The collapse point chosen was an unremarkable cellar beneath a shuttered tannery in the oldest and, by Julian's standards, least fashionable corner of the Fortress Quarter — the kind of building nobody looked at twice, which was likely the reason it had survived four centuries without a single curious constable ever wandering down its stairs.
"And you're certain of the depth requirement," Julian said, more instruction than question, watching Albert set a small brass lantern at the exact corner of the old floor markings with the same precision he brought to setting a formal table for twelve.
"I've performed this crossing before your grandfather's grandfather learned to walk, my lord. I am reasonably confident in the depth requirement." Albert straightened his cuffs, checked that his monocle was seated correctly, and regarded the circle at their feet with the same air of a man inspecting a room the housemaids had not properly cleaned. "Though I will say the markings have degraded rather badly since my last visit. If you would be so kind as to stand precisely where I indicate, and not an inch further, I would appreciate not having to explain to His Majesty why I returned without his most valuable asset."
"Flattering." Julian elected to ignore, for the moment, the fact that Albert had just implied an age no human ought to possess.
"I meant the coat. It's a very good coat, my lord." Albert did not smile, but something in the set of his grey mustache suggested he found his own sentence amusing.
Julian took his position without further comment, because questioning the precise mechanics of a strange man's professional competence had, in his experience, never once produced a useful outcome.
"Declaration, then Architecture, then hold," Albert said, all business now, monocle catching the lantern light. "You anchor the Dark half. I'll carry the Light. Whatever you do, my lord, do not release before I give the signal. I have seen what happens to practitioners who lose their nerves halfway through a suspended collapse, and hint, it isn't pretty."
"Comforting."
"I do try, my lord."
They began together, and Julian — who had performed a great many difficult and dangerous pieces of magic in his career, very few of them survivable by anyone with worse control than his own — found himself, for perhaps the first time, genuinely uncertain of the outcome. His own chant was low, subvocal, the old Demon cadence pitched below where most ears could follow it, dragging a Dark frequency up out of himself and holding it steady at the exact center of the old floor markings. Albert's half he could not properly hear at all — no sound or visible strain, nothing but a faint glow appearing in the center from a man who stood perfectly at attention. It grew, precise and enormous, meeting Julian's Dark exactly at the threshold the old markings described and folding inward against it.
The collapse, when it came, did not feel like falling. It felt like the room deciding that it no longer wished to continue existing in its current shape, and then — all at once, no transition Julian could describe later with any confidence — they were somewhere else.
The Undertoll did not so much surround them as it did loom over them, and kept looming, in directions Julian's eyes tried and failed to resolve into anything sensible. Towers of stacked market stalls rose on every side, brass-framed and impossibly tall, climbing into a darkness that had no ceiling Julian could find no matter how far he tilted his head back — and yet for all their height, most of them stood strangely empty, lamplit and swept and utterly without customers, as though built for a crowd that had been expected centuries ago and never arrived.
Great iron staircases spiraled up the outsides of the towers in switchbacks that doubled back at angles no honest architecture allowed, ending at platforms with no door, others simply ending mid-air, at nothing at all. Steam vented in slow gusts from pipework threaded through the market's bones like veins, hissing in time with nothing Julian could rightfully identify, and gaslight globes drifted between stalls at head height, untethered and bobbing gently as if they were breathing.
At what seemed to be the center of the market square far ahead, a monumental brass clocktower stood, with exposed gears hundreds of feet across. No one knew what it measures, but every few minutes its bells would ring softly despite no visible mechanism moving. Albert mentioned its name: The Grand Undertoll Clock, as visitors called it, though no name officially existed for it.
The oddest part, Julian decided after only a few minutes, was that the market refused to stay still. He passed a stall selling bottled weather, glanced away to study a spiraling staircase, and when his eyes retuned, the stall was gone and a different one stood in its place, hung with chalk sigils and a curtain of small bone chimes that made no sound at all as they turned. A divination tent, using tarot cards, it reminded him of a certain someone.
