Thakur pressed his spirit into a scrap of soap he rolled around in his hands as he approached the Adept’s gardens. He’d learned to control his spirit since becoming an adept, to confine from the wider world it sought to corrupt by kneading it into a single object where it could do all the harm it wanted. Few things could withstand such spiritual attention from his icon for long, steel, cloth, cement, all crumbled in a matter of seconds. Of the objects available to him in his cell during the few days it took him to master the technique, the soap lasted the longest, so soap he held, spinning it between his fingers as he rode the elevators between two dark skinned guards.

“So.” The woman said when he stood before her, black eyes sparkling as she regarded him. “You lived.”

He rolled the soap in his hand but didn’t look at her. “Thanks to you.” He replied. White wisps of ragged hair, once dark, shifted in the breeze at the edge of his vision.

She gave him a wry half smile. “You’re welcome.”

He looked down at the soap as his breath rolled through it. Breath was an extraordinary thing. Sensed in the mind it seemed like a physical manifestation. It could extend like a fog around him, or move like wind, like a voluminous breath capable of filling the room, yet when he wished, could condense into a single knot at the heart of a ball of soap. This ball of soap would kill someone if they used it now. Clean them, maybe, but kill them just as surely.

“I’m sorry about your wife.” The Rose Adept, the false adept, told him.

He looked up from the ball of soap and blinked blood, or maybe tears, from his eyes. He reached into the pocket of his robes for the rag he’d stolen from the washroom but it shredded as he tried to remove it and he stood staring at the fragment until more blood leaked from his eyes and he used the sleeve of his robe. The material was coarse and aged, despite being new only an hour before. He coughed and when he spoke his voice came out in a hoarse whisper.

“She was…” He regarded the soap in his hand, then looked at the woman in front of him and scowled. “She was good, for me.” He finished and looked away. “Are my daughters…?”

The rose adept nodded. “I’ve given them a room directly below my own.” She said, “While we waited for you to, finish.”

Thakur looked at the floor. He could feel the spirits of people moving around in the floors above and below this one. There were few enough. Guards beyond the doors that let him into her private sanctum, guards on the roof a half a dozen stories above and a few spirits he guessed were servants. A few floors down he could feel a slightly denser population just before the clinics of the Rose tower began and he felt medicines and bad blood and disease cloud his spiritual vision. Two of those flames below must be his daughters, and when he focused, he thought he could guess, a pair that glowed strongly despite the distance and surrounding spiritual noise, one pacing near a wall of the building while the other held still nearby. He could imagine them around those flames. Banya would be the one pacing beside the window, full of a nervous energy while she looked out at a city she could only have dreamed of before coming here, Vasickni with a book or familiar unrolled in front of her while she read.

“I would like to take them home.” Thakur whispered. “While I still can.”

He could see her butterflies now. They looked like tiny refractions of light, crystalline insects that fluttered around the adept, invisible to anything but a spiritual sense of the world. They’d swarmed around the adept in a tornado before he arrived, but she’d dismissed them with a wave of her hand, and they’d dissipated into the sky, the roses, and the room where the bowl of water stood ready for them.

She did not reply immediately when he told her that he wanted to take his daughters home. The breeze sighed through her tightly bound hair as she looked over the balcony at the city which surrounded them, the lights of other towers blinking in the orange light of day, airtraffic purring by at every height while monstrous shapes swam through the haze far far above and the bowl of the bottom swung upwards at the horizon as though to reach for the blazing core at the center of the heavens.

“Do you think that is entirely wise?” The false adept finally asked him, when she turned from the view. Her black eyes met his bleeding ones and held their gaze. “Considering your condition.” She said, when he gave no response.

He looked away, as she had done, out at the city, though his view of it was clouded by blood until he blinked it away. “I have it under control.” He said.

“Mmm.”

They stood like that, together, looking over the city while he pressed his spirit into the ball of soap.

“As I understand it, you can count the other adepts in this city.” The rose adept said. She looked at him. “I have my own means of doing so, but you, with your spirit, I’m told that you can sense the spirits of others like yourself even when they are miles away. Like a resonance, or a beacon.”

Thakur said nothing. From their vantage point above the city he could see the Midnight plains plunging down the curve of the Bottom’s horizon, half a dozen of them, massive and black as the dark of the dregs where he’d grown up, a formation of dark shapes advancing on them through the haze that obscured the Bottom beyond the Horizon.

“The agent I sent to collect your daughters was sent with more than a single mission.” The Rose Adept went on. “While he was there he was tasked with finding out more about the adept you claimed to kill at the start of your own ascension.”

“Did kill.” He said without turning to her.

She gave a slow nod. “There are many similarities between power in the dregs, and above them.” She went on. “Factions, like the sects, clans, and families you know. They divide this city, fight over it, reduce it, where they do, to wastelands like those you can see if you look turnward from this part of the tower.”

