He had descended from his platform without any of them noticing and was standing at the edge of their group with the ease of a man who moved through his own space without announcing himself. Up close he was larger than the platform had suggested, his blue coat well-made, his expression carrying the warm professional attention of someone whose job required genuine interest in other people and who had been doing it long enough that the interest had become real.

  He looked at the group. At the tracker in Drent's hand. At the pit behind him.

  "Lord Drent," he said. "You have something they need. They don't have the gold you want for it." He let this sit for a moment. "I wonder if there's a more interesting solution than a simple sale."

  Drent looked at him.

  "The floor," Ash said, with the slight inclination of his head toward the pit, "is currently available."

  A silence.

  "If the group were to fight," Ash continued, in the tone of someone proposing something entirely reasonable, "and if the fight were to satisfy our audience, and if Lord Drent found the entertainment sufficient value—" He looked at Drent. "The tracker in exchange for the bout."

  Drent looked at the pit. At the group. At the tracker in his hand.

  The amusement that had been living underneath his expression since he'd arrived came fully to the surface.

  "Against whom," he said.

  Ash smiled.

  He gestured toward the pit.

  On the far side of the arena, descending the short steps from the upper tier with the unhurried movement of something that knew it didn't need to hurry, was the champion.

  He was not a normal size.

  That was the first thing, and it occupied enough of the available attention that the second and third things took a moment to register. Tall, built in the way of someone whose Eido had been developing their physical capability for long enough that the development had become structural. He moved like what he was, which was someone who had not lost in this pit for six consecutive months and carried that fact in every step.

  His Eido was already partially manifested, the way fighters sometimes kept them at the edge of presence between bouts, and it rose from his back and shoulders in the form of something massive and geological, a figure of compressed stone and force that made the air around it feel like a different kind of air. Heavy. Dense. The Eido of a person who hit things and had decided to be very good at it.

  "Crux," Ash said, with the introduction of someone presenting something they were proud of. "Six months. Sixteen bouts. Undefeated." He looked at the group. "If your party can put him down, Lord Drent gets his entertainment. You get the tracker."

  He looked at Drent.

  Drent was looking at the group with the expression of a man who had already decided he was going to enjoy the next hour regardless of the outcome.

  "Agreed," Drent said. "I find the proposal entirely satisfying."

  He pocketed the tracker.

  The group stood in the Underbowl's warm light with the crowd around them and the empty pit below and Crux descending toward it with the patience of something that had nowhere to be except wherever the next fight was.

  Kai looked at Aris.

  Aris looked at Elysse.

  Elysse looked at the pit.

  Colette looked at Crux.

  "Right," Kai said.

  "No," Colette said.

  Not the composed no of a council chamber. The flat immediate no of someone whose patience for a particular direction of events had reached its limit.

  "Colette—"

  "We don't know who that is," she said, looking at Crux descending toward the pit with the unhurried movement of something that had done this many times. "We don't know what his Eido does or how he fights or what his range is or any of the things you need to know before you put people in an enclosed space with someone." She looked at Kai. "You are suggesting we step into that pit based on nothing."

  "We know he's undefeated," Kai said.

  "That's the wrong direction of information," Colette said.

  "She has a point," Aris said.

  Kai looked at him.

  "I'm just saying," Aris said, "that undefeated in sixteen bouts is not a reassuring data point for the people being asked to be the seventeenth."

  "You came down here," Kai said. "Through the Greyward and the Undercourse and this bar and these stairs. You came down here for a reason."

  "The reason was to buy an item," Colette said. "Not to fight a professional arena fighter for it."

  "The buying didn't work," Kai said. He looked at Aris. Not at Colette, not at Elysse. At Aris, with the direct quality of someone who had decided the question needed to go to its actual owner. "Do you want to cure her or not."

  The Underbowl continued around them. The crowd's ambient noise, the lamp light, Ash making conversation with Drent at a distance that was giving them their moment without removing himself from it. The pit below, empty and waiting, Crux settling into position on the far side of it with the patience of someone who had done a great deal of waiting in that space and had no complaints about it.

