She arrived before evening, which meant Edric had sent word the moment they'd finished talking and hadn't mentioned doing so, which was exactly the kind of thing Edric did.

  Sister Vael was a small woman in her mid-fifties with the specific build of someone who had been carrying heavy bags between parishes for thirty years and had developed the musculature to prove it. Her habit was the grey of the Eternal Depth's outer clergy, practical and slightly worn at the cuffs, and she walked into Saint Edren's with the familiarity of someone who had been here before and had her own sense of where things were.

  She embraced Edric in the nave with the efficiency of long friendship, looked at Aris with the expression of someone who had heard about him and was confirming details, and then looked at Elysse with the professional attention of a woman who had been treating people for a very long time.

  "Show me," she said.

  Elysse sat on the clinic bench while Sister Vael examined her back in the lamp light, the nun's face close, her reading glasses on, her expression doing the thing that experienced practitioners' expressions do when they encounter something outside their catalogue.

  She didn't say anything for a long time.

  Then she sat back.

  "I haven't seen one like this," she said. To Edric, to the room, to no one specifically. She said it with the honesty of someone who considered false confidence a form of disrespect. "The geometry of it. The depth of the placement." She turned the pattern over in her eyes for another moment. "No. I haven't seen one like this."

  "Can you treat it?" Aris asked.

  "Let me try what I have."

  She opened the bag she'd brought. Inside, arranged with the neat organization of someone who had been packing this bag for decades, were vials of varying sizes, cloth-wrapped bundles, small ceramic containers sealed with wax. She selected three vials and a container, uncapped them with the efficiency of someone who didn't need to read labels, and began applying the contents to Elysse's back with a cloth.

  The smell filled the clinic. Sharp and herbal and underneath both of those something mineral, the specific quality of compounds that came from deep floor reagents processed by people who knew what they were doing.

  The pattern didn't move.

  Sister Vael tried two more vials. A different cloth. A compound she mixed in a small bowl on the bench beside her, working from memory, her hands moving with the confidence of long practice.

  Nothing. The pattern sat exactly where it was, occupying its geometry, indifferent.

  Sister Vael capped her vials and set them aside.

  "Seraph," she said quietly.

  Her Eido rose.

  It was nothing like Void and nothing like Marionette. Where Void was dark and Marionette was articulated green precision, Seraph was simply light. A figure assembled from white radiance, tall and featureless in the way of something too bright to read details from, its form suggesting wings without having them, its hands extended forward with the palms up in the gesture of something offering rather than taking. It made the clinic lamp irrelevant. It made the shadows retreat to the far corners and stay there.

  It was, Aris thought despite himself, genuinely beautiful.

  Seraph's light fell across Elysse's back. Fell across the pattern. Fell into the geometry of it with the specific quality of purification, the light finding the wrong thing and addressing it, which was what Seraph did, which was what Sister Vael had spent thirty years learning to do with precision.

  The pattern sat in the light.

  And the light did nothing to it.

  Not the way Void's Hand had done something and then stopped. Nothing from the beginning, as if the light was falling on stone, as if the pattern had no surface that purification could find purchase on. Seraph's radiance moved across the crest and the crest remained exactly what it was, structured and dark and patient, and after two full minutes Sister Vael let the Eido go.

  The clinic returned to lamp light.

  Sister Vael sat quietly for a moment.

  "I see why you called me," she said to Edric.

  "What is it?" Elysse asked. Her voice was even. The composure back in place, the smile from the nave packed away somewhere. She was looking at the wall in front of her.

  "I don't know specifically," Sister Vael said. "What I can tell you is what it isn't. It isn't any debuff I've catalogued from floors one through twenty. It isn't any sigil pattern in the Eternal Depth's records, which go back further than the guilds." She paused. "My methods address what I know. This is outside what I know."

  "So we're back to nothing," Aris said.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  "I didn't say nothing," Sister Vael said. "I said outside what I know."

  "What's the difference?"

  "The difference is what I'd suggest next." She looked at Edric. "A guild healer. A qualified one, not a standard guild medic. Someone with experience treating deep floor conditions."

  "There's no guarantee they can treat it either," Edric said.

  "No," Sister Vael agreed. "There isn't. But in my knowledge there's no one else in Valerne who might. If my methods don't work and your boy's Eido can only hold it back, a qualified guild healer is the only remaining option I can point you toward."

  "They cost a fortune," Edric said.

  Sister Vael didn't comment on that. She recapped the last of her vials and began repacking her bag with the same neat organization she'd unpacked it with.

  "Before you go," Aris said. "The sigil itself. Have you seen anything like the pattern before? Not the specific one. The type."

  Sister Vael paused in her packing.

  "Sigils on Wanderers," she said slowly. "Yes. I've treated them before. More intelligent creatures in the deep floors sometimes mark the people who encounter them. A kind of persistent debuff, more structured than what simpler monsters produce." She looked at him. "But here's the thing about those. Distance weakens them. The further a Wanderer gets from the creature that placed the mark, the weaker the debuff becomes. Give it enough distance and enough time and it dissolves on its own."

