There were four of them, and they walked like people who had stopped believing the ground would hold.

Lloyd saw it before he saw their faces. It was a thing he had trained for years to see, and it came to him now automatically, a cold, quiet, clinical reading, as the figures staggered out of the trees at the far end of the lane and into the red light of the dying sun.

The first was a woman in her forties, broad and squarely built, with a dented breastplate and a short sword she was carrying point-down, the way you carry a thing you no longer intend to use. She walked in a straight line and she did not look back. That was the mark of a leader. She had decided that the people behind her were her responsibility, and that if she looked at the danger, she would stop moving.

The second was a boy of nineteen or twenty, with an arrow-shaft broken off in the meat of his left thigh. He had a bow slung across his back and a face the color of candle wax. He was being half carried by the third: a lean, sharp-featured man with a thief's soft boots and a wrist bent at the wrong angle, who was supporting him on the uninjured side and swearing steadily and without much heat.

The fourth walked a little apart, a thin gray figure in the stained white robe of a Church cleric. His hands were held out in front of him, palms up, trembling. The sleeves were scorched to the elbow. He kept glancing at his fingers as though he were waiting for them to do something and could not understand why they would not.

They were not looking around them. That was the thing that struck Lloyd most. In the lane, in the open, in the failing light, in front of a lit and unknown house, not one of them was scanning for threats. They were all looking behind, back at the trees, at the dark. They had no energy left for what lay ahead.

Behind them, deep in the forest, the horns were still baying.

"They are not criminals," Lloyd said.

"No," said Elena, at his shoulder.

"Look at their hands. No loot. No blood on the cuffs except their own. The woman's kept her sword clean. They're not running because they did something. They're running because something is chasing them."

"Demon patrol," said Elena again. She had not lowered her sword. "That is a Marcher hunting horn. Two long, one short. They are tracking by scent."

"How far?"

"A mile. Perhaps less."

"Then we have about eight minutes." Lloyd turned and went back into the cabin. "Open the door. Clear the long table. Get the kettle on the fire."

Elena stared after him.

"Operator," she said. "They are adventurers."

"Yes."

"Some of them wear the sun."

"I noticed."

"You are going to take them in."

"I'm going to take them in," said Lloyd, "and then I'm going to tell the Demon patrol that this is a licensed commercial establishment."

"It is not licensed."

"They don't know that."

---

The woman reached the porch first.

She stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up at Lloyd with eyes red from smoke and lack of sleep, and he watched her take in the situation in a single practiced sweep: the lamplight in the windows, the blank sign, the tall woman in silver armor standing at the door with a drawn sword.

Her hand tightened on the hilt.

"Easy," Lloyd said. "Nobody's going to fight you."

"We've no coin," said the woman. Her voice was hoarse. "No gear. We've got one potion between four of us and it's gone off. If you're a bandit, you've picked the wrong night."

"I'm not a bandit. I'm an innkeeper."

"With a Church knight at the door?"

Elena, behind him, drew herself up. Lloyd did not turn. He had learned over the past three weeks that the best response to a drawn sword in your vicinity was to pretend you had not noticed it.

"My employee," he said. "She works the door. She's off duty at five, so you're lucky."

"It's past six," said the thief, coming up the steps with the boy on his shoulder.

"That's what I said," said Lloyd.

There was a short, uneasy pause. Behind them, the horns blew again, closer now: two long, one short.

"Please," said the cleric. It was the first thing he had said, and his voice cracked in the middle. "He can't walk. I've nothing left. I tried to close the wound and I couldn't."

Lloyd looked at the boy. The shaft of the arrow had been snapped off about three inches above the skin, and the cloth around it was dark and wet to the knee.

He did not hesitate.

"Everyone gets a bed," he said. "Everyone gets soup. Weapons go in the basket." He pointed to a big wicker laundry hamper beside the door, which he had set there that morning for no reason he could have explained. "That's the only rule. It applies to everyone, regardless of banner. I'd appreciate it if you'd observe it."

"Whose banner?" said the woman.

"Mine," said Lloyd. "Come in."

---

The thing about a rule, he had always found, was that people obeyed it if it was clear, short, and enforced without fear or favor.