Twice more a new stall replaced the old, and twice more he said nothing, on the theory that a man who complained about a room rearranging itself around him in a place like this was a man volunteering information about his own composure that he had no interest in volunteering to anyone.
"You get used to it," Albert said, without turning around, as though he'd heard the thought rather than simply anticipated it, which Julian had long since stopped ruling out as a possibility. He produced, from somewhere in his coat, a small, folded card that Julian was fairly certain had not been there a moment ago and consulted it with the look of a man rereading his shopping list. "The broker we want operates out of the inner ring. Antiquities, unprovenanced ledgers, the sort of material no honest archive would touch. It will take some walking, my lord, and I ask that you resist the urge to comment on anything you see along the way. The residents find it rude and most remember rudeness for a very long time."
"You say that as though I intend to comment on anything and everything."
"You have a face, my lord, even when you believe you don't." Albert set off in front without waiting for a response, cutting beneath an archway strung with candles that burned a cold blue-white and dripped no wax at all, past a stooped figure selling nothing visible except a hand-written sign reading ASK.
It was a narrow passage between the lower and middle rings, entirely unglamorous — where the towers pressed close enough on both sides to blot out whatever passed for sky here, and the gaslight globes thinned to a scattered handful drifting like slow lanterns over dark water — that Julian became aware that they were being watched. Not with hostility. Only attention, the specific scrutiny of someone deciding whether it as worth the trouble to approach. He found the source before Albert did: Two figures beneath a stall awning strung with iron chimes, both in the ash-grey of the Bureau's Anomalous Affairs Division, though only one of them wore it the way it was meant to be worn.
Well," said the taller of the two, tie loosened at the throat despite clearly being the higher rank of the two. He was prematurely grey at the temples in a way that he had clearly stopped fighting some time ago. "I did not expect to find the Second Seat of the Order of Ten wandering the Undertoll on a Tuesday. Though I suppose down here, it might not be Tuesday at all."
"Warden." Julian inclined his head as much as politely required for the rank and not a fraction more. Iain Corbray. He knew the name the way he knew most names worth remembering — by reputation rather than acquaintance, a Greycoat who trusted what witnesses failed to notice more than what his own compass told him, one of perhaps five people in the entire Inspectorate who'd earned the rank through something other than seniority. "I wasn't aware Anomalous Affairs had jurisdiction here."
"We don't." Iain raised his hands and shrugged. "Nobody does, which is rather the entire point of the place, as I imagine someone considerably older and more patient than me has already explained to you." Something in Iain's eyes had flickered — brief and gone before Julian could properly decipher it, the specific look of a man revisiting a debt this particular market had never let him collect on. "Senior Inspector Renfrew. Attached to my case, against her better judgement, I'm sure."
The woman beside him — compact, sharp eyes, and young enough that the ash-grey coat seemed to wear her more than she wore it. — offered a short nod that didn't quite hide how unsettled the market had her. "My lord."
"Her highness, Princess Alara would like her," Albert said, apropos of nothing. "She likes the nervous ones."
Iain's gaze moved to him next as his hand drifted, with the casualness of a man who'd trained himself not to be seen checking, toward the pocket where a Bureau-standard compass rode against his hip. He didn't draw it. He didn't need to. Something in his face simply went still for a moment, the stillness of a man whose instrument had reported a number that shouldn't have belonged— a coherent, steady Heartbeat signature, whole and unbroken, in a man who by every visible measure had no business carrying one that old, that intact, at his apparent age. Iain said nothing about. He chose the option that this was someone else's business and not his — and let the moment pass as though it had never happened at all.
"Sealed Grimoire fragments," Iain said instead, voice easy again, as though the last three seconds never existed. "Three pages of a Tier III text, stolen out of Bureau custody eight months back, currently circulating somewhere a paying customer with considerably worse intentions than mine could acquire them. We traced the trail to a broker in the inner ring." He tilted his head slightly, an entertaining thought occurring in his head. "I don't suppose the Second Seat happens to be chasing the same one."
