Wonders of the Invisible World (23 page)

Master Ainsley, who was staring at the massive stonework, closed his mouth with a click of teeth and lowered his head. The sculptor, blowing softly into the holes, had an ear cocked, Damaris noticed, toward their voices.

“Big,” the composer pronounced finally, and added, after considering the matter, “Very big.”

“As you noticed, we have a lot of water. Will your music be up to the task?”

“I think—” he paused again, finished cautiously, “I think so. I hadn’t expected anything so ornate. I’ve seen such work in the courtyards and gardens of the rich in Iolea, but never so far north in a city square surrounded by chestnut trees.... The water will come from the river?”

“No. The source is the pure water of the Well itself. Water was guided from the underground river into a large holding tank; from there, pipes were laid across Master Greyson’s hop fields, with concessions for use as irrigation, along a stone archway across the river, and then buried beneath the banks and run under various gardens and streets, and finally the square. Once the fountain is open, the water can be piped into houses all around the square. So you can see why we planned such an elaborate celebration. Many in Luminum still get their water by lugging a bucket down to the river.”

She gazed at the great conduit head, the fountain, with satisfaction a moment longer, remembering months and even years of discussions, plans, legal contracts over property, endless papers she read requesting funds to pay for directors, engineers, pipe-makers, ditch-diggers, shovels and hoes and wheelbarrows, the ceaseless trail of problems into her office, annoyed citizens, leaky pipes, stolen equipment, miscalculations and miscreants.

All finished. Even the carp standing on its tail seemed to be smiling...

A halo of water shot out of the orb the carp carried. In a heartbeat, the sculptor’s face and hair were drenched. A mask of wet marble dust opened its mouth in a silent, astonished O. Damaris, her own mouth open, noted dazedly the single clogged hole in the orb. The water, oddly striated, filled the smallest basin quickly and began to run over its scalloped edge in three orderly cascades around the frolicking carp and the sculptor.

The sculptor shouted an incoherent word that freed Damaris from her transfixed state. She drew a sharp breath and whirled.

“Where is the engineer?” she demanded of the staring workmen.

“What is it doing?” Master Ainsley asked confusedly. “Should it be running now?”

“He went up to the castle to see you,” one of the workmen told her. “Said he needed to check something. I thought that’s why you came here.”

She was silent, pulling a vision of the project plans out of memory. The water had filled the carp basin and was flowing cheerfully down among the dolphins. The sculptor, on one knee in the water and clinging to the carp, was groping for a ladder behind him with his foot. It careened as he kicked. The workmen caught it, steadied it for him. He descended finally, cursing ceaselessly, wet as the carp.

“Go down to the river,” Damaris said to one of the men. “Make sure no one is in the discharge drain, and that it is covered. When this starts gushing out the flow will be strong. And you—”

“Why,” the sculptor demanded, interrupting his own steady stream, “is the water that color? It should be coming directly from the source waters of the Well.”

It was, Damaris saw with horror, turning as brown as mud, or worse: as streams running beneath schools sometimes turned in summer when the water grew shallow and the waste from a hundred students tumbled into it from their simple wooden water-closets.

The guard was peering through the opening now, drawn by the noises of water and the sculptor. “Stay here,” Damaris told him tersely as his eyes widened. “Don’t let anyone in.”

“What—”

“Don’t say a word about this to anyone.”

The composer asked helplessly, grimacing at the murk, “Should I revise my music?”

“Of course not.” She seized his arm, tugged him away. “It’s a temporary problem. A bit of soil in the water main. Most likely. The engineer will fix it easily. Come back to the castle with me; we’ll find Lord Felden so he can begin practicing your music.”

“I wrote water music, not mud music,” he muttered with one last incredulous glance at it before Damaris pulled him out of the shrouds. “Maybe your Well is running dry.”

Damaris closed her eyes briefly. Behind them, she caught an unexpected glimpse of the mage’s eyes, the swirling hues of mother-of-pearl opening to look at her, and she felt the skin prickle painfully at the nape of her neck.

“Not possible,” she told him adamantly, hurrying him along the ancient, colorful, bustling streets. “Human error. The engineer will find it. All will be well. You needn’t mention the incident to the musicians. It might weigh heavily on their playing and your music.”

“Water,” he sighed. “It plagues me still, even on bone-dry streets. Is it cursed, this fountain?”

“I hope not,” she breathed. “We would be forced to revise our lives.”

“But it is possible?” he asked so shrewdly that she could not answer, only rush him even more ruthlessly uphill until he had no breath for words.

Within the castle, she delivered him gratefully into the care of her betrothed.

“I’ve been looking for you,” Beale Felden told Master Ainsley. “They told me you had arrived and vanished.”

“Lady Ambre kindly took me to see the fountain,” the composer answered, and did not elaborate, to Damaris’s relief.

“Ah.” Beale smiled at her amiably but absently. She could almost see the notes and instruments, the faces of musicians crowded behind his limpid blue eyes. As he, if he noticed, might have seen the pipes and conduits in hers, as well as something of her terror. Fortunately for her, he was not particularly perceptive. That was one of the reasons, along with his fair hair, his amiable temper, his ancient title and wealth, that Damaris had permitted him to court her. He added to the composer, “The musicians are all eager to meet you, and see what you’ve brought us to play for the ceremony.”

“I only hope it will be suitable,” Master Ainsley sighed; his own eyes seemed to fill with visions of mud.

“I’m sure it will be wonderful,” Lord Felden answered. “This will seal your reputation in Obelos.” He bore the speechless composer down the hallway. Damaris watched them a moment; Beale seemed to be doing most of the talking. She turned away. She couldn’t guard every word the composer said, and, anyway, Beale, if alarmed, would be convinced by the simplest of explanations. A little dirt in the conduit pipe. Easily flushed out. He wouldn’t think to wonder who had started the appalling flow in the first place.

