The Far West (24 page)

Professor Torgeson’s remark about the mammoth getting ornery during migration put me in mind of how hard it had been to keep it contained, even when it was small. It had gone right through a rail fence once, early on when it was still a baby, and Professor Jeffries had had to improve the fence nearly every year after that. Finally, he got a bunch of his students together to build a stone wall, ten feet high and three feet thick, and after that we hadn’t worried so much about the mammoth escaping. Now, though, I didn’t think our log wall would be enough to hold the critter, and even if it was, the mammoth could do a lot of damage to it trying to get out.

I mentioned as much to Professor Torgeson, though I didn’t expect much to come of it. She frowned and told me that I’d spent more time caring for the mammoth than anybody except
Professor Jeffries, and therefore if anybody was an expert on it, I was. Then she marched me off to talk to Adept Alikaket and Captain Velasquez. Adept Alikaket didn’t look happy, but he had to admit that keeping the mammoth inside the log wall was dangerous as well as crowded. Eventually, he agreed to staking the mammoth in the corral outside the wall whenever we weren’t using it. The corral had just as many protection spells on it as the compound, and if the mammoth did get restless and try to get out, we wouldn’t have as much trouble fixing up the damage.

In the last week of September, just about sunrise, we woke to loud snarls, and the shouts of the sentries, and something slamming into the log wall around the compound. Everyone scrambled to grab a rifle and get out of the tents to find out what was happening.

I wasn’t the first one out, but I wasn’t the last, either. The first thing I saw was the front end of something hanging on to the top of the log wall. It had large, upstanding, triangular ears and a pointed muzzle like a fox’s, full of teeth, but it looked to be almost as big as a saber cat. It was making noises like a cat, too. Its fur was dark brown, streaked with lighter brown in places. It clawed at the logs, leaving long gouges in the wood. Its hindquarters were still outside, and it didn’t seem to have enough purchase to haul itself over and in.

As I rolled away from the tent, I heard two shots almost together, then another. The creature on the wall snarled and fell backward, disappearing behind the wall. A second later, something large and heavy crashed into the wall from outside. The timbers creaked and cracked, and there was a yowl.

“Three more outside!” the sentry shouted down from the platform.

Wash swung himself up to the narrow walkway that ran just below the top of the wall. “Concealing magic, too,” he reported a second later. “Anybody have a neutralizing spell?”

“Me,” Professor Torgeson said, climbing up beside him. I was right behind her, and the minute my feet were firm on the walkway, I looked around for something to shoot.

Right on the other side of the log wall, three of the giant fox-things were attacking the mammoth. The body of a fourth one lay at the foot of the log wall, twisted and unmoving. Now that I got a good look at the whole of them, they looked even more like giant foxes; they were tall and built for speed, and their tails were long and bushy.

Outside the corral, I spotted a ripple in the air, like a heat haze in high summer; if Wash hadn’t said something, I’d never have noticed. I figured there were others, but I didn’t look for them right then. I could only shoot one at a time.

I raised my rifle, keeping my eyes on the shimmer. Beside me, Professor Torgeson started muttering rapidly, her hands weaving an invisible pattern in the air. A rifle cracked, and one of the critters on the ground by the mammoth yelped and rolled head over tail as the bullet hit.

The mammoth lowered its head and made a sideways swipe faster than anything that large ought to have been able to move. When its head came up, the tips of its tusks were red and another one of the fox-things lay still.

Professor Torgeson finished her spell on a shout, and magic ripped outward from her in a great circle. The heat-shimmer in
the air that I was watching blinked into another of the fox-things. I squeezed the trigger and chambered the second round without even thinking.

The giant fox-thing yowled and went down, injured but not dead. I looked for another target. Several more of the creatures had appeared out of nowhere when Professor Torgeson neutralized their concealing magic. They were moving too fast for me to get a good shot. I picked one and tracked it, waiting for it to pause long enough for me to be sure of hitting it.

One of the fox-things leaped onto the mammoth’s back, digging in with its long, curved claws. The mammoth bellowed and shook itself. The thing on its back clung to its place, barely. Two of the creatures that had been concealed streaked toward the log wall; they seemed to know that their concealing magic was gone … and who to blame for it. I fired at one of them, but I missed.

