She pushed herself upright slowly.

  Not all at once. In stages, the way someone climbs out of deep water — first onto her elbows, then her hands, then sitting, each stage a separate decision made by a body that was cooperating under protest. Aris moved to help and she accepted it without comment, which told him more about her current state than anything she could have said.

  She sat on the nave floor with her back against the base of the Architect's statue and her knees drawn up and her white hair everywhere, and she breathed.

  Edric moved to her other side. Neither of them spoke while she breathed.

  After a moment she looked up.

  "I'm alright," she said.

  Her voice was wrecked. The words came out true anyway.

  "You don't have to say that," Aris said.

  "I know," she said. "I'm saying it because it's true." She pressed the back of her hand briefly to her eye, a quick precise movement, dealing with evidence and moving on. "I feel weak. Like something took a great deal from me very quickly." She looked at her hands in her lap. "But the voices have stopped."

  "Voices," Edric said.

  "In my head." She said it plainly, without apparent concern for how it sounded. "Since the kitchen. A voice at first, then more. Telling me that I ran." She paused. "That I left people behind."

  Edric looked at Aris.

  Aris looked at Edric.

  The look lasted exactly long enough to confirm that they were both thinking the same thing and neither of them had enough information yet to say it out loud.

  "I saw things," Elysse continued. "People. Being killed." She said the last two words carefully, with the precision of someone who has decided that directness is less damaging than the alternatives. "I couldn't see it clearly. But I knew them. I knew them the same way you know people in a dream, without being able to say how."

  "Did you recognize anyone specifically?" Edric asked.

  "No." She shook her head slightly. "Just the knowing. The certainty that they were mine to know."

  The nave held this quietly.

  "Thank you," she said, looking at Aris. "For whatever you did. It helped."

  "It might not have been enough," Aris said.

  She looked at him.

  He looked at the floor briefly, then back at her, with the expression of someone about to say something they would prefer not to say but had decided honesty was the correct policy.

  "There's a pattern," he said. "On your back. It was spreading when you collapsed. It retreated when I treated it but it didn't disappear." A pause. "It's still there."

  Elysse was quiet for a moment.

  "A pattern," she said.

  "Yes."

  "On my back."

  "Yes."

  Another pause. When she spoke again her voice had a quality he hadn't heard in it before, something that wasn't quite embarrassment but occupied the same territory, contained and precise.

  "Do I need to show you my back," she said. Not quite a question. The shape of one.

  Aris opened his mouth. Closed it. The honest answer was yes and the honest answer was also something he had absolutely no interest in being the person to say out loud.

  "Well," he started.

  "It would help us understand what we're dealing with," Edric said, with the serene composure of a man who had been a medical practitioner for thirty years and for whom this was a perfectly clinical observation.

  Then he paused.

  "Ah," he said. "To be young."

  Aris turned to look at him.

  "Edric."

  "The uncertainty. The delicacy of the situation." Edric's expression was composed in a way that was doing a great deal of work. "I remember it distantly."

  "You are a priest," Aris said, with considerable feeling. "You are a priest in a church dedicated to the Architect and I am asking you with great sincerity to behave like one for approximately the next five minutes."

  "I am behaving," Edric said. "I'm being very well behaved."

  "You are—"

  "Aris," Elysse said.

  He stopped.

  She was looking at him with an expression that was tired and faintly, reluctantly, almost amused.

  "It's fine," she said. "I grew up in a noble household. I've heard worse from people who were supposed to be dignified." She looked at Edric briefly. "Yes. I'll show you."

  Edric nodded with the professional ease of a man returning to business. "It will help."

  She shifted position, turning slightly, and reached for the back of the plain robe.

  Aris looked at the Architect's statue with great focus.

  "You can look," Elysse said, with a flatness that suggested she found his current posture unnecessary. "I need you to look. You're the one treating it."

  "I know," Aris said, to the statue.

  "Aris."

  He looked.

  Her back was pale and plain in the nave's candlelight, soft skin marked by the evidence of recent days. Bruising across her left side, deep purple and green, from the Hollow Guard's impact. Older marks too, fainter, the kind that accumulated over years of combat work and became part of the landscape of a person who had been doing this long enough. The makeshift bandaging Edric had applied covered the worst of the wound at her side.

  And the pattern.

  It sat between her shoulder blades and spread from there. Not like a bruise, not like any injury he had seen in six years of clinic work. It was geometric, precise, the lines of it too clean to be anything that grew naturally. It formed a shape that his eye kept trying to read as a crest, a sigil, something that belonged on a seal or a standard rather than a person's skin. Dark, very dark, the same ink-in-paper quality he'd seen before, and from its center the lines reached upward along her spine toward the back of her neck in the patient unhurried way of something that had a direction and intended to reach it.

  "Can you see it?" he asked.

  "I can feel it," she said quietly. "I couldn't before. Now I can."

