Thakur’s drivers were dead long before they hit the ground. They probably knew they were dead, probably, when the blood began to run from their eyes and their fingers locked in rigor mortis around the air-cab’s controls while their heart still beat.

Thakur had run out of lead balls to press his spirit into while they waited on the rooftop for the sword adept’s spirit to appear, and he’d had trouble focusing on preventing his spirit from touching them, or the vehicle they drove for him, when he did. Thakur hated flying, mostly he just didn’t trust the vehicles he didn’t understand while they were thousands of yards above the ground, but it had long been obvious that he needed a new plan if he was going to catch the boy, and this, thing, was supposed to be the fastest thing in the air.

The driver slapped the side of the cab with some pride when he told him that. “Wherever you need to go.” He’d said. “Not even a familiar will be able to beat us there.”

It was fast, when the sword adept’s signature appeared to the North and Thakur snapped at them to pile into the car and take off. It was even fast when the engine began to grind from the influence of Thakur’s spirit and the walls of the rear compartment began to rust. It was even fast when the motor failed and the vehicle plummeted towards their destination instead of hurtling towards it in a controlled dive.

“That’s where he’s at!” Thakur shouted at the pilots, as he clutched their seats and pointed out the windshield at the broken towers in the middle of the wasteland. “Take us there!” But they were already dead, or dying. The pilot tried to say something and coughed up blood instead and Thakur jerked the sliding door open on protesting hinges to pull himself onto the roof.

The wind tore at his hair and howled in his ears as they fell. He blinked away bloody tears and spotted the boy standing by himself on top of one of the broken towers surrounded by spiritual knives. His breath burned as he shoved it through the channels in his legs and he leapt, cannoning the cab into the rubble where it shattered against the rubble piles of the wasteland. He yanked his pistol arquebus from his belt as he felt the razor sharp signature in front of him contort and compress along a single edge.

He felt the cut fly towards him. Saw it rippling through the air ahead of a small dust storm. He shouted wordlessly as he flew towards the projection and brought all of the poisonous aura he could into a single knot he hurled towards the approaching cut in the air, just as he had with the father.

This time, the poison didn’t wipe out the projected breath. The projection slammed through it, dissipating the knot of venom he’d cast to cut through to hit him like a solid wall.

The world blurred as Thakur hit the wall of half-corrupted breath. He would have screamed, if he’d had any air in his lungs, and he felt his spirit convulse as it automatically forced breath through channels that reinforced his body so that he would survive.

His impact with the ground should have broken him. It cracked the cement and threw up a cloud of dust as thakur skidded through tangled brush and weeds until he slammed into another broken tower and came to a stop.

Thakur’s indrawn breath of agony wheezed in his chest as he stumbled to his feet and rubble fell on him from the tower above. He weaved as he clambered to the top of the crater made by his own body and spotted the boy in the distance jump onto a bike and hop into the air.

Thakur gave a hoarse shout and hurled a poisonous projection after him but his breath swirled through his meridians out of his control and he felt the breath that flicked out of the other adept to intercept before he collapsed to his knees to hack blood onto the ground while the bike disappeared into the twilight darkness.

Thakur coughed, and coughed, until he felt as though his lungs should be laying on the stones in front of him, instead of the pool of splattered blood running from his beard.

He should be dead. Every inch of his body hurt from his meeting with the ground, but worse than all the pain in his body was the ache in meridians that felt as though they’d been worked over with a hammer. His breath ignored the attempts he made at pushing them into the exercises and techniques he normally used to keep it out of his body and tore through the channels running through his core, his mind, his senses, his limbs, until his entire body felt on fire with agony. He coughed a deep bone splintering cough and blood spattered the dirt between his hands while bloody tears blurred his vision and madness ate at his own sense of self awareness.

He should have died, right there, from an overdose of his own poisons, but his breath slowed as the fire in his meridians receded and he managed to push it back out into the ground around him while the grass and weeds that rose from the devastated ruins blackened and died in an expanding circle and he regained control.

The pain remained, deep in his guts where things had broken, and in lungs that gurgled when he breathed and made him spit blood. He should have died, but he didn’t, and he left a trail of blackened grass in his wake as he limped back towards the rose tower.

He barely controlled his breath as he re-entered the tower at its base and let the guards guide him towards the elevator that would take him down to his cell. He leaned against the walls of the machine as they dropped and coughed more blood into his hand as he wept bloody tears of pain and pressed his breath into everything around him that was not the guards. The steel walls of the elevator blackened with rust as they dropped and the guards stared at him in fear as the sides began to grate against the the elevator shaft. The doors didn’t open when they reached the bottom and Thakur had to rip them aside to march into the prison complex he’d been assigned as his quarters, channeling more burning breath into his limbs in the process.

It hurt. Everything hurt. He wept more bloody tears as he hugged himself and paced the hallways that had been home since his “ascension” to adepthood.

The Rose Adept found him bunched into a corner of one of the cells where he’d smashed the lights in order to sit in darkness while his spirit ate away the cement around him.

“The elevator you came down in is destroyed.” She told him when she arrived outside what was left of the bars to his cell. “I had to have the techs drag it up with a winch before I could come down in a makeshift box.”

Thakur wheezed as he pushed his breath through his external meridian and he felt the blood in his lungs bubble and shift as air moved through them.

“How did it happen?”

