The sixth floor always felt like the inside of something sleeping.

  Aris had descended through the first five without incident which wasn't luck so much as familiarity. He knew where to step on Floor Two to avoid the loose stone that echoed. He knew the corner on Floor Three where the bat-things roosted during the early hours, hanging from the ceiling in clusters that looked like dead growth until they didn't, and he knew that if you took the left passage instead of the right you never had to find out which they were today. Floor Four was straightforward if you moved quietly and didn't linger near the eastern alcoves. Floor Five he crossed in twelve minutes on a route he could have walked blind.

  The white rabbits on Floor Three had been awake. He'd spotted one sitting in the middle of the passage small, perfectly still, luminously white in the dim light, looking at him with the serene expression of something that had never once been threatened in its life and had therefore developed no capacity for fear whatsoever.

  Aris had taken the long way around without breaking stride.

  People underestimated the white rabbits. Novice Wanderers in particular, drawn by the instinct that said small, fluffy, harmless an instinct that was reasonable in every context except this one. The rabbits were not harmless. The rabbits were a collective event. Touch one, startle one, look at one the wrong way on a bad day, and the floor erupted with them pouring from cracks in the walls, dropping from ceiling hollows, an avalanche of white fur and blank eyes that hit like a wave and bit like it meant it. Aris had seen the aftermath of a rabbit incident once, on a novice who'd thought the little creature would make good eating. The novice had survived but spent two weeks in the parish clinic and never descended again.

  He had a great deal of respect for the white rabbits. From a distance. At all times.

  Floor Six opened up around him as he came down the last steps.

  The ceiling was the first thing it always was, because it was so far above him that the upper reaches blurred into darkness, and suspended in that darkness were the crystals. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, embedded in the rock overhead like frozen light, each one casting a faint blue-white glow that didn't so much illuminate the floor as suggest it. The light fell in columns and pools, catching dust motes and leaving everything between the columns in soft shadow. It turned the whole space into something that existed between visible and not outlines rather than objects, shapes rather than details.

  The ceiling was also completely silent. Which meant the crystals were undisturbed. Which meant nothing large had moved through here recently.

  Aris exhaled slowly and let his eyes finish adjusting.

  The floor stretched out ahead of him broad and high-ceilinged, the walls receding into shadow on either side, the passage ahead splitting into three branches about forty meters in. The stone underfoot was dry and smooth and old, worn down the center by years of Wanderer traffic near the entrance, but out here, this far from the arch, it was rougher. Less traveled.

  And between the stones, in the places where the crystal light fell long enough and steady enough to sustain it, the grass grew.

  He'd never found a satisfying explanation for it. Edric had something theological to say about it life finds its way to light in whatever form light takes and the one scholar's text Aris had read on the subject spent four pages on magical resonance theory before concluding origin undetermined. It was grass. It was green. It grew in careful patches in a cave floor sixty meters underground, fed by the light of crystals that had been growing since before anyone built Valerne on top of them, and it was simply there the way some things are simply there.

  The Deepbloom grew in the grass.

  He spotted the first patch thirty meters ahead a cluster of the blue variety, low to the ground, petals closed in the dim hours and opened fully when the crystal light strengthened toward midday. He'd timed his arrivals to hit them between the two, when the blooms were half-open and the active compounds were at their most stable for harvesting. Another thing he'd worked out over years of doing this, through trial and error and one memorable batch of remedies that had done something unexpected to old Maret's sense of balance for a week.

  He started walking toward them.

  The floor was quiet enough that his footsteps felt too loud, so he moved the way he always did here weight through the heel first, rolling forward, the way Edric had taught him without knowing he was teaching it, just by walking quietly through the church at night so as not to wake the patients sleeping in the nave.

  Far away, somewhere in the direction of the western passage, he could hear the faint echo of other Wanderers voices reduced to tone by distance, the occasional metallic sound of equipment. Too far to make out anything specific. The sixth floor was large enough that you could go half a descent without seeing another person if you knew the routes.

  He preferred the routes.

