The Dreamer's Curse (Book 2) Page 16

  Sky had been quiet while they’d talked, but with none of the adults saying anything, he dared to ask, “What are they doing?”

  Decker cocked his head slightly. “Didn’t Sevana explain? No? Alright, well, the fountain that you saw in the middle of the square? It’s got a rather troublesome magic device in it that we’re trying to shut off. But the only way to do that, or so I’m told, is to take the water out of the fountain.”

  “Why?” Sky asked with intensity, as if truly trying to understand.

  “The water gives the magic…what did Sarsen call it? A gadgick?” he asked Sevana. At her nod, he continued, “The gadgick, then. Anyway, the water gives it power. So they think if they can find the source of the water, and divert it so the gadgick doesn’t receive any, then the gadgick will stop working. After that, they can remove it without any problem.”

  “Oh.” Sky looked at the two grown men playing with sticks and his face screwed up in a doubtful frown. “So how do you find water with sticks?”

  Sevana laughed outright, finding this question hilarious. “It does look odd, doesn’t it?”

  Decker shook his head in resignation. “I can see you’re not going to explain. Sky, what you’re seeing is an ancient art called dowsing. The sticks in those men’s hands will react to water, you see. So even though they’re above ground like this, the sticks will dip forward, pointing toward the water under the earth.”

  “Well, actually, the two rods will swing,” she corrected. “They’ll either cross each other, or swing away from each other. But he’s right in that the y-stick will dip forward.”

  “Oh.” He chewed on this information for a while before asking, “Is this how you broke the prince’s curse?”

  “No, not at all,” she denied easily, striding slowly behind Denis as the man crossed through a shady grove of trees. “I borrowed the strength of a water dragon to do it.”

  “EHHHH?” All four males stopped dead and snapped their heads around to stare at her incredulously. Even though Bernard walked a good twenty feet away at this point, he could apparently still hear her.

  “You’re, ah, exaggerating?” Decker asked.

  “Not in the slightest.”

  When she didn’t elaborate, he gave her a long look. “What will it take for me to hear the story?”

  “Dinner,” she responded sweetly. “With dessert, of course.”

  “Of course.” Mouth quirked in a dry smile, he flipped a hand, palm up, in acknowledgement. “Fine. Dinner’s on me. What happened?”

  Mouth quirked up in a wry smile, she mentally shrugged and prepared to tell the story. Really, there was no reason why she shouldn’t. And what did they have to do out here, anyway, while waiting for the rods to react?

  So she started from the beginning, from when she kidnapped the prince from his palace bedroom, and went all the way to the end when she walked out while leaving a frozen room of people behind. During the course of her career, she rarely told stories like this to anyone except Master or Sarsen, so it came as a surprise to her that she found the retelling…enjoyable. Seeing their reactions, their intense interest, felt flattering.

  She had the full tale out and was fielding questions when Bernard’s rods abruptly crossed. “Found it!” he called.

  Everyone went directly to his side. “How far down, can you tell?” Sevana asked, staring at the rods with interest. Did she imagine that they vibrated slightly in his hands?

  “I’d say maybe ten feet down?” Bernard’s brows furrowed as he considered this. “Maybe less than that. It’s a good, strong reaction.”

  “Alright, map it,” she ordered. “See if it traces back to the village or not. If it does, we know we have the right source.”

  “Sure thing.” He turned on his heels, reversing direction, and started for the village, paying close attention to the rods in his hands.

  Sevana held her breath as they walked. They all did. If this didn’t turn out to be the right one, they’d have to map it regardless before starting again, just so they didn’t mistake it for a new line. But she truly hoped that this would be the correct one. She’d already been at this job longer than she’d anticipated, and at the rate things were going, it’d take another week at least to wrap it up.

  Bernard went in a beeline—literally. He went in this direction for a while, then twisted a little the opposite way, stopped over a particularly large body of water (he assumed it to be a pond or something along those lines), but he always moved forward. He came to the village outskirts an hour after finding the source, and they all breathed a sigh of relief.