More shots rang out, and more of the fox-things dropped. One of them made it to the log wall and leaped, but it fell short of the top. The mammoth moved again, dodging and shaking, and swept the fox-creature from his back at last. Then he swiped his tusks at the fox by the log wall, knocking the critter halfway across the corral. I shot a third time, and so did nearly everyone else.

And then it was over. We all stayed on the wall for a while, ready and waiting, until we were positive that there were no more of the fox-things, while the mammoth did his own check, stomping and snorting all around the edges of the corral. When we were finally sure it was safe, Captain Velasquez ordered a double watch along the wall, and the rest of us set about cleaning up.

We counted nine of the creatures lying dead in and around the corral. The log wall needed repairs, and the protection spells on the corral were completely gone.

That last part worried everyone the most. The fox-things had not only gone right through the spells, they’d also taken them down without anyone noticing. Even the log wall hadn’t been as much of a barrier as we’d hoped; from the marks on the outside, that first critter hadn’t had any trouble clawing its way straight up it.

“We need an alarm spell,” Mr. Corvales said when he heard about the protections on the corral being gone. “Something to tell us if the protection spells drop.”

“We had one,” Captain Velasquez told him. “The giant invisible foxes took it down along with everything else.”

“Then we need something that won’t go down if the rest of the spells do,” Mr. Corvales said firmly.

Captain Velasquez looked like he was only just barely preventing himself from groaning, but nobody could argue that Mr. Corvales was wrong, so the captain and Wash and a couple of the magicians put their heads together and came up with an alarm spell that was anchored a ways back from the wall or
fence that the protection spells were tied to. They figured that since it wasn’t hooked to the same thing as the protections, it wouldn’t go down at the same time, and we’d at least have notice that something was wrong. Nobody knew if it would actually work against the invisible foxes, though, and nobody really wanted to find out the hard way.

All of the magicians got busy with the dead foxes right away, dissecting them and studying them to find out what made them tick. We hadn’t really had the need or time to examine any of our other new specimens so closely, and if it hadn’t been so important to learn everything we could as fast as we could, studying the giant invisible foxes would have been a nice change of pace. Captain Velasquez’s name for them stuck, though Dr. Lefevre complained every time he heard it that it was misleading, because the fox-things weren’t actually invisible, just magically concealed temporarily. Nobody else thought it was much of a difference.

The other thing that the fox attack did was to settle the argument over the mammoth. It had pushed the log wall out of true and cracked a couple of logs, and it had just been attacking the invisible fox, not the wall. Everyone could see that the rail fence of the corral wouldn’t hold it for a minute if it decided to get out, and nobody wanted to chance the mammoth making a serious attack on the wall. Adept Alikaket tried pointing out that the mammoth had killed two of the nine foxes, but you could tell his heart wasn’t really in it.

So a couple of days after the attack, Wash and Professor Torgeson and I took the mammoth across the river and let it go. I had mixed feelings as I watched it amble away, but
Professor Torgeson grumbled that we should have shot it just on general principles. I never did find out why the adept had been so set on bringing it along on the expedition.

From then on, we were even more careful when we sent groups out to cut hay and hunt and gather for the winter. We didn’t see any more of the invisible foxes, but Wash shot another medusa lizard.

As the days shortened and the weather got colder, there was less and less forage to be found, and everyone stuck close to the compound. The wall proved its worth more than once in those months. The terror birds had started south early in September, but the saber cats and Columbian sphinxes and prairie wolves didn’t leave until the herds of bison and the migrating mammoths went south in October. Twice, a pride of cats tried to come over the wall, just like the invisible foxes, and once Captain Velasquez called out the whole army unit to head off a woolly rhinoceros. The first snowstorm came in early November. It was kind of a shock for the soldiers who’d been born and raised in the South Plains; they’d been complaining about the cold since September, and they hadn’t really believed any of us Northerners when we told them it was going to get a whole lot worse.

Adept Alikaket still got up early every morning to do his practice, and as folks got less busy with gathering, more of them joined in. Even Lan started coming again. At first, I was pleased to see him, but by early November I could see that he was getting restless. And then suddenly he stopped coming.

