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.
“Why not?” I said cheerfully. “I think I saw him over by the storage cellar. Let’s go.”
We had no trouble finding Adept Alikaket. Explaining what we wanted was a little harder, because it was really Lan who wanted something, and he’d gone all tongue-tied and reluctant to talk. William and I had a silent agreement not to let him out of it, though, and after a few false starts we finally got through an explanation of the whole sorry mess.
Adept Alikaket’s face didn’t twitch a muscle the whole time we were talking, yet somehow he looked more and more stern as we went on. Oddly enough, the adept’s disapprova
l made Lan more willing to talk, and he took over the story in the middle. Once he started talking, he didn’t hold back or leave anything out.
“And you expect this story to persuade me to teach you?” Adept Alikaket said when Lan finished.
Lan flushed. “Not … exactly. I just … if there was something that would have made a difference …”
“Many things could have been done differently. Knowing them won’t make your guilt less.” The adept studied Lan, his face impassive. “If you continue to reach past your ability, you’ll only create new disasters.”
I could see Lan starting to get a mad on again, so I asked, “Excuse me, but what does that mean?”
“Cathayan magic is beyond you,” Adept Alikaket said bluntly, holding Lan’s gaze. “You cannot learn it, and if you keep trying, the best you can hope for is that only you yourself will be killed or injured.”
“What? Why? You’re teaching William —”
“You don’t have the ability.” The adept held up a hand to keep Lan from interrupting. “I see I should have explained more completely before. You are the seventh son of a seventh son.”
Lan nodded warily.
“Your personal magic is very strong,” Adept Alikaket went on. “Too strong. To learn Cathayan magic, one must be at one with the magic that is oneself. This, you cannot do without being buried under the mountain that is your power.”
“There have to have been double-sevens born in the Cathayan Confederacy,” William said. “You teach them, don’t you?”
“No.” We all stared, incredulous, and the adept sighed. “The double-sevens can learn the exterior part of the way of boundless balance, the movements, but they can’t master the interior part. Their magic is too much.”
“I’d still like to try,” Lan said stubbornly. “Maybe it’s different for Avrupans.”
“I won’t help you to destroy yourself,” Adept Alikaket said flatly.
“Even just the theory —”
“No. For your Avrupan magic, there is distance between the theory and the practice; for Cathayan magic, there is not. You’ve shown yourself headstrong and ambitious. I won’t tempt you to further foolishness. Be content with the power you have. It’s more than enough to bring you fame and honor if you use it well.”
With that, Adept Alikaket nodded to us and strode off. We stood looking at each other for a minute. Then Lan kicked at the ground and muttered, “It’s not fame and honor I’m after!”
“No?” I said, raising my eyebrows.
“No!” Lan glared when I still looked skeptical. “All right, maybe that’s part of it, but what I want is to do something big. Just to have done it. Something nobody else can do.” He kicked at the ground again. “Nobody else thinks that way. They have all these things that they want me to do because I’m a double-seven, but it’s all just more powerful calming spells, wider-ranging protection spells — the same things everybody does, just a bit stronger and better. There has to be something that only a double-seven can do!”
“Like the Great Barrier Spell,” I said without thinking.
“Exactly! Only I don’t have another double-seven to work with, like Benjamin Franklin did.”
“Benjamin Franklin was seventy-two when he did the working for the Great Barrier Spell,” I pointed out. “And Thomas Jefferson was thirty-five. You’re only twenty-two.”
Lan made a face at me. “If I just wait around, nothing will happen. There’ve been five double-sevens in the United States since Thomas Jefferson, and none of them has done anything special. I have to get started.”
“You’re just impatient,” I said. “Right, William?”
“Hmm?” William had been staring after Adept Alikaket with a frown of concentration on his face. “I’m sorry — what were you saying?”
“What has you off woolgathering?”
William’s frown deepened. “I was thinking about something Adept Alikaket said. About theory and practice and Hijero-Cathayan magic.” He hesitated. “I don’t think he’s right. At least, not all the way.”
Lan looked up, his face suddenly alight with hope. “William! You can tell me what he’s been teaching you!”
“What do you mean, he isn’t right?” I asked at almost the same moment.
“It’s that thing about there being a distance between theory and practice in Avrupan magic, but not in Cathayan magic,” William told me, ignoring Lan. “It’s the way he sees things, but —”
“— there’s always another way to look at it,” I chimed in, and grinned.
“What is going on with you two?” Lan demanded, looking from William to me and back.
