> 📗 Although normally I only send self-contained pieces to this list, _The Civil Mage & the Sewers_ is the second part of [the first chapter](https://eleanorkonik.com/the-civil-mage-sewers-1/) %% ( [[2022-08-17 Civil Mage Sewers (12)]] ) %% of a multi-part serial work. It pulls together a great deal of research I've done — check out the Afterword for more notes on that.  The moment Eramepi marched south, High Priest en-Avestur started assigning Irella 'urgent' tasks like repairing the palace stucco and creating a fourth bridge over the river. She couldn't tell whether he disliked her personally and was trying to undermine her because of it, or if he was simple afraid of upsetting the city's elites — the effect was the same. She was running herself ragged trying to get the renovations planned without any support from the Temple, but it couldn't be helped. When Eramepi returned, there wouldn't be time to waste on preparation. She would need to be ready to act. "It's a festival night." Alem, his stone-grey uniform crisp and pristine despite the oppressive evening heat, sounded perfectly neutral. Though _biladiyn_ weren't supposed to question the priests they guarded, but Alem was one of the chattiest men who had ever accompanied her. "Would it really hurt to take a night off?" Irella suppressed a flare of annoyance. At least Alem was asking out of concern for her well-being, not fear of reprisal. “I promised my Sovereign I would take care of the renovations. You were there, remember?” "But—" "Relax, Alem. I'm just doing an inspection. " According to Temple records, when the city was founded, the sewers had run along the edge of the eastern market, which was mostly used by women trading textiles and their tools. Over time, as the city sprawled across the plains, the market grew proportionally large and she was no longer certain where the sewers even _were._ He sighed. "At least eat something. You haven't eaten since highsun." He was right. She's been so busy taking parishioner requests so that the High Priest wouldn't keep loading her up with _truly_ useless work. She paused at a stall festooned with festival silks and took the proffered aniseed raisin-cake with a bow of thanks. She ate as she scanned the ground for signs of a sewer cap. Even with one of the _biladiyn_ beside her, she had to squeeze past the families gathered to dance in honor of the Sage's Starfall , a holiday she barely understood and mostly just considered loud. She saw a depression in the ground and kicked aside the discarded blanket covering it, but found nothing, even when she scratched at the dirt with her surveying rod. She was nearly ready to give up for the night, maybe check to see if the Archivist's Temple had records that had been purged from the Architect's library, when she saw it — barely a stone's through from the a fountain too painted too brightly vermilion to be anything but new. The old sewer cap, crusted with grime and bearing the green patina of neglected copper, had sunk nearly half a cubit into the bitumen binding the pavement. Irella was just glad she had found it. Irella knelt down and took a temple key from the pouch at her hip. She'd stolen it from the restricted rooms, under the theory that as one of a handful of thaumaturges able to literally enact miracles on behalf of the Architect, she ranked highly enough in the Temple to skip asking permission. She glanced at Alem. “Can you cordon me off? I don’t want someone to fall in while I'm having a look.” “Sure. Do you think four cubits is enough? I'm not sure if—" At Irella's nod, Alem reached into his kit and pulled out a brick-red rope wrapped around a bundle of sticks. A few well-practiced knots later, the sticks became a pair of tripods that he placed opposite the fountain. As he strung the rope between the tripods and the fountain, Irella reached to unlock the copper cap. Its green patina, slightly rough beneath her fingertips, was thick enough that she doubted it had ever been replaced. She lifted it out of its groove, revealing the subterranean tunnels to the morning sun. Instead of river water, the smell of human excrement, stewed in rotting food and moldy water, mushroomed out of the hole. People standing nearby, sipping sacred by the fountain, coughed and cursed. Irella winced as they scattered. So much for waiting until Eramepi got back before starting renovations. If en-Avestur found out that she'd done unauthorized work in a major market in the middle of a festival night, he’d leap to excommunicate her for insubordination. The Palace would be forced to intervene. The resulting political quagmire would weaken Eramepi's control of the League they had worked so had to build—at best. She had to work quickly. Alem said, "Irella, I think you should—" Ignoring him, she puffed air out through her nostrils to clear the worst of the smell, then rolled the sewer cap off to the side. “Take this for me, please?” A crisp gray shadow blocked the remaining sunlight and obliged her by taking the sewer cap out of her hands, then a woman’s voice said, “Where should I set it?” Irella snapped her gaze up, flushing as she recognized Enduca, whose short, black braids were as distinctive as her diminutive height. One of the few female _biladiyn,_ she usually escorted priests from the Temple of The Engineer. “Back on top of the shine-damned hole.” Enduca’s charge, his eyes bloodshot around the bovine brown of