He kept his eyes on the shapes moving towards them through the sky.

“Try it, if you will.” She said. “You will see what I mean.”

“I’ve met adepts before.” Thakur whispered. He finally pulled his eyes from the black shapes above. Her eyes were at least as black as the plains, if not blacker, despite their pinprick stars. “I don’t have any desire to meet another.”

The false adept turned from him and paced to the far end of the balcony. She stopped at a rose he could feel dripping with the shadow that had replaced her spirit and bent quickly to breath in its fragrance. Her shadow squirmed at the influx of darkness and she seemed to grow momentarily in his third eye before fading once more to her normal void. She looked at him. “How well do you remember your cultivation?” She asked.

He looked across the city without responding for a moment. “Not well.” He finally admitted.

She nodded and surveyed the flower she’d just inhaled. “Two of your guards died. Did you know that?”

Thakur’s hands clenched around the railing but he had to wipe quickly at the blood that pooled in the corners of his eyes. “No.” He replied.

“They did.” She replied. “I sent them to check on you when you were at your worst. I thought they would be safe, their spirits were strong, cultivators, open meridians in each of them, and yet they died. I’m not surprised you don’t remember. They told me you’d been writing on the walls. Unfinished sentences, before they died.”

“Why did you send them?”

“You weren’t collecting your meals, and it had been two days. I thought you might be dead, if Khunawal hadn’t said he could feel your spirit moving beneath us even when he was two or three stories above you.”

Thakur felt the soap in his hand crumble as his fist squeezed around it, felt the last of its being succumb to the icon that made his breath a hazard to everything around him. He turned from the false adept to hide his shame and grabbed the nearest thing at hand to push his spirit into instead, a single rose blossom plucked from among the thorns.

“You shouldn’t have sent them.” He told her. In his hand the rose seemed to resist his breath. There was a knot of darkness drifting amidst its petals that consumed his spirit as he pushed it into the blossom, that dissipated his breath even as the blood red petals curled and wilted around it and the stalk shriveled and turned to dust.

The Rose Adept let him mutilate her rose in silence while she looked out at the city and the void where her spirit should have been fluttered within her like the moths that seemed to be its source. Eventually he held nothing but a pool of red around a tiny fold of infinite black.

“I have some small power.” She mused. “The power to heal. Life without end. They are small powers in the scale of things. I have lived in this city, in this tower, since the city was no more than an outpost at the mouth of tunnels no one dared to explore. When my garden was just a small patch of green amidst a salty waste, and my butterflies no more than a child’s secret. I’ve watched families rise and fall, sects, organizations. I’ve seen adepts destroy entire towers, and level whole blocks for the sake of their sect’s base of power. I have watched the city unite, and fall into conflict, over and over again. Held children as they died, watched whole families get wiped out because they made the wrong enemies and had no one to defend them.”

She turned to him. “Not so different from what happened to your sect, or would have happened, if you hadn’t killed the gunpowder adept as you did.”

He said nothing. The void at the heart of the rose in his hand began to fray and dissipate as his spirit pressed into it. The adept approached him and placed a hand on his arm as the blossom finally succumbed and drifted through his fingers as ash. She extended a hand to him and when he looked, he found a ball of glass occupying her palm, cut flat on one side as though for use as a paperweight. He took it and moved his spirit from what little remained of the dying rose to the glass sphere while she moved on past him towards the little room adjoining the open balcony. She pressed a button along the railing and the glass roof of the garden groaned and rattled along its tracks.

“There are four adepts in the city, if you cared to feel for them.” The Rose Adept told him as the glass ceiling closed. “Most of those hold innocuous icons as the source of their power. The Hammer adept of the Barrayar organization is perhaps the most powerful, in sheer military terms, if that organization ever decided to deploy him in their conflicts. The organizations that keep them, however, rarely do so. Demonstrations of the adept’s power are usually all that is required to keep subordinates in line, and such organizations that have adepts are usually near the peak of that power. Adepts keep the peace, at the top, they serve as deterrents more than the weapons they have the potential to become.”

The glass half sphere in Thakur’s hand clouded with corruption as the fumes of his spirit danced within. He looked up, when it became too clouded for him to see his spirit, and watched the canopy rattle above him on its tracks.

“I don’t care.” He whispered.

The glass panels landed on the balcony with a clang and locks reached up to secure the lip around the garden. In the silence that followed, Thakur became once more aware of the fluttering gusts from the invisible creatures that lay thick among the flowers around them.

“You did, once.” The woman replied. “It was no common thing you did, to kill an adept without open meridians of your own.”

Thakur turned to glare at her while the ball of glass in his hand began to warm with corruption. Empty voids met his glare and he looked away just to blink away more blood.