  Forty-three steps, he noted automatically as he reached the first grass patch and crouched down beside it. Forty-three steps from the passage entrance to the east cluster. He could do it faster but faster disturbed the floor and disturbed the floor woke things up, and waking things up meant dealing with them, and dealing with them cost time and energy that he'd rather spend on literally anything else.

  He opened the satchel and took out the harvesting cloth a square of soft linen that he used to handle the blooms without crushing them and began working through the cluster methodically, selecting the ones at the right stage of opening, leaving the closed ones and the fully opened ones for the next visit.

  It was quiet work. Good work, in the specific way that physical, repetitive, purposeful tasks are good it left enough of his mind unoccupied to wander without leaving enough unoccupied to get into trouble.

  His mind wandered toward money, as it often did.

  These, he thought, turning a half-open bloom over gently in the cloth, are genuinely rare. Floor Six. East passage. Specific crystal light conditions. Half the apothecaries in the middle district don't even stock the blue variety because they can't source it reliably.

  He placed it carefully in the satchel's lined interior.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  I could sell these. Very easily. There's a merchant on Cours Marne who would absolutely pay for a consistent supply of blue Deepbloom at harvest stage. Real money. Enough to fix the church roof. Enough to buy Edric a coat that doesn't have three separate repairs on the left sleeve. Enough to eat something that wasn't donated.

  Another bloom. Another careful placement.

  But no. No, we give them away. Because the Architect provides. The Architect, notably, has never personally purchased anything, has no overhead costs, and does not require breakfast. Very easy to be generous when you are omnipotent and incorporeal. Some of us are working with a canvas jacket and a lucky dagger.

  He sat back on his heels and looked at the satchel.

  Half full already. The east cluster was good this visit better than last time, new growth coming in at the edges of the patch. He'd be done in forty minutes if the second cluster near the northern wall was as healthy.

  He allowed himself a small, private feeling of satisfaction, which he immediately converted into a mental calculation of what the remedies would treat and roughly how many patients that covered, which was more useful and also less likely to make him feel things he didn't have anywhere particular to put.

  He picked up the satchel, rose to his feet, and turned toward the northern passage.

  That was when he heard it.

  Not the distant echo of other Wanderers. Not the crystalline resonance of the ceiling. Something closer, and lower, and wrong in the specific way that the floor's usual silence made immediately obvious.

  A sound like armor on stone. Irregular. Too slow and too heavy to be someone walking.

  He almost missed her.

  That was the thing that stayed with him afterward not the creature, not the axe, not the sound of impact that he felt in his back teeth. The fact that he almost didn't see her at all. She was moving through the dark margin between two crystal columns, in the space where the blue light didn't reach, and if she hadn't been limping she might have passed through his peripheral vision as just another shadow.

  But she was limping.

  Aris straightened slowly from the grass patch, eyes tracking the figure without moving anything else. A woman he could tell that much from the silhouette. Tall, armored, moving with one hand pressed against her left side. The hand wasn't resting there. It was holding something in. She was moving at the careful, deliberate pace of someone who had calculated exactly how much each step cost and was paying it anyway because stopping was worse.

  He stayed still. Something in the quality of her movement told him that calling out would startle her badly, and startling an armed Wanderer in a dark floor was the kind of decision that ended visits to the dungeon permanently.

  So he watched, and waited for the moment to announce himself without triggering anything catastrophic, and that was when the sound happened.

  It came from the northern passage the direction he'd been about to walk and it was enormous. Not loud exactly, but deep, the kind of sound that bypassed hearing and registered somewhere more primitive, a resonance that moved through the stone floor and up through the soles of his boots and into his chest. Like a bell struck underground. Like something very large setting its weight down without caring what heard it.

  Aris went completely still.

  The woman spun toward the sound on pure reflex and in spinning she turned her back to the northern passage, which meant she was facing the wrong direction, which meant she didn't see what came through it.

  Aris saw it.

  He knew what it was immediately, the way you know a thing you've only ever heard described but never expected to encounter because there was nothing else it could be, nothing else that size, nothing else that moved like that. Like smoke deciding to be solid. Like armor that had forgotten it needed a body inside it.

