didn't have an explanation.

  He looked up.

  At the Architect's statue. The carved stone figure, broad-winged and faceless, one hand extended downward toward the woman sleeping beneath it. The same statue he'd taken his dagger from this morning, the same altar he'd placed it on every day for six years, the same face he'd addressed his internal monologue to for longer than he could remember.

  The broken dagger was on the altar now. Edric had put it back.

  He looked at it for a long moment.

  "Maybe," he said, and his voice came out quieter than he intended not performed, just quiet, the genuine article, "God does love me after all."

  He paused.

  "I don't know."

  Edric said nothing. Which was, Aris had learned over sixteen years, Edric's way of saying everything.

  The green threads worked on in the silence. Above them both, the Architect's hand reached downward. Outside, Valerne was fully awake now the market sounds of Cours Edren coming through the church's old walls, muffled and ordinary and exactly what they always were.

  Aris sat on the bench he'd sat on his whole life, cloth wrapped around his hands, and looked at a stranger sleeping under the statue of God, and didn't move for a very long time.