  "She came up from below Floor 40," Aris said. "She's been on the surface for three days."

  "Which is why this concerns me," Sister Vael said. "If something on a deep floor marked her, this pattern should be a ghost of itself by now. It should barely be visible." She looked at Elysse's back, at the robe covering what they all now knew was underneath it. "Instead it's progressing."

  "Which means," Aris said.

  "Which means either the creature that placed it is considerably more powerful than anything I have records for." She closed her bag. "Or it wasn't a creature."

  The clinic was quiet.

  Edric looked at Aris. Aris looked at Edric. The look was shorter than the one in the nave had been because they'd already had most of this conversation and the new information had landed in the same place.

  "I'll ask at the Eternal Depth's main office," Sister Vael said, standing. "Quietly. There are older records there than the ones I have access to. If this pattern appears anywhere in them I'll send word." She picked up her bag. "In the meantime." She looked at Elysse with the directness of someone who had decided that the kindest thing was accuracy. "Rest. Don't push your body while it's managing this. And let the boy treat it when the progression starts. It isn't a cure but it appears to be the best available brake."

  Elysse nodded. "Thank you."

  "Don't thank me," Sister Vael said. "I've done very little." She said it without false modesty, just as a statement of the arithmetic. Then she turned to Edric and her expression changed, dropping the practitioner's register for something older and warmer. "Walk me out."

  They left together, their voices dropping to the low murmur of two people with thirty years of friendship finding its register quickly.

  Aris stayed in the clinic doorway for a moment.

  Elysse was sitting on the bench with her back to him, her white hair loose, her hands in her lap. She hadn't moved since Sister Vael finished. She wasn't moving now. She was looking at the wall with the expression he couldn't see from this angle but could read from the set of her shoulders, the particular stillness of someone absorbing information they'd been hoping would be different.

  He thought about saying something.

  He didn't have anything that was true and useful simultaneously, which was the only kind of thing he was willing to offer.

  He left her there.

  The nave was dark except for the candles along the walls and the moonlight.

  It came through the window openings in long pale columns, moving slowly across the floor as the evening progressed, and one of them had found the Architect's statue and was doing something with it. The stone caught the light differently at night, the carved features losing their daytime solidity and becoming something more ambiguous, the extended hand reaching downward in a way that looked less architectural and more like intention.

  Aris sat on his bench. The warm one, the one that fit him, third from the front on the left.

  He looked at the statue.

  The statue looked back, or didn't, depending on your theology.

  "Right," he said, in his head, in the tone he used when he was addressing the general direction of the Architect without committing to the reality of the conversation. "So. Six years. Six years of this bench and this clinic and this building. Six years of treating dungeon fevers and infections and exposure cases and every manner of thing that the guild healers won't touch. Not a single failure. Not one patient I couldn't treat."

  The moonlight moved a centimeter across the floor.

  "And now you send me a girl with a pattern on her back that my Eido can't fully remove and that Sister Vael's Seraph couldn't touch and that apparently no one in Valerne has ever seen before." He paused. "A girl who came up from below Floor 40 alone. Who fought a Hollow Guard on Floor Six. Who smiled at me in my own nave and said she trusted me."

  The candle nearest the door moved in the draft from the broken latch.

  "I can't treat her." He said it plainly, the way he said things that were true and uncomfortable, the way he'd said them at this statue his whole life. "I can hold it back. I can push it down a little further every time and keep the voices from coming and maybe buy her enough days to find someone who actually knows what it is. But I can't fix it."

  He looked at his hand. At the palm where Void's Hand assembled and dissolved.

  "You gave me one job," he said. "One thing I'm for, in this building, in this city. And now you've sent me the one patient I can't do that job for." He leaned back against the bench. "That's very funny. I want you to know I find that genuinely funny."

  The moonlight reached the base of the statue's pedestal and stopped there, sitting at the stone feet, going no further.

  "She said she trusted us," he said, quieter now, the joke in his voice settling into something underneath it. "Which means I have to be worth trusting."

  He sat with that for a while.

  The nave held its silence, the way it always did, without asking anything from the person inside it.

  "I'll figure it out," he said, finally. To the statue, to himself, to whatever was or wasn't listening in the space between the two.

  "I always do."

  Outside, Valerne continued its evening. The street sounds had softened to the lower register of a city settling in for the night. Somewhere nearby someone was cooking something that smelled like the food Edric would have made if Edric had been cooking, which he probably was, because Edric cooked in the evenings the way he prayed in the mornings.

  Aris sat on his bench in the moonlight and looked at the statue of God and thought about who in Valerne might know what a pattern like that was.

  He had an idea.

  He didn't like it yet.

  He'd like it better in the morning.