  Aris looked at it for a moment longer.

  Then he brought up his right hand.

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  "Void," he said.

  The Eido rose, that familiar settling weight. He felt the merger at his palm, the orientation of it toward the pattern on her back. He assembled the sphere carefully, more carefully than in the dungeon, more deliberately than anything he'd done in the kitchen ten minutes ago. Void's Hand, held above the crest, dark and contained and hungry in the direction of the wrong thing.

  He placed it over the pattern.

  It worked.

  For a moment, it worked exactly as it always did. The sphere darkened, contracted, and the pattern moved. The outermost lines, the ones reaching toward her neck, pulled back. A centimeter. Two. The geometry retreating toward its center the way it had before, being drawn into the absence he'd created, dissolving at the edges.

  Then it stopped.

  Not gradually. Sharply, the way a rope goes taut. The pattern held its new position and did not retreat further, and the sphere above his palm sat against that resistance and could not move it.

  He pressed harder.

  Nothing.

  He held it for thirty seconds, forty, the effort of it building in his forearm and shoulder, and the pattern sat exactly where it was, neither advancing nor retreating, treating Void's Hand with the specific indifference of something that had assessed what was being done to it and decided it wasn't a threat worth responding to.

  He lowered his hand.

  The sphere dissolved.

  He stared at the pattern.

  "Well," he said.

  "Well?" Edric said.

  "It retreated a little more." Aris sat back on his heels. "And then it stopped." He looked at his own hand. At the palm where the sphere had been. "Void's Hand treats debuffs. Any debuff. I've never had it fail to treat something completely. Not once. Not in six years."

  "And now," Edric said.

  "And now it stopped halfway." He looked at the pattern. "Which means either this isn't a debuff, which it clearly is. Or it's a debuff that something is actively maintaining."

  The nave was very quiet.

  Elysse had been still through all of it. She turned her head slightly, enough to look at him over her shoulder.

  "Which means," she said slowly.

  "Which means," Aris said, and he didn't finish the sentence because finishing it meant saying out loud the thing that was already in the room and had been since Edric had told him there was a pattern on her back.

  Someone had put it there.

  And whoever had put it there was still holding it in place.

  Elysse pulled the robe back up. Aris returned his attention to the middle distance with perhaps more commitment than was strictly necessary.

  Nobody said anything for a moment.

  Edric was the first to speak, in the tone he used when he was thinking out loud and didn't mind being heard doing it.

  "A monster," he said.

  Aris looked at him.

  "You said she came up from below Floor 40," Edric continued. "Forty-six floors. In that range the dungeon produces things we don't have records for. Things that have never come back up with a Wanderer to be documented." He looked at the pattern on her back, now covered again. "Monsters can place debuffs. It's rare but documented. Something she encountered on the way up could have marked her."

  "Possible," Aris said. He looked at his palm again. "But Void's Hand removes debuffs. Any debuff I've ever encountered, it removes completely. The fact that it stopped halfway—"

  "You're level one," Edric said. Not unkindly. Just as a fact on the table.

  "I know what level I am."

  "A deep floor monster's debuff could exceed what your Eido can currently handle. Void may have limits we haven't encountered before simply because you've never needed to find them."

  Aris considered this. He didn't like it, which was separate from whether it was true.

  "Maybe," he said. "Or."

  Edric waited.

  "Someone put it there," Aris said. "Not a monster. A person."

  The nave held this for a moment.

  "That sigil," Aris continued, "is too structured to be a monster's work. I've seen dungeon debuffs. They're messy, organic, the way dungeon things are. That pattern has geometry. It has intention." He looked at Elysse. "Someone placed that on you. And that same someone is still holding it in place, which is why Void's Hand can only push it back and not remove it."

  Elysse was looking at the floor in front of her. Not avoiding the conversation. Processing it, in the careful way she processed things.

  "Who," she said. Not asking anyone specifically. Just putting the word in the room.

  "We don't know," Edric said. "And I won't pretend otherwise."

  "Could be anyone she encountered down there," Aris said. "Or anyone who knew she was going down there. Which narrows it to—"

  "Not much," Elysse said quietly.

  "Not much," he agreed.

  Edric straightened up from where he'd been kneeling and stood with the slight effort of a man whose knees had opinions about extended time on stone floors. He looked at both of them with the expression of someone who had arrived at a decision and was now organizing the practical steps around it.

  "I can contact the Eternal Depth," he said. "The institution has qualified healers, people with more experience than I have with sigil work and deep-floor conditions. I can send word today."

  "That costs money," Aris said.

  "It does."

  "Money we don't have."

  "Also true."

  They looked at each other.

  "A guild healer would be worse," Aris said. "Guild healers charge before they treat. And there's no guarantee they'd know what to do with this anyway."

  "No," Edric agreed.

