Three days after Brekk's departure, the second cistern was sealed and the water ran.
Droktagar opened the intake valve himself and stepped back. The water found its own path through the pipe sections to the distribution point at the settlement's center. There was no announcement. Word spread the way useful things spread in a small settlement: one person saw it, told two, those two came and told others. The crowd at the distribution point built over the course of an hour, not by anyone's organization but by the natural accumulation of people who had heard that something was working and wanted to see it working.
The Ashkar families arrived in the afternoon. Their previous water source had been a stream on the eastern ridge, an hour's climb in good weather and a genuinely dangerous undertaking in the worst winter storms. Three of the Ashkar settlement's deaths in the previous winter had occurred on that climb. The distribution point was four minutes from the fire-hall.
