Chapter Fourteen: Trouble at the Canal

The spillage pond was a relatively recent addition to Verdenlecht. It hadn't even been there when Val arrived about a month ago. The pond was the result of the Pale Order not giving a damn about the rest of their city and, quite possibly, wanting a passive-aggressive way to bemoan the duke's execution of their bishop.

There was a small canalworks built off the side of the River Imber, which stretched about two to three hundred yards across throughout most of its path through Verdenlecht. At one time, the canals had been used to run a series of waterwheels, but now they were used mostly for transport and recreation. However, a stretch of that canal was part of the Temple of the Pale Order's property and they had blocked it up to complete some construction for the new temple expansion. Val wasn't sure whether their congregation was growing (she really hoped not) or they just had more money than they knew what to do with.

In any case, the blockage of the canal caused the water to back up and flow into the nearby courtyard, waterlogging the public space. It had been rendered mostly-useless until the weather made everything freeze over and the empty space suddenly made a good skating rink.

Val had never been ice skating with actual skates, though she'd played slip-a-dip in the winters in Wayfair with slabs of tin gutters strapped to her shoes, which wasn't entirely different. She figured it out pretty quickly and didn't make a complete fool of herself when Gus glided out onto the ice, executing a graceful spin like some kind of tall, icy swan and making the rest of them look like bumbling toddlers.

"It's one of my favorite things to do in the winter. Practice it a bit more and you won't be terrible," she said.

"Uh… thanks," Val said, and managed to fall on her rear at that exact moment when a younger boy bumped into her.

Fortunately, she fell just in time to miss a snowball aimed at her head, which instead hit Gus in the chest and deposited her on her rear, in a less-than-swan-graceful manner. Val laughed. Iselde laughed. Gus was less than cheerful, though. She scooped up enough snow for a snowball and, within a few minutes Iselde's mean little prank had descended into an all-out snowball fight between everybody on the pond. Even the adults that hadn't skated to safety managed to get in on the action.

Val discovered that, while she might be fast, pretty good in a scrap, and talented with the Gift, she was no match for Iselde in a snowball fight. None of them were. Not only were the urchin's zingers precise, She managed to make them perfect spheres of half-ice with less than a second's packing time. Val took about three shots to the head, one of which would probably leave a welt, but it was all in good fun.

Their fight lasted for about ten minutes, up until Val noticed a group of people shouting at a group of large men banging notices on a shop door. Judging by their colors and the insignias on their sleeves, they were the duke's men. And, while Val had a generally favorable view of the duke, she quickly grew to dislike what the men were doing.

"Why are those people mad?" she asked.

"Those are probably eviction notices," Gus said. She did a little loop around them on her skates. "Most of the people with storefronts along the canals and the Riverway… everywhere really… most don't own their buildings. Since the spillage pond filled up the courtyard here, the businesses have had a fraction of their usual traffic. Today's the fifth of the month, which is about when the ducal guard presents eviction notices."

"They only give them five days?" Val asked. She'd once owed Pudge three tuppence for a whole month.

"They'll probably have a week before they have to leave the premises," Gus said. "My father didn't want to live under a landlord, so he bought our shop."

"Lucky him," Val said. One of Iselde's snowballs spattered against the back of her jacket. "I'm not in the mood for games. We should leave."

"We got to turn the skates in or you lose the deposit," Iselde said.

"Yeah… let's turn them in and make ourselves scarce."

From the spillage pond, they walked along the frozen canal, down toward the lock where the Pale Order had blocked the flow. Well… four of them walked. Gus glided along the ice of the canal on her lily white skates, doing little swoops and spins to remind them that she was very good at ice skating. Val had half a mind to buy her own pair of skates, though she ought to check how often it was skating weather in Verdenlecht first. She also had half a mind to not-skate over to the duke's men and tell them that what they were doing was wrong. She was a respectable member of society now, with papers and everything, and she had a right to voice her mind.

She knew doing so was likely to get her in trouble, though, and Val didn't need more trouble. She'd gotten herself into hot soup back in Wayfair and was on the straight and narrow from here on out.

