They unloaded the crates of explosives while the slums beyond the muck they stood in smoldered and the smoke of old battles swirled against the dark ceiling of the cavern. Three in all. The bombs came as long belts, nothing like the compact balls of gunpowder Thakur expected, and the guard on the back helped to drape them over his shoulders until Thakur staggered under the weight of them.

“There.” the soldier said as he looped the last one around Thakur’s neck. “Now you look like a proper firecracker.” He grinned and studied Thakur as though to gauge the effect. “You go off before getting those around your target and you’ll probably crack the foundation.”

“Nothing can crack the foundation.” Thakur replied.

“Enough of them strings and anything’ll break.” the soldier replied. He shoved the empty crates out into the mud then reached into a box in the side of the truck. He pulled out a small stick and held it up. “You ever use one of these?” He asked. He thumbed the stick and a familiar flickered to life above it. It flickered oddly, wavered like a candle flame instead of the solid planes of light a familiar was normally forged from.

“Touched familiar.” The man said. “Don’t know what icon, fire of some kind.” When he removed his thumb the familiar vanished back into the stick. “Normally you’d use a detonator for them strings, but these let you light em from a long ways, as long aways as you want, really.”

“Time.” The driver said from the front. “Gotta get moving soon.”

Thakur took the stick from the soldier and the treads under the truck squealed as it lurched forward an inch and the engine hummed to life.

“How do I use them?” Thakur asked.

“Just thumb the top.” The soldier replied as he grabbed the door handle and swung one side of the truck closed. “Strings have receivers, they know where to go. Just flick them off of the magazine and get outta the way, they’ll do the rest.” He gave Thakur a smile that seemed grim in the dim light of the Truck’s interior. “Good luck,” he said, “from all of us.” Then he slammed the door and the treads churned up the muck while the guard on top swiveled his gun to look at Thakur.

“I’d be fast.” He shouted over the squeal of turning treads. “Won’t take long for the adept to realize them strings have stopped.” The half-track rattled as it rammed over a slumped hovel in the long loop it took to head back the way it came. “He’ll come looking for them.” The gunner shouted. Then they were gone.

Thakur followed his footsteps back through the muck, threw himself really, while his heart hammered in his chest and the weight of the explosives on his back made him reckless. He slipped halfway to the tower when the mud grabbed at one of his boots while the extra weight carried him forward and he thought he was going to face plant in the very poison he’d spread for the adept as a trap.

He caught himself, barely, no more than an inch above the mud, both elbows buried in it, his mouth and eyes pressed shut as he held his breath.

He pushed himself upright and forced himself to take a breath, then opened his eyes.

He moved more slowly after that. Took his time going up the ladder, one deliberate step at a time, still almost lost his grip on a rung made slippery by the mud caked onto his dry-gloves and almost fell to his death.

His breath came hard and fast when he finally reached the top. Sweat prickled beneath his oilskin and stung his eyes where he didn’t dare wipe it away from his face. He paused just long enough to survey the swamp for any sign of the adept before he scurried around tower’s tank and laid the explosives out in a row along it’s base. It wasn’t until he was finished that he realized he hadn’t thought to prepare a safe place to wait, and by then, he was out of time.

He heard the adept’s footsteps as he stared at the explosives in horror and tried to think of a place that he could hide. They were loud, loud enough to be heard even in the moments when the pumps thrummed like thunder through the length of the pipes. The boom of each footfall came with a quality that he couldn’t quite identify, one that thundered beyond the audible range making even his soul shake.

Thakur darted to the edge of the platform when he realized what he’d been listening too. He spotted the man, or his shadow anyways, moving across the corrupted morass beneath him as his outline eclipsed the individual gleam of fetid puddles.

Thakur spun and looked for a place he could hide from what he knew must come, even as he knew that there was nowhere he could go. He cursed silently, and ran to the back of the tower, then cursed again and ran to the front. The footsteps drew closer and Thakur thought he caught the glint of eyes looking up at him as the shadowy figure stopped at the base of the tower.

Thakur yanked out the magazine of familiars and thumbed one to life. He stared at the uncertain light of the familiar while his mind spun, hope that perhaps it wasn’t the adept underneath him.

“What are you doing up there?”

The voice almost deafened Thakur.

Thakur closed his eyes and found his throat too dry to swallow. “Routine maintenance!” He shouted back. No doubt now. His thumb hovered over the igniter, but he hesitated just long enough to kick the nearest belt of explosives off the platform it shared with him and glimpsed it spinning towards the tower’s support structures before he closed his eyes again. “Please stand back!”

He summoned his daughters to his mind, flicked his thumb.

He didn’t hear the explosives go off. For a moment, nothing happened. He heard the pumps thumping in the distance, felt his heart hammer in his chest, then silence as something slammed into every inch of his body and his sense of up and down disappeared. He might have screamed, might not have. Everything was white, or black, or nothing at all, silent and senseless to his addled mind as he hurtled head over heals towards the unbreakable cement that served as the foundation of the world.

He didn’t hear the explosives, but he did hear the roar that came afterwards.

Water caught him. It was foul smelling and acrid. His vision was narrowing as he slammed into it, but the fumes snapped his eyes wide as his body fought to suck in a breath that he tried to hold. He thought the pain across his entire body would kill him as he floundered to keep his head above the frothing wave of sludge, but that would be a far better death than what waited if he let his exposed head fall beneath the water.

His arms and legs didn’t want to obey him, especially his legs, but he kicked and swam feebly anyways as the wash of water swelled then subsided.

It dropped him into a human shaped depression amidst the muck. Silt stacked over him and he felt the mud begin to harden and he started to flail at the rapidly drying mud until his gloves could no longer penetrate and he was cemented into the poison, one head and arm still exposed above the putrid soil.

