Demesne 201 - Oh (Patreon)

Lori had planned to clear the way to the tree line by creating another tunnel through the snow until they hit a tree, and then having people with shovels deal with the rest. It was, in her opinion, the simplest way to deal with a lot of frozen water unless they wanted a lot of ice lying around, and she didn't. Snow wasn't a contiguous solid, after all, so she'd need to compact it first before she could properly manipulate it. In many ways it shared the same problems as using earthwisps to move soil.

Then Rian had one of his strange ideas over breakfast.

"Using wind on the snow?" Lori said skeptically over breakfast.

Rian nodded. "Yes. At this point, most of the snow we're clearing up is new stuff. It hasn't had time to compact, get hard and stick together. We can shovel it, but if we had a strong enough wind, it would blow right off the roofs."

"Rian, stop procrastinating and waiting for the wind to do the work for you."

Next to Rian, Riz actually snickered.

"That's not what I'm doing," Rian said with theatrical injured dignity. "Though admittedly I can understand why you would think that. No, I was thinking that… uh, well…"

"You've thought of more work for me again, haven't you," Lori said blandly.

"In my defense, it's only work for you if you decide to do it. You're the Dungeon Binder, you don't have to do anything you don't want to."

"That's right, I don't," Lori said.

"Even if what I have in mind might be fun to play with, your authority is above and beyond all others in the demesne. You have no peers or equals, so no matter how enjoyable my idea might be, you don't have to do a thing."

"Now you're just being childish," Lori noted.

"It could still be fun," Rian said cheerfully. "And it might even help with gathering firewood. Maybe. Possibly."

Lori rolled her eyes. "You sound like a child begging for a new toy. Don't you have any more critical business to speak of?"

"Well, we could talk about the food supply," Rian said.

"Then do that and stop wasting my time with your silliness," Lori said.

"Fine, fine. We have enough food to last the winter."

Lori waited. Eventually she said, "That's it?"

"That's it." Rian had on one of his annoying smiles now. "All critical business, spoken about." He paused. "Well, there is one other thing…"

"Then it's not all critical business after all. What else?"

"Should we check on River's Fork to see if they're still alive?"

"So, this silly idea of yours, using wind to clean off the snow?"

"Yes! It's an idea that came to me last night, though only you can do it," Rian said, smiling brightly. "The snow we get every morning is pretty light since it hadn't gotten back down yet. With a strong enough wind, you could just blow it off the roofs."

"And I should do so… why? Shovels and feather brooms have been doing well so far."

"That would be nice, but no. My point is snow is airy. If you can create a strong, focused wind, you might be able to simply blast the snow out of your way instead of having to slowly tunnel through it." He blew on his hand, presumably pretending to blow away snow.

Lori tilted her head. She considered the snow over her demesne, the feeling of all the waterwisps covering its surface. The other wisps intermixed into it—lightwisps, airwisps, darkwisps, earthwisps—she had all but ignored. After all, there was always something dissolved or mixed into water. It was nothing unusual, and only really something to pay attention to when she was trying to make ice that was perfectly transparent, with no bubbles from the dissolved air or particulates from dust…

She shrugged. "I suppose I can give it a try when I clear the path to the tree line later."

It worked surprisingly well, once she had the technique down. The air had to strike the snow at an angle, essentially shaving off the surface, but a constant flow of wind quickly broke up any amount of snow. Even snow that seemed hard packed turned out to not be as solid as it appeared, unless it had become ice somehow.

"See, you're having fun," Rian said as he followed behind her, using the spear he held in his other hand as a walking stick. He poked the ground in front of him with the butt of the spear before taking a step. Lori did the same thing staff, the wire cool under her hand, which meant it was probably freezing. Their clothes fluttered energetically around them as the binding Lori maintaining sent air blasting in from of them at a slightly upwards angle and another one that blue at a downward angle.

It hadbeen two bindings, one pointed slightly upward and another pointed slightly downward to clear the path underfoot, but that had started throwing up dead leaves into their faces, which had been unpleasant.

