The Lodge of Valerne occupied the north face of Cours Centrale pza.

  It was the rgest administrative building in the city that wasn't a church, six stories of pale dressed stone with the dungeon arch visible from every window on its eastern side, the proximity intentional, the Lodge's founding architects having understood that the retionship between the institution and the dungeon should be legible in the building's geography. Wide steps led up to the entrance, worn smooth by decades of Wanderers ascending with empty packs and descending with full ones. Above the doors the Lodge's founding inscription ran in carved letters across the lintel, the old formal script that nobody used anymore.

  In descent, purpose. In return, proof.

  Inside, the ground floor was organized around a central hall the size of a small cathedral, the ceiling three stories above the floor, the light coming through tall narrow windows in columns that fell across the hall's main feature: the counters.

  Twelve of them, running in two parallel rows down the hall's length, each one staffed by a Lodge attendant in a white uniform, the Lodge's silver insignia at the colr. The counters handled everything. Loot redemption on the left row, the Wanderers presenting their dungeon harvests to be assessed and valued and exchanged for coin, the process steady and efficient and producing a particur sound, the clink of assessment weights and the rustle of documentation and the low transactional murmur of people converting risk into money.

  Registration and records on the right row.

  The lines at the loot redemption counters were long. The lines at the records counters were shorter, the specific shortness of a service that people needed less frequently and approached with more anxiety.

  Aris and Colette joined the shorter line.

  The hall smelled of dungeon. Not unpleasantly. The specific mineral quality that Wanderers brought back on their equipment and their clothes, the deep floor smell that the Lodge's stone had absorbed over decades until it was simply part of the building's character, the way old churches smelled of incense regardless of whether incense had been burned recently.

  Colette stood in the line with the cape folded over her arm, the house crest inward, her red hair loose. She had considered pinning it up before they came, covering the color, and had decided against it. The Lodge knew who she was or it didn't and either way the information wasn't useful to hide.

  Aris stood beside her and watched the loot redemption line.

  A Wanderer three counters down was presenting what looked like a crystallized floor boss core, the Lodge attendant handling it with the practiced care of someone who had assessed several thousand of them. The number the attendant wrote on the redemption slip made Aris's chest do something complicated.

  "Stop looking at the redemption line," Colette said.

  "I'm not," Aris said.

  "You are."

  "I'm observing the hall."

  "The specific part of the hall that has money in it."

  "It's a rge hall," Aris said. "Most of it has money in it."

  The line moved.

  The attendant at their counter was young.

  Twenty at most, the white uniform pressed and correct, her hair pinned back with the efficiency of someone who took the uniform seriously. She had the manner of a person who was good at her job and knew it without needing to perform the knowing, the specific competence of someone trained well and given work that suited them.

  She looked up when they reached the counter.

  Her eyes moved to Colette's hair.

  Something happened in her expression that she managed quickly and professionally, the recognition passing through and being filed, and she looked at the documentation form in front of her and picked up her pen.

  "Names and guild affiliation," she said.

  "Colette Aurel," Colette said. "Unaffiliated currently. This is Aris Edren, also unaffiliated."

  The pen moved.

  "Nature of inquiry."

  "Records," Colette said. "Specifically the incident reports from Floor 46 filed in the period following the Aurelian Compact's st expedition. Eighteen months ago approximately."

  The pen stopped.

  The attendant looked up.

  "One moment," she said.

  She left the counter and went through the door behind it and was gone for two minutes. When she came back her expression had the specific quality of someone who had been given an instruction they understood but wished they didn't have to execute.

  "Would you follow me please," she said.

  The room behind the counter row was small and administrative, a table and four chairs and a window that looked at the Lodge's interior courtyard rather than the pza. The kind of room that existed in every rge institution, functional and slightly airless, used for conversations that needed to happen away from the public floor without being important enough for an actual office.

  They sat.

  The attendant pced a thin folder on the table.

