It took Lori several days to build the bath house in River's Fork. Most of this was the difficulty of moving material to the building site she had chosen—the rock debris hadn't nearly been enough to work with—but the rest was the sheer difficulty of the project. It wasn't just that she was working outside of her demesne and had to claim wisps like any other Whisperer, or it was so stupidly hot and humid! No, the delay was caused by practical problems.

To build the bath house in a way similar to the ones she'd made before, she'd need a pipe to be able to draw water from the river, and another pipe for the used bath water so that it wouldn't go back into the river so close to where the demesne would be getting its drinking water. However, making pipes would be difficult without her awareness of the demesne's wisps to assist her in forming to pipes and displacing the stone. To properly make the pipes with the resources and capabilities she had available, she'd either need to have the ground dug up so she could lay out pipes manually, or make above-ground pipes from the river to the bath house.

The former wasn't practical, whether she did it herself by excavating the ground with earthwisps, or had it dug up by other people. If she did it herself, she'd be taking a lot of time to do it. If she had it dug up, it would require bringing in people from her demesne to do it or having the people of River's Fork do it, which would disrupt their work. Food was still tightly rationed in the demesne, and a lot of time was spent tending to and growing or catching what food they had. The above-ground pipe was the only practical solution. Building the above ground—or rather, ground-level—pipe all the way to the river required a decent amount of stone, which she needed to excavate herself. Since she'd need to excavate stone to build with in any case, a little bit more for the pipe wasn't a problem.

Figuring out where to direct the waste water was her next problem. While she could just let it all flow back into the river… she didn't want to, not the least of which because there as a chance that the waste water would get drawn into the intake pipe again. That would just be disgusting. Ideally, she'd reroute the waste water towards the fields… but even if the site of the bathhouse was equidistant between the river and the fields, that would still require a lot of piping.

An open gutter might have worked, conferring the water towards the fields with a minimum of construction on her part, but that was a short step away from having an open sewer, which was just asking for someone to do something disgusting. And on more practical terms, such a gutter would need to be cleaned since rocks and dirt would no doubt fall into it. Covering a gutter makes it all but a pipe anyway, and she'd be back to the annoying amount of work she'd have to do.

She was tempted to forego the pipes and just have people manually fill the baths with water from the river. It would be time consuming, but doing so would remove a very tedious portion of the work she'd have to do. What stopped her was the very real possibility that the work would be pushed on the few remaining children in the demesne. It was the sort of heartless cruelty parents would think of, making children carry heavy containers of water under the hot sun, and probably scold them for using that water to cool themselves down. And doing it that way still wouldn't have solved the issue of disposing of the used bath water. If she just made it flow out to a cistern outside the bath house, it would likely start getting malodorous, and someone might try to use it for quick washes and ugh.

Lori spent a lot of time considering the problem as she excavated stone from the closest source, which was the bedrock of the nearby river itself. After all, it wasn't like losing a little stone there would matter. It was a time consuming process that had her standing under the sun with water up to her calves in the river as she used her wand to claim the stone, wearing her boots without socks to protect her feet from rocks, graspers, and bloodsucking slugs. Her hat had new clips of bone at the edges of the brim for her to anchor bindings to, which made it easier to keep her head and face cool.

Once she'd claimed enough earthwisps, Lori gently drew the mass out of the water, leaving a long trench in the river that had slowly grown wider as she removed more and more stone. The stone was carefully moved up the broken ground of the riverbank until Lori was able to pile it up next to the spot where the bath would be. By the time she was finished excavating—which took three days—she had a pile of stone bigger than a house—well, one of the early-built houses in her demesne—which was a decent start.

First she made a foundation that would also act as a floor, spreading stone on the ground from one side of the pile of excavated stone in a long strip three paces wide. She anchored the stone onto the bare dirt, which she also claimed, bound and then compressed under the stone, making sure the floor was raised higher than ground level to prevent rain and dirt from flowing into the bath house. It probably wouldn't be any use against the spring floods, but that was a future matter to worry about.

Once the floor was laid out, Lori started hollowing out the pile of stone next to the foundation.

