The Far West (33 page)

Finally everything was nearly ready. Lan gave one last critical look at Mr. Corvales’s map, spread out on the bare ground in the middle of the diagram Roger had scratched. He looked up and gave me a tense smile. On the far side of the spell-working area, Elizabet gave Bronwyn a quick hug and stepped back. Beside me, William cleared his throat. “Eff —” He stopped short.

I tore my eyes from the preparations. “What?”

“I …” He hesitated. “If anything goes wrong …”

“It won’t,” I told him firmly.

He gave me a long look, then nodded in sudden decision.
“Right. We can talk after this is all finished.” He paused again. “I’d better get in place. Good luck.” He offered me his hand.

I took it and gave it a small squeeze instead of shaking it. Neither of us let go right away. “Good luck,” I echoed. “Be careful.”

William gave me a grin over his shoulder as he walked away. Theoretically, it didn’t make any difference where we stood. As long as we could see the casting and sense the spells, we could tweak them if they needed it. We’d never tried working on anything as complicated as this, though, so we thought we’d better stand on opposite sides of the spell-casting area, in case it made more difference than we thought.

Dr. Lefevre made one final adjustment to the iron ring that lay in the upper-right corner of the square-and-circle diagram in front of him, then straightened up and nodded.

Roger looked at Lan. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Lan nodded. He took a deep breath and began to recite the first spell. On the fifth word, Roger joined him, repeating the same thing Lan had said, but one line behind, like two people singing a round. That was the First Laurencian Protocol, one of the spells that Avrupan magicians sometimes use when they have to work on an especially tricky joint casting. Lan said it would pull their spells together more closely than they could otherwise get and then keep them there, like putting a large book on top of two sheets of paper to press them together.

As soon as they finished the Protocol spell, Lan went straight on into the spell that would put edges around the map to contain Roger’s spell, and William and I started the
world-sensing to keep an eye on the spells. We didn’t expect to have to do anything for a while yet, but we might as well be prepared.

Roger raised his hand and cast the mapping spell. I felt it surge outward, and then the edges of Lan’s spell contained it and sent it back. The blank parts of Mr. Corvales’s map started filling in, like a reflection appearing in a curtained mirror as the curtains were slowly drawn back. I could feel the spell building as Roger drew on the piled-up magic around the river and poured it into the mapping spell.

Just behind Roger, Wash closed his eyes and reached out. “Got it,” he said after a moment. “There’s a canyon just upriver. Here.” He pointed, and his magic followed his pointing finger into the map, and through the map to the actual place. Adept Alikaket and the professors cast the spells to follow Wash’s, so that they could start actually building the dam. The mapping spell shivered and tilted as all those other spells went through it, and I felt it starting to slip out of Roger’s hold. I nudged it and it steadied. I felt a broad grin spread across my face. It was working!

Distantly, I heard Adept Alikaket’s deep voice calling words in Cathayan. A moment later, I sensed him groping for more magic. I left the mapping spell for William to take care of, and tweaked the bit of the adept’s spell that wasn’t in quite the right place because it was normally fed magic from a circle of Cathayan magicians instead of having to draw from a huge built-up pile of natural magic. A second later, the spell took hold.

Power roared up into the adept’s spell, so much that I couldn’t help looking over to make sure he wasn’t burning up.
I had to squint and look away almost at once; Adept Alikaket was surrounded by a blinding white cloud. I could feel his spell shaping the power, reaching out to the rocks and dirt near the canyon and moving them into place. I wondered briefly what it looked like to the critters that were right on the spot.

Dr. Lefevre and Professor Torgeson started their spells, to anchor either side of the dam. Bronwyn began casting hers a moment later, to firm up the base. Roger’s mapping spell slowed and stopped; he cast the final part to make the new map permanent, then started to disengage.

And then I felt the built-up magic shake and shift like loose rock underfoot, and knew that in another instant it would fall in an unstoppable flood that would sweep away the dam and all of us.

“William!” I shrieked.

