The third floor was a different world from the two below it.

  Quieter, for one thing. The crowd thinned up here into something more selective, Wanderers who moved with the specific deliberateness of people who knew exactly what they were looking for and had the means to find it. The display cases were spaced further apart, each one given room to be looked at properly, the items inside them presented with the care of things that had earned individual attention. The ceiling was lower than the main floor, the light warmer, the whole atmosphere suggesting that commerce at this level was a more intimate affair than what happened downstairs.

  They moved along the counters slowly.

  Enchanted armor components. Reagents in sealed crystal containers with handwritten provenance cards. Weapons with Eido-interfacing properties. Aris read the price cards as he passed and stopped reading them after the third one because the information was not useful to him and was doing something unpleasant to his sense of what was possible.

  "Where is it," he said.

  "Keep looking," Kai said.

  They went along the left wall. Then the back. Then the right, counter by counter, the staff watching them with the polite professional attention of people trained to make all customers feel welcome regardless of the quality of their armor.

  Aris stopped at a gap between cases.

  "It's not here," he said.

  "Kai," Colette said, from behind them both, "remind me why we're here specifically. What is it we're looking for."

  "Spell tracker," Aris said. "Magical compass type item that reads a sigil's signature and traces it back to the—"

  "Wait," Colette said, with the expression of someone who had just remembered something. "I know what a spell tracker is. I had one in the Compact's inventory. We used it on Floor 22 when a—"

  "There," Kai said.

  He was pointing at a counter in the far corner of the floor, set slightly apart from the others, behind a standing display that Aris had taken for a room divider. Behind the display, its own case, its own counter, its own uniformed staff member standing behind it with the composed expression of someone who had been standing behind counters in this building long enough to have developed a relationship with patience.

  Aris had assumed the spell tracker wouldn't be here.

  He had been preparing himself, on the walk up the stairs, for the possibility that it wasn't in stock, that they'd have to find another source, that Kai's other idea — whatever it was — would become the plan by default through absence rather than choice. He had been building the scaffolding of the next option in his head the way he built things when the current option was closing.

  It was here.

  It sat in the center of its case on a small velvet stand, and it was exactly what it was supposed to be and also somehow more than that. A compass, roughly, the shape and size of one, but the casing was gold, worked in a pattern that Aris recognized after a moment as sigil geometry, the same family of forms as the pattern on Elysse's back but decorative, contained, harmless. The face of it wasn't cardinal directions but a blank pale surface that would, when activated near a sigil, orient toward the source the way a compass oriented toward north. The needle was dark, very dark, the color of something that had been made to find things that didn't want to be found.

  It sat in its case and it was exactly what they needed and it was beautiful in the specific way of objects that had been made by someone who understood both their function and their craft.

  Aris looked at it.

  The price card was in the front right corner of the case, white card, neat handwriting, the number written clearly and without apology.

  He read it.

  He read it again.

  He looked at the compass.

  He looked at the price card.

  His knees found the floor.

  Not dramatically — not a chosen movement, not a statement. The specific involuntary descent of a person whose legs have received information and have decided they need a moment. He went down onto both knees on the third floor of the Veilmarket with his hands at his sides and his eyes on the price card and his mouth doing something that wasn't words.

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  "Twenty gold," he said.

  To no one. To the floor. To the Architect, probably, wherever the Architect was in relation to the third floor of the Veilmarket.

  "Twenty gold," he said again, as if the second time would change what the words meant.

  It didn't.

  "Sir," said the woman behind the counter. She was wearing the Veilmarket's black suit uniform, her hair pinned back, her expression the practiced neutral of someone who had seen many reactions to many prices and had developed a comprehensive policy of non-judgment. "Are you alright."

  "He's fine," Kai said, looking down at Aris on the floor. "Told you."

  "You told me expensive," Aris said, to the floor. "You told me expensive. You did not tell me twenty gold."

  "I told you this kind of expensive," Kai said. "On the stairs. I specifically said this kind of expensive."

  "I make fifty copper a week," Aris said. "In a good week. With the dungeon. Fifty copper."

  "I know."

  "Do you know how many weeks of fifty copper it takes to become twenty gold."

