The door was open.

  It was always open, the broken latch, the draft from the window, the particular quality of a door that had given up on being a barrier and had committed fully to being an entrance. The afternoon light came through it and fell across the nave floor in the long column it made at this hour, illuminating the dust and the worn benches and the Architect's extended hand.

  Edric was watering the flowers in the window box on the left side of the nave when they came in.

  He had his back to them, the small watering can, the unhurried movement of someone performing a task that required attention and was receiving it. The grey habit slightly damp at the cuffs. The posture of a man who was entirely present in what he was doing and had not yet acknowledged the sound of four people coming through his door.

  Kai assessed the situation immediately and with the professional speed of someone who dealt in risk for a living.

  "We went to the dungeon," he said.

  Edric continued watering the flowers.

  "Got into a bit of trouble on Floor Four," Kai continued, with the confidence of someone who had constructed better lies than this before breakfast. "Pack of White Rabbits. More than expected. Aris can tell you, they're unpredictable when they cluster. The arm happened during the retreat."

  He said it with the complete ease of someone reporting a truthful event. The arm held against his side, the torn coat, the bruising on Aris's jaw, all of it consistent with a Floor Four encounter that had gone sideways in the specific way that Floor Four encounters went sideways.

  Edric moved to the next flower.

  "The retreat was," Kai continued, "somewhat hasty. There was a wall involved. That explains the coat."

  "And Aris's face," Colette said, from beside him, picking up the thread with the smoothness of someone who had been in enough council chambers to know how to support a position that was being presented. "He went down when the Rabbits broke the formation. Floor Four is uneven in that section, as I understand it. The stone near the eastern passage has a lip that—"

  "It was quite serious," Kai said. "For Floor Four. The Rabbit clustering behavior has been getting more aggressive recently, there are reports from other Wanderers that suggest the population in that section has—"

  "Aris," Edric said.

  He had not turned around.

  He set the watering can down on the window ledge with the small precise sound of something placed rather than put down, and he turned, and he looked at Aris with the expression he had been wearing since before they came through the door, the expression of someone who had heard the door open and had already known, before a single word was spoken, the category of what was coming.

  The expression was calm.

  It was the specific calm of deep water, the calm that had depth rather than flatness, and it was directed at Aris with the focused quality of a man who had found the person in the room most likely to tell him what had actually happened and was giving that person his full attention.

  Kai looked at Aris.

  Colette looked at Aris.

  Elysse looked at Aris.

  Aris looked at Edric.

  Six years.

  Six years of that expression across soup bowls and clinic benches and the front bench of the nave and the Architect's statue at odd hours and the garden in the morning and every single moment in between. Six years of the specific quality of that calm directed at him from various distances and angles and contexts.

  He lasted four seconds.

  "We went to the Undercourse," he said. "It's an underground market beneath the Greyward district accessed through a building on Passage Henault behind the coal merchant's stall, there's a man at the door who takes a silver coin to let you through and then there are stairs going quite far down and at the bottom there is a market which operates outside the city's licensing framework and also apparently outside several of the Eternal Depth's guidelines on acceptable commercial activity and there is a bar in an alley in the market where a girl with green hair works and she told us that the spell tracker had just been purchased by a Lord from House Drent who had gone downstairs into an underground fighting arena called the Underbowl where there is a host named Corven Ash who does the morning announcements from the Guild Headquarters steps and apparently also runs an illegal fighting pit in his spare time and the Lord from House Drent agreed to give us the tracker if we fought his champion who was a level four fighter named Crux whose Eido was called Avalanche and so we did and Kai broke his arm on the wall and I got hit quite hard by the shockwave and Elysse fought despite the ribs and the sigil and Colette used Sovereign and we won and then Drent gave us the tracker and we used it on the street and it pointed at the dungeon and then we came home."

  He breathed.

  The nave was very quiet.

  Kai had closed his eye.

  Colette was looking at a point on the wall approximately one meter to the left of anything relevant with the expression of someone who had just watched a carefully constructed position receive a direct hit and was assessing the structural damage.

  Elysse was looking at the ceiling.

  Edric looked at Aris for a long moment.

  Then he looked at Kai.

  Then at Colette.

  Then at Elysse.

  Then back at Aris.

  "The coal merchant's stall on Passage Henault," he said.

  "Yes," Aris said.

  "Silver coin," Edric said.

  "Yes."

  "Corven Ash," Edric said. "Who reads the dungeon conditions every morning."

