Vette brought them back to the bar before they left.

  Not for drinks. She went behind the counter and crouched and came back up with a piece of paper folded twice, the kind of paper that had been folded and unfolded enough times that the creases had become permanent features of its geography.

  She put it on the counter in front of them.

  "Passage Corre," she said. "Behind the tannery, the one with the broken drainage pipe on the east wall. There's a building at the end of the passage with a blue door. The door is never locked."

  Colette looked at the paper. A rough map, hand drawn, the lines of someone who knew a pce well enough that the drawing was for other people rather than themselves.

  "The Lodge knows about it," Vette said. "They've always known. They leave it alone because the unlicensed information that comes back through it ends up in their files eventually, through people like me." She looked at them. "No level check. No registration. No record of entry."

  "No record of entry," Aris said.

  "Correct," Vette said.

  She held his gaze for a moment with the expression of someone making sure the implication had nded.

  It had nded.

  "Anyone we should know about on the way down," Colette said.

  "Floor 8 has been quiet," Vette said. "Or it was two weeks ago, which is the most recent account I have. Below that I don't have current information." She paused. "The accounts I mentioned. The cw marks. Those groups came back through this entrance."

  "Thank you," Colette said.

  Vette picked up the paper and held it for a moment before giving it over.

  "Come back," she said. "Both of you. I don't run a bar for dead people."

  Passage Corre was exactly what the name suggested.

  A narrow service passage between two older buildings in the district bordering the Greyward, the kind of passage that existed in every city's older quarters, too narrow for carts, too short for a thoroughfare, present purely because the buildings on either side had been built at different times by different people who hadn't consulted each other about the gap between them.

  The tannery was on the left. The broken drainage pipe on its east wall was immediately identifiable, the pipe's fracture wrapped in cloth that had been doing the job of a repair for longer than a repair should take. The smell of the tannery extended well beyond the tannery's walls and had opinions about the entire passage.

  The building at the end had a blue door.

  It was not a remarkable blue. The color of something that had been more blue once and had been weathering toward grey for several years, the paint lifting at the corners, the wood beneath it the dark brown of old timber that had seen a great deal of weather and had developed the patient resignation of old timber everywhere.

  Colette pushed it open.

  Inside was a room that had given up on having a purpose. Storage, once, the remnants of it still present in the empty shelving along the walls and the marks on the floor where crates had sat long enough to leave impressions. In the center of the floor, occupying most of it, the entrance.

  A tunnel mouth cut directly into the stone, wide enough for two people side by side, angled downward at the specific gradient of something that had been designed for regur use. The edges of it were worn smooth, the stone at the entrance polished by the passage of hands and shoulders over years. A rope handrail ran down the left side, knotted at intervals, disappearing into the dark below.

  No arch. No Lodge insignia. No level assessment pte beside the entrance.

  Just the tunnel and the dark and the rope and the dungeon below all of it, present and indifferent.

  Aris looked at it.

  "Right," he said.

  They stood at the tunnel's edge for a moment before descending.

  Not hesitating. Preparing, the specific stillness of people who are about to do something that cannot be undone once started and are giving themselves the st moment of before.

  Colette was looking at the tunnel with the expression she wore when she was holding several things simultaneously, the practical and the personal existing in the same space without resolving into either.

  "When we get down there," she said. "Stay close. Sovereign works best within a short range, I can amplify your Eido more effectively the closer you are."

  "I know," Aris said.

  "If something engages us before we're ready, use Repel first. Create distance. Let me read the situation before we commit to anything."

  "Colette."

  "If the marks on the floors are still present they'll be on the wall surfaces near the passages, creatures that size don't leave ground marks, they leave—"

  "Colette," Aris said.

  She stopped.

  Looked at him.

  "I know," he said. "You've pnned for it. I trust you."

  She held his gaze for a moment.

  Something in her expression that wasn't the pnning quality and wasn't the composed quality. Something underneath both of those, older than either, the thing that had been on her face in the Lodge's small room when the attendant said one page.

  "Down there," she said, "somewhere on those floors. Is what actually happened to them."

  "Yes," Aris said.

  "I've been trying to find it for weeks," she said. "Through official channels, through the Lodge, through every contact I had left after the guild dissolved." She looked at the tunnel. "Every door closed."

  "This one didn't," Aris said.

  She looked at the blue door behind them, still open, the passage and the tannery smell and the afternoon light of Valerne beyond it.

  "No," she said. "This one didn't."

  She took the rope with her left hand and stepped onto the tunnel's gradient and began to descend.

