Weekly Digest 63 - (#200 - #202) (Patreon)

Past The Storm

The storm continued for two more days, finally blowing itself out and going still after five days of intense wind and snow. Technically it stopped midday of the fifth day, but Rian had suggested giving it time, in case it had simply been a lull and not the end.

During those two days, Lori had continued expanding her demesne using her new methodology. The creation of the massive spherical binding, while still greatly intimidating in scale, had been made and remade again and again. Despite how annoyed she'd been at Rian for wanting to time how long each binding took to create, it had become clear that each iteration was finished incrementally faster than the one before.

Rian, predictably, had gone strange again now that he had a new number that was going up… or down, as the case had been. It wasn't even something that he'd had anything to do with!

Still, Lori couldn't deny that there was a certain satisfaction in being able to do multiple times a day with relative ease what had once been possible only daily, and with great suffering. Between the relatively more sedentary pace enforced on them by the storm and how little else she had to do, she had the time to expand her demesne nine more times. Three expansions per day had turned out to be insufficiently optimistic.

On the sixth day after the storm began, with the sun shining weakly through the hole left open in the entryway to the dungeon to assure them this wasn't some temporary lull, her whole demesne set out to dig out their homes from the snow. Nearly everything had been buried in the frozen water, snow piled so high on the roofs of houses the structures were essentially entombed.

As they had planned, the first order of business had been for Lori to create a tunnel through the snow to the tool shed, a house-sized stone building at the edge of their agricultural fields notable for its low ceiling and wide double door to accommodate the carts stored within. It was also deeply buried, but the roof was well-cured wood and had been put together by carpenters who knew what they were doing. The floor was covered in bugs, dead from either the cold or running out of air in the half week the storm had persisted.

The next building she tunneled to were the curing sheds, full of a mix of firewood, logs that were being stored in preparation for being cut into plank, beams and anything else they needed, and a supply of charcoal, made by the demesne's charcoal burners. There wasn't a lot of it, not enough to supply every house in the demesne—the supply had been meant to supply the smiths—but it was a fuel. She also passed by the second bath house on the way, because they needed the facilities.

The whole first day was busy, with only a brief stop for lunch, as Lori tunneled to connect to other disparate buildings of the demesne, and successive day didn't get much easier. She was so busy she barely found the time to expand the demesne once a day. Thankfully, her new process was much more forgiving than her old one, affording her more recovery time, usually when she was just imbuing the binding in preparation for expansion.

Everyone else worked hard on getting the buildings with wooden roofs unburied, standing on top of the planks from the curing shed to distribute their weight on the snow so they wouldn't sink. There was a lot of digging, and Rian had needed to ask Lori to mark out with lightwisps the areas where there wasn't anything buried in the snow after there had been altercation's from people flinging their snow on top of other houses.

The laundry area's rather flimsy roof of branches had collapsed at one corner, which explained why Lori had woken up to find the binding keeping the area warm had dissipated, all the imbuement used up from melting the snow. The mushroom farm had been cold, far too cold, but while all the growing mushrooms seemed to have wilted, this apparently meant the mushrooms had simply gone into winter hibernation, and could be continued once it became warm enough to thaw and fruit again. The tannery, it was initially decided, was a lost cause until the snow melted, but eventually Lori had been convinced to tunnel there to save what skins and leathers had been left behind.

She also tunneled towards where the rest of the vigas had been stored, and in hindsight storing such an essential resource outside the Dungeon had clearly been a stupid idea. Fortunately the Dungeon had room. Even if there weren't many alcoves still standing empty, there was room in the side tunnels of the third level, at least until Lori continued with expanding it. Digging the houses out was put on hold the next day until all the storage jars of the precious grain had been properly moved to her Dungeon, every jar accounted for, their clay seals checked to make sure they were all still intact.

