One by one the masters told the Rose Adept about Thakur’s condition while he watched her meander about her roses. She touched some of them, examined their leaves and their petals, and sometimes, after examining them, she brought them to her nose to inhale. Each time she did the gathered masters fell silent until she moved on to the next raised garden bed before they continued.

The burning light of the core beyond the glass of the balcony made Thakur’s eyes ache, and when it came time for him to tell his part of his story he might have struggled with it if he hadn’t already gone over it a dozen times that afternoon. He wondered what time it was in the cycle down below, and how much longer he would have to stay awake and endure the nightmare this trip had become.

“And the wife.” She said when the masters got to her, “Her spirit still shines normally? Despite her symptoms?”

“It does, adept.” The one who’d been addressing her said. “We even touched her with one of your moths, but it seemed to… to… it seemed to die.”

She did look at them then, but she said nothing, and they went on.

“We thought,” Khunawal went on when they’d finished giving her their diagnoses, “that this might be a matter you would wish to attend to yourself, considering its similarities to… well, we thought you might wish to study the problem yourself.”

Little breezes danced around them and the adept looked up to follow something Thakur couldn’t see with her pupil-less eyes. “I will examine him myself.” She said after a moment of silence.

“Should we expect you in the lower clinic, to examine the wife?” Khunawal asked.

She was quiet for a moment. “No.” She said at last.

“She is connected.” Khunawal went on. “Adept, I am sure it-“

She raised a hand. “I will come-” she interrupted, “if I choose.” She turned her empty eyes to him and Khunawal quailed.

“As you wish.”

She nodded and turned back to her flower. “You may go now.” She said. “Leave him, and do nothing for the wife. I will issue my own diagnosis, if I come to one.”

Khunawal bowed and gave Thakur a sideways glance Thakur couldn’t interpret before departing with the rest of the masters.

When they were alone among the tangled green and red of the rose garden the adept turned her black eyes to Thakur and regarded him for a long silent moment. She approached, paced around him, as though measuring him while he stood stiff as a post leaning on his cane. He felt the air flutter around him as something brushed by the nape of his neck.

“You are from very deep in the dregs. That is certainly true.” The adept said at last. She came to a stop in front of him some six feet away, black eyes shining in the orange light of the core.

He frowned at her air of assumed absolute authority now that they were alone until he thought of his wife sleeping below while some poison ravaged her and he looked at the floor. “Yes, adept.”

“A long journey, I have no doubt.” The woman said.

He nodded and lifted his head to face her. “Longer, thanks to this,” he touched a hand to his chest, “and this…” he tapped the cane he’d been permitted to keep on the floor of the balcony.

“I’m sure.” The adept’s eyes seemed not to move, though when her head moved the small stars picked out in the black sky where the whites should have been shifted more like a reflection than the eyes they seemed to have replaced.

“Can you heal us?” Thakur asked. “Will you?”

Those black eyes didn’t blink as she regarded him for a moment while one hand trailed the long stem of a rose nearby. “That remains to be seen.” She replied.

Thakur’s frown returned and he looked down to grind the tip of his cane into the cement. “There were healers in the eighth pit.” Thakur told her. He lifted the cane and tilted it to examine the bottom for damage then set it gently back onto the ground and looked up to meet her unsettling eyes. “We did not come all this way because we’d heard there were more on the surface.” They gazed at one another for a long moment.

Something moved near the adept and she turned, lifted a finger and crooked it in order to gaze quietly at the thing, invisible to Thakur, that landed there. Thakur’s grip on the head of his cane tightened and it creaked as he leaned more heavily on it and ground the tip once more into the cement.

Eventually the woman turned, tilted her head, and led him out of the garden into the adjoining room.

“Thousands come to my tower everyday hoping to see the Rose Adept.” She said as she walked, finger still crooked in the air. “Few ever do. Few need to. There are few wounds my servants cannot attend to. Even urgent cases rarely require my skill.” Whatever she was watching on her finger flit away and she stopped to watch it go before she slowly dropped her hand. She looked at him, really looked at him, he thought, for the first time since he’d arrived. “Only the interesting cases are brought to me now. Interesting cases, and, experiments, or opportunities.”

Thakur tried not to shudder as those cold black eyes surveyed him. “Heal us.” He said. “And I do not care which we are to you.”

She met his eyes, or might have, if there were still eyes behind the voids he looked into. She nodded. “Come then, and we shall see.”

