She managed, though. Tucking her gloved hands into his belt for security, she tightened her legs on the machine’s flanks and held on, balancing with each turn and twist in their path as they got under way. The last light of the sun glowed peach where it touched the city walls by the time they rumbled out of the north gate. He continued north for a mile, too, but she wasn’t too alarmed; in fact, when he slowed the motorhorse at the crossroads and turned right, she relaxed, leaning gently into the curve with him so the wheeled, mechanical beast wouldn’t slip or skid.
Once on the road that would connect with others headed eastward, he shifted a couple of levers and increased the fuel mix in the engine. Rexei wasn’t completely sure of how such things worked; the Engines Guild was one of many she had yet to apprentice in, never mind master. She did know just enough to be able to tell the engine sounded like it was in excellent shape. Good enough that the leftenant increased their speed once they were on the straightest stretch of the road, until she was grateful to huddle behind his leather-clad back, though the wind still whipped around him, chilling her where it blew through her felted outer clothes.
The trip by motorhorse took only a fraction of the time it would have taken her to walk the five miles on foot. If it weren’t for the heat of the engine seeping through the metal flanks of the motorhorse, she would have been as cold from the wind caused by their speed as she would have been from the longer journey at a shank’s mare pace. Even the pack on her back helped somewhat, but her arms were stiff and numb by the time he carefully guided the vehicle up the winding road that mounted the side of the northern hill and turned it onto the crystal-lit curve that formed the top of the Heias Dam. By then, they were so close that the water cascading over the spillway was louder than the motorhorse engine.
The dam was one of the few structures still extant that had been crafted in part by magic. Over three hundred years old—and rumored to be from a time before Mekha had turned rapacious—the runes that imbued it with the power to self-seal any developing cracks drew their power down from the aether via large crystals on the ends of tall iron poles. During thunderstorms, those crystals attracted and transformed lightning into the magic necessary to prevent even a minor failure.
It was also rumored that the priesthood had been considering a similar system in their temples, but storms were difficult to conjure, even more difficult to turn electric, and without magic, they were too unpredictable and infrequent to make such a use practical for anything other than the slowest, most long-term spells. Such as repairing the Heias Dam. Right now, there were no storms in the clouds drifting in patches over the near black sky, and what few stars shone through their gaps could not compete with the glow of the crystals.
They weren’t the only source of light. Brother and Sister Moons were riding the night sky, though their light was partially blocked by the clouds. On the northern hillside, Rexei and the leftenant had passed the buildings used by the Steelworks to manufacture the extra-hard, flexible metal for Mekhana’s war-machines industry. That guild ran its services every hour of the day, for it was far more difficult to restart the smelting fires from scratch than to keep them going, and too wasteful not to use up all that nighttime heat. On the southern hillside, there were only a few oil lamps and crystal lights, but those were the Guilds that had a mere building or two, not several, and they were usually only worked in the daylight hours.
Some of them were not what she had expected. The first time her work as a messenger had brought her here, Rexei had not expected to see the Tillers’ symbol—a scythe crossed with a wheat sheaf—on one of the signboards. She hadn’t expected to grow dizzy from the conflux of energies, either, but during her recovery in the outer halls of the Vortex and her subsequent induction into the never-mentioned Mages Guild, she had learned that the Heias Dam had been so well planned, its creators had even included a special set of spells and a sluice that scraped up the silt washed down to the reservoir from farther upstream.
That silt was captured, dried, and bagged by the Tillers Guild for shipment to local farms so it could be mixed in with composted manure and other forms of mulch. The Tillers—the farmers—who worked those fields spread it out to keep the ground fertile. She had grown up in the north, where the land was flat and had few trees and mines, but was rich in good farming soil. Down here near Heiastowne, the valley where the town sat was fertile enough, but most of the landscape was hilly and better suited for growing timber, grapevines, and digging ore.
But they weren’t headed for the far side of the valley. At the center point of the broad, long curve, the leftenant guided the motorhorse to the left, along a causeway out over the reservoir waters. It terminated in a roundish, almost castlelike structure. To either side of the causeway, smaller ones led to the open, semi-submerged, pipelike spillways feeding the great turbines powering each of the local buildings, but this one led to the control house.
Moonlight gleamed off the ice that had crusted the edges of the lake, cold and pale blue. Warm yellow light spilled down from the windows of the control house. The leftenant guided his motorhorse into one of the stables set aside for vehicles, but once he parked it and turned it off, once they were both off the saddle-fitted back, he did not lead her toward the nearest door into the stone-walled structure. Instead, he caught her wrist and pulled her toward the back of the parking stable.
Confused, Rexei followed. The tune in her head had changed the moment they drew within sight of the dam. A counterpoint melody wove itself around the first one, stabilizing her inner senses so that the swirling energies of the aether around this place would not disturb her own energies, as they had the first time. As they did to any mage who didn’t know the exact key to countering what seemed to be a natural phenomenon, but which she had been told on her first visit was a deliberately exaggerated effect. Priests did not like coming here because of that effect, which was the one thing making the Vortex a safe zone for mages.
The militia officer did something in the darkest corner of the stall . . . and part of the stone wall swung away. Beckoning her to follow, he entered the shadowed passage beyond. Hoping she wasn’t making a mistake, clinging to her knowledge that the priests hated coming to the dam and that Mekha was dead, Rexei followed him inside.
The head-sized rectangular stones quickly gave way to the smooth concrete surface that made up most of the dam. A good thing, too, for the passage turned into a spiral staircase that descended down, down, down. She expected the air to turn damp as well as cold, but it didn’t; it stayed dry and became warmer. The light coming from below grew brighter, too.
After the third turning, she could see the source, another of those odd, ceiling-embedded crystals like in the forbidden basement of the temple. It wasn’t quite as bright as daylight, but it was brighter than three oil lamps put together. It illuminated a table set at the bottom of the stairs and a man who was hastily pulling his feet off the table, replacing them with his book. Behind him lay a longish passage lined with two doors nearby, two farther down, and one at the end; the door behind him and to his right lay open and seemed to look into another curving stairwell leading down.
“Rogen!” the sentry exclaimed, gaining his feet. “Wait . . . who’s that?” he demanded, frowning at Rexei. “I don’t recognize that one. He’s not authorized to be here.”