The second to last structure Lori had tunneled to had been the irrigation cistern, where all the waste water from the bath houses was delivered by the pips, to find that it had predictably flooded recently, since the ground had become waterlogged and then frozen. The snow around it had darkened from the things in the water, soap and dirt that had been washed off, and the binding that had evaporated the water and fed it back to be used again in the second bath house had also been overwhelmed and dissipated. Thankfully, the pipes hadn't filled with frozen water, but she had needed to quickly devise a different means of dealing with their waste water.

Using the snow as building material, she'd made pipes of ice and a binding of air-, water-, and firewisps to turn waste water into snow and blast it out over the buried agricultural fields, while the heat that was removed from the water by the process kept the underground pipes warm to prevent the waste water from freezing solid and blocking them. Lori would have to check it ever so often and invert the firewisps to destroy excess heat if it became too much and started to make the snow around it boil—it took the same amount of magic to increase heat as it did to decrease it—but she'd need to keep it imbued anyway.

The very last structures she tunneled to were the dock for the Coldhold, which had fused to the frozen ice of the river, and the nearby water hub shed. She'd deactivated the latter once the river froze and no more new water was being pulled into the reservoir. So far, the snow melter was doing adequately for their water needs, even if it needed to be loaded with clean snow daily, but that was hardly a resource currently in short supply.

Even when all the tunnels connecting everything had been finished, the ice walls lined with a layer of packed snow, there was always more for her to do. The sudden increase in usable latrines meant she had to put the plan Rian had proposed into action. It was a viscerally disgusting plan, even if she intellectually understood the all the things that rendered the material disgusting would have long since ceased to be relevant.

A part of her wanted to use bound ice as the building material in questions, simply because water was currently so plentiful, but eventually decided to use stone. Choosing where to put it was slightly more complicated, but she eventually decided to set it up just past Rian's house, just outside the mushroom farm. This required extending the tunnel slightly, creating an open space under the snow held back by ice walls. It was actually not that different from excavation her dungeon. She even made sure to place supporting pillars.

After the small space was made, she used stone to build a large stone tank that rose up to chest height, with a ramp leading above it so that the waste could be dumped inside. The size of the tank was to help prevent any misuse by putting the active biding well beyond arms reach. Why anyone would want to stick their arm in tank full of waste, she had no idea, but it wouldn't surprise her if someone did so just because she thought no one would actually be stupid enough to do so. The size would also allow it to be filled for a long time before it had to be opened and the contents removed so that the next step could be done.

A part of her hoped it would last all through the winter, but she was resigned to the unlikelihood of that. The waste of more than two hundred people, desiccated or not, would very quickly pile up.

When it inevitably did so, according to Rian's plan box would be turned into a kiln, the insides lined with bound ice to act as an insulator, to bake the waste. This would simultaneously reduce the weigh further and alchemically render the now-cooked waste of similar substance to charcoal. The resulting substance would be pressed into chunks and used as fuel to heat homes, or so the plan went. She had spoken to the charcoal burners Rian had spoken to, who assured her this was how it was done in small, cold villages in winter, and had confidently claimed they could do it. They even had the molds for pressing the… substance… into solid chunks. All she'd need to do was provide heat when the time came, and they'd do the rest.

The idea still made her shudder. But it was a solution to the latrine waste issue, andshe didn't have to touch a thing, so she really had no good reason to refuse the plan, and Lori had tried very, very hard to find one.

Sometimes, not very often but sometimes, she reallyhated her own practical nature.

That same practical nature resigned her to the fact that people were unlikely to leave her Dungeon and go back to their homes until spring, or at least they cleared the snow enough to be able to gather more firewood. Though at the rate progress was being made, that would also not be until spring. That didn't mean she had to like it.

"Well, can you blame us?" Rian said over dinner almost a week after the storm had ended as he put down the bowls of soup he was helping Riz carry. "It's still freezing out there, and the snow's still too thick for us to cut any new firewood. It's warmer in here."

"My Dungeon is for emergencies," Lori said as she took one of the bowls and a cup of water.

"A shortage of an essential resource is an emergency," Rian said as the three other women took their own bowls. "Until we can clear enough snow to be able to reach the tree line and start gathering more firewood, we'll have a wood shortage. And we're barely keeping ahead of the snow fall from burying everyone's houses again as it is, never mind making progress towards the treeline."