After all, it was already of a decent height as to act as a roof, and the sides of the pile could act as walls. All she had to do was hollow out the pile, basically re-excavating the stone as she made a space that formed a cave-like hollow that had a self-supporting, arching curve to it. The stone she slowly extracted was 'pulled' outwards from the hollow to continue the curve of the walls and ceiling. The whole mass of stone—foundation, hollowed stockpile and slowly extending walls, essentially everything that she that she wasn't actively moving—was all part of a single binding that reinforced the structure of the stone, allowing the stone to support itself when she had not yet finished forming the supportive arches. At intervals, she also raised up stone pillars to support the ceiling,

She slowly lengthened the stone structure over days. The work had to be done carefully, since the shape of the structure was important, and she had to remember to imbue the binding of earthwisps that reinforced the stone while she worked.

Twice, she found that the stone she had excavated was insufficient, and so Lori had to go back to the river to excavate some more. The excavated stone was piled around the open end of the tall, arched structure she was making, to make it easier to extend the building to the length she needed it to be. While the overall structure wasn't all that big—it only needed to be able to serve less than fifty people, and not even all at once—the walls needed to be thick enough to bear the weight of the roof, and she also needed more stone for the internal fittings, like the basins to hold water, the pipes, and the internal walls to prevent people from seeing inside…

At the end of a day of work, when the sun began to hang low in the sky, Lori, Riz, the friend Riz would bring that day, and the hunting party that helped the demesne hunt for beast meat would get on Lori's Ice Boat and back home. Without the security of sleeping in her own room aboard the Coldhold, as well as the numbers afforded by having Rian and the operators of the Coldhold present back when she'd been building the dragon shelter in the spring, she didn't feel safe spending the night in River's Fork. Oh yes, ostensibly it was because they didn't want to have to draw on the demesne's supplies for breakfast and dinner, but Lori just didn't want to stay. Not with the weather the way it was. Sleeping in Shanalorre's office was too hot!

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In the evenings, they'd get back to her demesne as it was getting dark, the sun hidden behind the trees, casting the sky in shades pinks and purples and orange and red. More often than not, dinner would have already begun without them, though there was always still food waiting. The next day, they would proceed back down river after Lori had spoken to Shanalorre and, after checking her rock for his name, Kolinh. Lori would be back to work building the bath house and sweating profusely by mid-morning.

Slowly, far slower than any of its counterparts, the bath house took shape. Instead of two long, half-cylinder structures parallel to each other—one for men, the other for women—Lori simply made one such building, then built a wall in the middle to divide it into two segments. Finishing the building was a relief, since it meant that she'd finally be able to work in the shade without the intense sun shining down on her.

Of course, the relief was short-lived, because as the day wore on the inside of the bath house got increasingly hot, and so along with lightwisps to let her see, Lori also had to anchor bindings of airwisps to circulate the still and hot air, and bindings of firewisps to destroy heat within the bath house to mitigate the heat. If she hadn't been a Dungeon Binder, she'd probably have never been able to do all this alone, since she'd have been spending significant amounts of her time simply imbuing the bindings that let her work.

Sometimes, when Lori was alone and she was sure Riz and whoever else couldn't see her, she'd simply stop working sit down, and waited for the urge to cry to go away. This… wasn't anywhere near what she thought being a Dungeon Binder would be like. Building a stone structure by herself in oppressive heat, unpaid…

It wasn't like she'd ever actually use this building herself. She'd certainly never used any of the bath houses she'd built in her demesne. Did the idiots that lived here really need it? They'd been doing well with… however they'd been bathing so far. Why did she have to work this hard by herself?-! Just her, fingernails scrapped ragged from all contact with stone, making pipes with the stone foundation and stone basins for holding in water…

She never let herself stop working for long, even when the heat and frustration meant she cried as she worked. Or perhaps that was just all the sweat pouring down her face. She went through the little jars of warm water she had Riz get her quickly, drinking to keep from getting dehydrated.

Many mornings, she just wanted to stay in her demesne and make beads. After all, it's not like the stone she'd already raised and formed was going to go anywhere. Surely she could put it off for a day… or even put it off completely until Rian came back, and only continue it if he had actually managed to recruit any Deadspeakers lazy and insecure enough to be willing to work for someone else instead of founding their own demesne. After all, no point building something if the intended user never arrived…

For two weeks, Lori left her demesne every morning and took Lori's Boat downriver to River's Fork. Each day, every day, she made the journey and worked on the demesne's bath house bit by bit. The basins were made, running along the center of both halves of the bath house. Pipes were formed to take the used water and pass it though an above-ground pipe to a stone-lined pit near both the fields and the in-progress planting terrace, the pit currently empty since the bath house had no water yet. She'd excavated the pit to be lower than the baths, so that only gravity was needed to get the water there, with stone-line sides to keep it from collapsing.