They entered the adjoining room and she pointed to one of the couches around the rippling bowl of water as she passed it. “Sit.” She commanded.

Thakur limped to the couch and sat. When the adept swept a hand across the bowl of water the ripples stopped. She approached him, arm held out as though balancing something delicate across its length. “We will be quick, if we can.” The woman said. She stepped directly over him and raised her arm over his head. “You must hold still now,” she told him, “And let them taste you.”

“Let what?” He asked, but she’d already shaken out her arm and he froze as he felt small invisible things flutter around him, stirring the air with phantom wings, tickling his face and arms where they touched his skin.

“My butterflies.” The adept replied, stepping back. “My rose moths.”

Thakur did his best to hold perfectly still as the invisible creatures flit around him. He tried to spot them where he could feel their touch on his arm or the gentle breath of air as something flit past his nose, but there was never anything to see. Gradually the sensation of being crawled across diminished and when he looked up at the adept she was frowning.

“What is happening?” He asked.

She only shook her head and turned to another table beside one of the couches. She pulled a small circular mirror from it and told him to hold out his hand. Thakur did and, with a deft flick, she slashed his finger with a needle then grabbed his wrist as he sucked in a breath and held it above the mirror until a single drop of blood dripped onto the reflective surface.

She released him and he retrieved his hand to massage the spot she’d held him before he pinched sharp wound she’d left on his finger.

The rose adept lifted the mirror and seemed to study his blood. She breathed on it and turned its angle to catch the light while the fog from her breath receded on the glass. She smeared the blood around with one finger.

“They’ve tested my blood.” Thakur told her as he massaged his hand. “What can you-”

She lifted the blood smeared finger to her lips and tasted it then spat it back onto the mirror.

He fell silent.

She gazed at the mirror for sometime, rubbing her bloody finger absently with another. Finally she looked back to him. “Thakur.” She said it as though tasting the name on her tongue, rolling it around in her mind. “Tell me again what it feels like, the pain in your chest. You described it as a fire. Fire is typically a living thing, moving. What makes you describe it as such?”

Thakur put a hand to his chest and took a slow breath, felt the burn course and swell within him as it had since the quiet cycle when he’d killed the gunpowder adept. “It moves when I breath.” He replied. “Like a bonfire.”

“Has it swelled since it began?” She asked. “Grown mostly, or faded? Do you have better days, or does it mostly remain stable?”

Thakur shook his head. “I don’t know.”

The adept looked down at the blood on her fingers and delicately set the mirror down on the table next to her then touched a clip at her shoulder. A familiar shot from the clip in a green bolt of light and a moment later a bent old man appeared at one of the doors to the room. “Decontamination.” The adept told him, pointing to the glass. “And something to clean up.”

The bent dark skinned man bowed and disappeared only to reappear a moment later with a cloth she used to wipe her fingers and a pair of tongs he used to carry it and the mirror out of the room at arms length. She paced around the table enclosed in the wider room by the couches and chairs arranged around it while A single ripple appeared on the glassy surface of the bowl at their center. Thakur thought he caught a glimpse of something crystalline and winged reflected at the edges of the rippling water.

The adept sat as the door closed behind the servant and she regarded Thakur across the table and its bowl of water. “What is it that you do so far down in the deeps?” She asked him.

“I purify water.” Thakur replied. “With filters and pressure mostly. Some heat. I thought at first it might have been poisons, from the water, but when Mayanna got sick I…” He trailed off, then looked up at the woman across from him. “Is it a spiritual parasite?” he asked. “Did I… get Mayanna sick?”

“You draw poisons from the water?” The adept asked. “Venoms?”

Thakur nodded.

“And what can you tell me of the venoms you remove?” She asked.

Thakur looked inward for a moment, then shook his head. “Everything.” He replied. “Anything.”

“I thought as much.” She sighed. She lifted the hand she’d rubbed with his blood into the air, still rubbing thumb and forefingers absently together as she studied him. “And the path to becoming an adept?” She asked him. “What could you tell me of that?”

Thakur reeled mentally at the turn in the conversation. “Adepthood?” He asked.

“Yes.” The woman looked at her fingers. She dropped her hands to her lap and interlaced them as she turned back to him. “Adepthood.”

“Nothing.” Thakur replied. “I mean, cultivation. Meridians.”

“Yes.” The woman said. “All part of an adept’s journey although not, contrary to popular belief, the beginning of the process.”

Thakur just stared at her. “What does this have to do with my wife?” He asked. “With me?”

“It could have everything to do with you.” She replied.