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“You brought me on a date… to a sewer?”
Laerryn looks up from the arcane engine that controls the city’s water supplies. “I said you could go home.”
They’re deep underground, in a less attended corner of the Meridian Labyrinth. The walls here are smooth dark metal, the lighting is, as Quay complained when they first arrived, “harsh”.
The complex processor in front of her controls multiple aspects of plumbing and drainage, including waste, she supposes. But it’s so much more. This is the city’s blood. Even wizards need to drink.
It relies on an advanced, structured version of various transfiguration and conjugation spells, simple Create Water party tricks advanced to an immense scale.
They draw up clean fresh water from the air itself and then destroy it again. Conjugation wizards like to say this is one of the simplest spells because the elements are found readily in the atmosphere. Because the solid waste left suspended in the water is not so easily banished, it’s instead packaged into blocks, purified, and burned in one of the city’s many engines—either mundane or arcane depending on how many potions people have been pouring down their drains.
A city of wizards who are spendthrift with their baths and positively prodigious with their fountains uses a lot of water. Unfortunately, neither of the wizards in the Conjurative Workings Division recognized the problem with the network of glyphs until they’d started losing water. They’re already dipping deep into to the emergency cistern. They have a day, maybe until the city runs out of clean water entirely. Someone is going to get fired, and possibly arrested, for this, as soon as Laerryn can locate and patch the leak.
Behind her Quay is playing with arcane wiring. White sparks flash and fizzle, leaving traces of ether behind like a ghost.
“Don’t! Please—don’t do… that.” She’s ruled out three districts; their sub-systems are functioning as intended. All the glyphs are intact, the mother water in the source pool hasn’t run dry, and connections to the city power supply run clean without obstruction or loss.
Quay swings his feet. His shiny shoes bang against the server he's sitting on. “Well then, what should I do? What are you doing? Walk me through it.”
She has the readout of the emergency cistern pulled up next to her. Slowly but surely the numbers are dipping. Soon she’ll have to institute emergency measures and worse talk to politicians about this. “It’s… it’s complicated.”
“Then explain it. I know you can walk and talk. Besides, haven’t I always made a good rubber duck?” For a moment his face shifts into a terrifying yellow visage, an aarakocra who’d be banned from every nest in the city. She barks out a laugh.
Talking to him does sometimes… smooth things. Not the big things, the projects even she can’t fully wrap her head around, the dreams she can barely voice; for those she goes to Evandrin. But the petty workplace trifles, how abjuration interns these days are all airheaded little nepotism hires who can barely cast a ward, how infuriating the zoning commission can be, how she can’t schedule road maintenance when the Septarian insists that for the unshakeable image of the city no roads should ever be closed.
It helps. Somehow, though he never offers any real solutions, she always finds the perfect compromise after a bitch session with him. She makes it clear to the magisterium that there won’t be any more interns unless they’re paid—she needs Patia’s help to frame that one correctly—and suddenly gets an influx of marginally more competent applicants. She gets an assistant to deal with the zoning board and her headaches decrease. The automata fixing potholes start wearing disguises, pop-up tents over cracks so her perfect city never falters.
“It’s a problem with the production of water,” she tells him, now aware of how dry her throat is. It’s been a minute since the restaurant, the Marquesian wine. “The city uses a spell-system to create it in response to demand, in addition to having reserves. Right now, not enough is being made somewhere and our backup supply is being drained. Ideally, I’d be able to see the problem on this map here,” she gestures to the map of the city in front of her, the little blinking lights indicating the status of each individual glyph network in its respective district. “And… nothing.”
There’s little she hates less than a malfunctioning warning system.
Quay sidles to her side, close enough to wrap an arm around. “And this is all the water in the city?”
She extends her magical perception out, probing another branch of the web for flaws. “Yes.”
“Mm. There’s us, and there’s Patia. There’s Nydas, he’s going to be mad when he loses hot water! There’s the magisterium and all their silly fountains. There’s my waterfall, where I do my broadcasts. Perhaps I’ll do one tomorrow on the Architect Arcane saving the city.”
Laerryn frowns, redirects her attention.
The waterfall. It’s on a recycler, they’re not that wasteful, but it still loses and uses a stupendous amount of water in froth, water which isn’t accounted for in that district’s usage. She ducks out from under her husband’s arm and stalks back to the center of the room.
There she sinks into a spell, sensing the weaving of magical lines, the perfectly entangled knot of the console, and off to the side a few auxiliary systems that never got hooked up to the district map. This is the Aqueduct, all water flow through here.
There’s the cooling system for the landing mechanism, only used once every seven years. There’s the emergency fire suppressant of the Meridian Labryrinth, never engaged. And there, tucked in a corner, is the magical heart of that damn waterfall. When it was installed eighty years ago they never hooked it into the main map.
Stupid of her to discount such a possibility, stupider of them to have been so lazy. She can fix it tonight, after she solves the more immediate problem.
Before she sends a message to Dweomer, she catches the silk lapel of Loqatius’ jacket and kisses him. “Thank you.”
Against her mouth he smiles, moonstruck. “Of course, darling. It’s going to be a very good news story.”
Fey do love to play with words. In the crystal jungle restaurant she might not have bothered to call out his dissembly. It’s rude to ruin a magician’s tricks. Here, on her own turf, she slides her fingers into his jacket, finding the inner pocket where he keeps the tools of his trade. “You know what I mean.”
“My love,” he looks offended as he lies to her. “I have never known a thing.”
Then he kisses her and suddenly her mouth isn’t so dry.