"Maybe we could hold a sept fundraiser for the shopkeepers?" she said.

"Sept already did that," Iselde said. "They raised near about five high marks."

Now, five high marks sounded like an awful lot. It was an awful lot. But she imagined that was a month's rent for maybe three of the dozen shops along the courtyard. They'd have to raise a lot more money. Or the Pale Order could just unblock the canal. Or somebody else could do it…

"Let's open the canal," Val said. "It's supposed to be open, right? So we should do it…"

Beni cleared his throat. "I'm not sure that's a good idea, Val. I mean… we could get in big trouble…"

"Not if nobody catches us, which they won't," Val said. She pointed to the end of the canal, where the lock doors had been closed and secured with a great steel bolt. "Look, the water's all frozen anyway. Nobody will notice until it starts to melt, and then the water will drain and the spillage pond will disappear. Problem solved."

"That sounds like a pretty good plan," Nikoli volunteered. "But how are we supposed to open it?"

"With magic," Val said.

+++++

It wound up taking a bit more than just magic. They figured that Beni was the strongest among them, with Nikoli as a close second, so they went out to the big steel bolt to try to lift it up. Meanwhile, Val and Gus got to work on the locks themselves, since the two of them were the best with the Gift. Beni might get there, too, eventually, but since he was a boy, his Gift was coming in more gradually than theirs had. For girls, it came in all at once and it was just a matter of figuring out what to do with it - which could take years in of itself. Iselde had sharp eyes and a good street sense, so she was their lookout.

"Still nobody," she said. Then she balanced along the raised lip of the canal lock, tiptoeing to the other side, and conducted another sweep. "Just a few pedestrians real far away. Come on, ya witches…"

Val crunched along the frozen bottom of the canals. It was all frozen mud and a few slicked-over puddles… and lots of debris that had been at the bottom of the canal for who knew how long. Val placed her hand upon the canal lock and got to working.

Beni and Nikoli couldn't even budge the bolt, wince it was frozen in place. So Val and Gus used the spell they'd learn for lighting the sept's big hearth and instead directed it into the entire lock door - a great big swinging door on either side of the canal, each of them around ten yards across. Val managed to channel extra heat along the iron supports of the door and hoped Gus had managed the same. She simply had to remember the shaping of her spirit and say the words: I call heat into the world, and I offer my will as testament. I call upon the friction of small things to shake heat out from the cold… well… she thought it in Old Sudren. She thought it and it would happen.

It worked much better if you thought it in Old Suderen, obviously, but if your translation wasn't quite up to snuff, you could just say it in Arleng for half the punch. But Val had remembered her Old Sudren well enough and managed to do it right. The energy leapt right out of her body, shooting along the door and up into the metal bolt.

"Hands off the bolt!" she shouted.

"Ahh! Hot!" Beni hissed from up above. It took a full five minutes to cool down, at which point Beni and Nikoli removed it without issue.

"It's even heavier than it looks," Nikoli said. Val thought it looked pretty damn heavy.

"Now we just pry it open, I suppose?" Val said.

They found sturdy boards discarded from the church's construction site and used them to pry the lock doors open. Val had expected them to just swing open like the double doors to some lordling's house. But instead they cracked open just a few inches, not even enough to disengage the lock. With another pull, they bowed open further… and then the doors disengaged and were pushed to about a quarter of the way open by the sudden rush of ice-cold water.

"Help!" Beni yelped. The ice beneath him began to crack… all of the ice began to crack.

Val should have realized that the canal wouldn't be frozen all the way through - the water was too deep. From the looks of it, it was only frozen down to about fourteen inches. Beni scrambled, nearly falling in, but Nikoli pulled him away from the collapsing ice. The two of them scrambled just ahead of a front of cracking ice as the water emptied from right beneath it.

Water sloshed through the open gate with a deep glunk… glunk…. glunk sound as dozens of gallons sloshed through and onto the frozen bottom of the canal. Val dodged out of the way of a big slop of water and then again as a great chunk of ice cracked from somewhere behind the door. The canal itself was bout twenty feet deep and twenty yards across, and now a great puddle of icy water was gradually spreading across, slopping around Val and Gus's boots.