"Why are people doing that if they're not living in them?" Lori said irritably.

"For space to hang laundry," Rian said.

Lori stared at him. Then she glanced at Umu and Mikon, just to be sure. They both nodded in confirmation.

She sighed heavily. The sad thing was she really couldn't find any fault with that argument. People still needed to wash their clothes, and while the laundry area's roof covering had been repaired, there was otherwise nowhere else to hang the clothes out to dry except her dungeon.

"Look, it can't be helped," Rian said as he stirred his soup with his spoon a few times. "Either this was a really bad storm or this area just naturally gets a lot of snow at this time of year. And you were the one who decided to make clearing a path towards the forest your last priority. Not that I disagree that the desiccator was more important." He raised a spoonful, blew on it and ate.

"I know, I know," Lori said irritably. "I'll get to it tomorrow." Simply movingall the snow by binding all the waterwisps had been an option for her, of course, but the tunnels were secured against further snowfall. Also, a part of her was of the opinion that people should be kept busy lest they have the time to do something stupid. Clearing a path towards the treeline was just the sort of thing to aid people in keeping busy.

"That would be wonderful, thank you. Warm as it is in here, I'm starting to miss my bed." Given that she had previously slept on that bed, Lori doubted it was the bed itself he missed as she glanced at the women seated to either side of him. "We'll have to keep a watch kept after you do," Rian mused. "Wouldn't want chokers getting into the tunnels, after all. Maybe some kind of temporary door."

Lori snorted derisively. "I highly doubt any chokers survived the storm. Even if they did, they'd be buried in paces of snow."

"Life always finds a way," Rian said. "Those things had been living and surviving on this content for who knows how long. this can't be the first time a storm like this had come around. They're out there somewhere. When spring comes, we'll probably up to our necks dealing with them, because' they'll be hungry."

That… sounded annoyingly plausible. "Well, I'll leave that to you," Lori said. "Their meat will do us good."

"Every little bite helps," Rian… probably agreed.

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Oh

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.

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The Sled

"Can I borrow your boat?" Rian asked her that morning as they waited for Riz and Umu to come with breakfast.

"My boat?" Lori frowned as she finished setting up the sunk board and moving it towards Mikon so the weaver could make the first move. Ah, winning was fun.

"Yes, your boat."

"Do you mean Lori's Boat?" Lori made her move as Mikon finished with hers. The weaver was trying all sorts of opening gambits other than the most optimal one, simply because she wasn't winning. She still wasn't winning, but now she seemed to actively be trying all possible combinations of not winning.

"Yes, that's what I said."

Lori gave her lord a flat, unamused look as she finished dropping the stones in her hand into the bowls and ended her turn. Rian, for his part, just wore a bright, cheerful smile. "Why?"

"I had an idea about how to get upriver to that thing we talked about checking on," he said. "I'm going to need your boat to start with."

The look became more unamused. "You're going to try and talk me into putting air jets on it, aren't you."

Rian made a show of crying with happiness, pretending to wipe away a tear from his eye. "Why do you still need me? You can tell what people are thinking just fine, my position is superfluous. Also, yes."

Lori rolled her eyes. "Not people. Just you."

"I don't count as people?"

"You're a lord," Lori pointed out.

"Fair enough, I suppose. Though in my defense, it's just a job for me. It's not like it's everything I am and for some reason I've wrapped my entire identity around it to an unhealthy degree."

She rolled her eyes again at that, then frowned. "Where is my—I mean, Lori's Boat?"

"You'd know better than I would, if you've been keeping the water jet running, but presumably still in the docks, buried under all the snow," Rian said. "That is, if it wasn't blown somewhere else by the storm. Ugg, I hope it didn't slide into the river and float downstream, otherwise we'd never get it back. But presuming it's still there, it should still be fine. The snow's likely not melting, and the carpenters have already checked it over recently, so the wood's been treated with what oil we have."