  Aris followed.

  The tunnel received them the way the dungeon received everything, without comment, without ceremony, the dark rising around them as the entrance above shrank to a pale rectangle and then to a suggestion and then to nothing as the tunnel curved and the surface disappeared entirely.

  Below them the dungeon opened, floor by floor, patient and indifferent and full of the things it was full of, waiting with the specific quality of something that had been waiting since before the city above it existed and would be waiting long after.

  Aris held the rope and descended and did not look back.

  They came out of the tunnel onto Floor 2.

  The transition from the tunnel's cut stone to the dungeon's native architecture was immediate and total, the walls changing from dressed city stone to the dungeon's own material, the dense dark rock threaded with the faint luminescent mineral deposits that provided the dungeon's ambient light. Cool air. The specific mineral smell that the Lodge's hall had absorbed over decades, present here at its source, cleaner and more complete.

  Floor 2 was familiar territory.

  Aris had been here more times than he could count, the Deepbloom harvests, the years of clinic supply runs, the floor's geography as known to him as the church's nave. The low ceiling passages opening into rger cavern spaces, the crystal formations along the eastern wall that marked the passage toward Floor 3, the particur quality of the floor's light that was different from every other floor in the way that each floor's light was different, a fact he had never thought about carefully before and was thinking about now.

  The floor's creatures registered their presence and assessed it and made the calcution that dungeon creatures made about Wanderers, the specific arithmetic of threat versus opportunity, and arrived at the conclusion that two people moving with purpose and active Eidos were not worth the engagement.

  They moved through Floor 2 without incident.

  Floor 3 the same.

  Floor 4 the same, Aris noting the section of uneven stone near the eastern passage that Kai had cited in his fictional account to Edric, the lip in the floor that did in fact exist and would have been useful detail if Aris had sted more than four seconds.

  They descended.

  Floor 7 was where the dungeon changed quality.

  Not dramatically. Not with a visible threshold or a transition that announced itself. The change was atmospheric, the kind that registered in the body before the mind caught up to it, the air a degree cooler, the ambient light slightly different in color, the creatures present on the floor operating with a different quality of attention than the upper floors.

  "I can feel the floor," Colette said quietly. The dungeon's energy density is higher than I expected at this level."

  "It increases with depth," Aris said. "The clinic cases from the lower floors always carry more charge than the upper floor cases. The dungeon energy concentrates downward."

  "No," he said. "It feels like breathing."

  Floor 7 received them without comment.

  The first thing was the dark.

  Not the absence of light, the dungeon's mineral deposits continued their faint luminescence on Floor 7 as on every floor above it, but the quality of the light changed at the transition, became less reliable, the deposits sparser and further apart, the spaces between them genuinely dark in a way that the upper floors weren't. The passages on Floor 7 were longer between light sources. The dark in those passages had depth to it, the specific depth of dark that exists in pces where it has not been interrupted for a long time.

  The second thing was the ceiling.

  On Floor 6 the ceilings of the rger cavern spaces were high but present, visible in the ambient light, the rock formations above readable. On Floor 7 the passage they entered had no visible ceiling. The light from the mineral deposits reached upward and found nothing, the dark above them simply continuing without offering a surface to resolve against. Aris looked up once and did not look up again.

  The third thing was the sound.

  Water.

  Not a stream, not a flow, a drip. Singur and irregur, somewhere ahead and to the left, the specific sound of water that had been finding the same path through stone for long enough that the path had become permanent. It came at intervals that were almost rhythmic, close enough to a pattern to register as one and inconsistent enough to keep registering every time it came, the ear unable to stop listening for the next one.

  Drip.

  Colette moved ahead of him by half a step.

  She had her hand on the wall, the left one, the fingertips reading the stone's texture the way Aris read a patient's condition, gathering information through contact. Her right hand was free.

  "The passage opens ahead," Colette said quietly. "Thirty meters approximately. Then it branches. The right branch goes down."

  "How do you know," Aris said.

  "The air," she said. "The downward passages pull differently. You feel it on your face if you pay attention."

  Aris paid attention.

  He felt it. A faint directional quality to the air's movement, subtle enough that he would not have identified it without being told what to look for. He filed it.

  "You've been here often I see," he said.

  "Guild training," she said. "Environmental navigation. Colette de Aurel can get herself from Floor 1 to Floor 20 blind if necessary." A pause. "Which may or may not be relevant tonight."

  "Reassuring," Aris said.

  "It was meant to be," she said.

  Drip.

  They moved through the dark.