"You don't mean," Colette said slowly, "the Lower Market."

  Kai looked at her with the expression of someone reassessing their assumption that the other person wouldn't know what they were talking about.

  "You know it," he said.

  "I know of it," Colette said. "Every guild captain in Valerne knows of it. Knowing of it and going to it are two different things for a reason."

  "What's the Lower Market," Aris said.

  Neither of them answered immediately, which was its own kind of answer.

  Before either of them could find the words, Elysse moved.

  She stepped in front of Aris and took his hands in both of hers, the direct unhesitating movement of someone who had decided to do something and was doing it without the usual negotiation of whether to do it. Her hands were warm despite the morning air, the hands of someone who had been holding swords since before it was practical, and she held his and looked at him from the distance of considerably closer than they had been standing before.

  "Hey," she said. Quietly, below the street noise.

  Aris looked at her.

  This was a mistake in the technical sense, meaning that looking at Elysse from this distance produced an effect on his cognitive function that he had not consented to and could not immediately address. She was, he was aware at a level that bypassed his usual processing, extremely — her face was very — the grey eyes at this range were—

  "You don't have to worry," she said. "About not being able to treat me. You've done more than anyone could have asked for. More than I had any right to expect from someone who found me on a dungeon floor."

  "I—" Aris started.

  "I mean it," she said. "Whatever happens with the sigil, whatever we find or don't find. You don't carry that."

  Aris's mouth was doing something that was not producing words, which was new information about what his mouth was capable of. He was aware of his own hands being held. He was aware of her face. He was aware of the morning air and the Veilmarket steps and the upper middle district street and approximately nothing else in useful proportion.

  "Right," he said.

  "Right," she said, and almost smiled.

  "Right," he said again, which was not an improvement.

  A sound from slightly to the left. A deliberate sound, the sound of someone who had something in their throat that required addressing immediately and at moderate volume.

  Aris looked.

  Colette was standing two feet away looking at a point in the middle distance with the expression of a person who was absolutely not watching anything and had simply developed a spontaneous respiratory condition. Beside her, Kai had his arms crossed and was looking at the Veilmarket facade with the focused attention of someone conducting a detailed architectural assessment.

  Aris became aware of his hands being held.

  He became aware of this extremely suddenly and comprehensively.

  He took a step back. Not a large step. A step of the size that could be described as a natural adjustment of position undertaken for no particular reason, which was the size of step that convinced nobody and he knew it.

  "We were talking," he said, to the group in general, "about the Lower Market."

  "We were," Kai agreed, to the facade.

  "Which is what," Aris said.

  Colette coughed once more for what appeared to be purely medicinal reasons and returned her attention to the conversation with the composure of someone who had been in enough council chambers to manage her expression through anything.

  "It's exactly what it sounds like," she said. "If the Veilmarket and the Cours Edren market are the upper markets, operating under guild charter and city licensing and the council's oversight, then the Lower Market is everything that operates without those things." She looked at Kai. "Underground trading. Black market goods. Equipment with unclear provenance. Items that didn't pass the Eternal Depth's enchantment review. Run by people who have a professional interest in not being found by the same institutions that run the upper markets."

  "That," Aris said.

  "That," Colette confirmed.

  "Right," Aris said. "And you want us to go there."

  "I want to get your patient the item she needs," Kai said, uncrossing his arms and returning to the conversation from wherever he'd been conducting his architectural assessment. "The method is secondary."

  "The method is illegal," Colette said.

  "Most effective methods are," Kai said.

  "That is not a—"

  "We're trying to heal someone," Kai said, with the flat conviction of someone who had decided on his moral framework for the situation and was not open to revision. "We're trying to identify who placed a curse on a girl who came up from a deep dungeon alone and injured. That's what we're doing." He looked at Colette. "I don't think God is particularly focused on the licensing status of the market we use to do it."

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  Colette opened her mouth.

  Closed it.

  Looked at the Architect's symbol on the Veilmarket's facade, which was there because every public building in Valerne was required by the Eternal Depth's charter to display it, and which had probably not been placed there with this specific argument in mind.

  "We are not," she said, with great precision, "doing anything that involves actual criminal activity. We are not stealing. We are not threatening anyone. We are not participating in anything that—"

  "We're buying an item," Kai said. "From a market. That happens to be underground."

  "From people who operate outside—"

  "Colette," Kai said, and the use of her name rather than any of the alternatives he'd been employing caught her slightly off guard. "Do you want to help her or not."

  A silence.

  Colette looked at Elysse.

  Elysse looked back at her with the grey eyes, patient and present, and said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.

  "No criminal activity," Colette said. "Non-negotiable."

  "Agreed," Kai said, with the ease of someone agreeing to a condition they'd already intended to meet.

  Aris looked at Kai.

  "How do you know they'll have it," he said. "A spell tracker specifically. That's a particular item."

  "Because a spell tracker isn't only useful for finding sigil casters," Kai said. "In the right hands it's a navigation tool for deep floor exploration. It can track beast signatures, locate rare monsters, orient a party in floors that have no reliable map." He looked at Aris. "Wealthy Wanderer parties pay well for good navigation equipment. The Lower Market serves wealthy Wanderers who don't want their purchasing habits on record." He paused. "They'll have it."