The woman, whose name was Marta Voss, hesitated for one second. Then she took the short sword from her belt, looked at it, and laid it in the basket. The thief followed, unbuckling a brace of daggers, a coil of thin wire, and a small curved knife that Lloyd suspected was not used on food. The cleric, who had nothing to put down, held out his burned hands apologetically, and Lloyd nodded.

The boy had his bow. He looked at it for a long moment, with his white, pinched face and his big frightened eyes, and then, very carefully, as though it were a thing that might break, he set it in the hamper on top of the others.

"Thank you," said Lloyd.

He did not know why he said it. It simply seemed that someone should.

They went in. Elena shut the door behind them. And then Lloyd, with a last glance at the dark line of the forest, put on his best and most ordinary expression, took a lantern from the hook, and walked down the porch steps to meet the Demon patrol.

---

There were six of them.

They came out of the trees at the end of the lane in a ragged line, with their horns lowered and their hounds on short leashes, big gaunt creatures with eyes like coals and a smell like wet iron. The patrol's captain was a young demon with curling dark horns and a Marcher badge on his collar, wearing the particular expression of a person who has been on shift for sixteen hours and has been told that the shift is not yet over.

He stopped at the edge of the light.

"Evening," said Lloyd.

"This is a restricted zone," the captain said. His voice was flat and weary. "We're pursuing four fugitives of the Church who crossed the northern line at the Sixth Marker. They came this way. Stand aside."

"I'm afraid I can't do that."

"Sir."

"I'm the proprietor of this establishment." Lloyd held up his lantern, so that the light fell across the porch, the windows, the freshly oiled door. "It's a licensed commercial inn, registered with the Thornwick Council of Property. Deed number four-one-seven. I'd be glad to show you the paperwork."

The captain stared at him.

"It's not on any map," he said.

"It's quite new."

"It's in the Buffer Woods."

"That's right."

"Nothing in the Buffer Woods is licensed. That's the point of the Buffer Woods."

"Under the Border Accord of Year Three," said Lloyd, in the mild, patient voice he had used for six years to explain procedure to people who did not wish to hear it, "Article Four, Section Two, no armed force of either power may enter occupied civilian property within the Buffer Woods without a joint warrant signed by an official of each side. I'd be happy to check yours."

There was a long silence.

One of the hounds whined. Somewhere behind the captain, a soldier muttered something that sounded very much like "oh, for pity's sake."

"Is that real?" said the captain.

"It's in the appendix."

"I've never heard of it."

"Most people haven't. It was drafted by a committee, and nobody enforced it." Lloyd smiled. It was not a warm smile. It was the smile he had used on auditors. "But I'd hate for there to be a complaint. I'd have to file a report. With both sides. It would run to a good twenty pages, and I would, of course, have to name the responding officers."

The captain looked at him for a very long time.

Lloyd, who was good at reading people, watched the thing happen in his face. He watched the man weigh the options: the dull, certain misery of the paperwork; the possibility, however remote, that the strange pale man with the lantern was telling the truth; the unspoken, unspeakable relief of an excuse to go home. It took about eight seconds.

"Fine," said the captain, heavily. "Fine. We'll mark it as lost trail."

"That's very reasonable."

"If I see any of them within a mile of the boundary, I'm coming back with a warrant."

"I'll put the kettle on," said Lloyd.

The patrol turned. One by one, with much muttering, the soldiers filed back into the trees, hounds straining at their leashes, until the last glint of iron had vanished into the dark.

Lloyd stood in the lane for a minute, listening to them go.

His hands, he noticed, were shaking slightly. He put the lantern down on the ground and wiped his palms on his trousers, very carefully, one at a time.

"There's no such article," said Elena, from the porch.

"No," said Lloyd.

"You made it up."

"I drafted it in the middle of the night, about three weeks ago. I've been meaning to submit it for ratification." He picked up the lantern. "It seemed like a gap in the Accord."

Elena regarded him in silence for a moment.

"I would like it noted," she said at last, "that you are a terrifying man."

"Noted," said Lloyd. "Help me with the wounded."

---

He treated the boy on the long table, with Marta Voss holding the lamp and the thief, whose name was Wick, holding the boy's shoulders.

It was not a difficult wound. That was the thing that stunned him. He had expected, from the blood, a ruined artery, or something deep. But when he cut away the cloth and exposed the shaft, he saw it at once, and the cold, sick, precise recognition that came with it nearly made him step back.