She found the engineer pacing as she entered her office; turning abruptly, he nearly bumped into her. They both spoke at once.

“Did you see—?”

“Have you heard—?”

They stopped, studied one another’s perturbed faces. The engineer, a lean, muscular, balding man apt to grab a shovel and leap into a trench if work on a project seemed slow, asked tersely, “Is it about the fountain?”

“Yes. Yours?”

“Yes. I was at the river, early this morning, making sure the discharge drain was completely clear before the guard-gate was locked over it. You remember where it is? Parallel to the conduit at that point where it arches across the river near the central bridge—”

“Yes.”

“It was just near my head, coming down off the stone archway. So I could hear what was going on inside.”

Damaris blinked. “Inside.”

“The conduit pipe.”

“Nothing,” Damaris said after a moment. Her voice shook. “Nothing should have been going on inside the conduit pipe. Why are you here? Why are you not checking the pipe at the source?”

He gazed at her, his brow furrowing. “For what?” he demanded. “What did you see?”

“A great deal of very murky water coming out of the fountain. Isn’t that what you heard? Water in flow?”

“No,” he said soundlessly. Then he cleared his throat. “I heard voices.”

“What?” She stared back at him in horror. “Someone inside the pipe?”

“Singing.”

“Inside the pipe?”

“And laughter. Some banging—”

“Children,” she whispered, her fingers icy.

“They didn’t sound like children. And I couldn’t understand a word. Sometimes the pipes themselves seemed to sing. I sent one of the workmen to the Well to check the cap over the conduit pipe, make sure no one had broken the locks on it.”

“If anyone had opened the cap to enter it, they would have drowned long before they crossed the river. No one would be laughing.”

They were silent again; their eyes slid away from one another, neither wanting to glimpse the doubt blooming there.

“Mud,” the engineer said heavily.

“Or worse. I couldn’t tell. At least it didn’t smell. But where could it possibly be coming from? What did the workman say?”

He shook his head. “The cap was sealed in the water as we left it. Nothing seemed amiss.” He paused again, asked her diffidently, “Any word from the water-mage?”

“No. Not for me, at least.”

His face loosened slightly. “An accident, then, along the pipeline. I’ll have the workmen follow it, check for wet or sinking ground. I’ll take a look at the source myself.”

She nodded briefly. “And your voices?”

“Echoes from somewhere else, they must have been. The river was misty at dawn; I couldn’t see clearly...”

She drew breath, loosed it silently, and met his eyes again. “That must have been it. Let me know immediately if you find anything.”

He bowed his head, left her listening to the bewildering silence from the water-mage.

The water-mage stood listening as well.

In the rocky, sunken cave where the water ran up out of the secret earth, Eada was little more than a bulky shadow in her black skirts and the veil that hid her long silver hair. She might have been a boulder in the jumble of rock that had broken and cascaded down around the Well so long ago that the shards were growing together again, grain by grain, century by century. The water filled its ancient, rounded pool among the stones with only the slightest tremor at its heart, the little flutter in the center of the pool that spoke of the unseen treasure of water buried deep beneath, in perpetual night. Seemingly without end, it pushed itself up into this silent cave with its little circular roof of sky and light; it gleamed a greeting, then passed into darkness again, down a narrow, shallow bed of stones, pushing more quickly now through its ancient waterway to find the light again, beyond the cave, where it bubbled up and pooled beneath the open sky.

That pool was where the city dwellers came to worship. They brought gifts, dropped wishes into it in the form of coins or words written on thin strips of metal.

They crowded around it during the ritual, under the first full summer moon. The knights ringed the Well beneath the ground; the king stood on the earth above, drank water from a gold cup, and dropped coins and jewels the color of blood into the wellspring. Near the natural pool above, and fed by it, a great marble tank had been built, a pretty thing surrounded by broad walkways, flowering vines, fluted pillars with little fountains perpetually offering water to the worshippers. Beyond it, the water flowed free again, very briefly, offering itself to insects, mosses and reeds, birds and wild creatures before it dove underground again, vanished back into the dark. Around this open water, the city dwellers watched the ritual, flooding beyond their human boundaries once a year to honor the mysteries of the Well, and to drink, after the king, the pure water out of the earth.

The water welling up out of the underearth made no sound.

The water welling up out of the underearth should have made no sound.

The mage, standing in the shadows, kept listening for silence from the sunlit pool. An ancient, familiar silence, there should have been in that cave, as old and peaceful as the dark. Instead, there were half-words, like water emptying down a drain; there were hisses, a gurgle like a laugh that echoed against the walls, a sudden splash that left no ripple behind it. The language of water, she recognized. But who spoke? What was said?

She heard a step in the low passageway that led from the Well to her dwelling. The walls echoed suddenly, as though a stone had spoken. Eada looked quickly into the water, saw nothing but the insouciant reflection of the sky.

“Mistress, the knight is here,” Perla said. She was a slight young girl, the daughter of a market-boater, used to the vagaries of water, who had come to peer into the cave one day and stayed to give the old mage a hand with this or that. She might have been part water sprite, Eada guessed. She feared nothing that poked its head unexpectedly out of the Well, and didn’t mind running errands between the underearth and sky.

A hesitant step in the stone chamber beyond told Eada how far the knight had gotten. Her odd experiments, her trifles, had slowed him in her workroom. She played with water in all its forms, even ice in its season. In tanks, she kept strange fish and other river creatures Perla and her friends found; she studied most for a moon or two before she sent them back. Scholars and witches from all over Obelos sent her the odd instrument, the unusual crystal that might interest her.