Thakur’s limbs burned as he leapt rooftop to rooftop through daylight he never expected to see in his lifetime. He moved slowly this way, far slower than the sword adept might have moved if he chose to hire an aircab to pursue him, but that route was closed to Thakur. His “gifts”, the same gifts that made his body burn where his spirit touched it, made such aerial transportation dangerous.

So he ran, and jumped the columns of aerial traffic moving between buildings as though jumping a narrow stream.

He didn’t need such transportation. He knew where the grizzled old sword adept would be going anyways.

The Rose Adept’s tower stood like a spear at the heart of the wealthiest district in the city. The narrow structure sparkled with the light reflected from hundreds of floors of windows. Walkways extended from some of the lower floors like roots into the parking structures to either side, and personal aircabs swarmed around it, coming and going like insects from a flower garden.

Thakur approached the tower from one of the parking structures. He pulled paper cartridges and lead balls from a peeling leather belt at his waist and reloaded his arquebus as he paced across the top level then leapt onto the covered walkway to the Rose Adept’s tower. The stink of corruption radiated from towering hospital in Thakur’s spiritual vision. He leapt up the tower one balcony at a time and felt the corruption moving in its guts. The sick who’d come here to be healed, buckets of vomit and human waste, sewage traveling down long pipes. They all radiated with poison, even the medicines crated around by the rose acolytes among patients in the lower level stank of it, ready to corrupt or kill whatever ailed those too poor to afford better care in the higher levels of the tower.

When he didn’t find the unique signature he’d come here looking for Thakur settled on an elevator housing at the top of the tower and pulled out a lead ball to rotate in his palm while he waited. The burning in his limbs faded as he pushed his spirit into the shot, leaving only the ache that never truly left his bones after surviving his first assassination.

The motor hummed beneath him as he kept his breath separate, carried him back to thumping pipes and subterranean passages, his life, his wife, before things fell apart.

The machine sputtered into silence sometime later as corrosion ate it from the inside and left Thakur to the wind and the light and the view of a city not his own from the very top of it’s tallest point. When he blinked, bloody tears ran from his eyes to stain his cheeks.

He could sense a bit of his corruption far below the spreading patch of rust he sat on, smeared across the spirit of a man that felt more like a blade. He stood, stretched, felt bones popping and something like a thousand needles tormenting him from the inside. He checked the pool of spreading rust he’d sat on to gauge how long he’d spent at the top of the tower and shook his head then leapt onto the low wall around the edge of the balcony and balanced along it until he found a particular balcony and tossed himself over the side.

The wind whistled through his ragged hair and beard as he fell. It snatched at what remained of robes that were new when he put them on that morning and brought tears, real tears, to his eyes washing away some of the blood stuck to his cheeks.

He landed with a thump in the middle of a balcony twice the size of other balconies along the tower. Raised flower beds stood around him in a geometrical maze, each one occupied by a snarl of green thorns that clambered across trellises that arched overhead like the midnight plains themselves, thickly smattered with roses the color of open wounds. The air stirred unnaturally around the flowers as he straightened, carrying their sickly sweet perfume to him on little puffs of wind.

A woman’s voice spoke to some subordinate beyond the flower garden and Thakur followed it past glass doors designed to roll down over the entire garden into a room that seemed like an extension of it, raised flower beds replaced by a maze of couches. A central table on which a bowl of water sat like a mirror reflecting the ceiling lights. The bowl rippled inexplicably as he entered and he heard the woman finish with a series of commands before the subordinate murmured his agreement and faded from the room beyond this one.

A door slid away on the far side of the room from Thakur and she slid it shut before turned her gaze to him.

“So it’s done?”

Her eyes, when he met them, were darker than the coloring of her skin, from corner to corner as black as the void pricked by blue sparks like sparks, distant familiars over a black lake.

“So it’s done.”

“You saw him.” Thakur replied in his whispering voice. “You know it is.”

When she nodded the sparks reflected in her eyes did not move with them, but shifted, as though in a dimension all their own hidden somewhere beyond the void of her gaze. “I told him he would die,” she said, “but you know best.”

Thakur felt the Sword Adept’s spirit shake below him as the corruption in his spirit turned his own body against him. Thakur pulled his vision back and shook his head.

“And?” He asked. “My price?”

The rose adept regarded him with her disturbing black eyes. She put a hand up to stroke at something mostly invisible on her shoulder and Thakur blinked blood from his eyes. She nodded. “I’ll make the arrangements.”

Thakur looked down at the lead ball in his hand. The other adept, the first, had lain in a pool of his own congealed vomit when Anand brought him to the corpse, thinking, perhaps, that Thakur would want to see the results of his handiwork, as though the emaciated stinking corpse of the gunpowder Adept was a sort of trophy Thakur would want to remember… in his dreams.

He nodded.

The Rose Adept turned and pressed a button on the wall. A moment later two big men in body armor and helmets appeared at one door of the open lounge.

“Escort him back to his cell.” She told them. “Discreetly, please.”

Thakur met her black eyes, then blinked away more blood and let the guards lead him to the elevator that would take him down to basements of the adept’s hospital. He felt the sword adept pass him as he fell towards the room that had been his since his arrival half a year ago in this city of light. He felt the man’s spirit spasm as the flesh that anchored it to this world succumbed to the corruption circling in him from Thakur’s lead shot.

His own spirit would be invisible to the adept, here amongst the poisons of the Rose Tower. Even outside it was barely discernible, like the fumes that rose from drainage vents or the wavering shadows over hot cement, a hint of poison mirrored by the trash in the streets and effluent running in the gutters, corruption camouflaged by the corruption all around them.

Thakur felt the elevator pass underground until it finally stopped at the deepest basement of the Rose Adept’s tower.

One of his guards put a hand on his shoulder as the doors opened. “This way.” He said.

“It’s dangerous to touch me.” Thakur whispered. He turned blood shot eyes from the ceiling where he’d been listening to the sword adept’s spirit die to the guard who pulled his hand back as though from a burning fire. “I could kill you without your ever knowing.” Thakur whispered. “Just by losing focus.” The lead ball in his hand crumbled as Thakur’s spirit overwhelmed the physical material and the corroded lead fell like dust to the elevator’s floor. “Do not tell me what to do.”

Thakur glared at the guard, then he pulled out a new lead ball and preceded both of them down the hall to the cell of blank cement walls behind iron bars. He handed the guards his arquebus and the pouch of shot and powder from his waist, then he stepped into the cell to sit cross legged in the middle of the room while they closed and locked the rusting door behind him.

He listened to their footsteps recede as he rotated his spirit through his external meridians, felt the Sword Adept convulse a hundred stories above him surrounded by Rose Acolytes and apprenticed healers. He tore a strip from the rags wrapped around him and used it to wipe the blood from his eyes, then stared at the bloody cloth while he pressed his spirit into the walls of his cell and returned, once more, to his battle with the corruption flowing in his own spirit, alone.