Page 733

Their conversation went on for a little while longer as they discussed the next stage of their plans for Warrenhold’s restoration. The matter of the hydroelectric generator was nearly resolved, thankfully. Hector had finally found its location a few days ago, buried beneath one of the unnamed towers. The survey team hadn’t been able to find it, because it sat on the far end of a flooded hallway in a room as big as a house.

Simply enough, Hector had been able to fill the room with iron and thereby push out all the water. It had proved slightly annoying, since Hector didn’t know how to swim--a thing for which Garovel surprisingly did not make fun of him--but he managed. A replacement generator was already scheduled to arrive as early as next week. It was easily their most expensive purchase yet, but they decided trying to fix the one already here would likely prove problematic in the long-term, given how many years it had gone without any maintenance whatsoever.

As for the flooding issue, it turned out to be the fault of a large crack in the generator room’s wall. Hector patched it up with metal easily enough, and afterwards, he was able to follow the hydroelectric generator’s actual water intake stream and discover the location of something else that had been eluding the surveyors: the waterfall.

When standing in the middle of all eight of Warrenhold’s great towers, anyone could hear the waterfall’s faint white noise, but the cavernous echoes made it impossible to use the sound as any kind of guide. Until then, they hadn’t been able to find the path that lead to it, and Hector discovered that was because the path went through the bathhouses, which were even more problematic than the generator room. The bathhouses weren’t merely flooded; they were flooded with searing hot water. Apparently, Warrenhold had its own natural hot spring.

That was Hector’s current project. He and Garovel had been trying to render the bathhouses usable once more--or at the very least enterable. So after getting some much needed sleep, Hector went back to it. So far, he’d managed to remove much of the excess water, but the heat was still unbearable.