With enough silver to buy himself proper meals for more than a week, and perhaps even a small room, the cold did not have quite the same effect as the days prior. Both keys were tucked away, safe in his coat pocket. Even the throbbing in Vidar’s head from the confrontation in the alley had lessened to a dull ache.
The sewers were not an inviting prospect, and he decided to forego his daily task in favor of visiting the one responsible for the maps provided by Embla. When he quit, dropping her name to that contact might no longer be viable. Best make use of it while he still could. Also, arming himself with knowledge now might allow him to reach the treasures hidden below a lot quicker. Those huge gems down there beckoned him, the light glinting off the smooth surfaces a promise of great riches to come.
Vidar smiled to himself as he walked through the snow, ignoring the cold wetness seeping into his boots. A few streets later, he crossed the river over to the more prosperous part of Halmstadt, and by the time he was nearing the location on Embla’s hastily scribbled note, the smile had slipped from his face. The damn cold. No good mood could stand up to it for long. Rejuvenating the locksmith’s light runes drained a lot of essence from him, but he should still have taken the time to create a sowilo rune. Being able to draw full breaths for a few minutes would’ve been worth it.
By the time he made it to his destination, Vidar wore a look of grim determination. The fine streets all the way up here in Nordstan were regularly swept of snow, but that did little to ease the chill from his already soaked shoes and trousers. The feeling in his arms was fully back from his work with the runes earlier, but they never regained any warmth at all, and he barely felt a thing when he banged on the door of the squat stone building only a stone’s throw away from Halmstadt Keep.
The thick wood meant his banging barely produced a whisper of a sound, so he kicked the door after a while when no one answered. Pain radiated from the big toe of his left foot all the way up to his knee, and he hopped around on his right, letting out a steady stream of cold-related curses until the door finally swung open just enough for a woman perhaps ten years Vidar’s senior, with dark brown hair in tousled curls, to peek out. A heavy-looking chain on the inside of the door showed in the gap. It grew taut, not allowing the door to fully open.
“Yes?” the woman asked, squinting through thick glasses.
Vidar walked up close and felt the warmth from the inside billowing out. “I have questions about the sewer systems.”
The woman blinked, then cleared her throat. “That is unusual.”
“I work down there on Embla’s behalf. She sent me.”
She sniffed the air and wrinkled her nose. “I should have known. Hold on.”
The door closed and Vidar heard a muted rattling on the other side. When she reopened the door, the chain was gone.
“Hurry up inside. You’re letting the heat out,” the woman said, closing the door behind him. She strained to lift the thick, linked chain and reset it to the locked position.
“Safety concerns?” Vidar asked. “I’m Vidar.”
“This is an official building belonging to the Crown, but we are not important enough to warrant guards. Hence, the chain. My name is Illia,” she said, looking him up and down. “I usually only deal with Embla or the small boy she sends to fetch the map.”
Illia spoke in a strange, almost archaic manner, like she’d been transported to the present day from some far-flung past. Vidar didn’t have trouble parsing her meaning since the words were the same, but it was almost as if she was trying, and utterly failing, to speak with a noblewoman’s air of nasal superiority.
“I’ve met with some… issues down there and was hoping you could illuminate me with the answers to a few questions.” Dammit, now he was starting to speak like that, too.
“Issues?” Illia asked, placing heavy enunciation on the s’s.
She waved for him to follow down a long, doorless corridor to a narrow room with desks lining one wall. The desks were covered in parchment and paper. Each was occupied by a hunched-over person scribbling furiously with ink on paper, with only the one closest to the door being empty. Illia’s desk.
It wasn’t until they arrived that he figured out how to proceed with the conversation. Vidar couldn’t just outright ask about the dead monsters with gems for eyes. They’d either toss him out on his ass or throw him in jail for that.
He spoke in a hushed whisper, not wanting to disrupt the work of Illia’s five colleagues. “How do you know where the blockages have formed?”
Illia scoffed. “That is a question, not an issue.” This time, she put the emphasis on the u in issue, rather than the s’s. One of the others sighed without looking up.
“I’ll get to the issues,” Vidar promised.
Illia glared daggers at one of the men, of which there were two, but didn’t comment on the sigh. Instead, she answered Vidar. “We receive reports and complaints from the citizenry. A lot of complaints.”
“Complaints?”
“When water no longer flows from their pipes, they complain. When their offal is not immediately carried away, they complain. All complaints, every day. From these concerned citizens’ writs, we triangulate from where they receive their water and where their waste is carried away. Where enough of them intersect, we mark a map that eventually ends up in your care.”
“I think I understand,” Vidar said.
The seated people never stopped working, but one of them scoffed.
