Demesne

It took over a week for the dragon to finally pass over us, and during that time things just barely had time to fall into a comfortable routine. At least, everyone else got to fall into a routine. The routine I fell into could probably be called comfortable from the outside, but those looking didn't have my worries.

For one thing, it soon became clear that while Lori was remembering to dim the lights to let people sleep, she was doing so inconsistently. Keeping track with our own water clock, the length of time between adjusting the lights could be as little as eight hours or as extreme as fifteen. Twice, all the lights in the demesne suddenly just went out, including the ones on the rocks that Shana, Tae, Lidz and I had, which Lori had never done before. The lightwisps were restored soon afterwards, but in the moments of darkness, many people had screamed in fear and there had been accidents on the stairs. The second time, Kolinh had tried to use one of the wisplights Lori had made, but that had been deactivated as well.

There had also been that day that the lights had remained dim, but that hadn't been nearly as disruptive, and many people had taken the opportunity to just stay in bed and sleep that day. Still, it was a worrying sign, implying that either Lori wasn't staying to some kind of schedule or had forgotten to arrange one. The loss of light also implied a worrying degree of carelessness that was normally uncharacteristic of Lori. She might be careless with her clothes, her personal safety outside of work environments she was familiar with—unless she was being excessively paranoid to the point of parody—and what she said at the dining table—though most of that was just utter apathy about anyone else knowing what was being said—but Lori was never careless with her magic save for that one time with the rock. What was she doing that she was deactivating the lights instead of adjusting them?

…

Well, the obvious answer was obvious. The question was why she wasn't getting any sleep. The almanac wasn't that interesting, was it?

…

Yeah, she was probably missing out on sleep from reading the almanac. There was also the possibility that she'd somehow managed to figure out how to finally use the other three kinds of magic and was being distracted because she was playing with all her new toys, but that was unlikely.

Even as I thought it, I was hoping she'd prove me wrong and return having unlocked the secret to using the other magics, but somehow I didn't think things would be so convenient.

Taeclas had managed to figure out the binding of the water heater bound tool Lori had made, using her pot full of water, several cups full of water laid out in a line away from the bound tool's core that did the heating, and some more water spilled out on the floor. She'd put the bead into the receptacle from a distance using a stick with a simple claw that she'd controlled with Deadspeaking, and then had waited for some time before removing the bead and checking the temperature.

"How long, exactly?" Lidzuga had asked.

"Lidz, I wasn't trying to do it to alknowledge standards. The point was figuring if it was safe for us to use the binding for heating the air coming into the dungeon, not whether someone decades from now could repeat and verify the experiment."

"That's not the point, it's a standard that—"

"Lidzuga, next time you can be the one to run the experiment," I'd interrupted. "This is what happens when you stay up instead of sleeping when you should. Tae, go on, please."

The water in the pot had gotten hot, but Tae observed that it had seemingly done so uniformly. The water had not started getting hotter at the bound tool, resulting in little currents and updrafts in the water as the heat originated from one spot.

"I can't be sure because Binder Lori didn't leave behind proper documentation," Tae had said, which had caused Lidz to start grumbling all over again, "but I think her binding uses waterwisps and firewisps so that the binding only acts on water, and only liquid water at that. And from the way I couldn't get any of the water hotter than a certain temperature, the firewisps are set to raise water to that temperature and no further. The binding might actually cool any water hotter than the set temperature, though I didn't bother to test that."

"Why not?-!" Lidz had exclaimed, looking aghast. "That's important information!"

I'd had Lidzuga work out his outrage of such shoddy scholarship by asking him to put together a shelf we could put the pot and bound tool on top of should it become necessary for us to start heating up the air coming in through the vents from outside. He'd taken two of our ladders—which to be fair were not really being used at the moment— and paired them together into a triangular frame, with the pot sitting on a plank between the topmost rungs of the ladders. Thankfully, the ladders had been made to more or less the same dimensions, and it only took one piece of scrap wood secured to the top of one rung to make the plank lie evenly.

Once that was in place, the pot had been filled with water, the bound tool had been set, and the volunteer militia had moved an additional pace back to keep from accidentally toppling the ladders. While the pot of hot water didn't seem to have much of an effect, since the movement caused by the bindings Lori set in place to circulate the air added an additional degree of cooling, the air from the vents seemed a bit less cold. Still comfortable, but no longer chilling the skin directly exposed to for some time. Lidzuga would no doubt be upset that my experiment was simply holding my forearm to the vent, counting to twenty, and then feeling how cold my skin was after, but we hardly had a more accurate way to measure the temperature.

Well, Lori probably did, but she wasn't sharing. Why share and have less when she could keep it to herself and have everything?

Beyond that, everything seemed to be progressing well. The children were rambunctious as ever, but that was a 'dealing with children' matter, and so was the purview of Shana and 'should probably be a lady but Lori doesn't like giving children work' Karina, who kept them in line with a mix of letting them play and having them help with the farming. All they did was water the plants, but that was one more matter that the farmers and those taking care of the plants didn't need to deal with.

There were a few incidents, which was only to be expected when you put two hundred people together for eleven days in a building they couldn't leave, but fortunately no blood was shed, and while there was colorful language it was at a restrained volume. I simply had to separate the people involved until they calmed down, and didn't even need to have follow up on them resolving the issue.

