Engines & Demons - The Undestined

Chapter 18i

Dak followed her father to the far end of the room. Once there, he shone his hand-light on the wall. The long room was empty except for four tall urns, each one painted with a bright pattern, their long necks heavily stoppered and bound with waxed twine. Its walls were of precisely cut stones like the rest of the cellars, but the wall that her father illuminated with the liquid light was made of welded metal plate.

"What is that?" asked Dak.

The wall's single central plate, three metres high and two wide, was filled by a circular design of concentric rings, with a six pointed symbol at its centre.

"It is a moon lock," explained her father, and Dak was glad to see the old look of pleasure back on his face.

There had once been a time when the joy of revelation had constantly suffused her father's features. He would often take her on tours of the fortress to point out things of interest, be it an area of well-crafted architecture, or a particularly clever piece of engineering design. He had once delighted in showing her its countless wonders, and they would spend many hours in the day following its passageways and climbing its towers, but those excursions had ended when her mother had died.

After that day, her father had fallen into a low brooding state, seeming to lose interest in everything except for sitting in his chair and staring out across the rooftops of the workshops. It had only been Sir Galder's commission to make him new armour that had broken him from his stupor. With the work done, Dak had been concerned that her father was returning to his brooding, but it seemed he was not. Dak was delighted that their tours of the fortress had resumed, though she suspected their true purpose was to keep her away from Tahlia.

On the afternoon that the rains had come, she had turned up at the workshop door, dripping wet and imploring her father to leave the dry warmth of his bed to go out into the wet and rescue her friend from the river. He had done so grudgingly, but only after she had told him that Maddock shared her friend's predicament, and when he had returned he had been stoked with anger.

"You will not be seeing that girl again!" he had raged in a most uncharacteristic way. "If you are keeping her as a friend, she will lead you to more and greater trouble. You are not to leave the Workshops without my say, and she is not to enter here. I have informed the Forge-guard Chief, and his people are now having orders to refuse her if she turns up at our gates, and if she is, by chance, finding her way to our door you are to turn her away. Are you understanding me, daughter?"

She had been unable to speak in the face of her father's fury, so had kept silent and simply nodded and then continued preparing their evening meal.

Her father's anger had slowly abated, and on the third day of the rains' battering he had taken her up to the fortress' heights, both of them draped in tragasaur tarp capes, to show her the rooftops' ornate guttering. The next day they had walked the battlements, and he had shown her the drains that channelled the water from their flat walkways. She had asked him where all the water went, so a few days later he had taken her down through the cold of the fortress' ale and wine cellars, where casks and bottles were lined in rows along long curved corridors.

"Come, touch this," her father had said, going to the convex wall and placing his hand on its metal surface. Dak had done the same.

"It is freezing!"

"Behind this wall is the reservoir core," her father had explained. "All the rains that fall on the fortress are stored in its insides. It will last the fortress through the year."

"The fortress must use a good deal of water," she had asked. "Does it not run out?"

"No. And when we get the chance, I will take you to a place and show you why."