It looked less like a guild house and more like some reclusive old bastard's fortress of solitude, the kind of place a man retreated to when he'd decided the world could officially go fuck itself and he was finally ready to commit to the bit.
The black stone drank the late sunlight the way the Sanctum of Aegis drank it, but quieter, hungrier, without any of the Sanctum's pompous grandstanding.
And the path that led up to the great closed door had long since been swallowed—by tall grass at the edges, the creeping moss across the flagstones and thick, patient vines that had crawled right up the walls and settled in for a long nap against the obsidian.
Pryce stood there and let out a long, slow breath through his nose.
'It doesn't matter.' There had to be a reason a Supreme Angel had handed him this particular address like it was the only one in the whole gilded shithole of Veyra worth knowing.
Lulu tilted her small head up at him, her one good eye narrowed into a squint as she studied the dark, silent structure.
Her tiny hand tightened a fraction around his.
"Is this really it, big brother?" she whispered, her voice muffled by the scarf. "It looks like—"
"Ah-ah-ah." He cut her off with a raised finger and a theatrical wince. "Lulu. Lulu. What did I always say? Don't judge a book until you've walked a mile in its cover."
There was a very long pause.
Her one good eye went flat with the weary, ancient patience of a woman three times her age watching her drunk husband try to put his boots on the wrong feet.
"Big brother."
"Yes, shortstack?"
"You just mashed two sayings together. I think, nobody could do that by accident and still look as proud as you look right now."
"I don't know what you're talking about. That's the saying. That's how it goes. Everybody knows it."
"Nobody knows it, because it isn't a real saying." She drew in the small, careful breath of a child about to deliver a lecture to a much larger idiot. "The first one is don't judge a book by its cover. That's the whole saying. You look at a book, and you don't decide about it just from the outside, because the good stuff is on the inside where you can't see it yet. That's it. That's all of it. It's one sentence."
"Mm-hm." He nodded sagely, clearly he hadn't understood a single word and wasn't planning to.
"The second one," she went on, stern now, warming to her subject with the tiny fierce dignity of a very small teacher who'd been saving this lesson for a while, "is don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes. It means you shouldn't decide about a person's whole life until you've lived the hard parts of it yourself. It's about shoes, big brother. It's about feet. It has absolutely nothing to do with books."
"Are you sure?"
"I am extremely sure."
"Because I distinctly remember books having shoes at some point."
"Books do not have shoes, big brother."
"Small shoes. Very small leather shoes. On the corners."
"Those are called corners. Those are just the corners of the book. They are not shoes. They have never been shoes."
"A mile is a mile, Lu. Whether you walk it in a cover or in a boot, the foot does the suffering."
"You cannot walk in a cover. A cover is a flat piece of leather glued to a book. You can't put your foot inside it. You can't even put a toe inside it. It is physically not possible to walk a mile in a book's cover, big brother, and I don't understand how you say these things out loud with your whole chest like they mean something."
"I know exactly what I said and I stand by every word of it."
"You stand by nonsense."
"I stand by confident nonsense, shortstack, and that's the whole art of it. Say a thing loud enough and sure enough, and pretty soon the saying becomes whatever the loudest bastard in the room claims it is. That's how proverbs are born. That's how kingdoms get founded. That's how religions of the past era got started."
"That is not how any of those things work."
"One day you'll write the books with the correct sayings in them, and I'll be very proud of you, and I still won't read them."
"One day I'm going to grow taller than you and write the real version on your forehead in permanent ink while you sleep."
"I look forward to your scholarly contributions, little professor."
She gave a small, muffled huff that was not quite a laugh, and he felt the tight cold knot in his chest loosen half a turn. Gods, he loved this small brave creature.
Gods help anything standing between her and a better life.
He led her across the overgrown path toward the closed stone door. The vines at the edges of the flagstones rustled faintly as they passed, though no breeze had stirred them.
Pryce chose, very deliberately, not to think about that.
At the center of the great black door, embedded in the obsidian like an eye waiting for a reason to open, sat a single blue stone that glowed with a soft, steady, patient light.
He squared his shoulders. He adjusted the scarf at Lulu's chin so it covered her a little better. He tucked her half a step behind his hip, out of whatever line of sight the door was about to offer up on the other side.
Then, with the quiet, grinning, slightly deranged bravado and he decided that if this was a trap he was going to take the bait with his teeth, Pryce reached out and pressed the blue glowing stone.
For a single breath, nothing happened.
Then the whole door shuddered, deep inside the stone, like something very old had just remembered how to wake up. The obsidian groaned and dust trickled down from the lintel in a fine black hiss.
The vines along the frame shivered and pulled back, reluctant but obedient, baring the edges of the doorway.
And then, with a low, grinding rumble that Pryce felt all the way down in his bones, the heavy door slid open.
What awaited him on the other side wasn't really what he'd been expecting.
Not even close.
His eyes went wide.