The passage turned slightly left around a column that was older than the others, its surface carved with something that predated the Undercourse's current incarnation, and widened into a small open square where several passages met. Stalls on all sides, the food smell stronger here, and a group of people near the central column who had the easy cluster of regulars with nowhere specific to be.

  Aris was looking at the carved column.

  He was looking at it with the focused attention of someone who had noticed something and was trying to—

  "Aris."

  Something caught his left arm.

  Not one something. Several somethings, which resolved on examination into hands, small and numerous, belonging to a group of young women who had appeared from the direction of one of the side passages with the coordinated ease of people who had developed a professional relationship with the geometry of this particular junction.

  "Oh," one of them said, in the tone of someone who had found something they hadn't expected to find. "Look at this one."

  "I—" Aris started.

  "He's adorable," said another one, closer now, examining him with the frank assessment of someone in a professional context. "How old are you?"

  "That's not—" Aris said.

  "He has the face," said the first one. "You know the face. The one that still has the—"

  "I'm sixteen," Aris said, which was possibly not the most strategic opening.

  "Sixteen," the first one said, delighted.

  "I need to—" Aris looked at the passage ahead of him where Kai had been a moment ago and found that Kai had turned and was already moving back toward him with the expression of someone who had looked away for four seconds and was now dealing with the consequences.

  "Hands off," Kai said.

  "We're just looking," said one of the women, not releasing Aris's arm.

  "You're not just looking," Kai said. "Let go."

  "He came to us,"

  "He absolutely did not—"

  "He has kind eyes," said one of the others, examining Aris's face from a distance of approximately not enough. "And the cheeks. Did anyone mention the cheeks."

  "Several people just did," Aris said. "I heard all of them."

  "Let him go," Kai said.

  "Your friend is very serious," said the woman holding Aris's left arm, to Aris, conversationally. "Is he always like this or is it a today thing."

  "He's always—" Aris started.

  "He's like a little priest," said another one. "Did someone send a little priest into the Undercourse. That's the funniest thing I've—"

  Kai went very still.

  The specific stillness of a person who has heard one thing too many and has made a decision about the next several seconds. It was a different stillness from his usual quality of stillness, and the people near enough to notice it noticed it.

  The grey mist came first.

  Not much of it. Not the full manifestation, not Reaper rising to its complete form. Just the edges of it, the atmospheric evidence of an Eido whose user had lowered the barrier between contained and present, a grey vapor that didn't move the way vapor moved, that drifted upward from Kai's shoulders with the slow patience of something that was simply informing the room of its existence.

  The dark lean form of Reaper was not there. But the quality of the mist — the specific texture of it, the way it absorbed the lamp light rather than catching it — said everything about what the mist belonged to.

  The temperature in the immediate area did not change.

  It felt like it did.

  The women looked at the mist.

  They looked at Kai.

  They let go of Aris.

  The release was unanimous and immediate, the coordinated movement of people who had developed good professional instincts and were applying them. They withdrew toward the side passage with the efficient unhurriedness of people who had decided to be somewhere else and were being somewhere else at a pace that didn't communicate urgency.

  The mist settled.

  Dissipated.

  Kai put his hand on Aris's shoulder.

  Aris was looking at the space where the mist had been with the expression of someone who had just seen the edge of something and was recalibrating.

  "That was," he said.

  "Yes," Kai said.

  "Your Eido—"

  "Yes."

  "Just the edges of it and they—"

  "Aris," Kai said, steering him forward, hand remaining on his shoulder. "Walk."

  They walked. Colette fell back into step behind them, her expression carefully composed in the manner of someone who had been about to intervene and was processing not having needed to. Elysse moved beside her with the expression of someone who had assessed the situation, determined it was resolved, and had no further notes.

  "Stay close," Kai said, to Aris specifically, his hand still on his shoulder. "This place is full of manipulators. Every kind. The ones you see and the ones you don't."

  "I wasn't going anywhere," Aris said.