  "I don't want anyone making a fuss on my account," Elysse said. She said it with the composure of someone who had been an inconvenience to people before and had developed a strong preference for not being one. "I can manage. The voices have stopped for now and—"

  "That's not how this works," Aris said.

  She looked at him.

  He wasn't quite looking at her. He was looking at the Architect's statue, at the extended hand above them, and his voice had a quality in it that wasn't quite his usual tone. Quieter. More certain.

  "We serve the Architect," he said. "Both of us. What that means, practically, is that when someone comes through that door we treat them. Completely. We don't treat them partially and call it enough because the rest is inconvenient or expensive or complicated." A pause. "That's the job. That's the whole job. We don't leave patients without treating them properly. Not ever. Not for any reason."

  Elysse was quiet.

  "So no," he said, and his voice returned to its normal register, "you don't get to decide it's too much trouble. That's not a decision you're allowed to make from this side of the table."

  A silence.

  Then Elysse said, with a quality in her voice that wasn't quite what it had been a moment ago:

  "Thank you."

  Simply. The same way she'd thanked Edric earlier at the table. Two words with nothing performed in them.

  Edric looked at Aris with the expression he used when something had confirmed a thought he'd been holding for a long time. Aris didn't see it because he was looking at the floor.

  "Sister Vael," Edric said.

  Aris looked up.

  "She's a good friend. Trained in sigil work and condition treatment, considerably more than I have. She serves one of the Eternal Depth's outer parishes — she'll come if I ask her." He said it with the confidence of someone drawing on a long established trust. "She won't charge us."

  "Can she treat it?"

  "I don't know," Edric said honestly. "But she'll know more than we do. Which is the right direction."

  Aris nodded slowly.

  "In the meantime," Edric continued, "you rest." This was directed at Elysse, in the tone that was not a suggestion. "And you," to Aris, "stay close to the church. Void's Hand can't remove it but it does appear to slow the progression when applied. Until Sister Vael comes that's the best we have."

  "I wasn't planning to go anywhere," Aris said.

  "You had a list of errands this morning."

  "That was this morning."

  "There were also some repairs on the roof I was going to ask you about."

  "Those can wait."

  "The east section has been—"

  "Edric."

  Edric stopped. The expression on his face suggested he had made his point and was satisfied.

  Elysse had been watching this exchange with the attention of someone cataloguing something for later use.

  "I don't want to keep you from your work," she said, to Aris. "If there are things that need doing I can manage here on my own. I'm not entirely helpless."

  "I know you're not," Aris said. "You're also not entirely fine. The pattern stopped progressing when I treated it but we don't know for how long." He said it practically, the same way he said everything. "It's better if I'm here. It's not a hardship."

  "You've given me your room."

  "The bench builds character."

  "Edric said that."

  "Edric says it about everything uncomfortable. It's starting to seem credible."

  Elysse looked at him for a moment. Then at Edric. Then back at Aris.

  "I trust your judgment," she said. "Both of you." Then, in a slightly different tone, "I do have one question."

  "Of course," Edric said.

  She looked down at the plain white robe. Then up, with the expression of someone asking something they would prefer not to have to ask but had decided was necessary.

  "This robe," she said. "The one I'm wearing." A careful pause. "Were you the ones who—"

  The sentence didn't need finishing.

  Edric didn't flinch. "You were unconscious and injured and your armor needed to be removed to treat the wounds properly. It was a medical necessity and handled with complete professionalism."

  He said it with the absolute unruffled composure of a man who had been a physician for thirty years and had never once found these situations anything other than clinical.

  Aris said nothing.

  Elysse looked at him.

  He was looking at a point on the wall approximately a meter to the left of anyone present with an expression of complete and total innocence that was doing the opposite of its intended work.

  "I swear on the Architect," he said, to the wall, "that I saw absolutely nothing."

  "He was outside," Edric said helpfully. "For most of it."

  "For all of it," Aris said, with feeling. "I was outside for all of it. I was on the street. I was very far from this building. I was essentially in a different district."

  "The market," Edric confirmed. "He went to the market."

  "Immediately," Aris said. "I went immediately."

  Elysse looked at him for a long moment.

  Then she smiled.

  Not the almost-smile from the kitchen, not the restrained movement at the corner of her mouth that she'd been permitting herself since breakfast. A real smile, full and unguarded, the kind that arrived without being managed and didn't care about composure or noble bearing or anything else.

  "I trust you," she said. "Both of you."

  The nave was quiet.

  Aris looked at her directly for what was possibly the first time since she'd opened the bedroom door that morning, which was a shorter time than it felt like and a longer time than the morning had technically lasted, and said nothing because nothing was what the moment called for.

  Edric looked at the statue above them with the expression of a man in quiet conversation with something that wasn't in the room.

  Outside, the street did what streets do. The morning moved into afternoon at its own pace.

  The church held all of it the way it held everything.