  "And the price," Aris said.

  "Considerably less than twenty gold," Kai said. "Probably."

  "Probably," Aris repeated.

  "In this direction," Kai said, "probably is better than certainly not." He looked at the group. "Are you coming."

  Aris looked at Elysse.

  Elysse looked at Aris.

  Kai had asked the question before they left the church and he was asking it again in a different form and the answer was the same thing it had been then, arrived at through the same quiet process, the two of them reaching the same conclusion from their respective directions.

  "Yes," Aris said.

  "Yes," Elysse said.

  Kai nodded once. Turned. And led them away from the Veilmarket's wide steps, away from the upper middle district with its guild banners and its deliberate architecture, downward through the city's rings toward the part of Valerne that didn't appear on the official maps but that everyone who had lived here long enough knew was there.

  "Stay close," he said. "And Aris."

  "Yes."

  "Try not to look like you've never been anywhere," Kai said. "It makes you a target."

  "I've been to the dungeon," Aris said.

  "The dungeon doesn't have pickpockets," Kai said.

  "The dungeon has things that eat you," Aris said.

  "Pickpockets are worse," Kai said. "At least the dungeon things are honest about their intentions."

  Behind them, Colette adjusted her cape and walked with the expression of someone who had made a decision they weren't entirely comfortable with and had decided that being uncomfortable was preferable to being unhelpful.

  Elysse walked beside her, careful and even, her borrowed armor catching the morning light.

  Valerne moved around all four of them, indifferent and ordinary, doing what it always did, completely unaware of where they were going.

  The main passage of the Undercourse was wider than the street above it, which made a kind of sense once you stopped being surprised by the place and started reading it. It had been built for traffic, for the movement of people and goods and the particular commerce of a market that couldn't afford to be cramped because cramped markets attracted the wrong kind of attention even underground.

  Aris walked through it and tried to look like someone who had been here before.

  The music was the first thing that got to him. Not the music from the platform with the three players, though that was good, the kind of good that happened when people played together long enough to have stopped performing for each other. The music underneath that, the ambient sound of the place, the layered voices and movement and the occasional burst of something from one of the side passages that might have been laughter or might have been something else. It had a texture that the surface didn't have, the specific texture of a place where people had decided that what they did here had nothing to do with what they were expected to be up there.

  The stalls were the second thing.

  He slowed at one without meaning to. The items on display were laid out with the casual organization of someone who knew their customers already and wasn't advertising to strangers, but Aris had been in enough clinic situations to recognize what some of the compounds were, and what some of them were was things the Eternal Depth's licensing board had opinions about and which would have cost significantly more on the third floor of the Veilmarket if they were available there at all.

  "Don't touch anything," Kai said, from beside him, without looking.

  "I wasn't going to," Aris said.

  "You were thinking about it."

  "I was looking."

  "In this place," Kai said, "looking and touching have the same price."

  Aris moved away from the stall.

  The people were the third thing.

  The Undercourse had, as Kai had suggested on the stairs, a population that didn't make sense by the surface city's logic. A man in armor that had the quality of something acquired through the Veilmarket's upper floors was bargaining at a stall with a woman whose clothes placed her firmly in the Greyward, and neither of them seemed to find the juxtaposition requiring comment. A guild Wanderer, colors removed but the bearing remaining, was eating something from a paper wrapping beside two people whose function in the Undercourse was legible from their positioning and their awareness of the room.

  "Look at this place," Kai said, with the tone he used when he was making a point rather than an observation. "Upper district and lower district, same stall, same price, same everything. No licensing fees keeping one out and the other in." He looked at a pair of Wanderers in expensive equipment negotiating at a weapons counter with a seller who had the look of someone who had never been near the Veilmarket. "The only place in Valerne where both classes exist in the same room without one of them being there to service the other." He paused. "And it's illegal. The irony of that should bother everyone more than it does."

  "How does it exist," Elysse said, from behind them. She was looking at the columns, at the ceiling, at the infrastructure of the place with the attention of someone assessing a fortification. "The Church must know. The Eternal Depth has eyes in every district."

  "They do," Kai said.

  "Then how—"

  "Bribery," Kai said. "Money. The same way most things that shouldn't exist do."

  Aris looked at him.

  "Someone in the Eternal Depth's administrative structure," Kai said, "receives a regular payment from the people who run this place. In exchange, the Undercourse doesn't appear in any report that goes upward." He said it with the flat matter-of-fact quality of someone describing a system they had catalogued thoroughly and found entirely predictable. "It's been running this way for longer than either of us has been alive."

  "Someone who worships the Architect," Aris said slowly. "Takes money to hide this."

  "Several someones, probably," Kai said.

  Aris was quiet for a moment.

  He thought about Edric in the garden, watering flowers in the early morning, coming inside when he heard Colette on the nave floor. He thought about the clinic and Sister Vael and the grey habits and the thirty years of honest work that the Eternal Depth's outer parishes represented.

  "That's," he said.

  "Yes," Kai said.

  "That's really—"

  "Yes," Kai said. "It is."