Movement, Epilogue (#2)

When the water dried up, the city slowly, slowly ground to a halt. For a time the boiler worked with the slowed flow of water, but it worked at half capacity. The trains ran, but at painstakingly slow speeds. The clocks themselves ticked out long minutes. Some refused to pay their employees full wages, citing the city clocktower, and the lessened productions of the machines they ran. The first people to leave were only a handful, the ones who had been on the edge of bankruptcy already. Others tried to stay longer, to find where the river was blocked, or just to wait and see if it would run again. Time stood sill, and the rate of exitus grew by the uncounted hours. Random belongings of those who had left were strewn in the street, not worth heir weight in the long miles they knew were ahead. Few of the airship captains would allow anyone on board, save for an outrageous sum. One or too filled their holds with the hungry and the sick; the others filled theirs with the rich, packed amid cargoes of brass and coal.

The subterranean river had always flowed freely in the past, but the networks had never been mapped and they were not well understood. One would need a submarine, lights, enough coal and food to last for days. A compass to map by, and a master cartographer to wield the pen. The abandoned city was rich in materials, there was much that was not worth bringing away. The coal stacks were full, there were brass and iron aplenty in the silent refineries. But of men, there were few indeed with the courage for such a mission. And no such vehicle existed that could map the waterways.

The mayor of the city was a good man, and a strong one in its hour of peril, but there was no true solution to the dilemma of the river. He spoke with the greatest inventors, adventurers, map makers, and few words of hope were spoken. One man had been all three of these in his life, and he alone laid out a plan of acion, and blueprints of a strange machine. It would walk on the very bottom of the river, its hull would be smoothed like an airship so the waters of the river would flow around it and not hinder. His machine was far from finished, and it would take him six years, he said, to finish it. Then the true task would begin.