his irises, held his night-black robes over his nose. Misanthropic, crude, and prone to fits of ego, the Engineer’s priests were uniformly brilliant and widely held to be justified in their arrogance. He’d doubtless earned the tiny scars across his cheek creating something ingenious. That didn’t mean she could afford to let him stop her. “Lean it against the fountain, please,” Irella told Enduca. Enduca had the kind of narrow beauty that was prized in Lysaria, with cheekbones sharper than the blade at her back, but she wasn’t weak. Her lithe muscles bulged as she took the sewer cap and handed it to Alem. The priest glared, waving his hand in front of his face like it would help with the smell emanating from the open sewer. "I would think that even a barbarian knows better than to fling shit where she eats." She wanted to tell him that the strangest part of coming to civilization as a child had been indoor toilets, and the Lysarian habit of defecating near their dining halls still secretly disgusted her. Instead, she pasted on a friendly, vapid smile. The Engineer’s priests were always willing to believe everyone else was stupid. “I have no intention of flinging anything, I’m just trying to do my duty as a Priestess of the Architect.” He offered a disparaging snort. “It's the middle of Starfall.” "Sometimes, the Architect's will cannot wait." Irella resisted the urge to elaborate. The less he knew, the less he could reveal to her High Priest if it came to that—and she desperately hoped it wouldn’t. "People have been complaining to the Architect about sinkholes and smells." “Not in the market,” he said with a snide sort of certainty that made her want to smack the beer from his breath. “Not before you got here. So surely whatever it is you’re planning can wait until a few days.” That was always the refrain: just a few more days. Left to their own devices, the elites of Oruku would put her off, and put her off, and put her off, until the Lysar River silted over—and even then they'd probably just ask her to pave it. “If I wait, the the pressure of raw sewage will build until it cracks the sewer lines under the market and ooze out into the foundations of the square,” she uttered each word with biting precision and immediately regretted it. No good ever came from making enemies, no matter how much they deserved her temper. “You might not realize this, being a barbarian clearly comfortable with heresy, but you are disrupting an important holiday.” His tone turned peevish. Damn him and his sense of entitlement. The cordon was barely big enough for a body across, and the dancing was already beginning to ebb, oils from fried stale bread sat heavy in the air. “The only disruption here is you, en...” He drew himself up, squaring his shoulders with as much dignity as he could muster with his face half-covered. "Tirigan." Irella’s stomach clenched as she recognized the name. She hadn’t been in Oruku long enough to learn his face, but en-Tirigan wasn’t just one of the Engineer’s priests. He was the High Priestess' lover. She couldn't back down now. In for a bolt, in for a blanket. Before the engineer could respond, the baker she’d visited earlier thrust forward over a small tray of tea and cakes. The heavy spice mingled with the scent of sewage, but Irella appreciated his interruption all the same. "May I offer you a pastry?” he said to the engineer. “My wife makes the best borek in the city. We grow the spices fresh." His smile was strained, but Irella appreciated his practicality. He must have heard her talking and realized that the sooner the engineer left her alone, the faster she would finish with the sewer, and the quicker the smell would dissipate. “It’s bad enough the Architect has sunk so low as to grace a barbarian with his favor, but you go too far, nin-Irella. Your High Priest will hear of this.” He ignored the baker entirely. “Come, Enduca. I can’t bear another second of this reek.” Enduca shot Irella a warning glance. “Do you want me to bring the pastries, en-Tirigan?” “Risk eating something so tainted with this stench?” He snorted. “Come!” “Is that going to be a problem?” Alem asked as en-Tirigan stormed off, Enduca trailing in his wake. “It will be fine,” Irella said, but what she meant was _there's nothing you can do._ "You'd think he’d rather have shit overflow into the streets." The baker kept his voice too low to carry as Alem politely declined the proffered pastry. “Good thing it’s not his decision.” She flashed him an encouraging smile, then knelt back down beside the access pipe. She had to finish repairs before en-Tirigan roused en-Avestur to come investigate. If she could present him with clean, functional sewers, she might be able to convince him to take credit for it, instead of trying to banish her for insubordination. According to the diagrams she’d found in the archives, this stretch of tunnel had corners. She suspected she would have to deepen its trench, but without a better look, she couldn’t decide whether to widen the curve or deepen the trench—or both. She pulled her surveying rod from the folds of her robe and opened it to its full length, until it matched her four cubits of height. Locking it into place with a twist of her wrist as the baker returned to his stall, Irella stuck the rod down into the bore-hole to measure the depth of the blockage. It didn’t reach bottom. The tunnel must have sunk since it was