Terri Finemason - A Cistern Scraper in Waterhelm
Its all quiet down there, your job always punctuated by the strange thumpf of your bucket carrier conducting his Workings beside you. Most cisterns these days are deep enough you don’t have no real light down at their bases, just glittering hole, your safe haven shinin’ down from above like Yahti herself. When you look at the floor your supposed to be cleanin’ you can only check its state with your hands. Its hard packed underneath but on that top layer, its a soft mushy texture, kind of like squeezing fresh clay from a river bank through your fingers. Gotta be real methodical with the shovel too, or else it all gets cloudy and your just prayin’ to Hormus you remember which way is up.
Cisterns in large Attovian cities are often hooked up to some kind of Cleanse Water Circle which may be powered by a vestigial power source the city itself owns like the Zyclester God Stone or by some Meyda-worker with a Soul potent enough to Transfuse the Circle relatively often. Due to the nature of the Cleanse Water Working however, a cistern cleansed regularly if left for too many years will develop a dense layer of particulate on its floor that can easily become several feet thick and begin to reduce the total capacity of the cistern it has grown in. Left unchecked long enough and the Cleanse Water Working must be conducted at least daily for fear of contaminants percolating back into the water from the dense layer of sediment. This is where a cistern Scraper is required. Cistern Scrapers often attempt to do their work on cisterns that have gone dry or been intentionally emptied, but most will also work on full cisterns if requested and paid more. The former is time consuming but simple drudgery, the second is difficult, complicated and often dangerous.
When Scraping a dry cistern large metal scrapers and hammers are used to break up the dried out sedimentary layer which is then loaded into buckets by the Scraper and hauled up by an assistant or compatriot. The primary concern when scraping dry cisterns is to come up for air at least once a Prak to let the lungs clear from the dusty and potentially contaminated air inside the cistern. When Scraping a full cistern there are always at least two Scrapers who descend into the water, one to scrape and one to conduct. One carries a large flat shovel which they use to gather the sediment, and the other carries with them a bucket tied to a rope that leads up and out. The bucket carrier will have on them either a Minor Stone or the ability to Transfuse. The shoveler will get a shovel full of the sediment and will work with the bucket carrier to scrape as much into the bucket. The bucket carrier then conducts a localized Cleanse Water Working on the bucket itself which shunts any clean water in it out thereby forcing the sediment to the bottom. Two such scrapers trained well enough can fill the bucket in a single breath after which the carrier yanks the rope twice and the two of them are hauled up or swim up.
Usually it can take a full day of dives to completely scrape a full cistern that’s truly in need. But cautionary tales go around about cisterns left too long that took months to finish and were never emptied thanks to their water being to important.