The knock at the church door came after the evening meal, which at Saint Edren's meant after the eighth hour, because the evening meal at Saint Edren's happened when it happened and not according to any schedule that had ever been written down.

  Aris was still on his bench.

  He heard Edric's footsteps cross the nave, heard the door, heard a voice he recognized before he could make out the words. He turned around.

  Kai came through the church door the way he always did, without knocking first because he'd stopped knocking at some point in the last two years and neither of them had discussed it. He was seventeen, lean, with black hair that went in several directions and had clearly never been asked its opinion on the matter. The grey coat he wore was good quality, the kind that looked casual and wasn't, and the eyepatch on his left eye had the worn-smooth look of something that had been there long enough to become part of the face.

  He ducked under the doorframe out of habit even though he didn't need to and looked around the nave with the expression of someone conducting an assessment they'd conducted before and finding the results consistent.

  "Still the same," he said.

  "You were here three weeks ago," Aris said.

  "Exactly." Kai walked down the nave with the unhurried ease of someone who moved through spaces like he owned them and had decided not to make an issue of it. He looked at the walls. At the candles. At the cracked plaster near the ceiling. At the window openings letting in the evening air. "Aris. My friend. This building."

  "What about it."

  "When was the last time anything in here was repaired."

  "The roof. Four years ago."

  "Which section?"

  "The east section."

  "What about the west section."

  "The west section is fine."

  "The west section," Kai said, looking up at the ceiling with the expression of a man who had dealt in materials long enough to read structural problems through plaster, "is expressing opinions."

  "It's always expressed opinions. It hasn't done anything about them."

  Kai sat down on the bench beside him, the bench complaining slightly about the change in load. He looked at the Architect's statue for a moment.

  "The Architect," he said, "is looking at this building and feeling something."

  "Edric says the Architect provides what's needed."

  "The Architect has provided a building that's having a slow conversation with gravity and losing." He paused. "How is Edric."

  "Good. In the kitchen."

  "Tell him I said he should let me send someone to look at that west section."

  "I'll tell him. He'll decline."

  "He always declines."

  "Yes."

  Kai stretched his legs out in front of him, crossed at the ankle, the posture of someone who had found a comfortable position and intended to keep it. He looked at Aris with the particular attention of someone who had known him long enough to read the difference between his various varieties of quiet.

  "You look like you've had a day," Kai said.

  "I've had a day," Aris agreed.

  "Good day or bad day."

  "Complicated day."

  "Those are the worst kind." Kai reached into his coat and produced two small wrapped items, setting one on the bench between them. "Brought you something from the market. The baker on Cours Marne. The good one."

  Aris picked it up. Unwrapped it. It was a pastry of the type that the baker on Cours Marne charged an amount for that Aris had always considered a theological statement about the nature of suffering.

  "You didn't have to do that," Aris said.

  "I know," Kai said, unwrapping his own. "That's why I did it."

  They ate in the comfortable silence of two people who had been friends long enough for silence to have its own quality, the nave doing what the nave did around them.

  "How's business," Aris said.

  "Good. Very good, actually. There's a House Drent expedition going to Floor 32 next month and they came to me for the equipment outfitting. Full party of eight." He said it without particular pride, the way you report a fact that speaks for itself. "The higher floors are pushing deeper than they were last year. More demand."

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  "More injuries," Aris said.

  "More injuries," Kai agreed. "Which means more people finding their way here, probably."

  "Probably."

  Kai looked at him.

  "The complicated day," he said. "Tell me."

  Aris looked at the statue.

  "I might have found someone I can't treat," he said.

  Kai was quiet for a moment.

  "Say that again," he said.

  "A patient. I might have found one I can't treat."

  "You," Kai said. "Can't treat."

  "That's what I said."

  "Aris." Kai turned to look at him with the expression of a man genuinely rearranging his understanding of something. "Your Eido treats debuffs. Any debuff. I have personally watched you pull Wither out of my arm when three guild healers told me it was untreatable and I was looking at losing the limb."

  "I know."

  "So what in the dungeon did you find that your Eido can't handle."

  "A sigil," Aris said.

  Kai stopped.

  The word landed differently than the others. Aris watched it land, watched Kai's expression shift from the easy register of a friend catching up to something more considered, the way his face moved when he was actually thinking rather than talking.

  "A sigil," Kai said.

  "On a patient's back. Geometric. Structured. I've never seen anything like it and neither has Sister Vael. The Eternal Depth has nothing on it in their records." Aris turned the pastry wrapper in his hands. "Void's Hand pushes it back. It doesn't remove it."

  "Pushes it back."

  "Treats the progression. Not the source."

