At first Mayana thought she’d simply caught the cold making its rounds among the women at the sect-market where she collected their allotment of food. Water still moved up the pipes and consumables once more made their way down now that the violence was over. His wife had often spent hours going through the allotments, moving stall to stall to trade her goods for others, her tales for gossip, and sometimes, her greetings for the viruses moving through the population, yet she’d never come home with a cold like this. She complained of feeling heavy and pain in her heart and sometimes even in her veins.

When Thakur woke to find her coughing blood into the pillow next to him, he called for the medic.

“Her symptoms sound like marsh lung.” The doctor told them when he examined her in their newly decorated sitting room. He was a balding man with white hair and a reedy little voice that quavered as he made his pronouncements. “Except, if that were the case, I would hear more liquid in her lungs when she breathed.” He listened intently to his stethoscope and moved it back and forth across her chest. “Breath for me again my dear.”

Mayana took a deep breath while Thakur and their daughters watched from the corners of the room.

“I feel like I’m burning up.” Her voice had gone hoarse from coughing through most of the morning. “Like there’s something eating me from the inside.’

The doctor put away his stethoscope and fussed over its box for a moment before putting a hand to her forehead to take her temperature. “Well, you aren’t warm.” He said. “But you wouldn’t necessarily run a fever if it was marsh lung. It’s a growth in the lungs you see. You would probably feel cold, if anything. Clammy even. Do you still find it difficult to breath?”

“Everything is difficult.” Thakur’s wife replied.

“Well… I’m afraid, I can’t help you then. I can give you some pain killers and some fever suppressors, in case your temperature does begin to rise, but if it isn’t marsh lung, and it is not, I’m afraid I don’t know what it could be.”

When Thakur’s wife looked up at him from the chair where she’d just been examined he felt as helpless as the moment the powder adept pulled him from the mud to shake him, more so, because it was no longer his own fate he wanted to stop.

His wife collapsed on the stairs to their room sometime in the middle of the next day cycle when the pumps thumped their loudest moving water towards the topside. After that, Thakur confined her to bed while her daughters cared for her and he looked for some other way to cure her before his own poisons made him too weak to go on.

If there was a grander house in the Eight Pits Cistern than the one Anand granted to Thakur, it was his own. White washed turrets peered over a low exterior fence of brick as Thakur approached it and men who’d guarded the sect-leader during the war, now uniformed and pracitcally sparkling, stopped him at the gate while a familiar shot inside to announce him. He was assigned a boy to make sure he wasn’t lost moving through the maze of corridors and rooms or the bustle of servants that seemed to fill every corner of it, men hauling tools and building material, women lugging totes of laundry, and liveried clerks and messengers with the Eight Pit Sect’s emblem pinned to their breast while familiars spun above them all.

Anand sat at the heart of the hubbub, scribbling away at a desk in a small office filled with familiars waiting above clips all along the wall. He only nodded when the boy announced Thakur’s name, then waved for the boy to go out, closing the door on the noise and purpose of the manor beyond.

Thakur fiddled with the head of his cane while he listened to the rasp of Anand’s pen and picked at the design etched in it’s head. Eventually Anand set the pen aside and sighed as he rotated his wrist and leaned back in his seat. He smiled as he looked up at Thakur then stood from his chair to move around the desk.

“Thakur.” A strong hand took Thakur’s while Anand’s other took Thakur’s shoulder. “Thank you for your patience. A courier just came from the top and I find its best to reply quickly while I still remember that they aren’t my subordinates. It can go badly when I issue them commands instead of requests.” He smiled and patted Thakur’s shoulder then gestured to a pair of seats. “But how is your family settling in?”

“Well enough.” Thakur replied. “We don’t have even a quarter of the household you seem to have hear.”

Anand made a sour expression as they sat. “Yes, a necessity I’m afraid. The adept seemed to like this place. He took a special interest in it anyways, when he was blowing holes in the walls for fun. It will quiet down when the repairs are all done and things get back to normal.”

Thakur settled himself gingerly on the edge of the chair and propped his cane between his knees as Anand settled back in his with a smile.

“Now how can I help you?” Anan asked. “Have you found an apprentice yet from among those boys I sent you?”

“I haven’t picked one yet.” Thakur replied. “They are all good boys, but…”

Anand nodded without Thakur having to go on. “I don’t look forward to the day I have to train my own replacement either,” he said, “there is a finality to the thought that, well, I’ve spent too many cycles lately thinking I might not hear the next one. I can do without the reminder for a little while.” He rubbed his forehead and looked at the familiars waiting for him above his desk in a plethora of shapes and colors, a few of them flashing for attention.

Thakur nodded and bounced the tip of his cane off the floor a few times until Anand turned back to him.

“What can I do for you then?” Anand asked. “I’m sure you didn’t take time away from your family to chat?”

“It’s, Mayana,” Thakur replied, “My wife. I… she’s very sick.” He looked up at Anand who nodded gravely for him to go on. Thakur looked away. “You said, when you gave us that house, that if there was anything we needed, you would do what you could to get it for us.”

“Of course.” Anand replied. “You’re family now.”

“Of course.” Thakur gazed up at the ceiling. When he didn’t immediately go on, Anand leaned forward.

“Thakur,” he siad, “we’re brothers now. If there is something you want from me, you just have to say it. No need to clear the water between us. Do you want a medic? Medicine? Servants to look after her? Say what you want and I will see it done, or see someone else see it done.”

Thakur nodded, then looked back down at his cane. “I know.” he said.

“Then what can I do for you?” Anand asked again, settling back, once more, into his chair.

