The Dreamer's Curse (Book 2) (17 page)

“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!”

She rolled her eyes. Only Sarsen would dare to tease her in
a room full of people. Several patrons at nearby tables stopped abruptly and
looked around with interest, no doubt curious about what she had to say to
that
.
“I did not lose,” she retorted with a sardonic look at the grinning Master. “I
have a witness to prove that, too.”

“Your witness is bribable,” Master informed her. “For the
sake of two helpings of blueberry cobbler, he confessed that I did beat you. By
a good five feet, too.”

“That’s because you
threw
the log five feet!” she
riposted, slinging herself into the only empty chair at the table.

Master, not at all ashamed of such reckless behavior,
chuckled and shrugged.

Sarsen, glancing between them, dared to ask, “Threw?”

“I ask you, what kind of an idiot throws a twenty-foot log?
Any kind of distance?” Just remembering it made her heart thump harder. “I
mean, he was about ten feet away from the workers, granted, but it’s still
nearly six thousand pounds, you know? It left a huge dent in the ground and
made a sound loud enough to shave off five years of everyone’s life.”

“No one came even close to being hurt,” Master defended
himself. “And I still won.”

Sevana felt justified in her reaction when Sarsen raised
both hands to his temples and rubbed, trying to stave off a headache just
mentally picturing this scene. “Clearly, the next time I enter a competition
with this old goat, I’m going to have to put some safety rules down first. Is
it just me, or is he getting more reckless in his old age?”

“Right here at the table,” Master said mildly, pointing at
himself.

Sarsen ignored him. “No, he was always reckless. He was just
more careful in front of you because
you
tended to be reckless and he was
trying to set a good example.”

“Really? Why do you suppose he’s abruptly stopped doing
that?”

“Maybe because he’s old and he doesn’t care what people
think anymore? Or maybe he’s figured he’s set the example already and you know
to follow it?”

“Surely he’s not so naïve as to believe that,” Sevana
disagreed.

Master cleared his throat meaningfully. “Still right here.”

Their banter got interrupted by Sky, who’d fallen into a
helpless case of giggles.

Her eyes crinkling at the corners in a silent smile, she
inquired dryly, “Are we entertaining you, Sky?”

He nodded, unable to say anything because he was laughing
too much. “D-do you al-always do this?”

“When you live with people for ten years, you get warped by
their twisted sense of humor,” she explained mock-dolefully.

“Don’t believe her,” Master warned Sky. “She came to me
twisted. If anything, she warped
us
.”

Sevana made a scoffing sound, which for some reason made Sky
burst into a whole new round of giggles. Kid must have his own warped sense of
humor to find all this so funny. “Changing the subject—I’m no expert but Hube’s
plans looked fine. I think we can start building the timber doohickey tomorrow
while the men finish digging the hole.”

“Doohickey?” Master objected mildly.

“Well, what do you want me to call it?” Sevana countered
half-absently, twisting in her chair to try and find a server. The place was
busy, heaven knew, but she’d been sitting here a while without anyone coming to
the table. “It’s not a timber dam, although Hube calls it that half the time.”

“It’s a pool,” Master informed her patiently.

“Oh? Every pool I know of is either decorative or intended
for swimming. You going to hop into it, Master?”

Far from discouraged, he perked up, eyes shining with
interest. “Oooh. Now there’s a thought.”

Sarsen let out a groan and slumped. “You just had to suggest
that, didn’t you?”

Sevana spared him a glance. “I guarantee that it would have
taken the children in this village a whole minute to have the same thought
after they saw two standing bodies of clean water.”

“Point,” he acknowledged ruefully. “Judging from that longing
expression…Sky, you want to join in, don’t you?”

Sky looked away from the table, toward the floor, and said
in a small voice, “I can’t swim.”

Every adult at the table snapped around, staring at him
incredulously. Although really, this shouldn’t have surprised any of them. As
ridiculous as it seemed, most sailors didn’t know how to swim. Sevana had
always thought it stupid in the extreme to have a career in water when you didn’t
have the faintest idea how to stay afloat in it, but that seemed to be the
norm. Rubbing her hands together, she stared at that bowed head thoughtfully.
The Fae no doubt had their own ways to deal with water, and they would teach
him, but in the meantime it seemed foolish to leave him exposed to a possible
danger without teaching him anything.

“Right.” Turning to Master and Sarsen, she asked, “Who’s
going to drown-proof the kid?”

“Since I fully intend to go swimming in it anyway, why don’t
I do it?” Master volunteered with a selfless smile that didn’t fool anyone at
the table. “Besides, it’s dangerous if you two do it. Your teaching methods are
something else.”

“No one has ever died on me,” Sevana defended herself with a
wounded hand over her heart.

“Or me!” Sarsen objected good-naturedly.

“
Yet
,” Master grumbled under his breath. “Don’t
worry, Sky, I’ll make sure you can swim well. You can leave it to me. I taught
these two, and they do just fine in water.”

Sky’s grin stretched from ear to ear. “Thanks, Master!”

“Not at all, not at all.”

Sevana went back to trying to catch a server’s eye, and
finally managed it a few moments later. She put in an order for anything that
was ready to dish up right this moment before she sat back in her chair and
properly faced the table again. “Alright, let’s come up with a timeline for
this. Hube isn’t sure how long it will take to build the two timber pools,
since we’re capable of lifting all the logs in place, which apparently is the
most time-consuming part of the job. But he said if we can lift them so easily,
he thinks we can put a pool together in a day.”