  “I think it’s safe to call it, ma’am,” Bernard announced, letting the rods relax at his sides.

  “I agree.” Of course, this line directly crossed the road. She highly doubted anyone would let her dig in the middle of it. “Trace back a good ten feet, away from the road, and mark it for me. I’ll go get the shovels.”

  “Ah, ma’am?” Denis scratched at the back of his head, giving her a funny look. “If it’s shovels you want, we’ve got plenty.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” she assured him dryly. “But which would you rather dig with? Ordinary, plain old shovels? Or an Artifactor’s shovel, able to cut through anything like it was soft butter?”

  “Ahhh…”

  “I thought as much.” Smirking, she told Decker, “Round up a crew of volunteers for me. I’m going through my clock to get the shovels, but it’ll be a quick trip. We’ll need plenty of space to work in, so carve out a five-foot by five-foot hole.”

  “I’ll have people together by the time you get back,” he promised.

  Of course, that left her with the question once again of what to do with Sky. Or no, perhaps it didn’t. With children, it all depended on how she phrased the question. I’m going to fetch a dozen shovels would not be the right way to say it. She looked down at him and asked, “So, how would you like to take a trip through a magic portal and be inside a talking mountain?”

  His eyes lit up. “YES!”

  “That’s what I thought.” The three men—all apparently experienced with children—bit back laughter. Smug, she took Sky by the hand and led him toward her makeshift workroom, where the clock sat. “Be back in a few minutes!”

  ~ ~ ~

  I need a dam expert.

  Sevana sat staring at the map Bernard and Denis had drawn for her, showing where the river was, as well as two other bodies of water. When Master had first proposed the idea of diverting or somehow stopping the water source that fed into the fountain, it had sounded so easy, so simplistic. All they needed to do was find the water source, trace it, and block it. Right?

  Wrong.

  She hadn’t thought about it until she’d gone back to Big with a wide-eyed Sky in tow, but as she went to retrieve the shovels, it occurred to her that none of the magicians knew much about constructing dams. Why should they? They were hardly ever called to do such a thing. So she went to her research room and spent a few minutes finding a promising book that would explain such a method and perhaps give her a pointer or two on designing it. She’d tucked it under one arm, and with Decker and Sky’s help, dragged a dozen shovels back through. Then she’d carried them to the site that Bernard had marked for digging, finding five men already on standby, waiting on her.

  Letting the men do the heavy work, she sat nearby on a portable chair, book and map propped up in her lap, and read. Or she had been reading. Now she just stared at the map in frustration.

  Water, by nature, doesn’t disappear just because one wants it to. It does not stop flowing or stay stationary because a powerful, important and beautiful Artifactor wants it to. Water, being water, would flow, and if something tried to impede it, it would find a different route to flow in, but it wouldn’t just stop. The book had mentioned oh-so-casually that if one was to build a dam, especially an underground dam as she wished to do, that one would of course need to extract the excess water with wells, through a dam body made of sand or through means of a drainage
pipe. It had, in fact, mentioned it so casually that she’d nearly skimmed over it entirely.

  Curse Master’s hide, but he had hit the nail precisely on the head earlier. Extracting the gadgick from the fountain would indeed be a simple matter but it would not be easy. She couldn’t just block the underground stream and not expect repercussions. She would have to come up with some sort of outlet for the pent-up water or she would create a flood plain right here near the road.

  She sat there, absently listening to the men talk about how nice the weather was, and how the wind took the edge of heat off, all of it washing over her without really interrupting her thoughts.

  “I’m an Artifactor,” she complained aloud to no one in particular. “Not an architect!”

  Decker, of course, heard her and trotted over. “Problem?”

  “What am I supposed to do with the pent-up water?” she asked him, tired of thinking of solutions. It seemed on this job that’s all she’d done—run into increasingly frustrating problems she had to devise solutions to. “We can’t just dam up the underground stream and not expect flooding to happen.”