He didn’t answer me in words, but I could sense him shoving the magic back into place and holding it there, just as I was. Unfortunately, it wasn’t like tweaking a spell. Spells are organized; they’re supposed to be just so, and you can feel when something isn’t where it’s supposed to be and shove it back into place. This was like a big pile of dirt — no one bit of it was supposed to be anywhere in particular, and trying to shove one part into place just made a gap somewhere else. And it didn’t help any that everyone else was still draining magic out of the pile and making new gaps.

We’d delayed the collapse for a moment, but I could tell that we wouldn’t be able to hold it for long — certainly not long enough for the others to finish. I could only think of one thing to do. I gave the magic one last shove, hoping it would stay put for a few seconds, and stretched out my world-sensing, looking for some way to keep everything in position. I just knew there had to be a key spot, a balance point that had been knocked off kilter by all the magic we’d been drawing.

It was like trying to see through a mud wall. I stretched and shoved and reached as hard as I could, but all I sensed
were the spells that Adept Alikaket and everyone were busy casting, winding over and under and past each other in a complicated dance.

Dance …

An image flashed through my mind of Adept Alikaket slowly doing the dancelike moves he called the way of boundless balance, out at the edge of camp at sunrise. Something he’d said —

Your Avrupan magic is a thing apart from yourselves — wood to be carved, stone to be shaped, metal to be melted and re-formed … Aphrikan magic is outside, but alive, to be shaped as a master gardener shapes his trees and bushes, not as a smith shapes metal or a carver shapes wood. Our magic, the Cathayan magic, is us, and we are it, all together, as drops of water are a river and the river is made of drops of water.

And then I knew why I couldn’t find the balance point I was looking for. I was used to tweaking spells — magic that had been shaped and organized by magicians. Even Cathayan magic was shaped and organized; the real difference was in how the magicians got at the magic for their spells and what they did to shape it, not in whether or not it was shaped. Natural magic, the kind that grew from rivers and plants and animals, was organized, too, just according to whatever grew it, instead of on purpose the way some magician wanted.

This magic — the magic that had been piling up along the river for eighty years — wasn’t organized at all. It must have started off with as much order to it as any magic that a river produced, but when it got trapped up at the high end of the river for so long, whatever order it had to begin with must have broken down. Now it was just an enormous heap of raw
magic, with no more form or shape to it than the sky or the ocean. We could tap the surface of it to power our spells, but we couldn’t get down to the heart of it. Not with any of the ways magicians usually reached magic.

A stream of images ran through my mind: Lan at age ten, staring up at William, floating treetop-high above the stream near our house; Miss Ochiba, explaining Aphrikan world-sensing to me and my classmates after school; Papa and Professor Jeffries and Lan, casting the Fourth of July illusion that showed George Washington and his men crossing the Delaware; Wash, sitting patiently beside Daybat Creek, nudging the water through the fallen rock so that it wouldn’t break loose all at once and flood settlements downstream; Master Adept Farawase, holding a stream of magic at the baby medusa lizard while her aides moved through the way of boundless balance. Last of all came an image from one of my dreams, of me standing on a high rock above an ever-changing ocean, then diving in.

I narrowed my eyes. “William!” I yelled across the murmur of everyone else working their various spells. “Can you hang on by yourself for another couple of minutes?”

Light flashed off William’s glasses as he nodded. “Not long,” he cautioned, and I nodded back to let him know I’d heard. Then I took a deep breath and instead of trying to sense the huge pile of magic, or nudge it, or use it, I dove straight into the middle of it.

It felt like the ocean in my dream: calm one minute, swirling chaos the next. I didn’t try to shape it or nudge it. I just let it carry me wherever it went.

After a second, I started sensing a pull on the magic, or rather, a whole lot of different pulls. Most of them were scattered; I figured those were the magical plants and animals that were drawing on the magical buildup. There was a cluster of strong tugs that had to be Adept Alikaket and the professors and everyone using the magic to power their spells. And there was a strong, steady suction off to the west that felt a bit like the Great Barrier Spell. I thought it must be the resonance that Roger said had made all the magic back up in the first place.

