Windwitch (The Witchlands #2)v(57)

It was precisely the sort of challenge he’d have loved as a boy. He and Kullen both.

Kill … me.

Cam beckoned Merik onward to a slant of steps underground. Once, it had been a market, where goods fresh off the river were sold—Merik remembered visiting in boyhood. Before Jana had passed. Before Vivia had transformed forever.

While some brave merchants still attempted to hawk their wares, Merik saw more homeless and hungry than anything else as he followed Cam into the shadows. Almost all sconces affixed to the damp flagstones were empty, candles long stolen or lanterns long smashed.

The racket from above softened, morphing into higher voices. Children’s. Women’s. Merik’s eyes adjusted, and families materialized in the gloom. Water dripped from the curved ceiling to gather in puddles underfoot that splashed as Merik and Cam marched by.

Unacceptable. This tunnel, these families, this life that they were all resigned to. Help is coming, Merik wanted to say. I’m working as fast as I can.

“This way, sir.” Cam veered right. Two old men playing taro separated just enough for her and Merik to weave through. Then the girl vanished into a slice of darkness where no fire’s glow reached.

They walked through the darkness for fifty-six paces (Cam counted, as she always did) before a pale yellow glow sparked ahead. Another fifty-two paces, and they reached it: a lantern, Firewitched, illuminating a sharp right turn in the tunnel. Then more darkness—this time for a hundred and six steps, with water dripping the entire way.

At last, though, he sensed a shift in Cam’s step. The girl was slowing with a rustle, like fingers brushing a wall, before she vanished.

Just disappeared.

One moment, Merik heard Cam’s tired breaths and clomping bootfalls. The next, there was nothing but the plopping of water droplets.

So Merik did as Cam had, skimming the tunnel wall with his palm and proceeding onward …

Power frizzed over him.

It lasted a single breath, the temperature dropping low. The air sucking from his ears and lungs. Then he was through. The light returned, uneven but bright. A low brick tunnel stretched side to side, while sounds rolled into Merik from all directions—men’s shouts and thumping feet.

And the roar of waters channeling through some distant tunnel every few moments.

Cam fiddled with her hood for a moment, towing it so low her face was completely hidden. “Should’ve warned you about the old ward-spells. They’re meant to keep people out, I suppose, but clearly they ain’t working so well anymore. Oh, but pardon me, sir. Where are my manners?” She opened her hands wide. “Welcome to my second home, sir. Welcome to the Cisterns.”

*

It was nearing midday before Vivia had a chance to return to the underground. Time was short; she had much to do. Check the lake, search the tunnels. The words recited, a beat to jog by. Her lantern swooped and sputtered. Check the lake, search the tunnels.

She was sprinting by the time she reached the lake, and she gave no thought to her uniform as she tore off boots and coat, breeches and blouse. There was something wrong—she could see it rippling over the shimmering lake surface.

“Extinguish,” she murmured. Then in she dove.

Too much water. That was the first thing she felt as she kicked beneath the surface. There was water she’d never met before, twisting and twining through the rivers and into the Cisterns. Vivia needed to find out why. She needed to find out from where.

While yesterday’s tremor might not have left significant surface damage, Vivia feared the same could not be said for below.

She hit the lake’s center, where the crystalline waters were cold enough to grip. Where the rocks were keen enough to cut. But only here could she wholly connect with what the lake wanted, with what the lake felt.

Deep, deep beneath its waters, where the plateau’s roots fed into the Sirmayans and grew up from ages past, Vivia sensed new water dripping in. It wasn’t from the recent storms but from the tremor, and it wasn’t limited to the plateau but rather had wormed its way under the valley and into the mountains.

There, currents leaked up from a crack in the earth. A new spring, icy and fresh, it was adding volume to these tunnels and to the River Timetz as well—abovestream. Above the dam.

Up, up, the water moved like bees humming in a hive. Out, around, and under too. If it wasn’t diverted soon, the dam would overflow. The city would flood. It would be a slow thing. Months, perhaps even years, in the making, for these new springs were small. Mere fractures in the rock. Yet if these fractures ever became rifts, if another quake rattled through the Stefin-Ekart valley, then the water might expand too quickly to counter. The city could flood in days.

Or worse, if the dam finally broke, it could flood in hours.

At that thought, Vivia’s latest Battle Room argument with Linday echoed out: Our people could be safe, even beyond Nubrevna’s borders, if the need arose.

No. Vivia couldn’t do it. Binding Nubrevna to the Purists was not a solution.

Yet … Serrit Linday. Why did everything keep circling back to him? Since the crack had first appeared in the dam three years before, he was the one who had resisted fixing it. Now he was the one treating with Purists, and he was the one with a door to the underground hidden in his greenhouse.

That door was what had brought Vivia here today. She intended to find it from the underground, and she suspected it was just on the other side of the cave-in.