“It’s part of how you need to look at things when you’re doing Aphrikan magic,” I said. “Miss Ochiba taught us some of it in our very first magic class in day school, back before she was Professor Ochiba.”
“I remember that speech,” Lan said after frowning for a second. “But what does that have to do with Adept Alikaket and Cathayan magic?”
“I’m not sure,” William said. “But I don’t think he tries very hard to see things more than one way. Maybe that’s what you have to do in order to be a Cathayan magician, but …”
I nodded. “The one time we talked about it, he was very sure that Cathayan magic is completely different from Avrupan or Aphrikan magic. But they all feel the same to me, underneath. It’s just different ways of making the magic do things, really.”
The other two stared at me. “Underneath?” Lan asked finally.
“When I do Aphrikan world-sensing.” I looked at William. “You know, the way magic feels, down under all the spells and the little differences because of where it came from.”
“No,” William said slowly, “I don’t know. I don’t sense anything like that when I do the world-sensing.”
We all stared at each other again. “I think we should go somewhere and talk about this,” Lan said after a minute. So we did.
By the time we finished, Lan and William had gotten everything out of me and then some — the dreams, the way I’d used Aphrikan magic to tweak my Avrupan spells for so long, the way I’d been able to tweak Lan’s spells when we were taking the mammoth up to the study center, even some of the spells and techniques I’d learned from the pendant. There was a lot more of it than I’d thought, when you piled it all up in one spot like that, and both of them were annoyed that I hadn’t told them any of it before.
“It didn’t seem important,” I said. They gave me identical exasperated looks. “It didn’t! Especially since it didn’t happen all at once.”
“Can you show us?” Lan asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “Not the dreams, of course. I’m not sure about the pendant — I’ll have to ask Wash. But I can show you the tweaking, at least.”
Right about then, Mrs. Wilson rang the dinner bell, so there wasn’t time for any demonstrations. Next day, we got together again, and I showed them what I’d done to tweak my Avrupan spells. Or at least, I tried to show them. Neither one of them could tell what I was doing at first, not even William with all his world-sensing going. All they could see was that I’d cast a spell that had almost gone wrong, but then had steadied and settled and gone right after all.
It took William nearly two weeks just to see what I was doing. It was even harder for Lan, because he’d never learned any Aphrikan magic except for a little theory. All of us got frustrated, but we kept at it. I couldn’t help wondering if it had something to do with the pendant, and I resolved to ask Wash about that, too, once we were all finished getting ready for winter and had more time to spend investigating things.
Winter sort of eased its way in that year. About a week after that first snowstorm, it warmed up and everything melted. It didn’t keep the Southerners from complaining, though. We had a few days of gray, dry weather to fill in cracks in the longhouse, and then we got more snow. The first real blizzard didn’t hit until mid-December, trapping everyone indoors for a day and a half straight. We got a foot of snow, and two of the
tents that people still had set up collapsed.
That storm moved most of the holdouts into the longhouse, though Wash and Mr. Zarbeliev stayed in tents until January, when it got cold enough that Mr. Corvales’s thermometer froze. With nearly everyone inside, the longhouse was dark and crowded; sometimes it seemed that you could hardly move without poking someone or having to step over someone’s feet. Wash and Mr. Zarbeliev were circuit magicians, used to being out in wild territory all on their own. Neither one of them cared much for towns or cities, even, and I didn’t think it was odd that they didn’t want to be cheek-by-jowl with all of us in the longhouse. For myself — well, I didn’t much care for the crowding, but being warm made up for it.
I finally got the chance to talk to Wash right before Christmas. I told him everything Lan and William and I had been doing. I asked about showing them the pendant, too, as I didn’t feel I could actually let Lan and William study it directly without getting his permission. Wash got real thoughtful, but all he said was “Does Miss Maryann know what you all are up to?”
“I was going to talk to her next,” I told him. “If you say it’s all right.”
“Some things you can’t tell about, going in,” Wash said. “You just have to take your chances. But I won’t be raising any objections, if that’s your worry.”
I thanked him and went off to find Professor Ochiba. She didn’t seem surprised when I told her about the pendant, but she frowned when I told her about tweaking my spells, and she made me go over everything else very carefully. Then she looked even more thoughtful than Wash had. Finally, she said, “It appears that the three of you have stumbled into something, though whether it’s something big or a dead end remains to be seen. I think you’d best go on as you’ve begun, but do keep me informed.”
“You and Wash and Professor Torgeson,” I said, nodding.
The Far West (Frontier Magic #3) Page 22