From inside the magic, I could feel the way the river held the magic, and the way all the spells we’d cast had unbalanced it. I couldn’t find any way to hold it all in place — there was just too much of it, and for a moment, I almost gave up.
There has to be another way to look at it
, I thought, and then I had it.

I couldn’t hold the mass of magic in place, because we’d already pulled too much of it away from one side, and nobody was strong enough to replace that much. But I might be able to drain enough magic from the other side of the mass to bring it back into balance again.

I reached out and found a weak spot farther up the river and to the south, probably a place where a smaller stream joined the Grand Bow. I paused just long enough to make sure it wasn’t pointing back downriver toward the Great Barrier Spell, and then I poked at it. The magic gave a little, then sprang back into place, like a swing door when you don’t shove it hard enough to stay open. I pushed harder. Raw magic swirled and started to leak past me.

“What the —?” Roger said from off to my left.

“Hang on, William!” Lan shouted.

I braced myself and shoved, trying to make sure the flow of magic wouldn’t stop, and suddenly I was caught in a rush of magic, like water gushing out of a drain hole that’s just been unplugged. Just when I thought I would be completely swept away, someone grabbed my arm. I blinked and my awareness of the magic faded. “William?”

“What do you think you were doing?” he said, giving my arm a shake.

“Never mind that. Did it work?” I asked.

“If it was supposed to take some of the pressure off, then yes,” William said, letting go of me. “Lan’s holding it now.”

I felt the blood drain from my face; even a double-seventh son wasn’t strong enough to hold up that much magic. William shook his head and added hastily, “Not holding it — balancing it, I should have said. It’s still not completely stable, but he can — oh, drat, the anchors are going again. You take Dr. Lefevre’s end. I’ll work on Professor Torgeson’s.”

I nodded. I couldn’t help glancing over at Lan, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that he wasn’t trying to block the mass of magic all at once, by brute force. Instead, he was giving it a little push here and an extra spin there, like a child adding spin to a top that was starting to wobble. I grinned and went back to tweaking spells.

I kept an eye on the “opening” I’d made upstream, though I was careful to stay far enough away from it that I wouldn’t get sucked into it accidentally. The pile of magic had burst through the weak spot I’d made like the river itself washing out a levy or a sandbar, flooding up the secondary river and out through the canyons and plains around it. For a while, I
was afraid I’d made things worse by giving the magic a way around the dam we were building, but when the flooding settled down, I could tell that the magic had spread out to the south instead of coming back to the Grand Bow.

Building the dam took most of the rest of the day, and used up a whole lot of the built-up magic. We had several more tense moments when it seemed like everything would collapse, but each time the wobble was less and it was easier for us to stop it.

Finally, the adept finished moving rocks and earth. One by one, the other magicians finished their parts. As they did, William and I had less tweaking to do, so we started letting what was left of the built-up magic settle into its new place, a bit at a time. We’d used up a lot of it, but there was still enough left that a collapse could wreck the new dam after all, not to mention the damage it would do once it got down to the Mammoth River, so letting go of it all was a tricky business. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief once it was all done.

“Well,” Dr. Lefevre said, once we were all sitting around the fire with tin cups full of the first really strong coffee we’d had in a while. (Sergeant Amy had been rationing the coffee ever since we left winter quarters.) “That was certainly a unique experience. This may revolutionize group spell casting, once we get back to publish the methodology.”

“
Unique
.” Adept Alikaket spoke slowly, like he was tasting something to get every last flavor out of it. “Yes, I suppose
unique
will do, if that is the strongest word your language has for such things.” He looked more exhausted than anyone, but pleased, too.

“Tomorrow, Mr. Boden and Miss Dzozkic should check to make sure this … experiment has worked as well as we hoped,” Dr. Lefevre went on. “Once they’ve rested, of course.”

“Some of it worked even better,” Roger said with a tired grin. “Have you looked at that map yet, Mr. Corvales? I think I got just about everything we could want — topology, water-sheds, mineral deposits, wildlife, and habitat.”