He struggled for a few more moments before he realized he was trapped. It hurt. Hurt his limbs where they’d been bruised by the explosion, and his head, and his chest. He closed his eyes and still felt himself spinning as the wave traveled into the slums and he tried to reconcile himself to being stuck in a trap of his own making.

The hand that yanked him from the mud was not gentle.

Thakur cried out in pain as it seized the upper part of his arm and pulled it almost out of its socket as it jerked him out of his tomb on the cistern’s floor.

“What was that?”

The adept’s voice slammed through the roaring in Thakur’s ears and blasted away some of the mud still caked to his oilskin. Thakur cringed away as the adept shook him and more mud crumbled from the Adept’s robes. He noticed, up close, that the adept was bald, balding, as a matter of fact. He hadn’t expected that, hadn’t expected the Adept to look old even as he held Thakur in front of him with one arm and glared past mud caked cheeks. The absurdity of the detail served to pull Thakur out of his daze the way the adept yanked him from his tomb.

The adept shook Thakur then tossed him on the ground. When he spoke again his voice almost blew Thakur backwards and he had to put a hand up to shield his face. “Were you trying to kill me?” Bits of mud flew away from the shockwave of his voice.

“Maintenance.” Thakur croaked. He couldn’t hear his own voice, and had to repeat it again, louder this time. “Maintenance. Just maintenance. I swear.”

“You blew yourself up?” The adept boomed. “What kind of maintenence is that?”

“I thought…” Thakur wanted to swallow, but was too scared he’d gotten some of the sludge into his mouth. He went to lick his lips but realized that was dangerous too and spat instead, making his mouth even drier. “I thought…” What had he thought? “I thought…” He said again cast around, still too addled to remember if he’d thought anything.

“Thought what?” The adept asked in exasperation.

Inspiration. “It was supposed to be, directed. They said so.”

“Who said so?” The Adept boomed.

Thakur cringed back, didn’t have to pretend to be addled, or afraid.

“The men, who gave me the explosives. Said, to destroy the tower. It was supposed to be empty, all I had to do was, was, make sure the belts were placed right.”

The adept wiped at the mud that caked his arms and made a disgusted noise. He spat and the spittle blew a crater in the muddy floor. There was a thunderous boom and a blast of wind and the muck seemed blew wholesale off of the Adept while he shook his hands to rid them of it.

“Please.” Thakur said. “I-”

“Bleeding Sect.” The adept said as he examined his hands. “I should just clear out this whole cistern and be done with it.” He glared at what remained of the city beyond the swamp they’d just made before he turned to Thakur. “You were supposed to die.” He said. “Did you know that?”

“I…” Thakur didn’t dare answer.

“A stupid trap,” the adept went on, “and a stupid man to set it.” His voice was closer to normal volumes now and Thakur could barely hear him, but he felt his heart thump painfully against his ribs with something like hope.

“Maintenance.” He repeated. “Just maintanance.”

“Go home.” The adept said as he turned away. “If they ask you how your maintenance went, tell them it will take more than water to kill me.”

“I will.” Thakur whispered as he put his aching head in his hands. “I will.”

He didn’t move for a long time. When he tried to at last, his legs gave out and he had to crawl on hands and knees until he could prop himself against a block of cement and stare across the slum he’d just inundated with a corrupted flood. Smoke no longer rose from the burnt out shells of old shacks. Piles of rubble were clotted around blockages where the floods had stacked them as they rushed from the collapsing water tower but the sludge he’d measured into the tower hadn’t gone farther than the edges of those slums before the wave of had congealed and solidified into a thick layer of acrid muck as hard and rigid as the cement, if thousands of times more toxi. There would be a risk here of contamination for the Eighth pit’s lake, but there were safeguards in place all along the pipes that lay downslope from the slums, between the lake and the small flood he’d just unleashed.

He went to his workstation before anything else. It took him forever to walk there. The oilskins were discarded outside on the slope and he sealed himself into the showers to wash himself for hours in scalding water. He rinsed his mouth continuously and soaped every inch, with special attention for his head and hair. The water falling on his skin hurt like the echo of the explosion that had tossed him into the wave of sludge, but it was nothing compared to the pain that would come later, much later, when he finally found Anand again to make his report.

“Is he dead?” Anand asked, in the sitting room of a different safe house he’d moved to in the cycles between their first meeting and this one. “We saw the tower go up, but we’ve gotten inconsistent reports since then.”

This time it was Thakur who sat on the couch opposite the sect-head as his head spun from the pain of his injuries and he struggled to focus on the man he’d traveled all the way across the ruined city to see. “Not yet.” Thakur he said. “But he will be.”

“So, you got the poison into him.” Anand replied. “That’s good. And you’re sure it’s going to kill him.”

Thakur glared at the sect leader then looked down at the hands that shook violently between his knees. “Poison doesn’t kill.” He said. “It corrupts.” He sighed, felt something burning in his chest just below his solar plexus, saw spots spin before his eyes and pressed a hand to his ribs until the pain subsided. “It’s the corruption that kills.” He finally added.

Anand offered him a glass of water and Thakur hesitated before he took a sip. Sweet, clean, though it did nothing for the pain in his chest.

“How long do you think?” Anand asked.

Thakur left his hand on his chest and gazed at the water for a long moment before he replied. “A cycle.” He replied. “Two, maybe three. Ten at most.” He coughed and felt his eyes prick with tears when he realized there would be no dislodging the burning sensation lodged in his chest. “Not, long at all.”

Longer, anyways, than he would have, or so he thought at the time.