  “Ah.” He snapped his fingers, an obvious light going off in his head. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “You and me both,” she grumbled under her breath.

  “But is it really necessary?” He turned to look back at the hole the men were digging, looking thoughtful. “I mean, you said the fountain would dry out in about three days on its own. This is only temporary, right?”

  “Do you want the road and all the streets in the village flooded?” she asked mock-sweetly.

  “Errr…”

  “Then that rather answers the question, doesn’t it?”

  Decker frowned, thought another moment, and then suggested, “Hube would probably have an idea of how to go about this.”

  True, the man seemed capable of building anything. And he knew the lay of the land and what building materials were available as well. “Get him.”

  With a sloppy salute, he put his shovel down and jogged toward the village at an easy lope.

  Turning to the little boy sitting so patiently at her side, she requested, “Go get Master for me as well. He might have solutions to this problem that I don’t know about.”

  He copied Decker’s gesture exactly before hopping to his feet and sprinting for the village in that universal speed that all children seemed to move in. Sevana smiled as she watched him. Having a gopher on hand at all times had its perks. Maybe she should think about taking on an apprentice after all.

  Then she remembered the trouble Bel used to get into and rethought that idea.

  The men came surprisingly quickly, too quickly for her to get much further into the book and see if there were specific directions on how to build one of those sand dams. (Not that she had any idea of where she’d get that much sand.)

  She closed the book with a thump and stood as they reached her. “Alright, gentlemen, here’s the problem. When we dam up that water, it’s going to build up and create a flood right here near the road.”

  “Sure will,” Hube agreed casually, almost cheerfully. “So what’s the plan for that?”

  She flicked her eyes to him in a glare. “Why don’t you tell me? I have never built a dam before and have no experience in this.”

  “Well, from what ya folks are tellin’ me, this dam of yours is temporary.” He waited for a confirming nod before continuing. “So it won’t need anything real fancy to fix it. I’m thinking a draining pipe and a timber dam would likely do us fine.”

  “Timber dam?” Her book hadn’t mentioned anything like that.

  “They don’t build ‘em often these days, as they don’t last more than a handful of years,” Hube explained, warming up to his subject. “They have to be wet to maintain the water retention, see, and they rot fast like a barrel would. But for what we’re doing, we don’t need anything that’ll last more than a week. They’re usually built across rivers and streams, that sort of thing, but we can make a square one to hold water with.”

  “Like a pool,” Master suggested.

  Hube grinned. “That’s a better way of puttin’ it, yes. Now, trick is, to hold that much water, it’s gonna need to be more than one layer. See, way you do it is, build one level with the logs crisscrossing, for strength. Then build another layer a foot away. The gap between ‘em you fill with dirt and rock. Gives it the strength it needs to hold the water’s weight.”

  Sevana didn’t underestimate the weight water could have. If Hube thought it would take two levels of wood and another of stone, he was likely right.

  “Instead of constructing a large pool, let’s try to make two smaller ones,” Master suggested. “After all, we have no idea how much water is going to spill over because of our dam. We might not need a particularly large pool.”

  She stared at the hole, which looked impressively deep from here, and tried to calculate something she couldn’t see. As one would expect, it was nearly impossible. “I suppose if two small pools don’t do the job, we can always build more.”

  “We’ll need to keep an eye on ‘em, make sure we got time to build another,” Hube concurred.

  Sevana patted him on the shoulder, a wide smile on her face. “Go for it, Hube.”

  He blinked at her several times before raising a hand and pointing at himself. “What, me do it?”

  “You want two complete amateurs to build a dam off that description? This close to the village?” she countered.

  He blinked again, mentally picturing the outcome of that, then chuckled. “Sounds like a bad idea. Alrighty, let’s get on with it then. You two gonna leave it all up to me?”

  “We’ll help,” Master promised just as Sevana opened her mouth to say, I certainly am. “Tell us what materials you need and we’ll get them for you.”