"I suppose," Lori said, trying to sound detached. All right, yes, this was fun. It was a binding that would have required her to swallow a bead before she had become a Dungeon Binder, since the amount of imbuement needed for the wind to be constant while moving this volume of air through a binding this wide was… well, she would just barely not be able to maintain it unless she was willing to hyperventilate, which was unsafe. It was jarring sometimes, to realize that she was doing something that would have taken at least two Whisperers to maintain, and doing it as a matter of course.

Rian nodded. "I don't suppose you can stick this binding in a tube that someone else can carry around? Let other people share in the fun and maybe make getting snow off roofs easier?"

Lori turned and gave him a flat look.

"It's just a thought," he said guilelessly. "The snow's been filling up the paths to the houses we dug up. If you want people to move out of the Dungeon and back to their houses, we need either an easier way to clear snow or just turn all the alleys between the houses into tunnels so all we have to worry about is keeping snow of the roofs and chimneys."

Ah, right, she still had to make the chimneys taller, didn't she?

"I'll consider it," Lori said.

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Lori, in her generosity—and because it was fun to use her binding to blast snow away—cleared space around several trees once they reached the tree line. Once she had cleared a path, people finally stopped simply loitering in her dungeon and actually began working again. Trees were cut for wood, and then snow had to be cleared to reach other trees.

Most of the tree would become firewood, but a few parts that were particularly straight and thick were set aside and taken to the curing sheds, to dry in the cold over time so they could be properly cut in the spring. The sawpit they'd been using before was buried in snow, and no one wanted to try digging down that deep. The rest of the wood was cut with saw and axes and taken down to the third level for storage, while the sawdust was gathered for the latrines. Lori was amused to see Rian going around gathering up thin branches and twigs into a bucket.

Now that they had a regular source of firewood again, people finally started going back to their houses. Lori gave in and spent two days building up a network of ice tunnels in the alleys and paths between the houses near her Dungeon. There were also breaks in the tunnels that opened out into the sky, through which people could access their roofs with a ladder. Well, once the snow was cleared, anyway, because of course snow would drop down and block the way.

Try as she might, Lori couldn't find a safe way to anchor the air jet binding to something solid without whatever she bound it to becoming extremely dangerous. Any material that the airwisps could be anchored that was light enough to be easily carried—the best one had been made from bone—would also be light enough to be propelled by the expulsion of air the binding caused. This meant that once the binding was made and anchored to an object, there was no way to safely put it down. Putting the object down resulted in a randomly moving, dangerous projectile moving around at high speed, at least until it ran out of imbuement. And unlike the water jet, they couldn't just remove it from the air so the binding would have nothing to propel, because air was everywhere.

Attempts to block airflow with wooden various plugs had some success, but the intensity of the suction meant it was very, very difficult to pull the plug out again. Rian had proposed a complex mechanism of sliding boxes, similar to the adjustable water jet driver in the Coldhold, to let the binding keep circulating air so that it could be put down safely, but even he seemed to agree that building such a thing wasn't reasonable.

That didn't mean the idea was completely abandoned, but it required Lori to personally hand out the bone tubes with the bindings and activate and deactivate the binding herself, which was… annoying. Still, worked to a degree, letting one person clear the snow from several houses if they stood on the right roof and were very careful with their footing, at least until the imbuement ran out. And the imbuement did run out, since she only put a relatively small amount of imbuement into the binding. Better not enough than too much. If the work still wasn't finished, well, they had brooms and shovels.

After that, Lori spent most of the next week making the chimneys taller. It wasn't much, only about a pace or so above the highest point of the roof, but it was enough to let the fireplaces vent out smoke even if the house was still partially buried. For the first time, however, she wasn't doing it alone.

"Rian," Lori said, regarding him and the mix of men and women with him, "what is this about?"

"So, a 'dealing with people' matter has come to my attention," Rian said, "in regards to you putting up extensions to the chimneys."

