The Far West (11 page)

“I am sorry; I was not clear,” Miss Bizen said. “Are there other creatures, not lizards, that do this?”

“Other animals that soak up magic?” Professor Torgeson said. “Not that we know of.”

“There are the mirror bugs,” Professor Jeffries said. “Though they are insects, of course, and not animals, and the ability manifests in a different way.”

Miss Bizen bowed and turned to translate that into Cathayan. As soon as she finished speaking, there was another burst of discussion in Cathayan. Then the adept asked about the mirror bugs, what they were and when they’d been found and what we knew about how they worked. It took quite a while to answer her questions, because we’d been studying the mirror bugs for a good three years, ever since they first showed up, and the professors had learned a lot about their life cycle. The adept was especially interested in the fact that if there wasn’t much magic around, the grubs developed into ordinary
beetles and stopped there, but if there was a lot of magic, even the grubs could pop right straight into mirror bugs without becoming pupae or ordinary beetles first.

Eventually, we got back to the medusa lizards. The Cathayans cast their spells, though not nearly as many as they had the day before. After each one, I tried to figure how much brighter the medusa lizard looked, and wrote down what I thought. Everything went smoothly until they finished and Professor Torgeson stepped forward to cast the spell and drain off the magic that the medusa lizard had absorbed.

“Please do not,” Miss Bizen said as the professor raised her hand.

“I beg your pardon?”

Miss Bizen looked at me. “This lizard has not absorbed so much magic as the other, has it?”

“No, ma’am,” I said, though I thought that should be pretty obvious. They hadn’t cast as many spells as they had on the first day.

Professor Torgeson’s eyes narrowed, then she frowned uncertainly. “It’s a good thought, but we don’t know much about how these creatures develop, or how fast. If absorbing magic triggers their petrification ability, we could be in trouble.”

Master Adept Farawase said something. “To take no chances is to die in spirit,” Miss Bizen translated, and frowned as if that wasn’t quite the right way to put what she wanted to say.

“We’ll have to try it sometime, Aldis,” Professor Jeffries
said. “Best to do it now, when we have so much help available if things go wrong.”

“Very well,” Professor Torgeson said. “But with precautions.”

“Of course with precautions,” Professor Jeffries said cheerfully. “What did you have in mind?”

What Professor Torgeson had in mind, apparently, was a lot more than we could manage. She had very firm ideas about how to treat dangerous wildlife, most of which involved killing it as fast as you possibly could and then studying it after it was dead. I think it came from being a Vinlander.

We finally settled on arranging a lot of the supply crates to make a barrier right in front of the medusa lizard pen, so that they couldn’t turn anyone into stone at a distance. Then Professor Torgeson put a rabbit cage at the end of the barricade, where the medusa lizards could see it from one side and anyone coming in the door could see it from the other. The idea was to check whether the rabbit had been turned to stone before you walked around the barrier. If it hadn’t, then it was probably safe to go into the pen.

While Professor Torgeson and I moved boxes to set up the barrier, Professor Jeffries took the Cathayans off to look at mirror bugs. Fortunately, we had plenty of specimens at all of the stages of mirror bug development, from the eggs to the grubs to the striped beetles to the mirror bugs themselves, even though none of them were alive.

The mirror bugs kept the Cathayans busy for the rest of the day. Professor Jeffries and I checked on the medusa lizards that evening, and both of the ones the Cathayans had used spells on were bigger. We made more measurements, and the next day we did all of it again.

The Cathayans stayed for four days, which was a day and a half longer than they’d planned. When they left, they took some mirror bug specimens and some samples of the stone animals we’d collected. Professor Jeffries almost gave them one of the medusa lizard eggs we still had under preservation spells, but Professor Torgeson pointed out that taking it through the Great Barrier Spell a third time would likely disrupt the preservation spell permanently, and hatching a medusa lizard on the east bank would cause all sorts of problems.

By the time they left, I was positive that Miss Bizen wasn’t the only one in the group who spoke English, but it wouldn’t have been polite to say anything about it. Once they had gone, I was so busy setting things back in order that I forgot about it.

We had a busy couple of weeks at the study center before fall classes started. The two medusa lizards that the Cathayans had cast spells at continued to grow much faster than the third lizard, which meant lots of measuring and taking notes to document exactly how fast they grew and whether there were any other differences between them. Professor Jeffries talked about designing a series of experiments to see how much magic a baby medusa lizard could absorb at once and how much difference the draining spell made, but nobody wanted to try anything like that without a whole lot more protection first.

On the last day of August, right before the professors and I were supposed to head back to Mill City, I was hauling a bag of feed from the supply shed to the mammoth pen when I saw a lone rider heading in from the northwest. Not too many folks travel alone through settlement country, even that close to the Great Barrier, so I stopped and shaded my eyes to get a better look.