Val and Gus had stayed down just in case more magic was needed… that, and they'd agreed that it would be cool to see a wall of solid ice. Would there be fish frozen inside it? But now, as she saw the lock doors trembling and slowly starting to open and water push through, she realized that it was a very bad place to be.

She scrambled up the ladder with Gus close behind, feeling the whole base of the thing shift as water started to flow past in earnest. Val hopped up to the stone lip at the edge of the canal and held the ladder as steady as she could so Gus could make it up, too. Then the rushing torrent yanked it from her hands as the glunk… glunk… glunk became a whitewater roar of water carrying huge slabs of ice as big as Val was.

"Guys! There's workers in the canal!" Iselde shouted. "Guys!"

Iselde waved her arms and leapt up and down - she'd wandered through the churchyard, about fifty yards down and around a bend in the empty canal. The rushing water had just about reached the bend… and Val supposed that just around that turn were workers that they hadn't bothered to check for. She'd assumed they would have heard it if anybody had been working nearby.

"Well? Tell them to get out!" Val shouted.

Val dashed down to the other end of the empty canal, nearly slipping on a slick of ice and sending herself tumbling right back into the canal just ahead of the water. Thankfully, her balance was good and she continued forward. As she rounded the bend in the canal, she spotted four workers sitting by the closed lock on the other end - they'd been doing some sort of work installing supports for a footbridge, presumably to make it easier to cross over from the temple to the new church building.

"Get out of the canal!" Val shouted.

The workers had already been alerted by Iselde's shouting, and now they spotted the rush of water headed their way. Ice-cold water followed by huge, crashing chunks of ice not far behind. Unfortunately, it seemed that they didn't have a ladder. Or, more accurately, Val and her friends had appropriated the only ladder and now it was lost somewhere in the rush of water.

"Throw us a rope!" Val shouted.

"It's… it's being used for the scaffold!" one of the workers shouted back just as the first water hit his boots. The greater rush of water was perhaps ten seconds behind - Val heard the lock doors still creaking open behind them and the crack of ice sounded like the splitting of great glaciers.

"Fuck the scaffold!" one of the other men said. He yanked a length of rope loose, wavering the structure, and tossed it up.

Beni and Nikoli started hauling him up. The scaffolding collapsed as the workers pulled another length of rope loose and tossed it up on the second try. Val, Iselde, and Gus started pulling him up, but he was a larger man and the three of them weren't as strong as Beni and Nikoli. Then somebody threw a rope down to pull the third man up.

The fourth man ended up getting soaked, but they managed to pull him out right ahead of the crush of ice, which hit the lock door with a massive crunch, pulverizing the scaffold and sloshing dirty ice water over the canal embankment and right up to Val's ankles.

"What in the world happened here?" Ette said.

Val gasped - the people who'd thrown down the other length of rope were Ette and Sabine. They'd been on a job all that morning, and it had apparently brought them to the whereabouts of the empty canal.

"The old lock doors must've gone brittle in the cold," one of the workers said. "We checked them before-hand, but we couldn't exactly check the water side properly…"

Ette nodded sagely. "That could be. You'd better get inside and get dry. It'll be days before the canal can be pumped out again, even if the ice thaws."

"Thank you, sir. You lot saved our lives."

Ette just nodded. Then, as soon as the workers were out of earshot, he turned to Val. From the look on his face, he knew exactly what had happened, or at least had a strong suspicion.

"What in sweet Sturmhalle were you children thinking? Were you trying to get those men killed? Or just trying to start a war between our sept and the Pale Order?"

"I… no…" Val said.

"Well? What were you thinking? Explain it to me so I can understand what compelled you to nearly murder four men…"

"We'd have rescued two of them," Iselde said.

Sabine crossed her arms. "Not helping your case."

"We didn't know they were there until we already opened the lock," Beni said.