  "You were standing still while somewhere happened to you," Kai said. "In the Undercourse that's the same thing."

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  Aris looked at the passage ahead. At the stalls and the people and the warm underground light.

  "How do you know this place," he said. "Well enough to walk through it like you live here."

  "I come here," Kai said. "Regularly."

  "For what."

  "Tools. Weapons. Armor components." He said it with the same matter-of-fact quality he used for everything professional. "Items that come through here from deep floor expeditions without the Veilmarket's provenance process get priced at what they're worth rather than what the licensing fees add to what they're worth. I buy them here and sell them at the surface for a margin that makes sense for everyone involved."

  "That's—" Aris started.

  "Practical," Kai said.

  "I was going to say something else."

  "Practical," Kai said again, firmly.

  "Where are we going," Colette said, from behind them, in the tone of someone who had been following someone else's lead for long enough to want a destination.

  Kai looked at the passages branching from the current one. At the layout of the place with the familiarity of someone who had developed an internal map through repetition.

  "Searching this entire market for one item," he said, "would take hours. We don't have hours." He looked forward. "There's a place here where you can find out what's available and where without walking the whole floor. Someone who knows the Undercourse's inventory the way Edric knows his clinic."

  "What kind of place," Colette said.

  "A bar," Kai said. "Mostly."

  "Mostly," Aris said.

  "Mostly a bar," Kai said. "The other part we'll discuss when we get there."

  He led them left at the next passage, deeper into the Undercourse, further from the stairway and the surface and the morning above, into the warmer light and the compressed sound of a city that had decided to exist beneath the one that had decided it shouldn't.

  The bar had no name visible from the outside.

  The alley that led to it was narrow enough that two people walking side by side would have to negotiate it, which was probably intentional, the kind of entrance that filtered its clientele through the simple mechanism of requiring them to know it was there before they could find it. A lamp above the door, old iron, the flame inside it doing its minimum work. The sound coming through the door was the sound of people who had found somewhere warm and had been there for a while.

  Kai pushed the door open and went in.

  The inside was fuller than the outside prepared you for.

  Low ceiling, dark wood, the accumulated smoke of enough evenings to have become part of the walls rather than a current condition. Tables that had been full for a while and showed it. The clientele was the Undercourse's usual mixture compressed into a smaller space and consequently more visible in its variety — people in the worn practical clothing of the Greyward's residents at tables with people whose equipment, even out of its guild context, announced a different kind of life. All of them sharing the particular democracy of a bar that had been open long enough to have its own gravity.

  The noise was the specific noise of people who were past their first drink and hadn't decided to stop yet, comfortable and blurred at the edges, punctuated occasionally by something louder from a corner table that didn't warrant investigation.

  Behind the bar, a girl.

  She was young, younger than the bar felt like it should employ, with dark green hair cut practically short and the expression of someone who had developed a comprehensive policy regarding the behavior of drunk people and was implementing it with the efficiency of long practice. She moved along the bar filling things and clearing things with the economy of someone who had done this long enough that it required no conscious attention, which freed her attention for the assessed monitoring of every person in the room that she was clearly conducting simultaneously.

  A man at the end of the bar said something to her. The content was legible from the tone if not the words.

  She didn't respond. Didn't change expression. Filled the glass in front of the next customer and moved on with the completeness of someone for whom the comment had not registered as a thing requiring response.

  Behind Aris, Colette had done something with her cape.

  He noticed it peripherally — the Aurel cape, which had been over her shoulders since they'd left Cresthold that morning, was now folded over her arm, the crest side inward, the whole thing reduced to a bundle of fabric that announced nothing about its owner.

  "Smart," Aris said, quietly.

  "An Aurel in a bar in the Undercourse," Colette said, at the same volume, to herself as much as to him, with the expression of someone having a private conversation with their own sense of dignity. "An Aurel. In this bar. In this district. Below a street that isn't on any official map." She looked at the ceiling briefly. "My mother would dissolve."

  "Don't think about your mother," Aris said.