At first, all I could see was a dark, man-shaped blob, no matter how I squinted. Just when I was getting irritated, I realized that it wasn’t the sun in my eyes that was the cause. The face under the broad-brimmed hat was a dark brown-black. I grinned and waved, because I was pretty sure I knew who it was.

The rider saw and waved back, then angled his horse to come toward the mammoth pen instead of straight in to the main compound. Once he got a little closer, I saw that I’d been right: It was Washington Morris, the circuit magician who’d taken Professor Torgeson and the rest of us out to hunt the first medusa lizard, and the man who’d given me the Aphrikan pendant I’d worn for the last three years.

Wash looked even scruffier than he usually did when he was coming back in from the settlements, with his beard grown raggedy and his hair at least three inches longer than normal. His buckskin jacket was covered in dust, and when he got close in and dismounted, I could see that his dark face looked tired. The nod he gave me was as polite as ever. “Miss Eff.”

“Hello, Wash!” I said. “What brings you by? Was Professor Jeffries expecting you?”

“If he was, I’m not aware of it,” Wash said. “Is he still out here? I thought you all would be back to Mill City by now.”

“We’d planned to be,” I said, “but having the Cathayans come visit slowed everything down.”

“Cathayans?” Wash asked.

So I told him while I finished filling the mammoth’s feed bin, and then I took him into the storage building to show him the medusa lizards. He frowned when he saw the size of them — the largest was nearing waist-high by then — and asked, “How long are you all planning on keeping them?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Professor Jeffries thinks they’ll be safe for a while yet, and he wants to find out whether they hibernate, so probably a couple months more, at least. We’re moving them to a new pen tomorrow, out by the lake where they’ll be away from everything else.”

Wash pursed his lips. “I’ll be speaking with the professor, then. Is he up at the main complex?”

I nodded. “I wonder, sometimes, if that parent thing works both ways.” At Wash’s puzzled look, I explained, “He says that the medusa lizards think he’s their parent, because he was the first thing they saw after they hatched, and that’s why they haven’t attacked anybody. Professor Torgeson thinks it’s just because they’re still too young.”

“Could be, but it’s not something I’d be inclined to rely on for long,” Wash said. “Well, that’s for the professor to explain. What all have you been doing, this last year? And how’s that brother of yours liking his work at the Settlement Office?”

As we walked toward the main buildings, I answered Wash’s questions and asked a few of my own about folks I’d
met out in the settlements. About halfway in, I mentioned the strange dreams I’d been having.

“I know the pendant you gave me has something to do with them, but I haven’t figured out what yet,” I finished. I didn’t ask Wash to explain, because he never had before, and by this time I’d figured out that a lot of Aphrikan magic was about learning how you yourself did things, which wasn’t something other folks could help out with much. But I thought he ought to know what it was doing.

“Dreams,” he said in a thoughtful tone. “That’s different. Same one every time?”

“No,” I said. “It’s always at least a little different, and sometimes it changes a lot. I’ve been writing them down, but I still can’t make sense of them.”

“Magic doesn’t make sense, if you think hard on it,” Wash said. “Not even Avrupan magic, much as it tries.”

“It’s still more head than heart,” I said. “Avrupan magic, I mean.”

Wash looked startled, then nodded. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

“There’s always other ways,” I said, and grinned at him.

“Maybe you should find one,” he said seriously.

I thought about that for a minute. Then I reached for the cord around my neck. I’d worn the pendant constantly for over three years, though most of the time I hid it under my clothes to avoid folks asking questions about it. The polished wood gleamed in the sunlight as I held it out toward Wash. “Has it changed any since you had it?”

For a moment, Wash stared at the pendant without any expression. I felt a brush of something, like a breeze against my hand, followed by an icy trickle down my back. Then he gave a slow smile that erased all the tired lines around his eyes. “It has indeed, Miss Eff.”

“I don’t suppose you’d care to explain how?” I said after a minute.

He reached out and brushed a finger across the pendant. I felt a tiny burst like Fourth of July fireworks, right at the back of my head. “Not quite yet,” he said. “But I’ll advise you to do some looking of your own.”

I couldn’t stop myself from snorting. “That’s all you have to say?”

“For now.” Wash grinned. “Getting irritated is part of the process.”

“If getting irritated is that important, I should be done with it three times over by now,” I said as I put the pendant back on.

“It’s only part of it, not the whole,” Wash said.

I thought about that while I stabled Wash’s horse, and on my walk back out to the menagerie pens, and while I did the routine work of cleaning and feeding the animals. That night, I read through the journal where I’d written down all the dreams I’d had. I’d been over it before, trying and trying to find some rhyme or reason to the images, but I’d never managed.