Ah. Right. Lori concentrated, sorting through the bindings in her demesne. Yes, there was one thatway… yes, it was the water jet… "It's still at the docks."

Rian brightened. "If you lend me the air jet and open a hole in the ice tunnel, I should be able to dig it out."

"Very probably," Lori nodded dryly. "What do you need it for? Besides the silly idea of putting air jets on it."

"Why is it a silly idea? Riz has been telling me about how they use sleds up north in the winter to get around, since it's more efficient that trying to walk or anything with wheels. Your boat's underside is just the right shape to be used as a big sled, once we take off the stabilizers fins. There's enough area to distribute its weight pretty evenly on snow so it won't sink much and with the right runners should go pretty straight. As long as we don't pile on too much weight, it should be able to skim over snow without much friction, and a sufficiently strong air jet can give it enough thrust to take advantage of that lack of friction."

Lori stared at him. "What's a sled?"

Rian stared right back as Riz and Mikon arrived with breakfast, putting the bowls of soup and cups of water down on the table. Lori took one. "You… don't know what a sled is?"

Obviously, or else she wouldn't ask. "Obviously, or else I wouldn't ask," she said, dipping a spoon into the soup to stir it a little before proceeding to eat.

"Huh. Well, if you don't know, you don't know." Rian shrugged and took the last bowl of soup as Riz sat down next to Mikon. "A sled is a kind of board that children sit on to slide down snowy slopes."

"It sounds very dangerous. I treasure my ignorance."

"The adult version is a practical vehicle for getting people or cargo around in the snow."

"… By distributing weight over a large area and using the relatively low friction of snow to make something that's easy to propel, if I recall your exposition correctly."

"Yes, exactly!"

"Presumably to reach the edge of the demesne to investigate that matter I spoke to you about."

Rian just nodded. He dipped his spoon into his bowl and blew on it before putting it into his mouth.

"Would not the trees get in the way? As I understand it, there are a lot of trees between here and the edge of the demesne."

"Not on top of the river," Rian declared, with the air of one making a dramatic reveal.

"Ah. That makes sense." Yes, the river was currently frozen and under a layer of snow, wasn’t it? It would make for flat, even ground with no obstructions. And if the ice should happen to break beneath him, so what? It was a boat. "And propelling it with the air jet?"

"It would probably take more force than the air jets you let us use to clear snow, but in principle it's not that different from the water jet, right? And the ice would have a lot less friction and resistance to push against than water."

"It's also supposed to have a metal bottom, Rian," Riz said. "To get it at its most slippery, it needs to melt the snow a little so it's wet under the sled. It's not necessary, but it helps."

"I don't think we'll be able to put one of those, Riz."

"And if I refuse to humor this silly idea?"

"Well, we should probably still bring your boat in from under the snow, and then I'm going to find a way to tie a pair of planks on my feet, tie a shovel to my back, and start walking up the river to check it out. It's only a little walk, what's the harm?"

"Rian, you hate the cold. You're weak to the cold. Your nose starts dripping and threatening to drown you if so much as a chill breeze blows in your face." She'd had him see their doctors and medics about it, but they all said he wasn't really sick, just dripping disgustingly.

"It's fine. My nose only drips one side at a time, so I can still breathe at half capacity."

And he was probably completely serious about that.

Lori sighed, and turned towards Riz, sitting on the other side of Mikon. "Go with him when he investigates and keep him alive."

The woman nodded. "Of course, Great Binder."

Rian grinned. "Does that mean you're lending it to me?"

"Why? You can walk perfectly well."

"Ah… well, there's another reason why I've been thinking of how we might be able to quickly traverse the snow," Rian said.

Of course there was. "Of course there is," Lori said blandly.

"You see, the first births are likely to happen in a month at the most. If we want to give them the best chance of both the mother and the child surviving, I think it would be best to find a way to restore contact with River's Fork and beg Shana to come here so she can heal either if there are any complications. Doing the experimentation this early gives us more time to find a reliable method, and the sooner we make contact with them, the more time we have to negotiate a deal they'll accept."