There were also no incidents of physical altercations—even among the children, and with only a limited number of little wooden toys that had to be borrowed and returned such an altercation should have been inevitable, even if only among the youngest—which was probably explained by how everyone was enjoying the novelty of being able to dance to music at any time of day. Often, people were just playing music with no dancing. The instruments were simple, made of cords stretched out across buckets for sound, folded leaves carefully removed from the crops growing in the dungeon farm, drums made from pots, and even a woodwind instrument someone had painstakingly carved from a block of wood that had been secured together with cord. The sounds they made, however…

If I could somehow convince Lori to give it all a listen, she might… well, not enjoy it, but at least acknowledge its positive aesthetic qualities instead of just calling it noise. People knew they had a very limited amount of time to do this and were making every moment of it count as the sounds of the instruments were refined and the playing improved. It helped keep people occupied and out of trouble, and thankfully they followed the intention of Lori's law about music, and stopped playing when most people started going to sleep. Mostly. There was the occasional note of a plucked string, but it was brief and quickly stifled by what sounded like some kind of balled-up cloth.

There were no noise complaints.

And of course, during this time, I developed a worrying routine. First, I worried how long Lori would forget to alter the lights from bright to dim, or from dim to bright. Then I worried about Lori and Riz's safety, and if they were taking care of themselves, and if someone in River's Fork had finally decided to try attacking Lori, and if Riz had gotten hurt protecting her…

That last look a while. It was a time-intensive worry.

After I finished worrying about that, I worried if River's Fork had enough water stored to last them however long the dragon would be here. I worried about Lori trying to kill everyone to keep the water to herself if it looked like she had to drink water reclaimed from unsavory sources. I worried the almanac would be too worn for me to read by the time Lori finally let me borrow it.

All my usual Lori worries.

It wasn't all worrying, of course. As the dragon dragged on, Tae became worried about the transplanted crops. While we had managed to dig perhaps two thirds of the crops still growing on the fields, there hadn't been enough time to do more than pile dirt on the still-bare portions of the third level—although there was very little of that left, if you didn't count the excavation tunnels—and lay the crops down on their side with their roots lightly covered in wet soil, which was apparently an old trick for these kinds of situations. It was the sort of mess that would have had Lori twitching, so we could only do it while she was away, but it was hardly the best way to keep the crops alive. They weren't getting nearly as much light as they needed, for one thing. Tae, Lidz and Shana conferred and decided the best way to salvage the crops was to forcefully mature them to the point they could be harvested.

"The grains aren't likely to get any bigger at this point," Tae had said. "The additional maturation is just so they don't taste funny. Although working on so many at a time…"

"We have mesh screens," I had suggested. "Would those help?"

The crops were laid out on the screens in layered sheets, their roots contacting the mesh. A surprising number of crops managed to fit on the one by one-half pace metal mesh, and we had enough screens to be able to do all the transplanted crops in five batches. At that point, it was all simple. Tae and Lidzuga claimed the life of the plants, Shana imbued them, and the two Deadspeakers tamed the imbued life into the meanings needed to accelerate the growth of the plants to maturity. Given the crops were all fairly mature anyway, it only required one day for them to mature, at which point the plants were all cut to isolate the grains and the grains winnowed. The stalks were set aside to dry so they would become straw.

It was the smallest harvest we'd done to date, and everyone more or less agreed it didn't deserve any kind of celebration.

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I was getting ready to go to sleep one maybe-night, helping Mikon and Umu lay out our bedrolls—and politely ignoring Mikon's 'idle words' that the air was just a little chilly and we should put one of the blankets over us to keep warm—when a cleared throat drew my attention towards Shana standing just outside our alcove.

"I apologize for interrupting," Shana said, though her face was of course its usual blank Lori-face and thus didn't convey apologies at all, "however, something has come to my attention that I believe you should be informed of, Lord Rian."

"Will it take long?" Trying to discourage Mikon aside, I had been looking forward to going to bed. And sleep, too, later.

She shook her head. "No. I am merely informing you that the dragon has passed completely, and that it is no longer occupying any part of Binder Lolilyuri's demesne that I am connected to."

I nodded in acknowledgement, trying not to read any significance into her wording beyond the literal. "That's good to know," I said. "Hopefully that means we'll be able to go out soon."

Shana shook her head. "I would not recommend it. While the dragon has passed, I can perceive several mobile meanings created by the dragon wandering the environs outside of the dragon shelter. I can only suppose that their equivalent which Binder Lolilyuri can perceive are also loose outside of this dungeon."

"I'm pretty sure at least one of the bindings Lori prepares before she left for River's Fork is intended precisely to prevent that from happening," I pointed out, "but Lori would probably be able to tell better than we can from where she is. Are any of what you're perceiving near her?"

"Yes," Shana said immediately. "However, they all remain outside of the dragon shelter, so she is in no danger yet., and as far as I can identify, the doors into the dragon shelter remain shut. And no, the Great Binder and Auntie Riz have not been injured since the last time you asked." Even her expression of annoyance was Lori-like! That was so wrong!

I nodded. "Well, hopefully this means we'll be getting out soon." It shouldn't take Lori that long to clear out any dragonborn abominations, should it?

It was three days later by the waterclock before the dungeon's entrance finally unsealed and Lori wrote more words on the ceiling: 'Go out now'.