Thakur looked up at Thakur’s face. “I’ve already had the medics look at her. They say, well, they say they don’t know what’s wrong with her.” He looked back at his cane, bounced it on the floor again then held it still. “Have you ever been to the surface?” He asked. He looked up at Anand.

“The surface.” Anand replied, nonplussed. “No, I’ve never been there.”

Thakur looked down at his cane and bounced the tip off the floor again. “But you send letters there.”

“I communicate up and down the pipes we move our water into, for all of the obvious reasons, and because there can be repercussions for us, materially, when the political situation up top changes. We might have centuries of history in these pipes, but the world above us was an ocean once. I don’t like to imagine what would happen if they ever stopped needing the water we purify down here.”

Thakur nodded.

“I don’t think that you’ve ever been there.” Anand replied.

Thakur shook his head. “It was one of my father’s dreams, to see it, once. He collected stories about it, the place all our water went. He always said he would go when I took over his duties, but he never did. Too long, I think, and too complicated to get all the permissions, protections, and passes.”

Anand nodded. “There are at least four sects between us and the surface. You would want their permission, and as I understand it, their protection, once you neared the top, to pass through the more lawless sections.”

Thakur looked up at him and met Anand’s gaze for a long moment.

“Is she so sick?” Anand asked. “Is this some last journey you want to take her on?”

“No.” Thakur replied. He looked away. “No, I… my father collected stories, I told you, stories about the surface. He always liked stories about the heavens best, other worlds, beyond the surface, but he used to tell stories about the people up there too. Things he heard from traders and travelers, things they’d heard in higher levels. He met one man who told him there were more adepts than normal people up there, that they became adepts when they were children and it turned their skin black, and a bunch of other nonsense, but he did talk about a few specific adepts, I remember my father believing those parts. He had a big book about the surface where he kept his notes and lists of things he wanted to see, and he added them to it. One of them was supposed to be able to fly, and another one could see through walls, hear things he wasn’t supposed to, pass through the foundations. Have you, heard any of those kinds of stories? From above?”

Anand leaned back in his chair. “I’ve heard that there are adepts up top at least,” he replied, “and after what we’ve seen, those sorts of things wouldn’t surprise me. The powder adept seemed capable enough of seeing through walls, or at least tracking the explosives I moved around without any need for spies.”

Thakur nodded. “There was also a story about an adept that could, heal. A garden adept, or blood, or some such. I don’t remember now, but I remember the stories. People went to her, and they were healed.”

In the silence that followed Thakur could hear distant saws working to repair the house.

“It’s no small thing you’re asking for.” Anand told him.

Their eyes met and Thakur looked back down at his cane.

“My wife is very sick.” He said. “There may not even be any truth in it, but, I thought, if you talk to people up stream…”

Anand crossed his arms. “The upper levels don’t like when we start asking questions about other territories. As I understand it, it’s not easy to get people living this deep, and there have been, incidents, uprisings, in a very real sense, attempts to migrate towards the surface when sections of the pipes flood or the air goes bad.”

“But you can find out.” Thakur replied.

Anand studied him. “You would wish to accompany your wife if there was such an adept, I presume. To see the surface?”

Thakur nodded. “If it were possible.”

Anand raised an eyebrow. “And your duties at the pumps?”

“Ruhk, from the seventh pit, knows my duties, and his son knows his. He will not find it hard to cover the eighth pit during my absence.”

Anand nodded absently, then touched his familiar clip to summon the little glowing sprite. “I will ask.” He said. “There are favors owed that I haven’t had a reason to call in until now. It will give me an opportunity to, test, some old alliances.” The sprite unrolled into a flat plate covered in menus which Anand swiped through until he found the panel he wanted and started filling it in with text. “I’ll let you know what I hear.”

The response came that evening, at an hour when the pumps cycled down from the thump of engines laboring tons of water upstream to the hum of hydraulic pressure dragging the purified contents of the lake away with minimal help from the station in the eighth pit. It was an hour when most sensible people slept, but in his room, in the fabulous house he’d won for them, even the loud cycles were felt as little more than a vibration through the walls, while his wife’s labored breathing seemed to echo in the room they’d come to share.

Anand brought the answer himself.

“It took some doing, but I have arranged transportation myself.” He told Thakur in a low voice in the hallway outside the sick room. He produced a small packet of papers that he handed to Thakur. “For you and your wife.”

Thakur thumbed through the letters, seeing his and Mayana’s names stenciled into forms and passports that bore the names of a half a dozen different sects, families, and organizations.

“You’ll have a guard as well, who will serve as a guide, once you reach the Twelve Pipes intersection. There’s a sect between here and there, but the Twelve Pipes is where our pipe ends. There are three sects working there. The Wassen Family, the Galuroo organization, and the Twin Lights Sect. Take these,” he tapped the bundled paperwork, “to the sect and they’ll assign someone to take you the rest of the way.”

“And at the end?” Thakur asked.

“At the end of what?”

“Of all of this.” Thakur looked up from the paperwork. “At the surface.”

Anand smiled. “We don’t have much affiliation with the Twin Lights Sect, the Galuroo organization runs the pipes moving through there, so we deal mostly with them, but the intersection is a highway for goods and people moving to and from the surface. The Twin Lights Sect makes a point of collecting information and serving as guides for people moving between the layers. They tell me that your rumors are true. There is an adept above us that can heal your wife.” He flipped the packet of papers in Thakur’s hand and pointed to a symbol stamped onto the back of some ticket. “They call her the Rose Adept.” He told him. “This ticket will get you and your wife into her clinic once you reach the top.”