The Spring Between Us

Chapter 56: The Spring Runs Again

We went to the spring house at dawn.

Sten came with us and Berik and Cal and four warriors, and Hank came with his own wolves behind him, and Nora came on a borrowed horse because she would not be left behind. We went up the mesa road in the grey light with the creek running beside us and the sound of it was so loud after three years of quiet that the horses put their ears back.

The spring house was the same as it had been the night I first came to the Çöl side of the border with poison in my pocket. Low walls, a tin roof, a door that had not been barred in my lifetime. I got down off my horse and went in.

The basin was full. The welling hole was open and the water was coming up out of it, slow and steady and clear, and it ran across the floor of the spring house and into the pipe and out through the wall.

"The branch valve did it," Sten said from the door. "The water came back up the deep line and the spring is filling again."

"It is filling. It is not running the way it used to." I knelt by the basin and put my hand in the water. It was cold and clean. "My mother measured this spring every week for two months. She wrote it down. Eleven inches gone since the thaw. She would have known what a full spring looked like. This is not full."

Hank came in behind me and knelt at the basin. "The plate is off the welling hole. The branch is open. What else is there?"

"The second pump." I stood up. "The Council's pump down in the chamber under the quarry. It has been pumping the deep line east to the town for twenty years. If we open the branch at the cistern and the Council keeps pumping at the quarry, the water will come up here and go straight back down the line and out east, and we will have a full spring house and a dry cistern and nothing changed."

Sten said, "Then we close the Council's pump."

"The pump is in a chamber under a company pump house with a Council soldier on the door."

"Then we close the door on the soldier." Sten put his hand on his sword. "Luna. The Council man has held this canyon with a pump and a paper and a rope. He has no wolves of his own. He has soldiers and clerks and a rogue and a girl who wanted a seat. We have both packs and the town and the creek is running. I will put twenty warriors on that pump house before noon and there will be no soldier on that door who wants to argue with twenty Kızıltaş wolves."

Hank was quiet. Then he said, "No."

Sten turned. "Alpha."

"No warriors on the pump house." Hank stood up. "If we put twenty warriors on a company pump house and a Council soldier gets hurt, Silas will write it down as an armed raid on Council property and the Council will send men with guns. Then it is not a water dispute. It is a war in a canyon and the packs lose." He looked at me. "We close the pump from the inside. Quiet. A few wolves and no swords."

"From the inside," Sten said. "How?"

"The chamber has a ladder and a hatch and a pump and a valve." I looked at the basin. "My father's map says the deep line runs from the spring house to the town and the Council pumps it at the quarry. If there is a valve on the pump, there is a valve on the line. We close the valve on the line and the pump has nothing to pump. And we do it at night with four wolves and no swords and we are out before the soldier on the door knows anything has happened."

"That is a better plan," Sten said, and he said it flatly, the way a warrior concedes a point.

We went back down the mesa road and spent the day doing the things that had to be done before the night. Sten put warriors on the gates and the cistern and the spring house and the ore shaft. Mira kept Inge in her hut and fed her and did not let her out. Cal took the six wolves who had voted against and put them to work on the water line, and by afternoon they were digging out the old branch trench with the rest of the pack. Nora sat in the hall with the pact and the letter and the two rings and read them over and over until she knew them by heart.

At dusk I went to the record room and sat down with Sten and Hank and Berik and said, "The pump house. Tonight. Who goes down?"

"I go," Sten said.

"You do not. You are Beta of this pack as of last night and if you are caught in a company chamber with a wrench in your hand Silas will hang you the way he hanged Ruth." I looked at him. "I go. Hank goes. Berik goes. And Cal goes because Cal can get through a gap no one else can see."

Sten's jaw worked. Then he said, "And if you are caught?"

"Then you take the pack and the pact and the town and you go to the Council at the autumn gathering and you put it all in front of them and you do not stop until someone reads it." I stood up. "But I am not going to be caught."

We went down the ore track at midnight with four horses and no lanterns. The quarry was dark and the pump house was dark and the soldier on the door was sitting on a crate with his back against the wall and his head down. Cal went round the back and came back and said, "He is asleep."

We went in through the back window and down the ladder into the chamber, and the chamber was empty and dark and the hole in the floor where the pump had been was still there. The pump itself was gone. There was nothing to close.

"The pump is not here," Berik said.

"It was here three nights ago. Wren said the pump was gone and the table was gone and the map was gone and there was nothing down here but a hole in the floor." I stood in the chamber with the lantern and looked at the hole. "Silas took his own pump out. He took his own ledger and his own table and his own map and his own pump out of this chamber and he put them somewhere else."

Hank was at the wall. "Derya. The pipe."

I went and looked. The four iron pipes that had come out of the rock and turned down into the floor were still there. Three of them were capped. The fourth was not. The fourth went down through the floor and into the rock and there was a sound in it, a low steady sound of water going away.

"That is the deep line," I said. "It is running. It is running east and down."

"Where is it going?"

I got down on my knees and put my ear to the pipe. The sound was steady and strong and it went on and on, and somewhere under it there was another sound, a small metallic ticking, like a wheel going round.

"There is a pump on the other end of this line," I said. "Not here. Somewhere east. He moved it and he moved it east and it is still pumping."

Cal came down the ladder at a run.

"Luna," he said. "The soldier on the door is awake and he has gone to the office and he is shouting into a telephone."

"Telephone?"

"There is a telephone in the company office. The soldier is on it and he is saying the word Luna." Cal caught his breath. "Luna. I think he is calling the Council hall."

I stood up. "Then we are out of time. We go back up that road now and we get the packs and the town and we go down to the Council hall tonight."

Hank took my arm. "Derya. The pump is east and the pump is still running and we do not know where it is. If we go to the hall without it, Silas will say the water is running because we opened a valve and flooded the cistern, and he will have a company engineer say the same thing, and the Council will believe him."

"Then we find the pump."

"We find the pump." Hank looked at the pipe. "Not tonight. Tomorrow. We follow the line east. It comes out of the canyon somewhere and there is a pump on it and a man who runs it." He let go of my arm. "Tonight we go home and we sleep and at first light we follow that pipe."

We went up the ladder and out of the pump house and back up the ore track, and the soldier was still shouting into the telephone in the office at the bottom of the road. We came into the pack house yard at two in the morning and the creek was running and the cistern was full and the spring house was filling, and Sten was at the gate with his sword on and his face set.

"Luna," he said. "There is a rider at the gate. He came up the mesa road an hour ago with a white flag on his saddle and a letter. It is from the Council hall and it is addressed to both packs and it says the envoy will sit at the quarry at noon tomorrow and hear the matter of the water and the matter of the bond and the matter of the seat, and that he will hear it in the open yard with both packs and the town present, and that no wolf will be harmed." He held out the letter. "And it says at the bottom that if the packs do not come, the Council will close the canyon road and the town will have no water at all."

I took the letter and read it in the lantern light.

"He is calling us out," I said. "He has the pump and the town and the road. And he is going to sit in that yard at noon and let the whole canyon watch him beat us."

Hank read the letter over my shoulder. "Then we do not let him beat us. We find the pump before noon."

I looked at the letter and then at the road and then at the dark canyon east of the quarry.

"Wake the pack," I said. "We ride at first light."