"It was my fault. I convinced them," Val said. "When we were at the spillage pond, we saw the duke's men hammering eviction notices on doors. That was because hardly anybody goes there because the place is flooded out and half the businesses had their first floors flooded, even, all because of the Pale Order blocking off the canal. So I figured we'd open the canal and when the water thawed, it would all drain out… and maybe flood the church property instead…"

"And you swear to the gods you didn't know those men were down there?" Sabine asked.

"We didn't. As soon as we realized it, we tried to help them out."

"I see," Ette said. From the way he looked at Val, she just wanted to shrivel up and hide away forever. Nobody had ever looked so disappointed in her before.

+++++

Val had never been punished before. Well, obviously she had been punished, plenty of times, at the orphanages. Usually, that meant privy duty. Once she got beat up by the Wayfair city guards for trying to steal pears. But she'd never been punished by somebody she knew and liked, and it made her feel pretty damn low. The whole way home, she wanted to cry. What if Ette and Ginn discussed things and decided they didn't want her anymore? What if she was back to being an orphan.

"Well… what have you got to say for yourself?" Ginn said. She and Ette had discussed things all right.

"I… please don't send me away," Val said, and then the waterworks turned on. She'd kept up a brave face a full five minutes after getting home, but it didn't last.

Ginn pulled Val into a hug, whispering into Val's ear as she cried into the crook of her arm. "Val, honey, we're not going to send you away. What makes you think Ette or I would do something awful like that? Aren't we good people?"

"Yeah, but… I messed up. I could have got people killed."

"That you could have. Or gotten the temple mad at our sept if they made you for some of ours. Or gotten the temple interested in the girl who looks a lot like the one they're looking for in Wayfair. You messed up bigtime, Val, and you're going to pay for it. But we're not ever sending you away. You're not going outside except for your lessons - and don't think I won't know if you sneak out. When you're here, you'll study and practice and do whatever boring thing I tell you to do until I think you're ready to be trusted again."

"I'll get rusty," Val said.

"You won't." Ette walked in from the other room. "Studying isn't just books. I've got exercises for the knife, staff, and sword, a whole damn book of them, and you'll use the practice room to drill the first three chapters of each and know them by heart. You'll use our target downstairs to practice your knife and your bolt-caster. And if I think you aren't giving it your all, it'll be another week and then another until you get to practice with anybody but your lonesome."

"What if I don't do it?" Val said.

Ette shrugged. "Then you don't. Do you want us to respect you?"

"Of course I do."

"Good. Then show me you respect us by abiding by our rules. Do you think we're being unfair?"

It sure felt unfair… but that didn't mean it was. When Val had convinced her friends to unblock the canal, she hadn't been thinking. In retrospect, they were lucky that more hadn't gone wrong. Nobody had died and they hadn't been caught, and for all they knew, the Pale Order thought the whole thing was on account of old lock doors buckling under the ice.

"You're not being unfair," she said eventually. "I'll do better."

Val spent the next week engaged in proper contrition, and was prepared to spend a few more proving how sorry she was. Sure, it was incredibly tedious, but she soon came up with ways to amuse herself. The magical circles that you made in Old Sudren spells (or any spell, really) took an artistic touch and Val worked on copying them as stylishly as she could, which she found helped her with the actual magic. When she got into weapon and target drills, she found it helped if she could get really into it, enough that she was sore and gasping for breath by the end. And when Ginn had her help with boring parts of her potion-making, like grinding things down into powder or paste, she really tried to make the best powder or paste she could. Competing with herself was a good way to make the punishment bearable and get better at things.

"You seem to be taking things pretty well," Ginn observed. She ran a pinch of freshly-ground vennel-powder between her fingers and nodded approvingly. "I'll talk to Ette this evening."

That was after eight days - more than a week, but Val knew that if she was to bring up ending her punishment first, then it would likely be extended. And Ginn did talk to Ette that evening, but they didn't end Val's punishment. Not exactly. Instead, Ette knocked on her doorframe just as she set down for another session of evening studying.

"Pack what you'll need, Val. We're heading to Wayfair first thing tomorrow."