Julian weighed how much truth was worth revealing and finally settled on the version that cost the least to give away. "The same broker. Most likely. Different merchandise."
"Of course it is." Iain didn't seem remotely surprised, which Julian suspected was less about coincidence and more about a man who had stopped being surprised by anything the Undertoll produced sometime around his second visit. "I'll say this — it's considerably more pleasant sharing a queue with the Order than with half the company this corridor usually keeps. Renfrew, make a note. We're apparently splitting a broker with the Crown's own attack dog."
"I'd prefer 'asset,'" Julian said.
"I'm sure you would." Iain's attention drifted back to Albert once more, brief and unresolved, a man consciously declining to pull on a thread he had every professional right to pull. "Shall we walk together, then? Professional courtesy, if nothing else. I'd rather know where you're standing than wonder about it in a place like this."
A reasonable precaution," Albert said, before Julian could answer for himself. "I do think you'll find us easy company, Warden. My lord rarely speaks unless it serves his schemes, and I almost never stop, so between the two of us you'll have exactly the amount of conversation you'd like and not a syllable more."
Something in Iain's face eased, the first unguarded thing Julian had seen from him since he checked his compass. "Renfrew, I like the butler."
"Everyone does, eventually. "Albert said and set off toward the inner ring without waiting to see whether the rest of them followed, monocle catching the strange drifting light.
The narrow passage widened as they walked, and the market widened with it, growing louder and stranger in the way Julian associated with depravity. A woman with too many fingers on her visible hand called out prices for something kept in covered cages that shifted against the bars and did not appreciate being ignored.
"Fresh caught! Fresh caught! Still remembers its own name — you there, grey coats, you'll not find better this side of the collapse—"
"Keep walking," Iain said, mildly, before Renfrew's curiosity could get the better of her. "Whatever it remembers, you don't want to be the one it remembers next."
A few stalls further on, a squat vendor selling what looked like bottled screams — small glass jars, each one fogged from the inside, each one straining against the cork — heckled them with real enthusiasm as they passed, switching effortlessly between flattery and insult depending on how far they'd gotten before ignoring him entirely. "Sir! Buy a scream for the wife, my lord, guaranteed authentic, guaranteed hers isn't in there — no? Coward. All of you. Cowards and grey coats, the worst possible combination—"
"He says that to everyone," Albert said, unbothered. "Don't take it personally, my lord. He said the same to me the first time I came through, and I wasn't even married."
They were perhaps a third of the way through the widening market when Julian became acutely aware that they were no longer merely being watched. Three men had fallen into step behind them — loose and unhurried, spread just widely enough not to look like a formation, which was, in Julian's experience, exactly how a formation looked when it didn't want to be noticed.
"Renfrew," Iain commented, without turning, in the same voice he'd use to remark on the weather. "Your left pocket."
Renfrew's hand shot to her coat a half-second too late; a slight figure was already peeling back into the crowd with the speed of someone who had done this often enough to have stopped finding it exciting. Her notebook — no, Julian corrected himself, not her notebook, a slim folded case of investigative credentials — already three hands removed and moving fast.
"Oh for—" Renfrew started after him on instinct and got exactly four steps before Iain's arm came up, not quite blocking her, just present, a suggestion rather than a command.
"Let it go."
"He has my identification—"
"Which means nothing down here and everything up there, and you are, at present, down here." Iain said it without urgency, though his eyes had not stopped moving since the three men fell into step behind them. "Chasing a pickpocket into a crowd this thick is how careful people stop being careful. We'll flag it with the Tollkeepers if it becomes a problem. It generally doesn't."
It became, within the next thirty seconds, rather more of a problem than any of them had planned for.