Illia nodded for Vidar to follow and she brought him to a second room. This one was bigger, like a storage room, only you couldn’t even see the wall. It was filled from floor to ceiling with pieces of paper stacked tall or dumped into containers of all shapes and sizes, some large enough to take up a considerable part of the room. Kenaz runes shone from several places affixed to the walls. She put her hand against the side of one such container.
“In here, we store complaints from citizens who report brackish taste in their water. It is the most common complaint.”
Vidar reached up and grabbed the rim before jumping to get a quick look down at enough pieces of paper to swim among them. “What does that mean?”
“Salt water. The system is designed to remove the salt from the seawater to make it drinkable. It has been failing for one reason or another the last few hundreds of years. Only about a third of Halmstadt’s population now has drinkable water, which is why we should focus on repairs. The problem is, no one knows how any of it works, and my requests for funding are denied again and again.”
“What about those without clean water?”
Illia’s shoulders slumped forward from their rigid position. “You’re the second person to pose that question to this branch of the administration in just a few weeks’ time.”
“Oh?”
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“It is nothing,” she said, putting emphasis on the o in nothing. “A curious scribe. If only the Crown would be so interested as today’s youth. Wells. Everyone else uses wells.”
“So, they’re carrying their water in from outside.”
She nodded. “That is correct. We have suggested, then demanded, then finally pleaded with our betters to make a concentrated effort to restore the water part of the system below our feet.”
“They don’t want to,” Vidar guessed.
“They do not want to,” Illia confirmed. “To be fair, it would be a mountainous task.”
“It is pretty big down there.”
She let out a strange little laugh without opening her mouth, air expelling in short bursts from her nose. “That is part of it. The bigger problem is that it is inaccessible with all the larger entrances lost to time. Much, if not most, of our information was destroyed in rampaging fires at one time or another. No schematics or engineering blueprint explaining the mechanisms have survived.”
“Wait,” Vidar said, his mind racing. “You’re saying you don’t know how any of it works?”
Illia removed her glasses and polished them with the white fabric of her tunic before replacing them. “There is no need to concern yourself with anything beyond your task, but your deduction is incorrect. We absolutely do know how most of the system functions, just not to the full extent. Just be glad it is not the waste transportation system that is failing. Once that happens, we will all smell like you.”
They returned to the work room, where Illia’s colleagues were still busy scribbling away.
“How long before the water-cleaning thing breaks down?” Vidar asked.
“We have no way of knowing that with any accuracy, but it will be in your lifetime if nothing changes. It has stood for many hundreds of years—a marvel, really—and it will crumble within a few decades.”
“Try a few years,” the one who’d sighed earlier said, without raising his head.
Vidar looked over to the thickset man, hunched over a blank piece of paper, a thick brown coat draped over his shoulders. “Really?”
“Do not concern yourself,” Illia said. “I did not mean to frighten you, boy.”
He let the condescending “boy” go and pressed for more information. These people seemed to enjoy sharing their knowledge, since the Crown, and probably most everyone else, cared little for it. “What is under the sewer system?”
Illia’s eyebrows drew together in confusion. “Under?”
Vidar chose his words carefully. “In many places, water drops into these huge basins. In one such basin, the wall was broken. It was hollow, with a chamber on the other side.”
Everyone stopped their scribbling and turned to him.
“Where was this?” a pale, old woman who hadn’t said a word before asked, her eyes shining with interest.
“All we know is that the system was built in a previously existing space. The tunnels existed before they were shored up and repurposed for the system in place today,” Illia explained.
“No one alive today has seen anything like what you just described,” the grunting man said. “The Crown should investigate.”
The one at the far end of the room, a young man Vidar’s age with blond hair and tired eyes, laughed mirthlessly. “The Crown does not care about the past. It no longer employs a single historian.”
“What of the places where the rune lantern flickers?” Vidar asked, trying to regain control of the conversation.
“You bring interesting tidbits of knowledge, my boy,” the sighing man said. “We have no information on such a location.”
The young man’s tired eyes opened wide. “Perhaps it is connected to the waning effect of the light runes down there?”
“No longer waning,” the old woman said. “They have long since gone dark.”
“There are kenaz runes down there?” Vidar asked.
“Embedded in the walls with small openings to let out the light. From what little we know, they were somehow designed to harness essence from the mechanism cleaning the seawater,” Illia said.
“They didn’t need a rune scribe to rejuvenate them?” Vidar asked.
“Supposedly not. I once posed the question to the rune scribes employed by the Crown, but they denied knowledge of any such mechanism,” Illia said.
“The guild won’t share any information either, if they know of any such mechanism,” the young man said. “Perhaps that student who visited here will have better luck.”
“You really care about these sorts of things,” Vidar said. His inquiries to these people mostly served to increase the number of his questions, rather than give him answers, but he, too, found the topic interesting.
