This is assuming a lot of things about how water spirits work. We don't know anything about how spirits claim territory. Boat waystones would be tolerable for surge capacity, assuming that enough waystones had been built down the river to absorb it. And any waystones built down the river to absorb boat waystones are waystones that could have just been placed on land.
The Black Water's waystones do not feed into a dwarven nexus. Everything that post said still holds true.
The Border Princes near Barak Varr don't have a nexus. The waystones would be limited to the rivers, and dumping whatever magic into the sea. There's a lot more valuable things we can do than that. The Runesmith Clans as a whole know that there is a network. Thorek had been monitoring Karak Azul's waystone during the Great War Against Chaos. He knew it had been connected to the network before it was disconnected. He's only 350 years old. He wouldn't have been the Master Runelord of Karak Azul yet, if he was even a Runelord! There's a decent chance that a handful of the Kings of the Old Holds know there is a nexus and some of the New Holds probably have an idea too. Karak Izor and Karak Norn were founded to have nexuses. 'Single digit number of dwarves' indeed!
Note that the process of getting a nexus in the Border Princes so they can directly benefit Barak Varr will mean directly telling the dwarves about the benefits of the Waystone Network, hence why the Hellwars are a possibility.
Point me to the rivers in Nagarythe that feed into nexuses. There aren't any. There isn't a point to boat waystones there. And like... you know that beastmen also target waystones? Should we completely abandon the idea of covering the interior portions of the Empire because of the mere possibility that they would be destroyed?
I said that it was a single digit number of dwarves who know magic is being channeled
into something in the karaz ankor as opposed to
through it. It was a rather major plot point that the high king had to obliquely show that the magic could be put to use for the good of the whole karaz ankor rather than solely for the betterment of karaz a karak, and before then it was a major plot point unknown to Belegar that magic was being channeled in to karaz a karak
at all.
To insist that the benefits of sending waystone network flows into the karaz ankor is not a top state secret is absurd.
And after our buttery smooth sale of waystones for handling the black water, it also strains belief that whether or not these spirits would carry magic to the KA network matters to whether or not the individual karaks who might purchase them will want to do so.
Likewise, the notion that this is somehow a
substitute for stationary waystone infrastructure where we can support it is... not something I mentioned anywhere, at all,
ever. "Surge capacity that can be evacuated from a position under attack" or "stationary infrastructure watched by conventional patrols" is a false dichotomy. Some places will benefit more from one kind than the other, but that is because these are different waystone designs for different use cases.
Either is functional.
Both is better.
As for assumptions... so is "there will be nothing to contract with in a canal". I gave a plausible counter-factual to compare with, if you want to move to only talking about things we
know, then "every body of water has a spirit" is the null hypothesis we're left with. The only time Boney has said "no" to a water spirit contract being infeasible was the sea of claws for "oh god,
why" on why we shouldn't and "the water flows
away from the coasts where you'd collect the sea's dhar" for why we couldn't.
And then you're assuming that network linkages from the rivers would somehow have to be overbuilt to support any of this, for some reason? If they're acting as trunk linkages now, they're going to keep being trunk linkages when we build out more permanent stones where they can connect to the river - and even after that, these stones have to suffer through hexennacht impacting themselves directly and indirectly via wide swaths of the upstream network.
These things mean that if we're not building those linkages you're concerned about to withstand temporary increases in flow
then we are building them to fail. Characterizing a build-out that features appropriate safety margins a waste is just silly.
But taking a step back from particulars - you're taking an idea that has been QM approved for more than a year and making up reasons why it somehow shouldn't work.
Historically, this has not been a successful questing strategy.