Another above-ground pipe of stone was laid between the bath house and the river, and Lori debated wondered if she needed to put in something to repel slugs, squids, graspers and aquatic bugs from getting into the pipe to the bath house before deciding that it was just bath water. There was no need to overdo it. She ran the pipe from the river along the outside of the bath house, and eventually passed the pipe through the wall between the bath house's halves, where the tube then let out to the basins she'd made.

Once the building was finished and the pipes were laid, all that was left was to make the bound tool that would draw water from the river and bring it to the bath house's basins for people to use. That, at least, she could design from the cool and convenience of her room in her Dungeon. A bound tool core mounted to a tube of bone—because stone was annoyingly heavy to try to move around on her table—on which a combination of waterwisps and airwisps were anchored. When it was mounted to the pipe she'd stuck into the river, the airwisps would draw air from the pipe, and the suction would pull water up the pipe. Once the water reached the portion of the pipe where the bound tool was located, the water would be propelled the rest of the way by the binding of waterwisps. Given the weather, there was no need to make the water warm at the moment, and adding the binding of firewisps later would be trivial.

It was a simple binding she'd used before—she used a variant of it in the bath houses of her demesne—so she was confident it was safe to leave alone with the idiots of River's Fork.

And then it was back to River's Fork to actually install the bound tool onto the pipe where it went into the outside wall of the bath house. She used local stone to make a protective shroud around the contact receptacle of the bound tool, to protect the wispbead from being dislodged by the wind or bugs. Keeping bugs from roosting in the contact receptacle could be Yllian's problem.

"It's simple enough to use," Lori said as she showed Yllian how to operate the bound tool. "Put a bead on it, and it will draw water up from the river to fill the basins. Don't let the basin overflow, that will be a waste of water, and I don't suggest drinking the water from the basin. At the very least, it might have silt. You'll have to clean the basins every so often to get the silt out."

"Understood, Great Binder," Yllian said solemnly.

"I've already tested it, so the basins inside already have some water in them. Remember, one is for men, the other is for women."

"I'll make sure nothing untoward happens in the baths, Great Binder."

Lori nodded. "You'll have to build your own shelves for storing your clothes while you're bathing. I don't have the time for that. If anyone vandalizes the bound tool, I will personally break their leg."

"I will see to it that their leg is reserved exclusively for you, Great Binder."

Lori nodded absently. "Now, the four new wisplights I gave you are for the bath house only. They're far brighter than the ones you already have, which is needed because aside from the entrances, there are no openings into the bathouse, otherwise people will get up to nonsense."

Yllian nodded in agreement. "Understood, Great Binder. May I use my own discretion for designating someone to handle the wispslights in the women's side of the baths?"

"Make arrangements you feel you need to," Lori said, waving a hand dismissively. "Make sure to keep an eye on the waste water pit near the fields. Don't let it get too full or else the baths will probably flood, and you'll be walking around in your own filthy bath water."

"Noted, Great Binder," Yllian said. Hesitantly, he added, "If I may ask… why are there no bathing pools?"

Ah. Right, Yllian had used the baths in her demesne, hadn't he? "Because they require dedicated full time maintenance and a more robust facility for dealing with used bath water, neither of which the demesne is capable of. Besides, the river is right there,"

"Understood, Great Binder. But… do you suppose that you could find it in you to add something like it before next winter?"

Lori gave him a flat look. "You realize you'll have to walk out of the dome into the cold just to use it, don't you?"

"Yes, Great Binder."

The two stared at each other.

"I'll consider it if Rian comes back having recruited a Deadspeaker who knows how to fuse wood and other materials together," Lori finally replied.

"I see…" Yllian said thoughtfully. "I understand, Great Binder."

Lori nodded. "Good. Now, I need to do some more tests before you can tell everyone they can use the baths. I will inform you when I am finished."

"Yes, Great Binder. I'll see to it that everyone is rationed some soap."

Lori waved a hand dismissively, and Yllian went off. "Erzebed?"

"Yes, Great Binder?"

"Did you two pack soap with you like I told you?"

"Yes, Great Binder!" Riz and her militiawoman friend both chorused.

Lori nodded, very aware of how drenched with sweat she was, how hot she was, and how her clothes stank of both. "Good. One of you get the packs, the other come with me."

Her responsibility here had finally been discharged. She supposed now was a good a time as any to use one of the bath houses she'd built.