He snorted, but smiled.

Near the dam the “new” river was shallow enough that the hinnies were willing to wade across. That put them on the side where the dam was mostly intact, and there was actually a switchback path that took you up to the top of the dam that the hinnies had no trouble climbing. Once at the top, Abi looked down, and quickly found the roundish hole near the base of the dam that was the source of the seepage.

“Doesn’t look all that big,” Stev said doubtfully, following her gaze.

“The fact that we can see it at all means that the dam wasn’t that long from failure,” she said soberly. “These things don’t just leak out slowly in a controlled fashion, like opening up a bathtub drain. When they fail, they take a huge bite out of the dam, and everything rushes out in a wave.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” They both raised their eyes to the ruins in the center of what had been the lakebed; right in the middle of the valley, with the river cutting its way through the mud right down the center of the cluster of buildings.

They were strangely unornamented, three and four story tall gray pillars with tiny windows. They didn’t seem to have roofs, unless the roofs were flat. The buildings huddled together like a covey of frightened quail, as if they—or the people who had built them—were afraid of the hills around them.

“Huh,” Stev said, sounding surprised.

“I wonder how they were made,” Abi said aloud. “Look how flat their surfaces are! They look as if they were cast rather than built.”

“I can’t imagine living in a place like that,” Stev replied, but his voice sounded as if he was preoccupied and not really talking to her. Which meant he was Sending what he saw back to his Companion.

I’m glad I nagged him into it.

She turned her attention back to the ruins, and decided she agreed with him. She couldn’t imagine living in a place like that. Why such tiny windows? Surely the winters couldn’t be that bad here—after all, no one in Ellistown had windows this small.

Then again, appearances might be deceptive. She had no point of reference in that sea of mud. Maybe the windows weren’t small. Maybe the windows were normal sized, but the buildings were bigger than she thought.

It didn’t look like a place that could spawn a monster. It looked more like a place that would spawn soulless bureaucrats.

She continued to stare at it, until finally Stev said, in a much more normal tone of voice, “Ready to go?”

“Definitely.” She sent her hinny down the switchback trail ahead of his. “I can’t imagine there being anything worth looking for in those piles.”