  “Mighty good of you, Master Joles,” Hube said sincerely and with no small measure of relief. “If you would then start getting me the timber. Long trees, at least twenty feet tall, and a good foot in diameter. They won’t have the strength they need otherwise. Strip ‘em of the branches, if you would. I’ll go back and draw up plans today, figure out how much we’ll need. But you’d best get a dozen trees felled.”

  “We’ll see to it,” Master promised.

  “Then I’ll get on those plans.” Hube headed back for his shop at a quick stride, the walk of a man set about on important business.

  Sevana looked at the forest around her, seeing plenty of trees that fit Hube’s criteria, but most of them looked dangerously close to the workers. She liked people volunteering to help her. They were less likely to do so if it got around that she dropped trees on them. “We’re going to need to move away from this area a little before we go around chopping things down.”

  “Not too far,” Decker cautioned. “As it is, it’ll take several teams of horses to drag the lumber over.”

  Sevana waved that away. “Don’t worry about that. We can lift them.”

  Decker looked at the pouch on her waist in bemusement. “You have a spell for that?”

  “Certainly. Magic is handy that way.”

  “We have a spell that will let us cut the trees down as well,” Master assured him, seeming amused at Decker’s reaction.

  The huntsman pondered that for a moment before jerking a thumb to indicate the hole the men were still digging. “And you don’t have a spell that will do that?”

  “We do, actually.” Master grinned at Decker’s expression. “We’re not making them dig for the fun of it, Decker. In truth, the spell we would use for this situation doesn’t dig anything out, but it banishes the dirt. It’s a permanent thing, and on living soil like this, it would have a detrimental effect. It would prevent anything from growing in this area for years. It’s far better that it’s dug out instead of magicked out.”

  “That said, we’ll spare you the extra labor involved with the dams as much as we can.” Sevana spun in a slow circle as she said this, taking a good look around the landscape.
She didn’t want to cut anything too close to the road, as that would obviously cause problems, and this area had odd patches with copses of trees and grass. The nearest section of tall trees that didn’t endanger anything would be… “There. Let’s start there and see how many we can get.”

  Master quirked a brow at her. “I bet tonight’s dinner that I can get six trees over here faster than you can.”

  She stared at him from the corner of her eye. Oh? Someone felt feisty. “With or without branches?”

  “Without.”

  “You’re on, old goat.”

  Master laughed out loud in delight. “You haven’t called me that in ages.”

  Actually, she couldn’t immediately remember the last time she had called him that. He always liked it when she did, though, for some strange reason.

  Wanting to keep Sky out of harm’s way but still nearby, she turned to him and said, “Sky, this man is a notorious brat. I don’t trust him. I need you to be the judge.”

  Sky perked up, happy to be included. “Sure!”

  “Stand near the workmen,” she directed, “and keep an eye on things. Also keep an eye on them. If they hit water, tell me but don’t get too close to where we’re logging. It’s likely to get dangerous over there.”

  “I’ll stay over here,” he promised.

  Sevana, glad to have that sorted, gave her Master a challenging look. “Well? Shall we start?”

  “Don’t pout later when I win, sweetling.”

  She snorted, already heading for the tree line. “I return those words right back to you.”

  No one could dig a hole, build a dam, and construct two timber pools in a single afternoon, of course. In fact, they still had a little digging left to do by the time the sun started to sink over the horizon. Sevana sent Master and Sky on ahead to the inn for dinner, making a detour by Hube’s to see how the plans were coming along. She spent several minutes looking over his design, but really, he knew what to do better than she did, so she didn’t give him more than a nod of approval. By the time she made it back to the inn, the three boys had claimed a back corner table, plates of half-consumed food in front of them. Hinun lay at Master’s feet, an empty bowl beside him. It was sad when the wolf got dinner before she did. Sarsen, the only one facing the door, saw her approach and waved at her. “Sev!” he called over the din of overlapping conversations, “I heard you lost!”