The sword adept was not his first adept, though he was his first as an adept himself. That changed little in the manner with which Thakur prepared for him. Adepts were all the same, arrogant in their power. It made them easy marks.

“He will come.” One of Thakur’s guards told him as Thakur prepared his gun. “He’s the strongest piece on the table, and this will be meant as a lesson. One man against an entire sub-family? They won’t be able to resist.”

“And, if he does not?” Thakur whispered. He lifted the last ball for his pistol arquebus and rolled it before his eyes between shriveled fingers while his breath pressed the Icon into the lead. His chest rattled as he breathed, and his hair hung ragged and white from his head. He blinked, and twin beads of blood ran like tears down his cheeks.

The guard twitched as he watched Thakur roll the led shot around in his palm and he pulled his sunflare rifle a little closer to his chest. “Then the Papad men will take care of them.” He said, and pulled his eyes up to Thakur’s. “Your responsibility is the Adept. If he arrives, the others will retreat as you requested. Otherwise, they’ll keep the trap until he does. A harder time for you, if they do, but nothing you aren’t expecting.”

“Nothing I’m not expecting.” Thakur whispered. Those few words made his chest ache and his throat burn. He clenched his hand around the little lead ball and blinked a few times against the blood welling from his tear ducts then cleared his throat and looked at the guard. “They know which paths to avoid?” He asked.

The guard watched blood drip from Thakur’s eyes as though he’d never seen the thing before. He nodded. “I pointed them out.”

“You may go then.” Thakur said, and turned his attention back to the lead ball clenched in his hand. It stung his fingers where he’d clenched it, but not from the strength of his grip. He’d grown feeble in the last few months, feeble, anyways, when he wasn’t channeling his breath through his limbs. It was the icon etched into the ball, the spiritual reality Thakur impressed into it with his breath, a piece of his burden relieved by the deadly deed he’d come here to perform.

He watched the ball for a moment with his spiritual sense, watched the fumes of his Icon’s aura rise from it like an invisible poison, echoing the corruption he could sense all around, in rotting garbage outside the apartment, and the rusting joints between pipes beneath the floor. It matched his own aura, when he permitted it to condense, something invisible but deadly. Impossible to detect until the symptoms had already carried you away.

“When he gets here-” He whispered, but when he looked up the guard was gone.

He didn’t have these powers the first time he killed an adept. He grew up in the tunnels, deep deep in the dark where the pumps beat their cyclic thunder of passing days and Sects battled over deep reservoirs of water and “chasing daylight” was used as a euphemism to describe those who left and only came back as corpses pulled from the sludge of the First Pit.

Thakur didn’t grow up around the first pit, a blessing he’d been forever grateful for after visiting it with his father while learning his trade. There shirtless men stood on rafts and skinned the sludge of its flotsam using nets, and hooks, and their bare hands while pouring in chemicals that only served to poison the water further while breaking up compacted balls of trash washed down from pipes miles above them. From the first, the water was pumped to the second where the finer trash and human waste was slicked away to the third and fourth and all the way up through the seventh where its silt and sludge and sheen of chemicals and oils was slicked away before the water bubbled up in the black subterranean lake of the eighth and final pit.

Thakur grew up around the Eighth, a vast cistern populated by a couple of thousand souls and the lake where his father taught him how to cleanse the water of its impurities, teaching him, simultaneously, all the ways in which water could make a man’s end, as it eventually made his own when a slippery observation tower tipped him into the poisoned lake and let him out again only to die.

Thakur lived well as his father’s replacement. He mourned his passing, but took up the work as he’d been trained, improved some of his father’s old inefficiencies, married, had children, prospered, until it all fell apart.

The adept came, when he came, from the darkness, as all things did down there. Adepts were rare, very rare, beneath the light, though cultivators were not so uncommon. Everyone knew that there was some secret to becoming stronger locked up in slow breathing. Thakur never understood it himself until he touched his own icon, but few ever progressed far enough in their practice to open any of their meridians. Those from the eight pits who had were among the first to die when the Gunpowder Adept arrived and leveled the Barrel Maker’s quarter in the first week of his conquest.