“So two days for two pools?” Master cocked his head, eyes on
the ceiling as he started calculating things. “Alright. With a fountain of this
size, it will take about three days for the water to evaporate, especially in
this heat. I think this might work out to where everything will be done about
the same time. We can finish digging by lunch tomorrow, or thereabouts. The
first pool will be put together by evening. So the day after tomorrow, we can
put the dam into place, and while the pool fills, we’ll build another one.”

“While that pool is being built, the fountain will be
draining dry,” Sarsen picked up the topic as Master slowed, becoming distracted
by his own thoughts so much that he forgot to speak. “So, we’ll have a two-day
wait or so until we can do anything.”

“During that two-day wait we need to keep an eye on the
pools to make sure they won’t overflow,” Sevana reminded. “Which I suppose
Master can do, since he’ll be swimming in them anyway.”

He gave her a benign smile. “It’s best to combine work with
pleasure.”

Sevana, not disagreeing with this philosophy, said
seriously, “It is.”

Sarsen, well used to this silliness, kept going without
trouble. “So what are we going to do for two days while waiting on the fountain
to dry?”

“I vote we make preparations.” Sevana braced her forearms on
the table and leaned against it, tone and manner completely serious. “I do not
want this thing in the village any longer than it needs to be. I don’t want to
run the risk of activating some other feature to it that we don’t know about
yet. I want to seal this thing up in a metal box and send it immediately to
Jacen for study.”

“He would be the best choice,” Sarsen admitted.

“One of us, at least, has to stay here and put everything
back in order once the gadgick is out,” she continued. “Since I originally took
this job, I think that should be me. So it’s up to the two of you—which one
wants to leave immediately for Jacen’s once the gadgick is out?”

Master and Sarsen shared a speaking look for several
seconds. Then Master’s mouth quirked up in a slight smile. “I wouldn’t mind
going,” he admitted frankly. “I haven’t seen Jacen for quite some time. Also,
I’d like to stay a few days and help him research the gadgick. I want a better
understanding of how it works.”

She nodded in satisfaction. “Then that’s settled. Sarsen,
you’re stuck with me doing the cleanup.”

“Fine, fine. Should be the easier job, leastways.” He rubbed
at his chin for a moment before asking, “What about Goffin and Roland? Should
we send them home tomorrow? I don’t think they can help us much from here on.”

Sevana blinked. “Wait, they’re still here?”

“They weren’t sure if taking all those stones out would
actually do the trick,” Sarsen confessed. “We decided to wait a day or two and
see how things went.”

Ah. Well, true, none of their previous theories had proven
to be exactly correct. It made sense to play it safe for a day or so. “They can
go home tomorrow as far as I’m concerned.”

“Then I’ll tell ‘em. You were the last to go, anyway. I
don’t think we have to worry about people disappearing in their sleep anymore.”

She should hope not, for pity’s sake.

~ ~ ~

By the time that Sevana had rolled out of bed the next
morning, dressed, eaten breakfast, and gone back to the worksite, three men had
already beaten her there and resumed digging. Sky chose to follow along again
and stayed faithfully at her heels like some sort of hunting dog. The metaphor
became more accurate than she intended when she realized he had a wolf on
his
heels.

Hube arrived on scene shortly after she did, along with
Master and Sarsen, so they went to work.  

Making a timber pool, as it turned out, didn’t differ much
from making a log cabin. The ends of the logs had to be notched out in a
particular way so that the logs would fit together tightly. For every two logs
saddled and stacked together, Hube would use either small trees or saplings to
bind everything, preventing anything from slipping or slowly spreading apart
under the force of the water. She found it interesting that he didn’t strip the
branches off before he used them. He said it would add strength and a little
“filler,” whatever that meant. He did this routinely, binding layer upon layer
together. After watching him do this once, Sevana and the rest felt they could
do the same and started helping him. It wasn’t as easy as it looked—nothing
ever was—but Hube patiently taught them the finer tricks, and within the course
of an hour, they had the hang of it.

With all four adults working well together, and a judicious
amount of magic, they had the first level of the pool built by noon. Sevana had
never worked physically harder in her life. She felt drenched with sweat, her
clothes sticking to her back and waist, tendrils of hair clinging to her
temples. She had a whole new level of respect for anyone that built dams for a
living. After all, they did this
without
magic.

Maybe she should come up with some sort of product to sell
to them…hmm.

They took a break for lunch at noon, which Sky had eagerly
gone and fetched from the inn’s kitchen in the form of a picnic. Sevana didn’t
want to do anything more than take a nap after eating, but unfortunately, the
rest of the work beckoned. With a groan, she forced herself back to her feet
and went back to it.

For some strange reason, building the second level of the
pool went faster than building the first. Perhaps because they all knew what
they were doing at this point and weren’t waiting on Hube’s directions? Because
they were now used to how the others worked? Or more likely a combination of
the two. Regardless, they had the second level up in a matter of three hours.

Using their carrying and lifting spells, the three
Artifactors gathered up the stripped branches from yesterday and the dirt that
had been dug up to get to the underground stream, and used all of that to fill
the space in between the two layers. Sevana hadn’t been sure that it would be
enough to fill the space, but it turned out to be fine. Barely. She had no idea
what they would do about the fill-in for the second pool, though.