I might have thought he’d lost interest, except that I caught him scowling at the adept when no one else was
looking. He had the exact same expression he always got when he was sulking about something Mama had forbidden him to do. Nine times out of ten, he went off and did it anyway, and got into terrible trouble. I couldn’t let him do that on the expedition, so three days after he stopped showing up at the adept’s morning practice, I collared Lan and dragged him out to a corner of the compound where we could talk more or less in private.

At first, he didn’t want to tell me what was up, but I kept at him. “You can’t tell me it’s nothing, Lan Rothmer — I know better. And you should know by this time that I’ll get it out of you, sooner or later, so you might as well tell me now and save us both a fair lot of aggravation.”

“All right,” he said finally. “It’s that Cathayan.”

“Yes, I already figured out that much,” I told him. “So what about him?”

“I asked him to teach me, and he said no.”

I stared for a minute. “But he’s teaching everyone, every morning. You just have to show up.”

“Not the silly exercises!” Lan said, exasperated. “Magic! Proper Hijero-Cathayan spells, not the halfway theory that they teach — taught —” He stopped. I waited. After a minute, he went on, “Anyway, he didn’t even consider it.”

“The practice isn’t silly,” I told him sternly. “It’s part of the magic. And I don’t think he can teach ‘proper Hijero-Cathayan spells’ to anyone here, really. From what he said —”

“He’s teaching William!” Lan burst out.

I blinked at him. “He is?”

Lan nodded.

“Then maybe we’d better talk to William.”

“I don’t want —”

“Maybe not, but we’re going to do it anyway,” I interrupted him. “Because if we don’t, you’ll keep stewing until you decide to go off and try something all on your own.”

“I wouldn’t,” Lan said, but his eyes slid sideways.

“You were thinking about it, though, weren’t you?”

“Maybe.” He looked down, then straightened. “But I really wouldn’t actually try to
do
anything. Not after what happened last time.”

“I hope not,” I said. “But I bet it will be a lot easier for you to not do anything if we talk to William and Adept Alikaket before you think yourself into a bowline knot.”

William was working on the invisible foxes with Professor Ochiba. We still didn’t know how they’d taken down the protection spells on the corral, or how they’d gotten around them in the first place, because most natural magic doesn’t leave traces the way Avrupan spells do, so it’s really hard to study unless you actually see it happening.

There were a couple of different theories. The most likely one was that the fox-things had followed the mammoth’s scent from farther out, and then gotten through the protections when they cast around to pick up the trail. Professor Lefevre thought that the foxes were like the medusa lizards and mirror bugs — drawn to strong sources of magic — and that all the protection spells on the compound were enough to attract the pack. Some of the other folks thought that the foxes weren’t affected by the protection spells at all.

Professor Ochiba and William had one of the dead foxes
laid out on the ground beside the trestle table we usually used for examining specimens. Professor Ochiba was sitting cross-legged next to it with her eyes closed, while William cast a small flea-repelling spell at different parts of the creature. Lan and I waited until William stopped and Professor Ochiba opened her eyes.

“Hello, Professor, William,” I said. “Find anything interesting?”

“There is some residual activity,” Professor Ochiba said. “Mainly around the head and long fur.”

“Activity?” Lan said sharply. “What kind of activity?”

“It seems to resist magic indirectly,” William replied, scribbling rapidly in the observations notebook.

“Like the medusa lizards?”

“No. Different.”

“Different how?” Lan persisted.

“The mechanism is not the same,” Professor Ochiba said as she stood up and stretched. “The medusa lizard skin actively resists and absorbs magic; it dissipates most of the spells that strike it, absorbing part of them to make its resistance stronger. It’s a natural magical loop, which maintains itself even after the creature is dead. The invisible foxes merely redirect spells that strike them. I believe it would take less magic, but the effect disappears rapidly when the creature dies.”

“They redirect spells?” I said uncertainly.

“You know how water beads up on oilcloth? Like that.” William shoved his glasses back in place and then gestured at
the dead fox. “When the spell hits, it doesn’t sink in and affect the invisible fox. Instead, it slides off along the fur and into the air.”

“Would it work the same way with stationary spells? Like the protection spells?” Lan asked.

“Possibly. But merely deflecting the protection spells would not have caused them to collapse completely.” Professor Ochiba stretched again, then bent to collect the fox. “That will be all for today, William. We’ll run the same series the day after tomorrow. That will give us three data points —”

“Four.”

