Chapter 716: Someone Tends This Place

Chapter 716: Someone Tends This Place

The wall was only as high as Leon’s hand, but he had not seen anything like it since leaving the foreign camps.

His second body crouched beside the water. Flat stones had been fitted together along the lower edge of the slope, holding a shallow stream against the hillside. Mud filled the smaller gaps. Where one stone had split, another had been pressed against it from the outside.

Water ran past the repair without escaping.

Leon followed the channel with his eyes. It curved behind a shoulder of rock and disappeared beneath hanging grass.

At the spring, his original body set down its cup.

"What is it?" Seraphine asked.

"Water going somewhere it shouldn’t."

She waited.

"There’s a channel," Leon said quietly. "Built along a slope. I’m going to follow it."

Seraphine glanced toward the closed flap. "Carefully."

He nodded. There was no need to leave the household or call the expedition together. He was already at the channel, looking at a repair nobody in the Palace had made.

The second body rose and moved along the uphill side, keeping off the narrow strip beside the water.

He had first thought it might be a natural seam. Plenty of things here looked arranged until he examined them closely. The moving terrace had been stranger than a crooked stream, and the mineral field had laid out its colors with remarkable regularity.

But someone had packed mud behind those stones.

A little farther on, sediment had been lifted out of the channel and piled against a dry rock. Grass shoots grew through the older heaps. The newest held dark clumps with pale roots exposed where they had been pulled loose.

Leon stopped beside it.

So somebody keeps it clear, too.

He looked back along the slope. No figures moved between the rocks. He heard running water, the brush of grass against his cloak, and a faint clicking from something hidden beneath a leaf.

The stillness gave him no reason to assume the place was empty.

He continued without disturbing the sediment.

Beyond the shoulder of rock, the channel divided. One branch followed the hillside. The other descended through a notch fitted with a flat piece of wood.

The wood had been cut to fit.

Leon leaned close enough to see the worn edge where it slid against stone. Raising it would let more water into the lower branch. Pressing it down would send the greater portion onward.

He left it where it was.

Beside the wooden piece, three shallow grooves had been worn into the stone. He studied them before realizing they marked different positions for the water gate.

Someone could change the flow without judging it afresh every time.

Leon had spent much of his recent work making circulation respond to changing conditions. Here, somebody had solved a smaller, ordinary problem with a fitted plank and three marks. He liked the practicality of it.

He also liked that the plank could be replaced. When the edge wore too thin to hold the water back, its owner would only need another piece of wood cut to the same shape.

That suggested repeated use, though it gave him no reliable age for the channel. He resisted the urge to turn a few scratches into a whole history. The people who knew might be somewhere ahead, and he would learn more by looking.

The lower channel led toward a patch of green sheltered between two ridges. From above, it had looked like another stretch of vegetation growing where moisture gathered.

Now he could see narrow beds separated by paths.

He stopped walking.

Short plants with dark, rounded leaves occupied the upper rows. Below them grew a paler species, each stem supported by a forked stick. Water entered through small openings at the ends of the beds and drained through shallow cuts on the opposite side.

The plants carried spiritual energy. Leon could feel that much from the path’s edge, although he knew neither their names nor what they might be used for.

He wanted Loriel here immediately.

The thought was followed by the inconvenient fact that she was far away with the gathering party, and he had no intention of exposing his clone to bring her over for a look.

At the spring, his original body reached for his notes.

Seraphine watched him turn to a clean page.

"Plants?" she asked.

"Rows of them." He began sketching the leaf shapes. "Can you ask Loriel to come in when she’s free?"

Seraphine left quietly. Leon kept drawing while his other body moved to a better position above the beds.

There were differences between the rows that he might have missed without the irrigation channel. Some had been thinned. Small weeds lay drying beside one path, roots turned upward. A dead stem had been cut near its base instead of being left to rot among the others.

This was more than a convenient watering spot for passing cultivators.

Someone had prepared ground, planted it, and returned to tend what grew.

That did not tell him who.

Another expedition might have established a camp here long before the Palace arrived. Harrowmark had already spent nineteen days inside when he questioned them. There could be people who had entered much earlier, or people who had never come through a gateway at all.

The last possibility held his attention.

He had been searching the realm as though everyone in it must be another visitor. These narrow beds made that assumption feel careless.

Loriel entered the tent and sat beside his sketch.

"What am I looking at?" she asked.

"A cultivated patch. My other body found it beyond the northern ridges."

She drew the page closer. "Are these supports?"

"Forked sticks. One for each of the pale plants."

"Then someone expects those stems to carry more weight." Loriel studied the rough drawing. "I can’t identify them from this. If you get closer, look at the undersides of the leaves. Don’t touch the pale ones until you know whether that coating comes off."

"I’m not collecting anything yet."

"Good." She looked up. "Someone’s garden?"

"That’s what I’m trying to find out."

His second body stayed above the beds. The plants were tempting, but taking a handful before he knew their use or their owner would gain him very little.

Whoever tended them might know which nearby growth was valuable, what the weather did, and where the paths led. They might even know something about leaving.

Leon would rather learn that first.

He followed the main channel farther along the slope. Beyond the planted patch, it passed beneath a low stone cover, protecting the water from loose soil sliding down the bank.

A broken piece of that cover lay beside the path.

Its replacement was a thin slab braced with two freshly cut sticks. Pale wood showed where the bark had been trimmed away, and damp mud had been pressed around its edges.

Leon crouched again.

The mud bore finger marks. Water had not yet softened them, and a bead of moisture clung beneath the freshly cut end of one stick.

He looked toward the bend where the channel disappeared between the rocks.

He had been following an old construction through the hillside.

Someone had repaired it recently enough that the wood was still wet.