  "I've pulled everything we have on the Aurelian Compact's final expedition," she said. "Registered departure, Floor 46 designation, party composition, equipment manifest." She opened the folder. "And the incident report."

  Colette looked at it.

  The incident report was one page.

  One page for fifty people.

  "Cause," Colette said, reading.

  "Creature encounter," the attendant said. "Floor 46. Cssified as an unpredictable high-density spawn event. The Lodge's assessment determined that the party encountered a concentration of floor native creatures exceeding the expected parameters for a party of that level."

  "That's not what happened," Colette said.

  "I understand," the attendant said.

  "The floor's native creatures at level 46 would not have eliminated a party of that composition. Not quickly. Not completely. There would have been survivors beyond—" Colette stopped. "Beyond the one."

  "I understand," the attendant said again, quietly. "The Lodge's assessment is what I have on file. I can't provide records that don't exist."

  "Are there witness accounts," Aris said. "Other Wanderers operating on adjacent floors around the same period."

  "Three," the attendant said. "All filed within the week following. All describe hearing unusual activity from the direction of the lower floors but none were in direct visual range of Floor 46 during the event." She turned a page. "Their accounts were noted and filed."

  "And," Colette said.

  "And noted and filed," the attendant said.

  The room was quiet.

  Colette looked at the one page report and the three witness accounts that had been noted and filed and the equipment manifest that listed everything that had gone down and never come back up.

  She closed the folder.

  "Thank you," she said. "For pulling this."

  "I'm sorry," the attendant said. "I know that's not sufficient."

  She said it without the professional distance, just pinly, and Colette looked at her properly for the first time since they sat down.

  The attendant's hands were folded on the table and she was looking at the folder with an expression that had nothing administrative in it.

  "Was someone in your family," Colette said carefully.

  A pause.

  "My brother," the attendant said. "Terren. He was a third-level Wanderer with the Compact for two years." She looked at the folder. "He was very proud of it."

  The room held that for a moment.

  "I'm sorry," Colette said.

  "He used to come home and tell me about the floors," the attendant said. "The lower ones he'd been to. He made them sound like somewhere worth going." She looked up. "I believe you that the report isn't right. I've believed it since they filed it. One page." She looked at the folder again. "Fifty people and one page."

  "Is there anything else," Colette said. "Anything not in the file. Anything you've heard."

  The attendant was quiet for a moment.

  She looked at the door. Then at them.

  "Officially," she said, "I've given you everything the Lodge has on record."

  A pause.

  "Unofficially," Aris said.

  She looked at him.

  "There's a pce in the Undercourse," she said. "A bar. The girl who runs it, green hair, she hears things that don't make it into Lodge files. Wanderers who operate unlicensed, people who move between the official system and the other one." She folded her hands again. "If anyone has heard something from the floors around that period it would have moved through there."

  "We know the bar," Aris said.

  The attendant nodded once.

  She stood and picked up the folder and held it for a moment.

  "If you find out what actually happened," she said, "I would like to know."

  "You'll know," Colette said.

  The Undercourse — Vette's BarThe bar was the same.

  The same low ceiling and the same mp arrangement producing the same warm unreliable light and the same quality of noise, the specific sound of a room full of people conducting business that they preferred to conduct underground. Vette behind the counter with the green hair and the expression of someone who had seen everything come through her bar at least twice and had developed opinions about most of it.

  She recognized them when they came through the door.

  Not warmly. Not unwarmly. The recognition of someone who remembers the people who were involved in a thing that became a story worth telling, the look that said she knew who they were and was already calcuting what their presence meant for the current evening.

  "No fight tonight," she said, when they reached the counter.

  "No fight," Colette said. "Information."

  Vette looked at her.

  "Drink first," she said. "Then information. That's how this works."

  Aris put two copper on the counter.

  Vette looked at the copper. Looked at Aris.

  "Two copper," she said.

  "It's what I have," Aris said.

  She took the copper.

  She brought them through the door at the back of the bar, the one behind the counter that Aris had not noticed the st time, and into a room that was smaller than the storage room it pretended to be from the outside. A table, two mps, the kind of functional intimacy of a space designed for conversations that needed walls.