The arrow had a broad head, flanged on three sides, with a pattern of small backward-curving barbs along each flange.

"This is a Legion issue," he said. "Type Three, field model. The barbs are angled to prevent withdrawal."

"You know this?" said Marta.

"It's a very common trap component." He did not say that he had specified the barb angle himself, for a dart launcher on Floor Fourteen, eight years ago, after a long internal debate on the ethics of tissue damage. "It's designed so that pulling makes it worse. The correct approach is to push the head through and cut it off on the other side."

The boy made a small, faint noise.

"It's all right," said Lloyd. "It's going to be quick. Elena, I need you on his legs."

"Understood," said Elena, and planted both hands on the boy's knees with the calm of a woman who had held down worse.

It took about four minutes.

He had a clean knife, a pair of tongs he had boiled that afternoon for an entirely unrelated purpose, and a bottle of apple brandy that he had been saving. He worked fast, with his head bent, and the part of him that had been trained to think in numbers went very still and clear. Angle of entry. Depth. The nearest vessel. He pushed, and the boy screamed, and the barbs came through the other side with a wet, tearing sound, and he snapped the head off with a pair of pliers and drew the shaft out the way it had come.

Blood welled up, dark and thick. He packed the wound with clean linen, and pressed down, and counted.

One. Two. Three.

It slowed. It stopped.

"There," he said. His own voice sounded strange. "He'll be weak for a few days. He needs fluids. Broth, not water, and he should be kept warm. I'll stitch it in the morning when the swelling's down."

Marta Voss stood very still, with the lamp in her hand.

She was looking at him in a way that Lloyd, who had spent his life reading faces, found difficult to read. It was not gratitude. It was something odder: a long, level, careful gaze, the kind a person gives to something that does not fit into any of the boxes they have for it.

"You're no healer," she said.

"No."

"But you knew exactly what to do."

"I know how things break," said Lloyd. "It's not the same as knowing how to mend them. But the two are related."

He washed his hands in the basin. They did not stop shaking until the water had gone cold.

---

The cleric, whose name was Brother Teodric, cried quietly in a corner for ten minutes, and nobody said anything about it.

Elena brought him a blanket. She did not look at the sunburst on his chest, or at the scorched, blistered palms that he kept turning over and over in his lap. She wrapped the blanket round his shoulders with the stiff, gentle clumsiness of a woman who did not know how to comfort anyone and had resolved to try, and then she stood a little way off, with her arms folded, standing guard.

It was a strange tableau, Lloyd thought, glancing across the room. A Church cleric, a Church knight, and a company of adventurers who had been, an hour ago, running for their lives from the Demon Realm, all seated at his tables, in the lamplight, eating bread.

Nobody was speaking. Nobody was reaching for a weapon. The basket by the door held four swords, six knives, and a bow, and every one of them was staying exactly where it had been put.

He put the soup on the table.

It was nothing special. Leeks, potatoes, the last of the ham stock, a handful of barley. But it steamed in the lamplight, and the smell of it filled the room, and when the first spoon went to a mouth, there was a sound in the room that he had never heard before. It was a small sound. A long, soft, shuddering exhale, from four people at once.

Marta Voss put down her spoon.

"What do we owe you?" she said.

Lloyd had been waiting for it. He had run the calculation in his head while he was working on the boy. He had planned it, with a margin, in a neat little column. Cost of ingredients, labor, firewood, lamp oil, linen. He knew the number to the copper.

"Four silver and a half," he said. "For the bandages, the meal, the beds. I'm adding ten percent for overhead."

There was a pause.

"That's all?" said Wick.

"That's the cost, plus ten percent."

"Plus ten," said Wick, in a hollow voice. "You pulled an arrowhead out of my friend's leg, and the price is cost plus ten percent."

"The medical service is included. I don't charge for it."

"You don't charge for it."

"It's a goodwill gesture."

"Operator," said Elena.

She had come up behind him, quietly, and was standing at his elbow with her arms folded and an expression of deep, serious reproach.

"A word," she said.

She led him by the sleeve into the kitchen, shut the door, and turned to face him.

"You are a terrible innkeeper," she said.

"I'm a competent innkeeper."