This time, I spread my world-sensing out around me and just read, letting the dreams play over in my head without wor
rying about what they meant. When I finished, I sat and let my mind drift. The dreams were important, I knew, but they didn’t feel like any kind of foretelling. The very first ones I’d had had been about the far past, when I was five and we still lived in Helvan Shores. And the next ones, where I’d been trying to cross the river and kept sinking in and drowning, certainly hadn’t ever come true.

I sighed and pulled out the pendant itself. It sat in my hand, a dark whorl of wood a little smaller than a robin’s egg, polished smooth with much handling. I wondered idly what kind of tree it had come from; I didn’t recall ever having seen wood quite like it before.

A picture formed behind my eyes, of a tree with leaves like silver lace and a twisting, curling trunk. It wasn’t much taller than an apple tree, but its roots spread wide and reached down toward the heart of the world. It felt strange and familiar, both at once, and I knew nothing like it had ever grown in Columbian soil.

After a minute, the image faded, and I was left staring at the pendant. I didn’t move. I hardly dared to breathe. In the three years I’d worn the pendant, it hadn’t ever done anything like that before. I wondered briefly whether it would answer other questions, but I didn’t think so. I tried asking anyway, every way I could think of, but nothing else happened.

Finally, I reached out with my magic and poked at the pendant, the way I’d poked at my Avrupan spells to make them work properly. I’d felt the layers of spells around it before, but I’d never been able to tease apart more than the topmost few. There was a bit of my magic wrapped around the outside,
and then some that felt like Wash’s, and then several layers that were full of magic that felt like concealment and not-noticing, wound through with both Avrupan and Aphrikan magic. Past that, I’d never been able to tell much.

On the second or third poke, the pendant started to look fuzzy, and after a minute I realized that it looked like the Cathayan magicians had, when they were spell casting. The fuzz around the pendant was almost the same color as the wood itself, and not as foggy. It looked more like wool yarn that someone had wrapped tight around the pendant in complicated layers.

The layers seemed to have loosened up a bit in places, and if I held it right I could see straight through them all to the wood at the heart of the pendant. I wondered briefly whether Wash had done that when he touched it, or whether the loosening was something that just happened after the magic had a chance to get accustomed to a new wearer. I thought it probably just happened after a while; almost all the magic curled around the pendant felt like Aphrikan magic, and Aphrikan magic often works more slowly than Avrupan magic.

I sat back suddenly, feeling as if I’d been very dense. I
knew
that pendant was Aphrikan magic, and I’d known that right from the minute Wash gave it to me. And yet I’d still been thinking about it as if it were Avrupan magic, something that I could take apart into neat piles that would tell me how it worked and what it did.

Oh, there was Avrupan magic wound around the pendant. I’d felt it. But Avrupan spells compel things to change and be the way the magician wants them to be; Aphrikan
spells mostly nudge or coax things in the direction the magician wants — and the heart of the pendant was Aphrikan. Heart, more than head.

I set the pendant down and read through my dreams again. I still couldn’t make sense of them, but I could feel that they’d been nudging me. I frowned and shook my head, knowing that wasn’t quite right. The pendant didn’t have a mind or personality or will. It was just a lot of magic, wrapped around the wood.

And then I understood. The dreams were mine; all the pendant did was pull them out and make me pay attention to them. I’d been nudging myself, without knowing.

That felt true, though I couldn’t say why. Now all I had to do was figure out what I’d been nudging myself to do or think. Some of the dreams were different, so it was probably something different every time. I sighed. I’d have to start writing down a lot more than just the dreams, I thought. I’d need to know what I was doing and thinking, and maybe what I thought I wanted to know at the time.

Then I stopped, wondering if that was really such a good idea. It would be just the thing if I were working with Avrupan magic, but it might not be so helpful in understanding Aphrikan magic. I looked at the pendant and slipped the cord back over my head. I fingered it, and slowly I smiled. I wasn’t Aphrikan, and I wasn’t Avrupan, not really. I was Columbian, born and raised, for all my grandparents weren’t. I didn’t have to do things one way or the other. I could do either, or both, or mix them up until something worked.

That night, I dreamed of standing on a high rock in the middle of the ocean. The water changed constantly. One minute, the waves dashed furiously against the stone, showering me with spray; the next, the water was calm and smoother than the real ocean ever could be; the minute after that, it swirled and eddied around the base of the rock.

I tried to catch the spray, but there wasn’t enough. I wanted more. I looked down into the shifting water, took a deep breath, and dove.

The water rose to meet me. As it closed over my head, I laughed and woke up.