  "He's very good at both jobs," Aris said. "Professionally speaking."

  Edric was quiet for a moment.

  Then Marionette rose.

  It came up slowly, which was somehow worse than if it had come up quickly. The green angelic doll form pressing close above Edric's skin, the threads extending from every fingertip with the patient deliberateness of something that had all the time available and intended to use it. The green light it produced fell across the nave in the specific quality of Marionette's presence, warm and precise and carrying within it the unmistakable suggestion of something that could find every damaged thing in a room and intended to address each one individually and at length.

  Edric's expression did not change.

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  It remained exactly as calm as it had been, which was the problem, because calm in a person whose Eido had just fully manifested in their own nave in the early afternoon was a different category of calm than the ordinary kind. It was the calm of someone who had decided what was going to happen next and was waiting for the relevant parties to arrive at the same understanding.

  Kai took a step backward.

  This was involuntary. He took it before he had decided to take it, the specific retreat of a body that had received information ahead of its owner's conscious processing. His back found Colette, who had also moved backward, and they stood together in the middle of the nave with the green light of Marionette falling across them and Edric's expression holding its quality.

  "I want to be clear," Kai said, to Aris, in a voice that was lower than his usual voice, "that this is your fault."

  "I know," Aris said. He had not moved backward. He was standing in the Marionette light with the expression of someone who had made their decision and was prepared to experience its consequences.

  "You could have said Floor Four," Kai said. "Four seconds. Floor Four, White Rabbits, done. I had built an entire convincing account of—"

  "Kai," Aris said.

  "It had details," Kai said. "The eastern passage. The uneven stone. I had committed to specific geography—"

  "Kai."

  "The lip," Kai said, with feeling. "I mentioned a specific lip in the stone, Aris, that is the kind of detail that makes a story—"

  Colette put her hand on Kai's arm.

  Not the broken one. The other one, the firm grip of someone who had decided that silence was the current best policy and was implementing it through physical means.

  Kai stopped talking.

  Edric looked at all four of them.

  The Marionette threads moved in the air at his fingertips with the slow patience of something that was not in a hurry because it didn't need to be. The green light found the bruising on Aris's jaw and the angle of Kai's arm and the careful way Elysse was managing her breathing and the expression Colette was wearing underneath the composed one, all of it visible to Marionette with the clarity of an Eido that had been reading damaged things for thirty years.

  Elysse took a small step to the left.

  She found herself against Kai's right side, which meant she was now standing between Kai and Colette, which meant that the three of them were standing in a cluster in the center of the nave with the green light falling on them and Edric's expression holding its quality and none of them were entirely sure what was going to happen next but all of them had arrived at the same assessment of its likely character.

  Colette looked at the cluster she was part of.

  She was a former guild captain. She had stood in council chambers with all five noble house representatives and the Lector of the Eternal Depth and had not moved from her position. She had faced a level four arena champion in an underground pit and had activated Sovereign with the composure of someone performing a professional function.

  She was currently pressed against the side of a one-eyed seventeen year old arms dealer in a lower district church because a priest's Eido was green and present and his expression was doing something that didn't have a good name.

  "This is undignified," she said quietly, to herself.

  "Yes," Kai said, at the same volume.

  Neither of them moved.

  Aris looked at the three of them clustered in the nave's center and looked at Edric and looked at the three of them again.

  "He's not going to—" Aris started.

  "Kneel," Edric said.

  The word came out in the register he used for the morning service, which was the register that the nave's acoustics had been built for, which meant it found every surface of the room and came back from all of them simultaneously.

  The cluster kneeled.

  All three of them, immediately and without discussion, their knees finding the nave floor in the unanimous movement of people who had received a clear instruction from a source they had assessed as non-negotiable. Kai's good hand went to the floor for balance, Colette's cape settled around her knees, Elysse's borrowed armor made a sound against the stone.

  Aris, who had been standing slightly apart, kneeled as well, because it seemed like the appropriate category of moment and he had been doing this his whole life.

  All four of them kneeled in front of the Architect's statue, the extended hand above them, the afternoon light coming through the curtains, Marionette's green glow falling across the backs of their heads with the warm precision of something that knew exactly where it was going and had been waiting for this configuration.

  Edric looked at them.

  He looked at them for a long moment with the expression that had not changed since he turned from the window box, the deep water calm, the specific quality of a man who had found ten year old Aris in an orphanage healing sick children with an unnamed Eido and had brought him home and fed him soup and asked him one question and had been, in the thirty years before that and the six years since, doing exactly this, looking at people in need of treatment and treating them.