“We care about the system providing water to and removing offal from the city,” Illia said.
“We’re not here for the pay, that’s a certainty,” the sighing man said, sighing.
“They’re talking of removing half of us,” a quiet woman in her middle years said, speaking for the first time.
“Let’s see them try,” the old woman croaked, shaking her fist in the air.
Vidar stepped back out into the corridor. “Thank you for your time. I better get started on clearing the latest blockages.”
“Hold on. You need to tell us more of your discoveries,” the sighing man said.
“No time today, I’m afraid. I promise, I’ll return.”
Vidar found himself outside again soon thereafter and decided enough was enough regarding the snow and the cold. He pondered their answers as he made his way to a wine shop and procured enough vinegar to submerge the padlock before heading back to Rat Town.
Finding a landlord willing to rent him a room proved easier than he’d feared, and before he knew it, he was sitting on the floor of a small but comfortable—and furnished—room on the second floor of an inn not far from Embla’s house.
According to the innkeeper, a rotund woman past her middle years with hair all turned to gray and her fat cheeks sagging, they didn’t get many customers who chose to stay the night. Most just wanted a chair and some cheap alcohol to wash away the day’s work, or lack of work. It played in Vidar’s favor, allowing him to rent a room long term rather than pay per night. The cost still made his eyes bulge, but he was able to pay for the first month up front, even if that ate up most of his funds. Still, he was confident he could make more.
Vidar retrieved his hidden possessions and set to work once the padlock was submerged in a bowl of vinegar. The room stank of it, but a few days down in the sewers had made his nose resilient to strong odors.
With the all the tools necessary spread out before him, Vidar set to work re-creating that first sowilo rune. Four strokes for the symbol. It did not take him long to remake the ruined one. He held the finished sowilo rune in the palm of his hand, staring down at it without blinking. Compared to the rubbing, a few of the lines were a little off. Not by much, not much at all. Close enough. It would work, he decided.
With his eyes closed, Vidar imagined the circle of essence with the sowilo rune imprinted on it. Warmth. This rune would provide him warmth. The thought ran through his head as he carefully imagined a narrow opening at the bottom of the circle. Essence flowed from his hand and arm as he willed that intangible, and renewable, part of himself into the circle, allowing it to drain into the physical rune crafted from wood and paint.
The rune drew a lot of essence from him. It rendered his arm useless and threatened to draw from his chest before Vidar closed the opening. The sowilo rune circle remained firm in his mind’s eye. If he wasn’t mistaken, it was about half-full. Vidar wasn’t sure if he imagined it or not, but he thought this one might have drained essence faster than his first attempt.
He opened his eyes and examined the lines. Messy. A few strands on the brush were already sitting at odd angles, adding thin streaks of the red paint where they should not go. Even the strokes themselves weren’t fully straight, and at one point, he’d hesitated. An unsightly splotch was proof of his inexperience.
Grinding his teeth, Vidar shook his useless arm, hoping it would quicken the recovery. Another mistake, draining essence from the arm he used to paint with. It was like he’d done every mistake possible.
Useless, his father called him. A disgrace.
A cold wind blew outside the poorly fitted window, lowering the already dismal temperature of the room. With the innkeeper’s refusal to use runes—well, her inability to afford them—and the fact the whole aged building was built with wood, it made for a poor combination. The place was cold. Not as bad as the shacks, but it wasn’t a big step up.
Vidar drew in, then expelled a deep breath, muttering, “Screw you, Father.”
He made a slight opening in the circle in his mind’s eye, triggering it.
A faint glow spread through the painted lines and warmth bloomed. Vidar felt the heat coming off the wooden disc. His eyes grew wide with wonder. Tears streamed down his cheeks for some reason, and he had to wipe them off with the sleeve of his coat, then lean back and grab the rough cloth on his small table in the corner to wipe running snot from his nose.
Curious, Vidar held the rune against the wooden leg of his lumpy bed, careful not to touch the paint to the wood, afraid it would smudge it. The bed leg grew warm and a thin strand of smoke soon drifted from it, filling the room with the smell of burning timber. He made a mental note of the symbols themselves being extremely hot.
Little by little, he made the opening thinner and thinner until it was almost imperceptible. Only then could he touch the rune without burning himself. Satisfied at having discovered how to use the sowilo runes in his clothing, he greatly increased the size of the opening, allowing more essence to flow from the rune before placing it back down on the floor. With that much heat coming off it, the room soon grew temperate enough to be comfortable.
Vidar basked in the warmth for a moment, sitting cross-legged before the rune, before raising both fists toward the ceiling in victory.
“Hell yes,” he muttered. “I did it. I really did it.”