The shout came from two stalls down — not fear, Julian had registered that early, but rage, the pitch of a man who had just discovered he'd been cheated and intended to do something enormous about it. The crowd gathered around the scene as the broad-shouldered trader in a leather apron had one of the three loitering men by the collar. The other two, rather than intervening on their companion's behalf, had simply produced short iron cudgels from beneath their coats with an efficiency that hinted that they had done this more than once.
Julian turned slightly and noticed the men following them were gone.
"That's ours," Iain said, pointing at the Corbray crest on each cudgel before moving, voice gone professional in a way that made Renfrew fall into step behind him without needing to be told. "Corbray family gets everywhere, don't they."
Julian did not run. He simply appeared half a step ahead of the trouble, in the manner of a man who never needed to hurry toward violence. The first cudgel swung wide and sloppy, telegraphed three full seconds before it landed anywhere, and Julian caught the wrist behind it without any particular effort and applied just enough pressure to end the man's struggles. The second attacker had better sense, or fear, and was already backing toward the crowd rather than engaging a man who so easily brushed off an attack.
It lasted, in total, perhaps twenty seconds, and would have ended there — a small, unremarkable brawl — had the crowd around them not begun, all at once and without any visible cue, to go very quiet.
"Ah," Albert commented, in the tone of a man noting rain through a window. "That'll be the Tollkeepers, then."
Julian had heard descriptions of them. He had not, until this moment, seen one, and found that the descriptions had entirely failed to prepare him. They did not barge into the space so much as become present in it, three of them, tall and grey with precisely the wrong number of joints wrong in their movement, and the crowd that had been pressing close a moment before simply wasn't there anymore, folded back into the stalls and the shadows between them with practiced efficiency of people who had learned, the hard way, how much space a Tollkeeper required to work.
Nobody spoke. The two men with cudgels dropped them, the iron clattering against the market's uneven stone, and stood very still. One of the Tollkeepers regarded them with an attention that had no obvious eyes to carry it, and something passed between them that Julian felt rather than witnessed, a brief transaction of consequence.
The trader dropped the third man and dropped to his knees in prayer, muttering the words "please don't take me" over and over again. The three thugs were simply gone a moment after that. Not fled. Gone, same as the Tollkeepers.
"They don't kill," Albert said quietly as he read Julian's expression. "Not here, at least — that would be bad for business. But I wouldn't ask where those three are now, my lord. I've asked, once, a very long time ago. I never found an answer."
"Efficient," was all Julian could say.
"Extremely." Iain interrupted, having sheathed whatever readiness that occupied his stance, and looked, if anything, faintly relieved rather than shaken. "That's the entire Undertoll legal system, in miniature. No trial. No appeal. Very speedy. Say what you like about the Bureau, we're positively sluggish by comparison."
It was as they resumed walking — Renfrew considerably paler than she'd been ten minutes prior, her hand still checking, uselessly, at the empty pocket where her credentials had been — that Julian noticed, for the first time, the shapes that occupied the market's shadows. He had taken them, at first glance, for beggars, huddled at the base of towering stall, and it was only when one of them turned their head — too slowly, several seconds behind the movement of their shoulders — that Julian understood he'd been wrong.
They were thin in a way that had nothing to do with hunger, translucent at the edges where the drifting gaslight caught them. One of them was murmuring, endlessly and to no one at all, a string of words in no language Julian recognized. Another simply watched them pass with an expression that presented too many emotions and none at all.
"Voidburn failures," Albert said, before Julian could ask. "People who came through and never found the way back. It happens, more than the Association likes to admit. The crossing is not always kind to the ones who attempt it without proper preparation." He did not look at them for longer than required. "I would not stare, my lord. Some of them don't take kindly to gawkers."
Julian looked away. Beside him, Renfrew had gone quieter still, and even Iain had no remark.
"Inner ring's close," Albert said, brisk again, the moment already behind him. "Another two turns, my lord, and we'll be one step closer to our broker."