"You are not an innkeeper at all. You are a charity." She held up a finger. "You have fed four people. You have housed four people. You have performed surgery on one of them, in your kitchen, with a bread knife."

"It was a boning knife."

"You have driven off a Demon patrol with a forged article of law. And you are charging them four and a half silver." She dropped her hand. "I was a knight of the Holy Order for eleven years. I have been inside a thousand inns. I know what a bowl of soup costs. This is a loss."

"It's a margin."

"It is a loss, Operator Vane. You will be bankrupt by the end of the month."

Lloyd looked at her. She looked back, with stern, honest, furious concern, and he found, to his considerable surprise, that she was right.

"Five silver," he said.

"Ten."

"Seven."

"Ten," said Elena, "and you will not apologize."

"Eight, and I won't apologize."

"Done."

They shook on it, gravely, in the middle of the kitchen. It struck him, as he walked back out to the common room, that he had just been bargained down to a higher price by his own employee, and that this was perhaps the most competent thing anyone had done for him in a year.

He named the figure. Marta Voss paid it in four coins, counting each onto the table, and a fifth for the boy's blanket. Lloyd wrote it in the ledger, in the column marked REVENUE.

It was the first line in that column.

He looked at it for a long moment.

Eight silver.

---

The Messenger Box rattled at nine.

It was a quiet sound. The room was dim and warm, and the adventurers were drowsing at the tables, and the fire was down to a bed of glowing coals. Lloyd was behind the counter, wiping a cup, and the sound came from the shelf beside him, a sharp, thin, insistent clatter, like an insect trapped under a glass.

He did not stop wiping the cup.

It rattled again. Then a third time, longer, louder.

Wick looked up from the table. "What's that?"

"Nothing," said Lloyd.

"It sounds like something."

"It's the pipes."

It rattled a fourth time, and the lid popped open a quarter of an inch, spilling a thin thread of gold light across the shelf. Lloyd put the cup down. He picked up the Box, held it for the space of a breath with the faint warmth coming off it into his palm, and then, with great care, he opened the drawer under the counter, and put it inside, and shut it.

He did not read the page.

He did not even look at it.

The drawer was already full. He heard the soft shuffle of paper as the Box settled in on top of the others. He closed his hand on the knob for a second, and then let go.

When he looked up, Elena was standing in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel in her hand, watching him.

She did not say anything. Her face, in the lamplight, was grave and perfectly still.

He picked up the cup and went on wiping it.

---

They talked, after the others had gone to bed.

It was Marta Voss, in the end, who stayed. She sat by the fire with her boots off and a cup of tea in her hands, with the weary, unguarded posture of a woman who had run out of reasons to be careful. Lloyd, who was banking the coals, did not think she wanted to be asked. But she spoke anyway, in a low voice, to the flames.

"We went to the northern shrine," she said. "A little ruined chapel, up past the Sixth Marker. A pilgrim's errand. Brother Teodric had a vow to fulfill. We took a back route through the Marches to avoid the Abyss." She paused. "Everyone avoids the Abyss now."

Lloyd's hands went still on the poker.

"Do they?" he said.

"Haven't you heard?" Marta looked up. "Something's gone wrong in there."

"I'm afraid I haven't kept up."

"They say it's gone mad." She said it simply. "Parties that went in a month ago and came out in good order are coming out in pieces. The traps don't keep time. A man I know told me a pit dropped in front of him on the Fortieth Floor that hadn't been there in the spring. Walls open when they should close. Monsters lie down in the corridors and won't get up. I've heard a mimic gave up on the whole business and sat on a chest, weeping."

"That's absurd," said Lloyd.

"That's what I said." She smiled, faintly, without humor. "I've been delving for twenty-two years. I know a dungeon. They're cruel, but they're consistent. That's what makes them survivable. You learn the rhythm. You learn where the dark is. The Abyss was the cleanest of them all. Every step was timed. Every trap was fair." She shook her head. "Now it's all wrong. Like a body that's lost its pulse."

Lloyd said nothing.

"The casualty numbers have doubled," said Marta. "On both sides. The imps are dropping from exhaustion. Folk say whoever's left is driving the whole place at full tilt, and the Core is crying out in pain. There are people who say you can hear it from the road at night." She looked into the fire. "It's like something that's been left."

"Left?" said Lloyd. His voice sounded far away.