built, which was normal but unfortunate. Irella tried to ignore the rush of blood to her head as she reached down farther, inverting half her body in the sewer. Her shoulders scraped the ceramic sides, but the rod finally struck bottom. When she pulled it out, the bottom three cubits were covered in muck. Since most of the city’s sewer pipes were only two cubits tall, that was a problem. She would need to clear out the sludge before she could fix anything; she could only channel the Architect’s power into places she could see. But her god claimed the building of cities as His domain. The Great Piers of Pontero could not have been built without boring holes and driving piles. None of the League’s grand palaces and temples could have withstood the Lysar River’s floods without structural columns embedded deep in the ground, and the magic to forge such stability had been among the earliest she had been taught, as a novice in Marna’s Temple. Irella breathed in and out, deep and even, deliberately focusing on the surrounding stench. She isolated each scent, absorbing them one by one into her consciousness. She set aside the stiffness in her knees, the sweat lingering between her toes. Her heartbeat slowed as she entered the meditative state she used to commune with the Architect. Her palm dangling loosely into the hole, she visualized a helix, its circumference sufficient to fill the access hatch. An aetherial haze sprung forth, the divine power she channeled taking tangible form. The spiral projection spun slowly, expanding downward until it had embedded itself a cubit deep in the sewage below. She lifted her hand, an unconscious mimicry of a fisherman checking a basket trap, and the curls of the helix compressed upwards, pulling in on themselves, creating a tube. The tube spun slowly upward. A digit-thick disc of dry, solid waste followed; she piled it beside the sewer cap. “Ew.” Alem took a step away from the disc. She could have done more, but larger miracles were exponentially more difficult to create than small. Magic was all-or-nothing, success or failure, and it was almost always better to ask for many small things than one large working. If you asked the gods for too much, their retribution was blinding in its pain. “Is that the miracle you called to break the Siege at Keldehss?” She let the words, the motion, slide over her. She had to maintain her focus, or she would lose her connection to the divine. “Sorry, I forgot. I don’t get many chances to witness a miracle. You know, Oruku only has three thaumaturges?” The helix rotated, expanding downward again. She repeated the process three, four, five more times as sludge slid into the hole the Architect had facilitated, only to be swept up and reformed into an unnaturally condensed brick. Finally, the hole, now deep enough to fit her body, stopped filling in with sludge. She released the connection with a whispered prayer of thanks, then looked up at Alem. She’d accomplished everything she could manage on the vertical plane. Unfortunately, that had been the easy part. It was time to work from inside the sewer itself. "Help me down?" Alem nodded obediently and held out his hand. She took it, letting him support most of her weight while she braced her knees against the walls of the sewer hatch. The hatch tube wasn’t quite wide enough for her to fit comfortably, so she had to wiggle a bit to get into the tunnel. She moved slowly, since the last thing she wanted to do was twist an ankle or wind up covered in excrement. Her robe caught on the stone. She cursed her bulky barbarian build. “Everything okay?” Alem asked. She released his hand and tried to twist the linen free. Nothing. “My robe’s stuck,” she admitted. “Hang on,” he said. She felt him tug, heard a tear, and squeezed her eyes closed in frustration. “Stars above,” he swore. “I’m sorry.” “It’s fine,” she said through clenched teeth. If en-Avestur arrived before she got herself cleaned up, he’d be that much more enraged. Part of her wanted to turn back, crawl up into the market and declare the task done, the clog cleared. It would be at least a few decan before the hole she’d bored filled again—no. She’d promised Eramepi that she would fix this city, and she didn’t have it in her to leave the task undone. Irella braced herself on three limbs and shifted her weight downward, awkwardly repositioning herself so that she could crawl down the access shaft. Finally, her boots—they, at least, would be easy to clean—touched the bottom of the hole she had bored. Putrescence surrounded her. She exhaled sharply to clear her nose and crouched so that she was eye-level with the sewer pipe she’d severed boring down. Working cubit by cubit, she compressed sewage and dropped it into the hole at her feet. When she finally revealed the T-junction—why was there a T-junction in a sewer?