Wonders of the Invisible World (26 page)

Soon after that, she received the first message from the engineer. He had checked the conduit line from fountain to Well, and seen nothing amiss. But something, he assured her, was. On that disturbing note, he ended, but she didn’t have long to wait before the next messenger came, and the next. Garner’s was not the only sodden body to appear in her office. Sprites had invaded the water pipes of Luminum, and they showed no respect, not even to the king, whose luxurious water-closet, fitted with cushions, scented linens, and bowls of flower petals, had somehow popped its ornate taps completely off to spew river water all over the carpets. There were similar disasters throughout the city, in those houses and inns fortunate enough to have private systems. The harassments extended beyond pipes, Damaris learned. Fishers found their boats immobile in mid-current, or completely overturned. Sluice gates between canals and irrigation ditches were randomly opened or shut, causing herds of pastured animals to find themselves shank-deep in water. Mill wheels ground to a halt for no reason anyone could see. Damaris, fearing for the dikes, sent riders out to check for breaches. The harbormaster came himself to tell her that a dock had floated out to sea.

“Why,” she demanded incoherently of him, “can’t they just put it into words? Why must water speak for them?”

“I don’t know, Minister,” he sighed. “I’m only hoping the sea gates don’t start talking.”

Beale wandered back in the midst of all this to invite her to the rehearsal, after supper, of Master Ainsley’s music. She stared at him incredulously, then remembered what he was talking about.

“Music. Yes. For a little while. But Beale—”

But he was already leaving, trumpeting, in his resonant baritone, what must have been the horn section to Master Ainsley’s piece.

She saw Garner again finally, taking his place belatedly among the knights in the hall for supper. He was still alive, and he looked dry; other than that she couldn’t draw conclusions. She watched him, hearing Beale only when he stopped speaking. Then she would shift her attention quickly back to him.

“Beale,” she said carefully, during one of his brief silences. “Are you aware of the water problems in the city?”

He shook his head. His eyes, she realized suddenly, were on the knights’ table also. “You seem distracted,” he murmured, in a rare moment of discernment she could have done without.

“I am,” she said quickly. “I have been hearing all day long about disturbances, restlessness in the water.”

His face cleared; he asked with a sudden chuckle, “You mean the king’s water-closet?”

“Yes, that, too. And—”

“I heard they had to bail out the royal bedchamber before the water was stopped. You keep staring at that knight. The morose one with no manners.”

“He’s a Knight of the Well, on the water-mage’s business. I need to talk to him after supper. I’m beginning to be very worried.”

“Oh,” he said complacently. “Is that all. I was beginning to think—No matter. It’s probably just a storm.”

“What?”

“The weather seems to be changing. I heard the wind rise as I came to supper. An early summer storm, nothing more; it will no doubt blow over by morning.” She opened her mouth just as he pushed back his chair and stood up. “I beg your pardon, my dear, but we have so little time to practice. You will join us, won’t you, before too long? You must hear Master Ainsley’s composition; it is wonderful. The voice of water itself...”

She had to wait for Garner until the king and his nobles rose from the dais table; then the knights were permitted to leave. Garner, watching for her, came to meet her as the elegant court swirled around the king to welcome him. He looked exhausted, she thought, as well as a bit wild-eyed, haunted by sprites.

“Anything?” she demanded.

He shook his head. “Nothing that makes any sense. Fountains refused to flow, or poured like waterfalls all over the streets. Rain barrels overflowed as though they were fed by secret springs. Public water-closet doors stuck fast; I helped tear several open to free those trapped inside. Pipes leaked; people were chased out of their houses by water.”

“Did you meet any other water creatures?”

“I heard them singing out of buckets people dropped on their way back from the river. I searched along the river, and on my way to the Well. But, perversely, they hid from me.”

“You saw Eada again?”

“I tried to, but she was nowhere to be found, either. I saw your engineer.”

“More than I did,” she said grimly. “Did he have any messages for me?”