  "I'm actively trying not to," Colette said.

  Kai had already taken a seat at the bar, in the particular way he sat in places he'd been before, the ease of a regular in a place that recognized regulars. He leaned forward on the counter and waited for the green-haired girl to complete the circuit that would bring her back to his end.

  She arrived without hurry, cloth over her shoulder, eyes doing their assessed monitoring.

  "Lyse," Kai said.

  She looked at him. Recognition moved through her expression and settled into something that wasn't quite a greeting but acknowledged his existence specifically rather than generically.

  "Kai," she said. Flat and quiet, below the bar's ambient noise, the volume of someone who had learned that in this place the right register was the one that carried exactly as far as intended and no further.

  "Still working Tuesdays," Kai said.

  "Still working," she said, moving a glass. "What do you need."

  "The market," Kai said, at the same register. "Spell tracker. You know if there's one in the current stock."

  Lyse didn't stop moving. Her hands continued their work, the cloth going over the counter in front of Kai with the automatic thoroughness of someone whose hands had their own occupation while the rest of her was elsewhere.

  "High demand item," she said, low and even. "Last one in the stock moved about twenty minutes ago."

  Kai's expression did something brief and controlled.

  Aris, standing behind him, felt the specific feeling of a door closing that had been the last door in the corridor.

  "Twenty minutes," Kai said.

  "Customer came in, went straight to the stock counter, paid and went down," Lyse said. "They knew what they wanted."

  "Down," Kai said.

  "The Underbowl," she said, and the direction of her eyes shifted for exactly a second, toward the far end of the bar where a door sat in the wall that Aris had taken for a storage entrance. People moved through it with the purposeful ease of people with a destination, a steady trickle, enough that the door opened and closed regularly and had acquired the worn quality of something frequently used.

  "They're still down there," Kai said.

  "Haven't come back up," Lyse said.

  "Then we can still reach them," Kai said.

  "You can try," she said, in the tone of someone who was providing information without endorsing the plan it would be used for. "Item's bought and paid for. They don't have to sell."

  "People in the Underbowl are usually open to negotiation," Kai said.

  "People in the Underbowl are usually watching the fights," Lyse said. "Which puts them in a particular kind of mood."

  "Fights," Aris said.

  Lyse looked at him. The assessed monitoring settling on him with the same quality it had settled on everyone else, without particular judgment, just the comprehensive reading of a person she hadn't seen before.

  "First time," she said.

  "Is it that obvious," Aris said.

  She looked at him for another second. Then she picked up a glass and moved to the next customer with the completeness of someone who had said what she intended to say and had moved on.

  "The door," Kai said, standing, "at the end of the bar."

  They looked at it.

  "How much further down does this place go," Colette said, with the expression of someone who had thought they understood the scope of the situation and was now revising.

  "You'll see," Kai said.

  They crossed the bar in Kai's wake, through the noise and the smoke and the press of people who paid them varying degrees of attention, and reached the door. Up close it was heavier than it looked, iron-banded wood, the kind of door that was built to contain sound as much as to separate spaces.

  Kai opened it.

  The sound hit them first.

  Not the bar's ambient noise. Something larger, more directional, the compressed roar of a crowd focused on a single point, the specific sound of people watching something that required a response from them and was getting one.

  The stairway beyond the door went down again.

  Further than the stairway from the Greyward to the Undercourse. Steeper, the lamp light sparser, the stone of the walls noticeably older in the way that things get older the further underground you take them.

  Aris looked at the stairs.

  Looked up at the ceiling of the bar above.

  Looked at the stairs again.

  "How deep," he said.

  "Deep enough," Kai said, and went down.

  Colette looked at Elysse.

  Elysse looked at the stairs with the expression she used for things that were going to be difficult and that she had decided to do anyway.

  "Don't," Colette started.

  "I'm fine," Elysse said, and went through the door.

  Colette stood alone at the entrance for one moment.

  "My mother," she said quietly, to no one, "would genuinely dissolve."

  She went through the door.