—the sticks and broken pottery piled against the back wall made her clench her teeth. Every city in the League had obelisks proclaiming laws against using the sewers as midden heaps for exactly this reason, and every Justicer she’d ever spoken to about them claimed they were unenforceable because lawbreakers were too hard to catch. By which they meant sewers weren’t important enough to justify their time. Irella removed the trash, then began the much more difficult task of rebuilding the sewers to curve. This couldn’t be chunked; there was no way she knew to alter a pipe in stages without rendering it structurally unsound. She pictured the slope she wanted. With the hard-won skills of a temple-trained mage, she held reality in her eyes and desire in her mind, willing reality to bend to the tenets of the Architect. The world wavered in the face of her focus. Power coalesced out of the divine aether, reality itself convinced of the rectitude of the dual states she held, until even Alem would have been able to observe the superimposition of aetherock over the original ceramic. Slowly, a hard layer of foggy red aetherock replaced the packed clay the ancients had settled the sewers in. It was a strange substance, like fog condensed, but exponentially stronger and lighter than even glass. In its natural form, it emerged brittle and porous, but the will of a thaumaturge could render it supple and stronger than stone. No one had ever maligned the strength of Irella’s will. She mentally deepened the sewer by a finger-width where she crouched and nearly a hand-span at the junction, and focused on bringing that vision to life. She just had to focus. Fifteen minutes. Maintain her focus. Thirty minutes. Her fingers and toes ached. Cramped. She ignored them. “...the bloodspot fever got mir-Er...” The voice came from above. Her nose and eyes both burned. She absorbed the sensations, balling them up and tucking them into a corner of her consciousness, as she’d been taught. "— A woman’s sad disbelief almost penetrated Irella’s concentration. She shoved the words aside. An hour after she began, the dual states had almost resolved themselves. “...well that was a short-lived...” “Long live Sovereign Valentia!” Her mental construct collapsed, her focus shattered by the sudden roar of voices — and shock at the words. Reality snapped back into place as the hand of the divine retreated to the aether without Irella to call it forth. “Alem?” she shouted. Her fingers were stiff and bloodless as she scrabbled uselessly at the walls of the chute, trying to climb out. “What just—” “Eramepi is dead. Bloodspot fever.” Alem reached down and grabbed her forearms, then hauled her out of the sewer in a feat of pure strength. His eyes, when they met hers, were much too wide. “Valentia issued a proclamation. She’s claiming his throne.” "The rebels?" He hadn't died in battle; before or after didn't matter, not to her, not just then, but she'd fought too long in the Unification Wars at her Sovereign's side; her mouth moved with military precision through the motions of considering tactics, strategy. "I don't know," Alem said, but she barely processed the words. Only her mouth had the luxury of functioning. Eramepi was her more than just her sovereign. He was her guiding light, her lodestone. Her world had revolved around his will since she was a child. How could be dead? Irella’s knees, already weak from sitting still for so long, collapsed under her. Alem held her upright, not even flinching when she dug her fingers into his shoulders for support. "You should go back to the temple,” he said quietly. “You can’t do anything more here.” Numb with shock, Irella stared down at the exposed sewer. Eramepi would have wanted her to fix it. That was the whole reason she’d braved censure to come here in the first place. She shuddered and closed her eyes to keep in the tears, because Alem was right. Even the idea of trying to concentrate on sewer repairs sent hysteria tickling the back of her throat. How could she—? She shook her head to clear it and opened her eyes. “Not the temple.” The words burned their way through the tightness in her throat. There were too many people in residence at the Temple of the Architect who would be happy to see Eramepi dead. “Take me to the palace.” There, at least, she might find answers. > 📗 The [next section](https://eleanorkonik.com/civil-mage-empress-1-3/) %% ( [[2022-08-31 Civil Mage Empress (13)]] ) %% is available. --- ## Afterword - [Sewers](https://eleanorkonik.com/sewers) %% ( [[2022-08-01 Sewers]] ) %%: Sewers and asphalt in a fantasy novel often seems to signal a relatively Classical vibe to a story, but it's a pet peeve of mine that our education system tends to imply that sewers were invented by Rome. They weren't! The ancient Mesopotamians used bitumen, and the Nahrian Basin is loosely modeled on Iraqi geography. I'm not saying the sewers Irella is working on are identical to what you'd see in Mesopotamia — Nahria has magic, after all! — but it's not outside the realm of possibility for a Bronze Age ish society, and that's a hill I'll die on ;) - [Clothes](https://eleanorkonik.com/clothes) %% ( [[2022-03-28 Clothes (DRAFT)]] ) %%: The world's oldest coin-based currency is [less than 3,000 years old](https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-and-civilisation/2021/08/worlds-oldest-coin-factory-discovered-in-china), thus the phrase 'in for a bolt, in for a blanket' — it's a reference to how many civilizations used bolts of cloth (and blankets!) as de facto currency, for example trade and tribute between the Chinese and neighboring nomadic leaders. The [Tang Dynasty used silk bolts as well as coins as currency](https://blog.patra.com/2019/10/21/silk-as-money/), and Iceland had a similar [system of made-to-order cloth bolts](https://reason.com/volokh/2020/12/02/when-cloth-was-money-literally/). It's not a unique system historically, but rarely comes up in fantasy stories, and I wanted to explore it