Thakur fled at the start. When the violence moved from the Barrel Maker’s quarter into the streets around the Market District that bordered the pipe ways leading up to higher layers of the subterranean world. He hid his family in a utility shed along the edge of the Eighth pit and watched from the pump control room as the city was lit by the sporadic lightning of sunflare beams and the growing glow of spreading flames. He kept his vigil, the water rose and he ran the pumps while cycle by cycle the air grew thick and heavy with smoke and one by one the messages he sent to his contacts in the Eight Pits Sect for information were met by silence and the reverberation of gunfire from the cavern’s ceiling.

He felt safe behind the fences of the Eighth pit. For six weeks, he felt safe, tucked away in the only asset neither side would want to destroy or tamper with for fear of risking the entire cistern. For six weeks he saw no one but his family, and spoke to no one except those few who answered the familiars he sent them before they died or stopped sending back a response, then that sense of safety was shattered.

Ten men, battle stained and ragged, cut their way through the fence to the control center at the start of the sixth week of the conflict.

The air vibrated with the hum of the pipes during their down cycle as Thakur watched them work and contemplated what he should do. He could hide, run, fight, lock the door and hope they would go away, but none of them were permanent solutions to the problem he’d faced every morning since his messages stopped receiving answers and the fact everyone in the Eight Pits faced from the moment the Gunpowder Adept arrived to set the Barrel Maker’s Quarter aflame.

The Eight Pits Sect had no adept. Change, was only a matter of time, and the cost the Eight Pits Sect would charge before finally being driven out.

Thakur opened the door instead.

It caught the men by surprise. All ten stopped and raised a gun in his direction. Sunflare pistols and beam rifles, thick arquebus barrels and even some kind of mechanical crossbow loaded with what looked like a thick explosive charge.

Thakur crossed his arms to stop his hands from shaking as he stepped out of the door in front of them.

No one said a word for a moment, then one of the men in the lead dropped the tiny Goblin Arquebus he’d pulled from his belt and smiled. “You must be the caretaker.” He said as he stepped forward. He looked Thakur up and down. Sharpened his smile. “Do we have anything to fear from you?”

Thakur’s mouth was dry so he shook his head instead of answering.

“Good man.” The leader looked pointedly round at the others in his party who put up their guns. The others trailed him as he walked the rest of the way up the path until he stood face to face with Thakur.

“We’re with the Black Pipe Sect.” The man said, waving to a badge sewn onto his shoulder. “Representatives of the Gunpowder Adept taking over these pipes.” He glanced at the darkness lit only by smoldering fires and the sparks from those few windows that still hid the survivors living in the ruins beyond the Eighth pit’s fences. “We’ve come to review our new facility.” He looked back to Thakur and showed his teeth again in a smile. “Would you mind giving us a tour?” His hand rested on the pistol at his waist.

Thakur swallowed and forced his own face to respond with a grimace like grin of his own. “Happy to.” He replied, and gestured them inside. “Right this way.”

He made sure to keep them far away from the shed where his family hid.

By the time they were done, Thakur had led them to one of the observation decks on the far side of the subterranean lake from the glittering lights of the city.

“You’re telling me that this is not safe to drink.” The leaders said as they looked out at the expanse of dark water. “It looks safe enough. Why not pipe it up as it is and let the topsiders filter it on their own?”

“Better price.” Thakur replied. “At little cost.” His voice grated from the smoke that hazed the air above the battlefield. The lake flickered with the reflected light of the bonfires that still burned in the city where the air stirred its surface as though it were stirred by cavern spirits. “Think about it.” Thakur went on when the soldier didn’t reply. “I’m one man. It costs little for me to purify the pit. That’s one more service the sect can charge for, which makes our water more valuable.”

The soldier nodded absently as he watched a tiny golden speck flit above the water’s dark surface far towards the middle of the huge expanse. The familiar was one of those Thakur usually deployed to monitor water quality in the middle of the lake and make sure the seventh pit, a level below their own in the complex maze of the many pipes that made up the Eight Pits, removed all the particulates and did their job properly. In this case however, he’d reprogrammed the little sprite to watch for other human figures moving along the shore as a warning if he needed to get his family out.

“How long have you been doing this?” The soldier asked as he stepped along the railing of the platform and surveyed the technical instruments of the work station.

“I apprenticed to my father.” Thakur replied. “Since I was a boy.”