…

Lori gave her lord a look pronouncing exactly how much she disliked this idea. "Is this really necessary?"

"Your Bindership, 'mother died in childbirth' comes up a lot in novels and plays for a reason."

…

Lori sighed. "Fine, fine. Get it out of the snow and see what state it's in first."

"Wait, you're already agreeing? I usually have to do a lot more convincing."

"You can still walk. I'm sure Binder Shanalorre could be comfortably conveyed on your back."

"Thank you for your benevolence and generosity, your Bindership!"

––––––––––––––––––

It was a relatively simple matter to dig out to the docks with two air jets and several people with shovels. It helped Lori had already made a tunnel to the water hub shed, which was next to the docks. She just had to open a hole in the wall of the ice tunnel and, admittedly, put down some lightwisps for them to follow so they wouldn't get lost.

She couldhave just made a tunnel, but she needed to imbue the bindings she'd be using to expand the demesne later. Besides, it was best to give people something to do. Lori had seen a few pacing restlessly, unable to settle down, so best to give them something physical to let them spend their imbuement on before they did something idiotic.

Once dug out of the snow, Lori's Boat was taken to the second level and raised up on wooden stands to be examined by the carpenters and other woodworkers, just in case there was any damage. Thankfully, being buried in snow for two week hadn't seemed to cause it any more harm. The fittings that had been added to it—the outriggers, the water jet, the stabilizer fins—were removed carefully, and the places they had been mounted on were checked for weakness or damage.

Then Rian had gleefully declared they should 'test it to see how it handled the snow'.

Lori had then been treated to the sight of grown men pushing Lori's Boat around in the snow, trying to get it moving as fast as they could, before trying to jump aboard to ride it for however far it managed to travel on the force that had been imparted on it. The grown men acting like children had then been joined by actual children, who then rode on Lori's Boat while the adults pushed them around. At that point, she had retreated to her room so she wouldn't actually have to see if they somehow broke the boat, and spent the rest of her afternoon expanding her demesne like a responsible person.

"We're putting runners where the outriggers would usually be to make sure it goes straight, but other than that, your boat is already a wonderful sled," Rian reported at dinner. "Now we just need a way to get it moving." He gave Lori a hopeful look.

"So you didn't break it from jumping on it?"

"No, we didn't break it. It's pretty durable Deadspoken wood. Some of us have bruises on our shins, though I don't expect you have any sympathy for us."

"It was your own silly idea," Lori nodded. She waved a hand. "Very well, I'll see about putting together a larger air jet to propel it for you."

Well, she supposed she wasn't too annoyed at Rian for thinking of more work for her to do. With the desiccator for the latrine waste running, other people taking care of supplying water to the reservoir with snow, and the snow limiting what work could be done, Lori had most of her day free, and even she was starting to get bored at efficiently expanding her demesne, playing board games at meals and reading her almanac. Being aggravated at Rian for thinking up some foolish project was a nice change of pace.

Obviously, the larger air jet to propel the boat-turned-sled would need a way of stopping, else it would be… well, a very inconvenient conveyance. However, unlike the smaller air jets, a vehicle-mounted air jet would be relatively stationary, so the air could be pointed in a particular direction and she wouldn't have to worry about it moving to point somewhere else. Obviously, it would need some kind of mechanical element, just like the water jet, but it would have to be fairly simple so it could be built with what they had.

To that end, she went down to the second level and examined the boat again, taking measurements to refresh her knowledge of its dimensions. Then she went back to her room and sketched out some ideas on a stone tablet. The air jet would need a large volume of air being thrust at great intensity to propel the sled. Enough to counter the weight of the materials and… say, three, no, four passengers as minimum. That would be… what, four hundred sengrains of weight? Well, she could calibrate the thrust later. What she needed was something to anchor the air wisps providing the thrust to, which would in turn need to be physically connected to the sled…

Ugh, why did she let her lord keep talking her into going along with his silly ideas?