  Kai was quiet for a moment, looking at the statue with the expression of someone running through what they knew and checking it against what they'd just heard.

  "Sigils," he said slowly. "They're monster work, mostly. The smarter ones, the deep floor creatures that hunt over time rather than by force. They mark their prey. Weaken them before the strike." He paused. "There's a type on Floor 24. The Stalker."

  "I've heard of it."

  "Probably not enough." Kai's voice had a quality it hadn't had a moment ago. The quality of someone describing something from experience rather than report. "Floor 24 is one of the darkest floors in the dungeon. Not crystal dark like the upper levels. Just dark, completely, the kind that your eyes never adjust to. And in it there's a creature that doesn't fight you. It just finds you. Places its sigil on you without you knowing and then follows."

  "Follows."

  "At a distance. Over floors. It waits until the sigil has done enough work and then it comes for you when you're at the lowest point." He said it plainly. "I lost someone to it, once. Years ago." He didn't elaborate and Aris didn't ask. "The sigil from a Stalker weakens with distance though. Get far enough from Floor 24 and it loses its hold. Surface exposure dissolves it eventually."

  "That's what Sister Vael said," Aris said. "That monster sigils weaken with distance."

  "Right."

  "This one isn't weakening."

  Kai looked at him.

  "She's been on the surface for three days," Aris said. "Came up from below Floor 40. The sigil is progressing."

  A silence.

  "Below Floor 40," Kai said.

  "Yes."

  "And the sigil is getting stronger on the surface."

  "Yes."

  Kai leaned forward, elbows on his knees, looking at the nave floor. He was quiet for long enough that the candle nearest the door moved through a full slow flicker and steadied again.

  "There's another possibility," he said. "For what placed it."

  "Tell me."

  "Not a monster." Kai looked at him sideways. "A person."

  Aris said nothing. Listening.

  "Some Eidos can inflict debuffs," Kai said. "Support types, mostly. People who operate behind a party rather than in front of it. The ability to weaken an opponent, slow them, mark them." He paused. "Sigils placed by an Eido are different from monster sigils. They don't weaken with distance. They don't dissolve with time. They follow a different logic entirely."

  "What logic," Aris said.

  Kai let the silence run for a moment longer than necessary. Then:

  "They don't go away unless the person who placed them revokes the spell."

  Aris looked at him.

  "Or," Kai said, and his voice had dropped into a register that didn't have any of the usual lightness in it, "they die."

  The nave held this.

  Outside, Valerne's evening sounds moved through the walls like weather, the city unaware of what was being said inside the old church at the end of Cours Edren.

  "Someone placed a sigil on an injured girl," Aris said quietly.

  "That's what it sounds like."

  "Who does that."

  "I don't know," Kai said. "Someone who wanted to keep track of her. Someone who wanted to keep her weak. Someone who needed to be sure she couldn't recover." He straightened up. "Any of those."

  "Can you tell who placed it. From the sigil itself."

  Kai shook his head. "Not my area. I deal in weapons and armor. Sigil reading is a different field." He looked at Aris with the expression of a man who is about to disappoint someone he respects. "I don't have anything in my inventory that could help you with this one."

  Aris nodded slowly.

  He looked at the statue. At the extended hand. At the moonlight that had found the stone and was sitting in it, doing nothing in particular.

  "There's nothing," he said. More to himself than to Kai.

  "I didn't say nothing," Kai said.

  Aris looked at him.

  "There's a tool," Kai said. "A spell tracker. Magical item. You place it near the sigil and it reads the signature of the Eido that made it. Traces it back to the source." He said it practically, the way he described any piece of equipment. "Gives you a location. Not a name, but a direction."

  "Where do you get one," Aris said.

  "The market," Kai said.

  "The morning market on Cours Edren."

  Kai looked at him with the patient expression of a man waiting for a friend to catch up.

  "The Veilmarket," he said.

  Aris closed his eyes briefly.

  The Veilmarket. Valerne's permanent indoor exchange, three floors of stalls and dealers operating out of a building in the middle district that had been there since before the current guild structure existed. The place where expeditions outfitted themselves with equipment that the standard markets didn't stock. Where serious Wanderers went for serious gear and where the prices reflected the seriousness of everyone involved.

  Where Aris had never bought anything because Aris had never had the money to buy anything there.

  "So," he said. "Expensive."

  Kai looked at the ceiling. At the wall. At the statue.

  "I wouldn't use the word cheap," he said.

  "No," Aris said. "I wouldn't either."

  The candle by the door guttered in the draft and steadied.

  Aris sat with the specific feeling of a path forward that was also a wall and looked at the Architect's stone hand reaching toward the floor and thought about money, which he thought about often and had less of than ever.