The Ward-Stone

Setting the stone takes a mason 8 hours. It may be set in a wall, in a threshold, or in the coping of a curb, and on setting it you choose what it wards: one wall up to 60 feet long, one doorway, or the whole enclosure of a room up to 30 feet on a side.

While the stone is whole and in place, water and other liquids do not cross the line it wards of their own motion. A tide rises against the wall and stands. Rain runs to the line and turns. Seepage stops, a broken pipe empties on its own side, and a cellar under the level of the harbour stays dry and is entered dryshod.

Liquid carried in a vessel by a creature crosses freely, and so does a creature that is wet. The stone does not know which side is which: what is inside stays inside. A place warded with water already standing in it stays wet, and must be pumped.

Water that is turned aside is not stopped, but sent. While the stone wards a place, the ground within 300 feet of wherever it was last set takes the water it turned, and takes it at the tide. Cellars fill there, wells go brackish, and mortar lets go. Nothing announces the connection, and no office of this city has ever accepted one.

If the stone is chipped, drilled, cracked, or broken, the ward fails at that moment and does not return, whatever is done to the stone afterwards. Everything it has held out since it was set arrives in the same hour: a cellar warded through a season fills to the level of the water outside it in less than an hour, and the door opens inward.