“Better still. We’ll spend tomorrow analyzing what we have so far.” The professor nodded farewell to us and walked off with the fox.

William closed his notebook and tucked his pencil through the loop of ribbon he was using as a bookmark. “I’d say I was happy to be finished early, except that going through all these figures tomorrow is going to be a miserable job.” He shrugged and smiled slightly. “There’s good parts and bad parts to anything, I suppose. What are you two up to?”

“Nothing much,” Lan said. “Just … nothing much.”

I heaved an exasperated sigh. “Lan’s in a grump because Adept Alikaket won’t talk to him about Cathayan magic.”

William looked surprised. “That’s odd. Sos Melby and Professor Lefevre and I have been asking him questions for weeks, and he’s never been reluctant to answer. Maybe it’s because you’re in the exploration-and-survey section?”

“I knew it!” Lan clenched his fists.

“Why would it make a difference that Lan’s in the exploration section?” I asked, frowning. “We’re supposed to all be the same expedition.”

“I don’t know,” William replied. “But Mr. Corvales has gotten snappy with Adept Alikaket a couple of times, and exploration-and-survey is supposed to be his section, so perhaps it’s something to do with that.”

“Mr. Corvales got snappy with the adept? I hadn’t heard that.”

William shrugged. “It’s no big surprise, is it?” Lan and I looked at him. He shrugged again. “The three section heads are supposed to have equal authority, but the Cathayans put up half the money for the expedition, and Adept Alikaket is their representative. So it’s more important to keep him happy than it is for either of the other two. It has to make things awkward.”

“I never thought of that,” I said slowly.

“It’s stupid.” Lan kicked at the ground, the way he used to when we were twelve and he was frustrated enough to want to hit something, only he had nothing to hit. “If I can learn proper Hijero-Cathayan magic —”

“Oh, we’re not learning the actual spells,” William interrupted. “It’s mainly just discussions of theory. The way Cathayans think about magic is fundamentally different from the way we do. It’s fascinating.”

“Lan,” I said suddenly, “when you talked to Adept Alikaket, what did you say? Did you actually ask straight out about learning spells? And did you tell him about the accident at Simon Magus, and Professor Warren getting killed?”

Lan turned bright red. “I didn’t have a chance to tell him,” he muttered. “I just — he just —”

“You didn’t even try.” I suppressed another sigh. Sometimes I felt like I was a lot more than just fifteen minutes older than Lan. “William, do you think it would make a difference if the adept knew?”

“It might.” William gave Lan a long, hard look. “Why are you so keen on learning Cathayan spells, anyway?”

“I —” Lan took a deep breath. “I need to know what went wrong. With Professor Warren.”

“You know what went wrong,” I said as gently as I could. “You finished the team spell casting, and Professor Warren was the focus. He wasn’t ready, and all that magic burned him out.”

“I know,” Lan whispered. “But what if there was something else? Something we could have done differently? We never learned anything about that practice dance thing the adept does every morning. What if
that’s
what made the difference?”

Then it wouldn’t have been your fault
, I thought, though I knew better than to say such a thing straight out. Lan had been in a complete funk for months after the accident. He said he’d gotten over it, but what with this fascination with Hijero-Cathayan magic and the way he was still refusing to go back to school the way Mama and Papa wanted, I didn’t think he was as over it as he claimed. I didn’t want to upset him all over again by pointing that out, though.

William wasn’t as kind as I was. “What made the difference was you pulling a stunt you should have known not to
try,” he said sternly. “Nobody but you was ready for that spell to go active; no matter what else could have or should have gone into it, they still wouldn’t have been ready, because nobody knew you were going to activate it.”

“All right!” Lan snapped. “I messed up, I know that! I just have to know whether there was something I could have done differently.
Besides
not finishing the casting in the first place.”

“And that’s all?” William stared steadily at him.

“Yes … no. I don’t know.”

“Good enough,” William said after a moment. “Let’s go ask the adept some questions, then.”

“
Right now?
” Lan looked like he couldn’t decide whether to be excited or frightened out of his wits.

I thought for half a second, and then linked my arm in his. William grinned and took Lan’s other side.