  Aris looked at Kai.

  Then he looked at Elysse.

  She was standing slightly apart from the group in the way she sometimes stood, not removed but given herself enough space to be looked at rather than crowded. The borrowed armor, the white hair, the grey eyes that were currently on the pit with the assessing quality they had for everything. The careful management of a body that was cooperating under protest, present here in this underground arena because she had decided to be present and had not allowed her body a vote on the matter.

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  He thought about Floor Six. About the Deepbloom patch and the Hollow Guard and the moment he had accepted that the situation was going to end a particular way and had been wrong about that because of what was standing in front of him now.

  He thought about Void's Hand pressed over the pattern on her back and the pattern retreating and stopping and the specific feeling of a limit reached, the first limit he had encountered in six years of this work.

  He thought about the bench in the nave and the kitchen and the morning light through the church windows and the Architect's statue and the way she had looked at him from the nave floor when she opened her eyes.

  He stopped thinking and looked at her and knew why he had come down here.

  "Yes," he said. "I want to cure her."

  Kai said nothing. He didn't need to.

  "What makes you think we can beat him," Colette said, looking at Crux, who was standing in the pit below with his arms at his sides and his Eido pressing close around him in the geological, dense way of something that had learned to be patient.

  "Ash," Kai said, raising his voice toward where the host was standing.

  Ash looked over.

  "The fighter," Kai said. "Level."

  Ash consulted nothing. The information was simply present in him.

  "Four," he said.

  The group was quiet for a moment.

  "Four," Colette said.

  "Four," Ash confirmed pleasantly.

  "I'm a three," Kai said.

  "Two," Colette said, to no one specific, in the tone of someone doing arithmetic they don't enjoy.

  "I'm a one," Aris said. He said it with the matter-of-fact quality he used for things that were true and undecorated. "Level one."

  "Level five," Elysse said.

  The arithmetic stopped.

  Aris looked at her.

  She was still looking at the pit. She said it with the same register she'd used for her own number, just a fact, the way she said things that were true and required no additional material.

  "Five," Aris said.

  "Yes," she said.

  "You're a level five."

  "Yes."

  "I found you on Floor Six," he said. "Unconscious. Injured. On the floor."

  "I'd come up from Floor 46," she said, finally looking at him with the grey eyes. "Alone. It was a long way."

  Aris processed this.

  He had known she was capable. He had watched her manage her injured body with the instinctive economy of someone who had been doing this for years, had seen the way she assessed the Hollow Guard in the dungeon even concussed and bleeding, had read the level of her in a hundred small ways since she'd woken up in his room.

  Level five was not what he had been reading her as. Level five was the reading you got if you removed the injury and the curse and the memory loss and the exhaustion of coming up alone from the deepest descent in Valerne's recent history.

  Level five was, in the context of this pit and this fighter, a different conversation than the one they'd been having.

  "Then she goes in," Kai said.

  "No," Colette said.

  Immediate. Flat. The same register as the first no but carrying something different underneath it, something more than tactical objection.

  "She's level five," Kai said. "He's level four. The math—"

  "The math doesn't account for her condition," Colette said. "She has cracked ribs. She has a curse on her back that is actively progressing. She walked the length of a church nave this morning and needed a wall." She looked at Elysse. "You are not fighting alone."

  "I'm not asking to fight alone," Elysse said.

  "You're asking to fight."

  "Yes," Elysse said. She took a step toward Colette, the careful step of someone managing their body's complaints, and looked at her with the directness of someone who had decided that directness was the only currency available. "I know I'm not at full capacity. I know what the ribs are doing and I know what the curse costs me. I'm not pretending otherwise." She paused. "But I am the reason we're here. I am the reason Aris came down these stairs and the reason you came down these stairs and the reason any of this is happening." Another pause. "Let me be useful in it."

  Colette looked at her.

  The composure was doing its work but the work was visible, the specific effort of a person whose instinct and their decision were pointed in different directions and who was negotiating the distance between them.

