The White Order(125)

Thinking about Anya’s reaction when he’d entered the Hall, and so much that had occurred, Cerryl had to agree with Faltar. But there wasn’t much he could do, and he lifted his mug and enjoyed a swallow of cool ale.





LXXVII




CERRYL STEPPED INTO the tower room, glad that Myral had the shutters open and that a breeze blew in—except that the breeze stopped when he closed the heavy brass-bound door.

From his seat by the table, where he sipped cool cider, Myral studied Cerryl. “You’ve been working on not holding chaos within yourself, have you not?”

“I’ve tried to follow your instructions and suggestions,” Cerryl admitted. “It’s hard.”

“Anything done well is often hard.” Myral smiled briefly. “Those to whom power comes naturally have difficulty understanding such until it is oft too late.”

Cerryl refrained from noting that parables weren’t exactly going to help him, and eased into the chair across from the older mage.

“How is the cleaning on this one coming?”

“Not too bad,” Cerryl said, “but there’s a place just ahead where another tunnel seems to join, and it’s not on the map.”

Myral frowned, then rose and half-walked, half-waddled to the bookcase. Cerryl didn’t recall the older mage being so ponderous before, but said nothing as Myral returned to the table and unrolled the map scroll.

“Where?”

Cerryl pointed. “About there, right before that turn when it joins the eastern main tunnel.”

Myral’s eyebrows rose, and his face cleared immediately. “Oh . . . that. It’s not a collector tunnel. Years and years ago, there was a group of ruffians—they called themselves traders, but they decided to use the sewers as a way out of the city to avoid the guards and the tariffs, and they built an entrance from the lower level of their building. That tunnel was never fully bricked up underground—just from the building side. If you followed it, you’d come to a brick wall. There was another bricked-up tunnel exit all the way out by the spillway, but that was filled in with rubble.” The older mage smiled. “They got away with it for almost a year.” He paused. “I told you how the sunlight striking the water on the spillways cleans the sewer water before it reaches the lake . . .?”

“Yes, ser. You took me out there and showed me how the sludge is trapped in the first basin, and then—”

Myral waved vaguely as he straightened up and rerolled the scroll. “No sense in telling you what I’ve told you. These days—maybe I always did—I repeat myself too much. Happens when you get old.”

“Old? You don’t look old.”

“I’m old, Cerryl. Old, old, old for a mage. I have my vanities, and Leyladin helps me with them, but I’m an old man, good for telling about sewers and refuse and such, and little else.” Myral plopped back into his chair, breathing heavily. After a moment, he glared at Cerryl. “Go on. You go scour the sewer, and I’ll sit here and look important to myself.”

Cerryl stood.

“When you get to the smugglers’ tunnel, be careful. You’ll have to clean that out, or it will mean the secondary will have to be scoured sooner. But there’s no telling whether their workmanship was any good. You may have to get masons. Just let me know.” Myral laughed, then coughed. “It’s not as though I’ll be traveling far.”

The younger man nodded again, then left, meeting Jyantyl and the lancers outside the barracks at the rear of the halls as usual.

The morning went quickly enough, if not so swiftly as Cerryl had hoped, since he found another set of small collectors on the east side. One was nearly totally plugged, and he’d had to use firebolts and steam to bore through the sludgy mass.

Even after he and the lancers had taken a midday break, Cerryl still felt tired, but he again unlocked the bronze sewer grate and nodded to Ullan and Dientyr, then started down the steps. At least in summer the tunnels were somewhat cooler than the streets.

He tried not to breathe deeply at first, until his sense of smell was partly deadened. The odors were far worse in summer and would get even worse as the heat drew on toward harvest. Cerryl ignored the omnipresent stench and let his senses range up the sewage tunnel to his right. Somewhere ahead was the bricked-up smugglers’ tunnel.

The wastewater flowed down the bottom of the sewer, below the slimy walkway . . . but there was something about it . . . a hint of turbulence . . . something.

Cerryl let a small lance of the golden chaos light flare along the top of the water. A line of fire flashed even beyond the limits of his light lance. Something in the sewage was burning—an oil? He tried to sniff but could smell nothing. Where would oil come from?