Mr. Corvales nodded with evident satisfaction. “Yes, it’s very well done. Though there seem to be a lot more wildlife indications on the northern half than farther south. Is that accurate, or was the spell losing strength at that distance?”

“It’s accurate,” Roger said.

“We already knew that the magic buildup along the river was attracting magical wildlife,” Captain Velasquez put in, frowning at Mr. Corvales. “This is consistent with that finding.”

“Theory,” Professor Torgeson muttered.

“It’s more than just attracting them, sir.” Roger held out his cup for Sergeant Amy to refill. “I think there are more of them than there should be, especially the predators like the rock dragons and the giant invisible foxes. Everything felt a bit … off center, up around the river. I don’t know what’s going to happen now.”

“Now?” Captain Velasquez asked.

“The magical wildlife around the river appears to have adapted to the high levels of available magic caused by this peculiar buildup,” Dr. Lefevre said in his lecturing tone. “Building the dam has caused a significant drop in the level of available
magic around the river, and while it’s certainly not back to what we would consider normal levels, the change is bound to have an equally significant effect on the adapted species.”

“Though exactly what that effect will be is unpredictable,” Professor Torgeson put in. “It depends on how each species utilizes the ambient magic. Those that require high levels of magic for reproduction will no doubt see significantly smaller population growth in the next few years. Predators that use magic to hunt will have much greater difficulty in catching their preferred prey, and so on. It is a pity we can’t stay to observe it.”

“We’re heading back as soon as we can,” Mr. Corvales said firmly. “I don’t think we could handle another pack of rock dragons.”

Captain Velasquez nodded reluctantly. “As you say.”

“Also, we’ll need to let folks know about the dam,” Wash pointed out.

Adept Alikaket nodded. “It’s only a temporary solution. You’ll have to get another batch of people out here to deal with this magic buildup for good.”

“What?” Mr. Corvales looked taken aback. “I thought — how temporary?”

“It’ll take a few years for the water — and the magic — to fill up behind the dam,” Roger said reassuringly. “But Adept Alikaket is right; the river is still producing magic, and the resonance with the Great Barrier Spell is still making it pile up at this end of the Grand Bow. Eventually, there will be too much again, dam or no.”

Lan nodded agreement. “It’ll take longer because of that thing Eff did, but it’ll still happen.”

“‘That thing Eff did’?” Adept Alikaket said, raising his eyebrows.

“Draining off so much of the pileup,” Lan replied. “Didn’t you feel it when the pressure let up?”

“That was
you
, Miss Rothmer?” Dr. Lefevre said, looking at me in disbelief. “What did you
do
?”

“I made a … a hole to let some of the built-up magic spread out away from the river,” I explained.

Dr. Lefevre relaxed. “Ah.
Not
another groundbreaking change to accepted magical theory, then, just an extension and application of the previous one. Would you mind going into more specific detail?”

It took me quite a while to explain so he understood it, and a couple of times Lan and William had to help out. By the time I finished, Mr. Corvales was frowning and muttering again. “If this means that the dam hasn’t solved the problem —”

“Building a dam was never going to be more than a temporary answer,” Adept Alikaket interrupted.

“And thanks in part to Miss Rothmer, we have plenty of time to find a more permanent solution,” Professor Ochiba said firmly. “Not that that is an excuse for delay, of course. Still, under the circumstances, I will be surprised if it is at all difficult to raise funds for another expedition. I shall certainly recommend that Triskelion participate in any future investigation.”

Wash gave her a surprised look, then grinned. “One way or another, I imagine we’ll work out something.”

The corners of Professor Ochiba’s mouth turned up, as if the words Wash said meant more than they seemed. “Just so.”

“You Columbians.” Adept Alikaket shook his head, but he was smiling, too. “So sure of yourselves.”

“I believe ‘overconfident’ is the word you are looking for,” Professor Torgeson said in a dry tone.

Adept Alikaket laughed. “Possibly.”

“It’s not overconfidence if you can actually do it,” Lan pointed out.