  The Hollow Guard filled the northern passage the way water fills a container completely, inevitably, without hurrying. It was enormous. Two and a half meters at least, broad-shouldered, its form the suggestion of plate armor assembled from pieces that didn't quite touch each other, gaps between them showing not flesh but nothing, a darkness that was darker than the floor's shadows and somehow more present. It moved without footsteps, drifting forward with a slow, absolute patience. In each gap between its floating plates a faint phosphorescence pulsed, cold and rhythmic, like something breathing very slowly. Its head if the upper assembly of plates could be called that held two points of pale light where eyes would be, steady and unblinking.

  In its right hand, dragging slightly against the floor, was an iron axe the size of a door.

  Floor Thirteen.

  Aris's mind produced this information with the specific clarity of pure useless shock. Floor Thirteen. Seven floors down. A creature that had no business being within seven floors of where it currently was, that had apparently covered that distance through seven levels of dungeon architecture and every obstacle between them and was now here, on Floor Six, in the east passage, drifting toward a woman who was bleeding and looking the wrong way.

  His legs were not moving.

  He was aware of this. He was aware of his legs and aware that they were not moving and aware that this was a significant problem, and none of that awareness was translating into motion. His heart was doing something architectural inside his chest structural, load-bearing, very loud.

  Move, he told himself.

  His legs noted the suggestion and declined.

  The Hollow Guard was forty meters away. Thirty-five. Thirty. The woman still had her back to it, still looking toward where the sound had come from, turned completely around and facing Aris's direction now and he could see her face.

  He would think about that moment later and not be able to fully account for what happened to time inside it.

  She was young. Not much older than him, maybe, though it was hard to tell because of the state of her. Her hair was white not pale blonde, white, the real thing and it was destroyed, matted with dried blood at the ends, tangled beyond any remedy he could imagine, sticking to the side of her face where something wet had dried. Her armor had been significant once. He could tell that from the pieces that remained the quality of the metal, the craftsmanship visible even in what was left of it, which was not much. The breastplate was cracked clean through. One pauldron was gone entirely. She'd wrapped her midsection in cloth torn from something her underlayer, probably and the cloth was dark with old bleeding and darker in the center with new. Her legs were still armored from the knee down and that was roughly the extent of it.

  She looked like she'd been in the dungeon for days.

  Her eyes when they found him across the forty meters of dim crystal light between them were a pale color he couldn't identify in the blue-dark, and they were exhausted in a way that went deeper than the body. Not hopeless. Something worse than hopeless. The look of someone who had been hoping for too long and hadn't decided yet whether they could stop.

  She lifted her hand toward him.

  It was an involuntary thing he could tell that, even from this distance. Not a request exactly. More like a reflex toward another human being, the hand coming up before the mind authorized it. Her fingers were shaking.

  Twenty meters behind her, the Hollow Guard raised its axe.

  "LOOK OUT"

  The words tore out of him before he'd finished deciding to say them, loud enough that they bounced off the ceiling and came back changed. His voice in the dungeon's silence was enormous and wrong and exactly what was needed.

  She snapped back. Turned. Saw it.

  For one fraction of a second she moved he saw her body shift, the instinct of a trained fighter engaging even through the exhaustion and the blood loss, her weight dropping, her remaining hand coming up

  The axe came down.

  It didn't hit her cleanly. She'd moved enough for that enough that instead of coming straight down it caught her at an angle, the flat of the massive blade connecting with her left side in a blow that wasn't a cut but was somehow worse. The sound it made was a sound Aris had never heard before and immediately wanted to unhear. The force of it was incomprehensible. It picked her up.

  She went sideways through the air for a distance that his mind refused to calculate and hit the far wall and came off it and hit the floor and didn't move.

  A spray of dark against the stone. Against the wall. Against the pale grass of the nearest patch, which was ruined now, which was the smallest possible detail and his mind noted it anyway with the hysterical precision of shock.

  The Hollow Guard lowered its axe.