Lori gave him and those with him a blank look. "If they want me to work on their houses first…"

"No, no, actually it's something sensible this time. We know how you are with names so we'll skip that part, but these good folk are our demesne's stone masons, carpenters—" ah, that's why they looked familiar, "—stone workers and thatchers."

Lori frowned. "What's a thatcher?"

Rian glanced at a pair of people. "She's from the city, they don't do thatch roofs there," he said. "Ahem, a thatcher is basically a craftsman who makes roofs using fibrous plant material. Not something you've probably run into in the city, but they're very important in the edges and in places that don't have ready access to other roofing materials. They're mostly here because they have a good head for heights and standing on roofs. Which is about what we—and by which I mean me—want to talk to you about."

"Well, go on. I have work I still need to do," Lori said irritably.

"Yes, about that. It's been discussed, and brought to my attention, that the good people of your demesne don't want you to work on the chimneys."

Lori blinked in surprise. "I thought the extensions were needed?"

"Let me rephrase," Rian said. "The chimneys still need to be extended slightly, but it has been agreed that while it needs to be done, no one wants youto be the one to do it."

For a moment, a surge of indignation surged though Lori. How dare they! She was the Dungeon Binder, no one had any right to tell her what to do, they— "Is there something wrong with the quality of my work that—"

"No, you—!" Rian sputtered, his vocabulary finally either failing him or realizing who he was talking to. "No one wants you getting hurt!"

Oh. "Oh," Lori said blandly.

"Yes, 'oh'. You're the Dungeon Binder, remember? No one wants you risking your life in a slippery roof just to make chimneys."

"I thought you said only I could deal with extending the chimneys," Lori said.

"That's because I was stupid," Rian said, not seeming to notice the way people looked at him in askance. "And because I was thinking that we didn't have any mortar to anchor things to the stone with. But Pellee and Markes pointed out that you didn't actually have to be on the roof to work your magic on the stone, and they very rightly informed me that the extensions to the chimneys could be formed on the ground where it's safe for you. They could handle the dangerous part of actual climbing up to the roof to put the extension on the chimneys and make any holes that need to be made. They've done it before, they have more experience than you at it." Some of the people with Rian nodded. "As to mortar, if you know where it is you can use your magic on it from the ground, right?"

Lori blinked. That… hadn't occurred to her. She'd resigned herself to trying to navigate up a ladder and having to find a way to bring stone up there herself. The idea to have someone else do it hadn't been something to consider. Why would she? The chimneys had been her work, after all…

"I see," Lori simply said. "Well… all right then." A thought occurred to her. "What tools do you have?"

Lori spent her time making the chimney extensions using their stone stockpile while other people took care of climbing up to roofs to knock holes into the existing chimneys—she softened the stone so that their tools wouldn't get worn and marked where it was with a few weak lightwisps—and carrying her finished stone tubes up to put them over the chimney to extend it. At first she fused the extension to the rest of the chimney herself, until the stonemasons started using the softened stone they'd removed to act as a mortar, using it to seal up any holes where the chimney and extension met and anchoring it as best as they could. Then she just sent them up with some softened stone so they could do the work themselves.

She very quickly saw that they meant about injuries. Even with the roof swept clear of snow, sometimes patches of ice developed, and the boots they had to wear didn't have very good grip on the wooden planks. Lori saw at least three instances of someone slipping and sliding down the roof to land on the snow below. Thankfully, the thick snow cushioned their falls, so no one was grievously hurt, but one person injured their knee on the roof from slipping, and another one clipped their head on the eaves on the way down and they had been taken to the hospital for observation in case of brain swelling.

It had been terrifying to watch, hearing the crack as the man's head struck the wood, the blood on the snow from the scalp injury, how he had been carried to the hospital by four people while they all talked to him to keep him from falling asleep…

That night, Lori lay in bed, one hand on her head and staring unseeing at the ceiling over her as she shuddered at the images of her falling and striking her head on a roof.