  He walked to Kai first.

  Marionette's threads found the broken arm with the focused attention of thirty years of practice, the green light moving along the joint, and Kai made a sound that he would not have made if he had been aware he was going to make it and which he did not acknowledge afterward.

  "Forty-six floors," Edric said, while the threads worked.

  "Yes," Aris said.

  "The tracker points at the dungeon."

  "Yes."

  "And you fought a level four fighter in an underground arena to obtain it."

  "Yes."

  The threads moved to the shoulder. Kai's eye closed briefly.

  "How did you win," Edric said.

  A pause.

  "Elysse," Aris said.

  Edric looked at Elysse, still kneeling, her white hair falling forward, the borrowed armor, the grey eyes looking up at him with the composed directness she gave everything.

  He moved to her.

  Marionette's threads found the ribs with the gentleness of something that understood the difference between the damage that had been there and the damage that the evening had added to it.

  "Does it hurt," Edric said.

  "Yes," Elysse said, which was the first time she had said this to anyone and she said it in the plain honest way of someone who had decided that Edric was a different category of person to say things to.

  "Good," Edric said. "That means you're paying attention."

  He moved to Colette.

  She was kneeling with the posture of someone who had been kneeling in formal contexts her whole life and had never kneeled in quite this context before, the cape settled correctly around her, her hands folded in her lap, her expression doing the thing it did when it was managing several things.

  "You're new," Edric said.

  "Yes," Colette said.

  "Did you participate in the planning of this."

  "I objected to several elements," Colette said. "On the record."

  "And then participated anyway."

  "The situation developed," Colette said, with the precision of someone who had been in enough council chambers to know how to describe a thing accurately without endorsing it.

  Edric looked at her for a moment.

  Then Marionette's threads found the place along her side where the tension of the evening had settled into something that wasn't quite an injury but wasn't quite not, and addressed it with the same patient thoroughness it brought to everything.

  He moved to Aris last.

  He stood in front of Aris kneeling on the nave floor and looked at the bruising along his jaw and the shoulder and the various evidence of an afternoon that had exceeded its original scope in several directions.

  "You told me everything," Edric said.

  "Yes," Aris said.

  "Immediately."

  "Almost immediately," Aris said. "I lasted four seconds."

  "I know," Edric said. "I counted."

  Marionette's threads found his jaw, the bruising, the shoulder, the various things that had been introducing themselves to pit floors at velocity, and worked with the focused warmth of something that had been treating this specific person's injuries for six years and knew the landscape well.

  "The tracker," Edric said. "It pointed at the dungeon."

  "Yes."

  "And you don't know yet whether it's a monster or a person."

  "No."

  "And you're going to wait a few days to see if the direction changes."

  "Yes."

  Edric was quiet for a moment. The threads worked. The afternoon light moved on the floor.

  "You did well," Edric said.

  Aris looked up at him.

  "The arena," Edric said. "Getting back up. Going in with a sword you don't know how to use because your friend needed time." He looked at Aris with the deep water expression that had been doing its work since he turned from the window box. "You did well."

  "We still went to an illegal fighting arena," Aris said.

  "Yes," Edric said. "You did."

  "In an underground market."

  "Yes."

  "Below a bar."

  "Yes."

  "With a—"

  "Aris," Edric said.

  "Yes."

  "Soup," Edric said. "All of you. Kitchen. Ten minutes."

  He withdrew Marionette's threads with the patient economy of someone completing a task, the green light receding, the angelic form settling back into his skin, and he picked up the watering can from the window ledge and walked toward the back of the church in the direction of the garden door, his footsteps unhurried on the nave floor.

  The four of them remained kneeling in front of the Architect's statue.

  After a moment Kai looked at Aris.

  "Four seconds," he said.

  "I know," Aris said.

  "I had the eastern passage," Kai said. "Aris, I had specific geography."

  "The lip was a good detail," Colette said, from her side of the cluster, to the middle distance.

  "Thank you," Kai said.

  "It wasn't going to work," Colette said.

  "It might have," Kai said.

  "It wasn't going to work," Elysse said, from the other side.

  Kai looked at the Architect's statue.

  The Architect's stone hand reached toward them all impartially.

  "Fine," Kai said. "It wasn't going to work."

  They got up off the floor.

  In the kitchen, ten minutes later, there was soup.

  There was always soup.

  End of Volume One.