Crixus Oraan is a water artesan, an engineer who builds aqueducts and piping for bathhouses and mansions in the empire of Rond. His guild has entrusted him with a large sum of gold, but in a misguided effort to win enough to buy a lavish house for his new fiancé Kharrina, he loses the guild's gold in a card game. In this first volume of the Aqua Pura Trilogy, Crixus finds employment with the Lamiae of Nistru, a cruel society where those at the top bathe in the lifeblood of those at the bottom. Will his conscience allow him to finish the job?
Excerpt:
Crixus Oraan and his two assistants lounged downhill from the dowser and his entourage. The water shaman chanted, anointed himself with pungent oils, cast wild eyes about the hillock, and in general gave a good show for the nobleman who hired him. Salty wind tickled their hair, relieving the humidity common to Rond in summer.
“The usual wager?” Stamm produced a sestric, its silver plating scratched from decades spent in belt-pouches. Crixus dug out a sestric. They held the coins up between thumb and forefinger.
“Two hundred yards,” Crixus said.
“You’re too gentle,” Stamm said, wagging the coin at him. “Three fifty and not one less. He’s got the sense of an aurochs.”
The hill overlooked Restia, a coastal town beginning to bloat with nobles and their summer households. Since the completion of a paved road between Restia and the capital city of Greater Rond, money and business flowed into the town like wine at a wedding celebration. In the last two months, Crixus had made the day long journey every week to arrange contracts for aqueducts and plumbing to the new estates. It brought him into contact with dowsers far more often than he preferred.
For Kharrina, however, it was worth the headache.
He had been haggling with Councilman Stada over costs for running pipes to the main house, the servants’ quarters, the bathhouse, the fountains, and the surrounding vineyard. Crixus had explained the necessary steps so many times that he grew tired of his own voice. Stada’s gaze would wander off after ten seconds of explanation, until the word “sestrices” came up—then he would snap back in a display of decisiveness.
Crixus found himself talking to the bald patch on the older man’s head. Though just a few inches taller than the average Rondan, he towered over the councilman, who refused to look him in the eye as he spoke; thus, the bald patch took on a life of its own as the councilman’s gaze wandered throughout the imaginary work site Crixus described. It irked Crixus now to watch Stada gaze in awe at the water shaman.
“He may have the sense of an aurochs, but he’s got the showmanship of a trained bear,” Crixus said. “Look at him. If he did that in a tavern, we’d call him a drunkard.”
Behind them, Gavri sorted the soil samples she had collected from the far side of the hill, past the stand of trees. At Crixus’ urging, the girl wore her dark hair in a plain pageboy cut and forsook makeup. This, along with the shapeless worker’s garments, hid her femininity enough that she might be taken more seriously in the Guild. Gavri knew stone as well as masons twice her age.
“Ser, I know the man is a fraud, but what’s the harm? Councilman Stada has more money than wit,” Gavri said. They chuckled at her matter-of-fact tone. “It’s not the Water Guild’s problem if he wastes good silver on dowsers. We know where the water is.” She presented the soil samples, arranged in rows in a wooden box separated into a grid of compartments by slats. A metal arrow inset on one side marked cardinal north, so that the box was a miniature cross-section of the hill itself. “Or we soon will.”
In three of the compartments, she had placed a tiny white flower. “We will indeed! Good work.” Crixus lifted a blossom. “However, our mystical friend does more than waste the old man’s money. When his prediction turns out to be wrong, we’ll have dug a well needlessly. We’ll charge the client extra then go dig where there is water to be had, but we’ll have lost his goodwill. If you really want to spend the next year bickering with Stada, I’ll put you in charge.”
Gavri considered this. “Then why do we tolerate him?”
“I don’t,” Stamm said, spitting.
“He has ties to the priesthood. You should know by now that everything is connected.” Crixus’ fingers danced across the sample box, arriving on the section that contained the white flowers. “I wouldn’t mind cutting those strings, though. I can see he’ll be trouble.”
He noticed that the shaman had, after many histrionics, produced his forked dowsing rod, cut from a hazel branch.
“Go back to this parcel, here,” he pointed to the three flowered compartments, “and set up stakes where you think digging will be easiest. I’ll meet you there.”
Stamm and Gavri set off with the sample box, map, and tools. Crixus watched them disappear into the trees. Neither was accorded much respect in the Guild. Stamm was a lazy and unrepentant drunk. Gavri was young, inexperienced, and female, thus not given all the training she deserved. Nevertheless, Crixus liked them better than the veterans he’d worked with, perhaps because they didn’t intimidate him.
And now intimidation was what Crixus needed to muster up. He unbuckled his mason’s hammer, passed into his care by his father. The epidemic that had swept through Greater Rond was so swift and brutal that it even struck down a strong man like Simic Oraan in less than a week. A teary-eyed Crixus had been forced to recite the ceremonial words for his father as the dying artesan coughed his life away.
The gold appointments on the handle depicted the Oraan family crest, a few elements of the Rondan flag, and a bull, the family’s symbolic animal. The head of the hammer weighed five pounds; it was heavy for delicate stonework but so sharp on the wedge-end that he could use it in place of narrower chisels. The steel alloy was many times harder than the average iron smelted for a workman’s tool. Such a hammer cost half a year’s wages, and Crixus took fastidious care of it. He preferred to dent a common mason’s hammer on standard jobs, yet he always wore the family hammer at his side. He hoped the sight of a thick-set, heavily muscled man with a hammer in his hands would elicit a primal fear response in the shaman.
