The basement was not built to reassure. Bare pipes dripped onto bare concrete floors. Piled boxes closed him in, their cardboard stamped with serial numbers and bar-code glyphs. No Umar. A door in the far wall stood open.

He slid through the door into a hallway broad enough for four men abreast. Voices carried around a corner. “Freeze!” He heard bare feet, running.

A crossbow bolt tore down the crosswise hall, leaving a crackle of spent lightning. Corbin peered around the corner in time to see Umar vault a desk at the hallway’s end and punch the guard in his throat. They fell together. Umar’s hand tightened into a fist, then descended with the sound Ray Capistano’s cleaver made when he cut steak.

Umar stood, holding keys. He tried one key in the lock of the door behind the watchman’s desk, and when it didn’t work he tried another.

“They’ll hunt you down.”

“They are busy.”

“They’ll come for you when it’s done.”

“If they find me.” Corbin had grown used to Umar’s doubled voice, but that laugh still twisted in his chest.

The fifth key worked.

They walked between two wire cages, behind which rested neat arrays of shelves: a library of danger. Corbin did not recognize most of the contents of those shelves, and when he did, he wished he didn’t. A diamond-bladed sword bloomed with purple light, and a paper tag marked its gold hilt. Beside it lay a pipe with a rusty stain at one end, likewise tagged. Bags of powder in many colors. A single six-sided die. A spike-knuckled glove slicked with greenish oil. A deck of playing cards. A pair of red slippers. A sheaf of blasting rods. Tagged, tagged, tagged, tagged, tagged. That was the first floor.

On the next level down, each shelf held a single object surrounded by a blue Craft circle. Nothing here struck him as unusual in form: a book bound in pale tan leather. A corduroy blazer. A bow tie. A silvery mechanical wand with a green gem at one end. An unadorned ring. A knife with a wooden handle. A clay cup.

The knife whispered like a woman, not like any woman but like June in bed when they were young together, before everything. The wand sang. The blazer pulsed when he looked at it too long.

He drew closer to Umar.

On the third floor each cage held a single item, and he did not look at these.

The fourth floor held no cages, only doors: three on either side. Ghostlights glowed green above the lintels. Umar walked to the last door on the left, stood in front of it, and placed one hand above the latch.