  She sat across from them and put her elbows on the table.

  "What floors," she said.

  "Ten through sixteen," Colette said. "Eighteen months ago. Anything unusual. Anything that wouldn't have made it into the Lodge's files."

  Vette looked at the table for a moment.

  "I had three separate groups come through that period," she said. "Unlicensed, all of them, which is why they came here instead of the Lodge. Two were running loot operations on the mid floors, twelve and thirteen mostly." She paused. "The third group I remember because they came back looking wrong."

  "Wrong how," Aris said.

  "The kind of wrong that doesn't come from a hard fight," Vette said. "The kind that comes from seeing something you don't have a category for and having to keep walking anyway." She looked at Colette. "They described cw marks. Floor 11 through 14. Not native creature marks, the dungeon's mid floor creatures don't leave the pattern they described. Too rge, too deep, the wrong angle for anything that lives on those floors."

  "Anything else," Colette said. Her voice was level.

  "Bodies," Vette said. "Or what was left of them. The dungeon's scavengers had been through but there was enough remaining that the group could see the capes."

  She looked at Colette directly.

  "Red," she said. "Aurelian red."

  The mp on the left side of the table produced its warm unreliable light and the bar's noise came through the door in a muffled continuous presence and Colette sat with her hands ft on the table and said nothing for a moment.

  "They made it to Floor 11," she said. "Some of them."

  "Some of them," Vette confirmed. "What finished them on Floor 11 the group couldn't say with certainty. The marks continued down to Floor 14 at least but they didn't follow them further."

  "Why didn't they report this to the Lodge," Aris said.

  Vette looked at him.

  "They were unlicensed," she said. "Reporting to the Lodge means expining what they were doing on Floor 12 without registration. Besides." She paused. "The equipment on the bodies. The gear that the scavengers hadn't taken."

  She didn't finish the sentence.

  Aris understood.

  "They took it," he said.

  "People eat," Vette said. "Aurelian Compact equipment on the open market, even a single piece, covers a month of expenses. I'm not defending it. I'm expining why the Lodge's file has one page."

  Colette absorbed this.

  She absorbed it the way she absorbed things that were true and painful and had to be held without being allowed to change what needed to happen next.

  "The cw marks," she said. "Are they still there."

  "Dungeon surfaces accumute," Vette said. "Six months, maybe a year, they'd persist. Beyond that." She shrugged. "Depends on floor activity."

  "It's been eighteen months," Aris said.

  "Then probably nothing," Vette said. "Probably."

  Outside the bar, in the Undercourse's mp-lit street, Colette stopped walking.

  Aris stopped beside her.

  She was looking at the middle distance with the expression she wore when she had made a decision and was checking it for weaknesses before she committed to it.

  "Floor 10," she said. "At minimum. I need to see those floors."

  "Colette—"

  "I know what you're going to say," she said. "We're unregistered. We don't have the level for it. The Lodge has no record of us going in."

  "All of those things," Aris said.

  She turned to him.

  "I know," she said. "And I'm asking you anyway. Floor 10. We look at the floors, we look for whatever is left to look at, and we come back." She held his gaze with the grey eyes that were doing their reading. "I'll protect you. I know what Sovereign can do for you in a dungeon context. I've seen it." A pause, smaller. "I won't let anything happen to you."

  Aris looked at her.

  He thought about the one page report on a table in a small administrative room. He thought about the attendant folding her hands over a folder that contained fifty three people and one page of Lodge assessment.

  He thought about the spell tracker on his shelf at the church, pointing where it always pointed.

  "Alright," he said. "Floor 10."

  Something in Colette's expression settled, the decision confirmed, the weakness check complete.

  "Thank you," she said.

  They walked toward the Undercourse's exit and the city above it and the dungeon arch waiting at the center of the Cours Centrale pza with the patient indifference of something that had been waiting for people to walk through it for longer than anyone currently alive had been counting.