"Abandoned. That's the word that keeps coming up." She turned her cup in her hands. "They say the old Head quit. Walked out one morning without a word. Nobody knows his name. But everyone says the same thing, that he was the only one who kept it alive."

There was a long silence.

The fire popped. A coal broke, and sent up a thin spiral of sparks.

"That must be hard on the people there," said Lloyd.

"It's hard on everyone," said Marta. "That's what I can't make out. He must have known what would happen. Whoever he was. He must have known that it would fall apart without him." She drained the cup. "I suppose people do that. They get so tired they stop being able to care."

She stood, stiffly, and put the cup on the mantel.

"Thank you for the soup," she said.

"It's a pleasure," said Lloyd, and she went upstairs.

---

He stood for a long time at the counter in the empty room.

The lamp had burned low. The embers glowed red in the hearth. Outside, the wind moved through the trees, soft and persistent, and in the cellar, far below, the spring ran on in the dark.

He pulled out the drawer.

It was nearly full. He had not counted. He knew there were at least a dozen sheets, perhaps more, stacked in their velvet bed, each one folded, each one sealed with the black wax and gold of the Legion. They had been arriving, one after another, for three weeks, and he had put them away, each in its turn, in the place at the back of his mind where he kept the things he could not look at.

The latest sat on the top, still warm.

He laid his hand on it.

He could feel it. A faint, steady, living pulse through the lacquer, as if it had been made to be touched. He could feel the weight of it. It was a small box, about the size of a loaf of bread. It could not have weighed more than a few pounds.

It weighed more than the cabin.

He stood with his palm resting on the lid, and the room went quiet around him, and he thought about a pit on Floor Forty that had not been there in spring. He thought about a mimic, sitting on a chest, weeping. He thought about a Core, crying out in the dark, to a hand that did not come.

He thought: I could open it.

He thought: she would not have written if it were not important.

He thought: and then I would have to answer.

His fingers tightened on the lid. For one terrible second he felt the catch give a little under his thumb.

Then he took his hand away.

It was the hardest thing he had done since he walked out of the gate. It cost him something that he could not have named. He put the drawer back, quietly, and pressed it shut with the flat of his hand, and stood there, shaking, in the dark.

On the other side of the wood, the Box rattled once more, very softly, and was still.

---

They left at dawn.

The boy could walk, with a crutch Dorrin had knocked together from two broom handles and an old belt. Brother Teodric's hands had stopped shaking, and he held them out in the morning light and looked at them with a faint and wondering smile. Marta Voss gathered their weapons from the basket, one by one, and handed them out, and each of them took theirs with a small, odd, reverent little bow, as if returning to a thing they had not expected to see again.

At the door, she turned.

"I don't know what you are," she said.

"An innkeeper," said Lloyd.

"That's not an answer." She looked at him for a moment, with her tired, level, weather-beaten face. Then she dug in the pouch at her belt, took out a small round object, and pressed it into his palm.

It was a gold coin. A full gold crown, stamped with the face of a long-dead king.

"I can't take that," said Lloyd. "It's far more than the bill."

"It's not for the bill." She closed his fingers over it. "It's for the next lot. There'll be more of us. Folk who've been to the Marches, folk who can't go home. Someone will tell them." She shouldered her pack. "And I'll tell people about the soup."

"The soup is perfectly ordinary."

"It really isn't," said Marta Voss, and went down the steps.

He watched them go, a small ragged line of figures trudging south along the road in the early light, the boy limping on his crutch, the thief carrying the bow. At the bend, Brother Teodric turned and raised a hand.

Lloyd raised his own, hesitantly.

Then they were gone.

He stood on the porch, in the thin gold sun, with the coin in his palm and a feeling in his chest that he did not recognize. It took him a moment to place it.

It was warm.

"Eight silver," said Elena, behind him. She had come out of the kitchen with a mug in each hand, and she held one out. "And a crown. It is not a catastrophe."

"No," said Lloyd.

"It is a beginning."

"Yes." He took the tea. His hand did not shake. "Yes. I think it is."

She looked at him, and then away, at the empty road.

"The drawer," said Elena, gently.

"I know."

"It is still shut."

"I know," said Lloyd. He drank his tea. He watched the sun climb over the fields. "I know it is."