“He did something,” Thakur replied, “too much breath, went through my meridians when it hit me and pushed my spirit out of my control while I hit the ground.” He coughed, a long wheeze of a cough, and he put a hand to his chest as though he could hold the blood in by sheer force of strength.

“The sword adept?” The woman behind Thakur asked.

“Who do you think?” Thakur snarled, and coughed violently into his hand. “Look at me.” He wheezed as he coughed and tried to wipe the blood from his hands onto his ragged robes at the same time. “This, there’s no fixing this. No medicine, no magical healing parasites.” He wiped blood from his eyes with an already blood hand. “He’s ruined my body and now, I’m dying.” He coughed again, coughed for long minutes until his body finally gave up.

“You were always dying.” The Adept replied. “That’s why we made our deal.”

Fresh tears forced themselves out of the corners of Thakur’s eyes and he let another coughing fit carry him away while he hammered at his chest and his breath turned the cement around them black with corruption.

“Is the boy dead?” The woman asked.

“No.” Thakur managed through the bubbling in his chest. “He keeps running away.” He snorted and spat blood as he tried to wipe the red stains from his beard. “He’s almost killed me twice now, and he has some trick for hiding from my spirit.” He coughed and wiped blood from his eyes before it could scab in his eyelashes. “How am I supposed to kill him if I can’t get close to him?”

“Your eldest Daughter’s wedding is in a couple of days.” The woman said after a short silence in which his coughing subsided. “Her sister seems to think she’s picked out a gorgeous dress.”

“But not you.” Thakur replied when she didn’t go on.

The false adept shrugged. “I’ve never been married, and I can’t say I’ve ever cared much for such things. I can tell that your youngest does though.”

Thakur’s lungs bubbled and he closed his eyes to restrain the cough by force of will.

“You know the power of an adept.” The false adept behind him went on. “If the Iblanie sent their pet adept against your wife’s new family, do you think they would be able to protect her?”

“Stop.” Thakur rasped. “Just stop.”

“They will.” She replied. “Their last adept, the boy’s father, went on a killing spree that lasted four years during his time with the Iblanie. He didn’t just wipe out the leadership or the military arms of the organizations that opposed the Iblanie during that spree, he killed their families, even babes still on their mother’s breast.”

“I already know what you want from me.” Thakur bubbled. He coughed at last and brought up a bit of blood as the woman with voids for eyes watched him.

“This is not about my demands.” She told him. “Not anymore. Your daughter is going to have a powerful husband in a couple of days, but no marriage can keep her safe while that boy is alive.” She watched him cough until he’d finished bringing up the bits of corrupted lung and blood in his hand. “And you’re running out of time.”

Thakur didn’t turn around to meet the Rose Adept’s empty eyes. He wiped the lung from his hand onto the wall and watched the cement smoke where he’d left a trail of gore with his fingers. “I haven’t even gotten a good look at him.” He replied.

“Then your daughter will get her year of happiness while her sister lives on as their dependent.” The Adept replied. “Or you kill him, and I arrange the marriage I’ve prepared for your second daughter.”

“Banya.” Thakur grated through the blood. “Her name is Banya.”

The adept flicked a hand in dismissal. “I can give your daughters a future, but I can’t protect that future.” She replied. “That is up to you.”

Thakur clenched his fists and slammed one into the smoking wall beside him. Flecks of cement rained down from the indent he left in the wall and the breath he’d channeled accidentally through his hand burned in his channels. “He keeps getting away!”

“Then maybe it’s time you tried harder.”

It took an hour, after she left, before the corruption in the cell reached a point that the walls between it and it’s neighbors began to crumble into rust and blackened gravel, and several more before he felt in control enough to drag himself back to the surface and the light of day.

He spent the following nights prowling the rooftops and glowering at the horizon whenever the aura of the sword icon stabbed into his spiritual perception somewhere out of reach. He no longer kept to the edges of the Iblanie family’s territory as he had while trailed by soldiers and mercenaries on loan from organizations that owed the Rose Adept favors, but leapt between industrial facilities and clambered the slanting rooves of apartment complexes and personal homes to glare at the people living, and sleeping, within.

He couldn’t sleep himself, not after that first night. He’d laid down shortly after the Rose Adept left, but the blood in his chest had made his breath wheeze, and he’d woken from a dream of drowning in his old lake to cough a new lake of poisoned blood onto his cell floor. Sometimes he dozed, in between rooftops, sitting propped up against a utility box that rumbled like his old pumps, or while he crouched over a precipice waiting for the Sword Adept’s aura to appear.

When the aura did, Thakur sometimes went to the street to move after it, but other times he simply crouched at the top of a tower and watched it shift across the city scape beyond view while Thakur coughed up blood until the aura winked out again, leaving Thakur alone once more in the night. He spent some of his days doing the same and was rewarded with more frequent sightings of the boy’s aura, even one as close as few streets away, but they always disappeared, and he was never close enough, or fast enough, to get anywhere near his target when it appeared.

At one point on the third night of prowling he leapt up a tower that gave him a view through lanes of moving traffic of the tower which was supposed to serve as the Iblanie headquarters. It was bright against the night time city scape, still full of people moving in bright lit rooms despite the late hour, well armed guards standing at the doors. When the sword adept’s spiritual signature flickered to life it didn’t appear here though, it didn’t even appear nearby, but miles away from this part of the territory, and, as usual, flickered out only a few moments after it appeared while he glowered at the Iblanie tower and waited to for it to return.

It never did. At least, not while he was there.