“Only that he could find—”

“Nothing amiss,” she guessed, and he nodded.

“He told me to tell you that the fountain was clean, completely dry. The scaffolding is down; the debris cleared; the work is ready to be unveiled.”

“If we dare,” she sighed. “Well. That’s something.”

“A trick,” he suggested somberly.

“Maybe. But if anything goes wrong, it will go wrong first tomorrow night at the Ritual of the Well. They won’t wait for the water music the day after.” He was silent, so completely baffled, she saw, that he had forgotten to be angry. She added, “At least you didn’t fall in the river again.”

“Maybe I should,” he murmured. “Maybe I should go back, find that nymph with your face and listen to what she has to tell me.”

“Lies,” Damaris said succinctly. “Like her face.”

He was silent again, blinking at her out of heavy, blood-shot eyes, as though he couldn’t remember the difference between the minister and the nymph. She shifted abruptly; he raised his hand to his eyes, rubbed them wearily.

“I’m too tired to think. I’m going to rest a little, for as long as the mage will let me.”

“Let’s hope the night will be more peaceful than the day.”

She went to the music room, where the musicians, Master Ainsley, and Lord Felden sat on their gilt chairs in ranks according to their instruments. Beale smiled at her, pleased.

“Welcome, my lady. We are just about to go over it again.”

Damaris sat down. He lifted his horn and nodded his head. As they played the first light, charming flurry of falling water droplets, she heard the storm begin.

A summer storm, Beale had said. Warm, noisy, clearing by morning. But nothing was predictable that day, not even water coming out of a tap. Damaris left as early as she could, throwing Beale an apologetic smile without quite meeting his eyes. In her office, she studied the tide tables. Rare for a summer storm to be destructive. As rare, she thought dourly, for a water bucket to sing. And that night the moon was nearly full, the tide would be high, and late, and everyone would be sleeping as it rose...

She made her decision, wrote a note, affixed her seal of office, and sent it to the harbormaster.

Close the sea gates now.

The mage heard the first falling notes of rain on the river, on the sea. She was a shadow beside the Well, night-dark, motionless as the ancient tumble of stones around her. Her blank gaze was fixed upon the water. She saw nothing; she saw everything. Her mind was a fish, a ripple, a current running here, there, everywhere: through pipes, along ditches, in ponds, canals, down the river flowing to the sea. She listened, wondered, watched.

Snatches, she heard: underwater whisperings. Brief as the gurgle of water down a drain, some were, and as coherent. But she had been water-mage for many decades. She understood the ways of water creatures, and many of their words. When she didn’t understand, she went farther, her mind seeping into another like water, filling every wrinkled crevice of it until she saw, she spoke, she understood.

What she guessed at last amazed her.

Her surprise cast her thoughts back into the still old woman she had left at the edge of the Well. For a long time she sat there, contemplating the fragments of this and that she had pieced together. A word repeated many different ways, an odd detail washing up against another, an underwater face seen through as many kinds of eyes as were in the water, now a colorless blur, now a bright, startling mosaic of itself repeated in a single eye, now as nearly human as it could get...

“Well, I never,” the mage said in the dark, and, a little later, “All this fuss...”

The Well turned suddenly vivid, bone-white, as though the moon had fallen into it. The mage gazed at the water, astonished again. Then the thunderbolts pounded all around her, trying to shake apart the boulders. She drew fully into herself for a moment, hearing the rain hiss down through the open roof onto the Well; then she felt it. She grunted; her thoughts slid back into the water. She rode the river current down until down became up as the salt tide pushed upriver. She borrowed bodies, then. There were many, she realized, and all swimming against the tide, making for the sea.

She saw it as they did: the massive gates across the harbor, sluice gates lowered, hinged gates fashioned to open outward with the outgoing sea and close fast when needed, with the help of the incoming tide. The tide had barely begun to turn, but they were already shut.