A wave of the soldier’s hand along the controls brought other familiars like the one above the lake flashing to life as tiny golden figurines hovering above their clips ready to take commands. He waved them away absently and looked at Thakur. “You have no apprentice now?”

Thakur was very aware of the way the soldier’s thumb slid idly over the grenades clipped at his belt. “No.” He said, without looking away.

The soldier nodded and looked out at the lake again. “What do you do with the impurities?” He asked. “It must go somewhere, if you remove it.”

“There are pits.” Thakur replied. “I can show you.”

The soldier nodded, and Thakur led him and his companions to the pipes where he filtered the lake water before it was sucked up to the pumphouse that sent it on to the sects and organizations that supplied the Eight Pits. The pipes split a dozen yards from the shore of the lake and one pipe emerged from the knot to point its spout down an open hole in a narrow flat space of the cavern floor. A deep cold emanated from that hole and it gurgled loudly with the spent fluid vomited into the dark by the pipe draining the lake of its impurities.

“This goes deeper.” Thakur replied. “Much deeper. Deeper than any of the eight, or any other pipes we know.”

The soldier stared down the pit in fascination for a moment. “There could be people down there.” He said at last.

Thakur shook his head. “Feel the cold?” He held a hand over the pit and the soldier followed his example.

“I don’t think anyone lives that far below.”

The soldier took his hand back and nodded, then looked down the hill, over the pipes at the black water of Thakur’s domain. They were in an uninhabited corner of the cistern the Eight Pits Sect used as their base of operations and home. The scrap built city at the center of the enormous cavern would barely have filled the lake that occupied its center, even before a quarter of it was reduced to burning rubble and shattered slums, let alone filled all the nooks and side plazas of the ancient cave.

An explosion silhouetted a building as they watched and the soldier’s hand paused in its meditative track across the grenades at his belt as his attention was drawn to the fighting. A few flashes lit the streets around the toppling building followed by what silence existed in the city against the backdrop of the constant churn pumps and the gurgle of poisons dropping into the abyss beside them.

“I don’t think we ever purified the water in the Black Pipe.” The soldier mused. “We never had space. But these, Eight Pits, once Mulanius is finished with his pacification, may serve for the purification of more water sources than the sludge you’re dredging up from the lower levels now.”

“Mulanius is the adept.” Thakur said.

“He is.” The soldier replied. He twitched his hand away from the grenades at his belt and tucked it behind himself so that the long tail of his greatcoat fell over them and conceal them from Thakur’s view. He looked at Thakur, all musing gone from his eyes. He said nothing, just looked at Thakur, then turned and marched down the sloping cement of the cistern’s base towards the edge of the lake below.

“You have done well to continue your work during the fighting.” The soldier said over his shoulder. He stopped when he reached the path around the shore and looked back. “That may commend you in Mulanius’ eyes when he is finished. I will recommend you to him, but you should know that it does not guarantee your position here is safe.” He waited, and Thakur eventually touched a few controls to keep the familiar in the center of the lake vigilant before he stepped away to join the soldier on the trail.

“The Adept can be, volatile.” The soldier went on as Thakur joined him and they began to walk. “That volatility only grows more restless as your previous leadership continues to resist the inevitable. I intend to propose that we apprentice one of our own to you, and either implement the same system of filtration used here, or pipe water from the black pipe into your pits. If he listens, then you’ll be part of the rebuilding that will be necessary if we’re to keep this city from growing dark.”

They walked on, but the soldier withdrew into himself without going on and Thakur was forced to ask the question.

“And if he does not?”

“If he does not?” The soldier asked. “Then, anything. Mulanius is a warlord, not a planner. What… other men… plotted to obtain in the Black Pipe Sect he simply killed for. Slaughtered, really. He claimed he would do the same in One-Light, but that cavern is… gone now. He is volatile. As I said. There’s no telling what he will do when he does not get what he wants quickly.” He gave a grim smile. “Gunpowder adepts have short fuses, as it appears.” The soldier glanced back at Thakur as they walked. “Continue your work.” He said. “If this city survives, there will still be work for you, and if he listens to me, that work will only double.”

Thakur did not miss the way his fists clenched behind his back as he repeated the phrase, “if he listens.”