  "Please," Elysse said.

  It was a small word and she said it simply, without performance, the word of someone who didn't ask for things often and was asking now.

  Colette closed her eyes briefly.

  "I'm a level one," Aris said, to the group and partly to himself. "In case anyone wanted to revisit that."

  "We know," Kai said.

  "I'm just—the number is very small compared to the other numbers in this conversation."

  "Aris," Kai said. "You have an Eido that does things no one else's does. Stop apologizing for the level."

  Aris looked at the pit.

  Corven Ash had drifted back toward their group with the patient ease of a man who had seen many people make many decisions in this space and had learned that the decision always came and that hovering over it helped no one.

  "The level gap is significant," he said, to the group in general, with the warm professional fairness of someone presenting information without a stake in its use. "Given the circumstances, I'm prepared to allow all four of you into the pit simultaneously." He looked at Crux below, who was receiving this information with the equanimity of someone who had faced unfavorable odds before and found them acceptable. "It wouldn't be the first time Crux has faced a party."

  "Has he won," Aris said.

  "Every time," Ash said, pleasantly.

  Aris looked at the pit again.

  Colette stood very still for a moment.

  Then she looked at Elysse.

  "You don't fight alone," she said. "Not in that pit. Not like—" She stopped. Something moved through her expression that Elysse couldn't read and that Aris could only partially read and that Colette did not explain. "Not alone. That's the condition."

  Elysse looked at her for a moment.

  "Understood," she said.

  Colette looked at Ash.

  "Four of us," she said. "Together."

  Ash smiled the smile of a man whose evening had just improved considerably.

  "Wonderful," he said.

  Across the pit, Lord Drent settled back into his tier with the satisfied expression of a man who had come to the Underbowl for entertainment and found it in a form he hadn't anticipated. He produced the spell tracker from his coat pocket and turned it in his fingers, the gold casing catching the lamp light.

  "Good luck," he said, with the courtesy of a gentleman, which was doing the same work it had been doing since he arrived.

  Colette looked at the tracker in his hand.

  Looked at the stairs leading down to the pit.

  "How," she said quietly, to the general space around her, falling into step beside Aris as they moved toward the descent, "did things arrive at this point."

  "We're trying to find a cure," Aris said. He said it simply, the way simple true things deserved to be said. "That's why we're here. That's why we're doing this."

  Colette was quiet for a moment.

  She looked at Elysse ahead of them, descending the pit steps with the careful deliberateness of someone who had decided that the steps were going to be taken correctly and would not accept alternative outcomes from her own body.

  "Yes," Colette said. "Alright."

  They went down the steps.

  The crowd above them shifted as the four figures descended, the attention of the Underbowl redistributing, the tiers filling with the forward lean of people who had been watching fights for long enough to recognize when something different was about to happen.

  Corven Ash's voice found the room.

  "Ladies and gentlemen of the Underbowl," it said, carrying to every corner with the ease of thirty years of practice, warm and certain and containing within it the specific quality of someone who genuinely loved what they were about to describe. "Tonight our champion faces something we haven't seen in this pit before."

  A pause, perfectly timed.

  "A party."

  The crowd's response filled the Underbowl like water fills a vessel, rising to the ceiling and coming back, the sound of people who had come here for exactly this kind of thing and were receiving it.

  The four of them stepped onto the pit floor.

  The stone under Aris's feet was solid and old and had a quality he recognized after a moment as the quality of ground that had absorbed a great deal of impact over a long time. The walls of the pit rose around them, the crowd above looking down with the focused collective attention of the Underbowl fully engaged.

  Crux stood on the other side of the pit.

  He was larger from the floor than he had been from the tier. The Eido pressed close around him, the massive geological form, Avalanche barely contained in the space between its host and the air, and the weight of it was something you felt rather than saw, a density in the atmosphere on his side of the pit that the rest of the pit didn't have.

  He looked at the four of them with the patient attention of someone doing an assessment and not finding the results surprising.

  Ash's voice came from above.

  "When you're ready," it said.