She came slowly back to herself, feeling as though, between rain and river and sea, she must be wet as a puddle. She whispered, as she pulled herself to her feet, balancing on one stone, then another, “Good girl.”

She moved through the torch-lit cavern of her workroom, into the chamber beyond, which had a bed, and a hearth, and warm, dry clothes. She put them on, and moved into the tiny kitchen. She found Perla there, windblown and barefoot, stirring something savory in a pot over the fire.

“The knight came, mistress.”

“Did he?” She warmed her hands, remembering him like a dream: the knight looking into her cave, she seeing nothing out of his eyes. “Did he leave a message?”

“No.”

“What are you doing here, child? Didn’t you see the rain coming? You should have scampered home.”

Perla answered only with a brief, wild grin at the thought that a storm should be something to avoid. She brought Eada a bowl of stew, bread, and some late strawberries. The mage ate absently, mulling over what she had glimpsed underwater.

“Who’s to say?” she inquired finally, of nobody, she realized. The child had gone somewhere, maybe home, maybe out to watch the lightning. “Not I,” she answered herself, and rose with sudden energy to clear the table. “Not for me to say...”

For a long time then, she sat beside the Well, half-dreaming, half-dozing. She heard rain dripping off reeds and waterweeds, dimpling ponds, sighing in gusts over the restless sea. In her thoughts, or her dreams, she allowed herself to be carried along by impulses. They went against the tide, she realized: push against flow, drive against mindless drag. Mute and innocent as a polliwog she went along, seeing little beyond a silken, singing dark running against the tide. Then the tide caught the shadowy travelers, sent them swirling, tumbling in its grasp, flung them toward stones, toward the moon. They melted down, fingering themselves between stones, slithering, flattening themselves, easing around, sliding under vast slabs of wood, finding ways through the heave and swamp of tide, clinging, climbing, up and over, into the calm on the other side.

And then they began to push back at the tide.

Eada woke as though she had heard, across the city and river and fields, the sound of moored ships banging recklessly against the wharves, straining at their cables, masts reeling drunkenly, swiping at one another.

She opened her eyes, just as she felt Damaris, in her own bed, open hers, stare into the suddenly chaotic night.

Damaris,
the mage said to her.
They have opened a gate.

“I can hear it,” Damaris said aloud. The mage, riding her mind, looking out of her eyes as she sprang out of bed, felt the cold stones under her feet, and the slap of wind and rain as she pushed a casement open.

In the harbor ships and boats heaved and tumbled on a tide that was trying to tear away the wharves. Some, anchored in deeper water, had already begun to drift, meandering a choppy, heedless path toward other ships, toward warehouses and moored boats. Little rain-battered blooms of fire moved quickly along the harbor’s edge; some met to confer, parted again; a few vanished, doused under a wild burst of tide.

The great harbor bell in its massive tower began to boom a warning, accompanied by the high, fey voices of ships’ bells careening madly in the waves.

I’ll be right there,
Eada told the Minister of Water, and was, quick as a thought, far more quickly than any of the Knights of the Well her thoughts had galvanized awake along the way.

The tide was still dancing its way into the open gate, which trembled mightily under the onslaught, but couldn’t bring itself to close, locked, as it was, in the grip of many invisible hands. The sprites recognized the mage, who was barely visible, and who looked more like a battering ram than herself. She wedged herself against the gate and pushed back at them: an enormous snag caught against the gate, her feet its root ball in the sand, her head and shoulders its broken trunk rising above the weltering. She could hear the hisses and whispers in the rain, the spindrift.

“You’ll have to sort things out another way,” she told them. “Drowning Luminum will not explain anything to humans.”

The longboats were casting off from the wharf, rowing against the tide. Some of her knights were among them, the strongest, the most fearless, straining against the surge to reach the gate. Their boats rode low under the weight of huge chains, which they would lock into the iron rings on the inner side of the gate, so their pulling could help the tide push it shut.