  "Aris—"

  "Four hundred weeks," Aris said. "Four hundred weeks of good dungeon weeks. That's—" he did the calculation, staring at the floor. "That's almost eight years."

  "Sir," said the woman behind the counter, with genuine care, "the item is exceptional quality. The tracking range alone—"

  "Eight years," Aris said.

  Behind him Colette had developed an expression of someone who was trying very hard to be invisible while people on the third floor of the Veilmarket looked at the young man on his knees in front of the spell tracker case. She had positioned herself slightly to the left with the instinctive spatial management of someone who had spent years in rooms managing appearances and was now applying that skill to a situation it had not been designed for.

  Elysse was looking at the compass in the case with the same expression she looked at everything with, which was the expression of a person taking in information and drawing no conclusions yet about how to feel about it.

  "I can offer eighteen," the woman behind the counter said, helpfully. "As our floor minimum."

  "Eighteen," Aris said.

  "Yes."

  "Eighteen gold."

  "That's our lowest—"

  "Three hundred and sixty weeks," Aris said.

  "Aris," Kai said. "Get up."

  "In a moment."

  "Now."

  Kai reached down and took him by the elbow and applied the steady upward pressure of someone who had made a decision about the next thirty seconds. Aris came up from the floor in the way of something being retrieved, his eyes still on the price card, his expression still doing the thing it had been doing since his knees had made their decision.

  Kai turned around.

  He looked at Colette.

  She looked back at him with the specific expression of someone who could see what was coming and was preparing the appropriate response to it.

  "Hey," Kai said. "Princess."

  "Don't," Colette said.

  "Couldn't spare some of that stolen money? Family vault must have a few gold rattling around in the—"

  "I have," Colette said, with the precise diction of someone controlling something carefully, "ten gold in my personal reserve. The guild bank is frozen. My family's accounts require my mother's countersignature which I do not currently have access to and would not ask for under any circumstances including this one." She looked at him. "Ten gold. That's what I have. Personally. On my person. Right now."

  "Ten," Kai said.

  "Ten."

  Kai looked at Aris.

  Aris looked at the ceiling briefly in the manner of a person conducting a silent conversation with someone who wasn't present.

  "Between all of us," Kai said, "we have—"

  "Not twenty," Aris said.

  "Not twenty," Kai confirmed.

  The woman behind the counter maintained her expression with the professionalism of someone who had been a spectator to many such calculations and had learned to give them the space they needed.

  "Eighteen is truly our—" she began.

  "Thank you," Kai said. "We'll be in touch."

  He turned and walked toward the stairs. Aris followed. Colette followed, adjusting her cape with the small precise movement of someone reassembling composure after a public experience. Elysse followed, her pace careful and even, her face carrying nothing in particular.

  They came out through the Veilmarket's tall doors into the morning air and stood on the wide stone steps in front of the building while the upper middle district continued its business around them without interest.

  Aris stood at the top of the steps and looked at the street and said nothing for a moment.

  Then he turned to Elysse.

  His expression had the quality it sometimes had when he was being honest about something he didn't want to be honest about, the specific difficulty of a person whose instinct was to find the solution and who had arrived at a place where the solution was not currently available.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  Elysse looked at him.

  "The tracker was the clearest path to finding who placed the sigil," he said. "Without knowing the source we can't find a way to remove it. I can keep treating the progression, keep pushing it back, but—" He stopped. Started again. "I might not be able to treat you. Not properly. Not the way you should be treated."

  He said it the way he said difficult true things, directly and without dressing, and it clearly cost him something that he was not going to show any more of than he already had.

  Elysse looked at him for a moment.

  Then she looked at Kai.

  Kai had his hands in his coat pockets and was looking at something in the middle distance with the expression of someone who had not yet said what he was about to say and was deciding on the timing.

  "Kai," Aris said. "You said you had another idea."

  "I did," Kai said.

  "Tell me the other idea."

  Kai looked at him. Looked at the group. Looked at the Veilmarket behind them with its iron ornamentation and its guild banners and its price cards that said things about the world that he had never needed the Veilmarket to tell him.

  "How do you feel," he said, "about a different kind of market."