Chapter 53: Opening the Waterways II

They went looking for that drain valve immediately. There was no time to lose. Dwarf went first, or as near to first as a man who has to be carried down a stair could get.

They found the gate just a few hours later.

It was far from the chambers that held the valves to the fields, they had to climb all the way back to the top of the pit and follow along the edge of the cistern, round the curve of it, and where the ledge widened and the wall opened.

A mouth of dressed stone the width of a cart, running away west into the rock. No gearing on it.

There was no thread, no wheel, no gate.

Which was weird.

It sat a few feet above the water, they could see, between the two there was a band of dried scum on the stone, level and unbroken as far as the torchlight went in either direction, barely a trickle of still water leaving through the accumulated filth.

"There." Dwarf's voice came out dry. "There. I told you."

Then he thought for about another second and that got him to shut his mouth.

"Ah," he snorted, arms up in defeat as he turned away from the 'drain'.

"What?"

"This is not a drain, dragon man." He scrambled to pinch his nose again, lest he faints because of the terrible smell.

He looked along it into the wide tunnel carved into the belly of the plateau. "This is just an overflow, a lip. Bitch. It's not the drain we were searching for."

Dwarf saw no one understood so he explained:

"Whenever there is a rainy season, this thing fills. This channel here must be built to prevent it from spilling up the drains into the city."

He crouched, looking up and down the massive channel, nose still pinched.

"That is why this thing has no gate. It needs to stay open all the time."

"Then what if we take the lip out." Someone leaned in to see.

"There is nothing to take out. Are you even listening? It is a hole." Dwarf hit the man in the back of the head. "This overflow is never going to help us get rid of this much... vomit. We need an actual drain here."

They stood there a while.

"Then there is no drain," Eivind pointed. "Whoever built this never meant the thing to be emptied."

"Whoever built this was no fool." Dwarf scoffed. "You do not carve a tunnel the size of a fucking home under a plateau, line it, roof it and feed every gutter in the city into it, and leave no way of getting the muck back out."

Dwarf looked around them, dead serious.

"I'm betting my left nut there is a drain."

Regardless of Dwarf's bets, it was clear, at least to Hiccup, that there must have been a way to drain the thing, clearly.

"We must have looked in the wrong rooms," pondered Dwarf.

He must have taken is bet seriously.

"There are several dozen channels on each chamber bellow. With a total number of channels..." He made an abstract gesture. "Some many channels under it."

"Several hundred, at least.", Eivind approximated.

"Right."

"Those are field gates. The number matches, some hundred channels here, some hundred terraces below." He nodded, convinced of his theory.

"They water the terraces and they end at the terraces. Send a cistern's worth of that filth down one of them and we have only moved it onto the crops."

The half man strolled up and down, talking with himself.

"The drain is obviously not with the others, since we searched the lower levels up and down." Dwarf turned round on the spot, torch up.

"It does not go to the fields, it should go the other way... Somewhere else in this warren there must be some other room." He concluded.

"Where?"

He was looking at the floor now. Then past the floor.

"You cannot clean a cistern you cannot empty. There must be a way of emptying, and it must be low. Much lower than anything else for it to work properly."

"Lower than the field chambers," reasoned Eivind.

"Lower than everything, yes."

So they went down.

Only there was nowhere left to go down from. The stair to the irrigation chambers went where it went, and they had walked every room at the end of it twice over.

Which left the pit itself.

They had only ever used one arm of that ledge. Coming off the long stair you turned right, and a hundred paces later the wall opened on the spiral that took you to the field chambers, and every one of them had turned right every single time, because that was where the gates were and the gates were what they had come for. Nobody had ever gone the other way, and that morning they had gone left only as far as the overflow and stopped there. Past it the ledge ran on into the dark, round the far side of a hole none of them liked standing near, and nothing about it had looked worth the walk.

So this time they turned left, past the overflow mouth, and kept going. Slow, one hand on the stone, the water somewhere below on their shoulder.

It took the better part of an hour to come round to the opposite end of the pit, dead across the void from the stair they had been using all day.

Then the wall opened again.

There was a new set of stairs going down. These ones went straight and steep, and the air coming up out of it was moving ever so slightly.

"There," roared Dwarf.

The stairs went down a long way, well past the depth of the ones leading to the irrigation chambers.

The chamber at the bottom was bigger than any of the other ones.

"This one must lead somewhere else," Hiccup muttered.

If his sense of direction worked fine underground, then this one must lead away from the plateau and into the cliff side, instead of toward the terraces.

He closed his eyes. The thin flow of air, the echo of waves ramming against rock...

He was certain now. "It leads to the cliff side, I'm sure."

"Then this is the one. This must be the one that empties it." Eivind nodded slowly.

Dwarf was already in under the rusted gears with a torch on hand.

He did not have to go on his knees for it, which he pointed out at some length. Some of the other masons began examining the mechanism, though they could hardly tell what they were looking at.

They were at it for a long time.

When Dwarf came out he was grinning in a way that did not suit his face.

"This one turns."

"You are certain."

"It is bronze the thickness of my arm, unlike the other gates." He wiped his hands. "So the rust has not yet eaten at it. Give me some men and a day to work grease into the thread, and I will open it."

That, sadly, did not turn out as expected.