The Far West (Frontier Magic #3)

by Patricia C. Wrede

  I didn’t need it. The pack of rock dragons were all dead. Some had been shot; some had been burned or crushed by spells; one of the flying ones had crashed into the ground from too high up. The shimmering dome of Lan’s protection spells slowly faded back to normal as I watched.

  All around me, people lowered their guns or relaxed from their spell casting and started taking stock. We hadn’t gotten off scot-free. Elizabet was still unconscious, with Bronwyn minding her. Wash had a burn down one side where he’d been caught by a spray of venom, one of the soldiers had been badly clawed, and two of the horses were dead. All of the magicians were wobbly on their feet, though it was hard to tell whether it was from what I’d done to most of them, from too much spell casting generally, or just from having been in a big fight. Still, we hadn’t actually lost anyone, which was a lot better than it could have been.

  “Well,” Mr. Corvales said loudly after a moment. “I believe that settles it. We are not going any farther west.”

  There were a lot of shaky laughs, and Wash’s voice called back, “I do believe you won’t get much argument on that, Mr. Corvales.”

  “We’re moving out as soon as we can,” Captain Velasquez announced. “We’ve a few hours yet till sunset, and I don’t want to spend the night fighting off the scavengers this lot will draw.”

  Everyone nodded and most folks began moving toward the tents. I sat down right where I was and put my head in my hands.

  “Are you all right, Eff?” William asked.

  “Just wobbly, like everyone else,” I said.

  “What was that? That thing you did?”

  “I think we’d all like to know that, Miss Rothmer.”

  I looked up. Adept Alikaket, Dr. Lefevre, and most of the other magicians I’d pulled into the deep levels of magic had come over to me instead of starting to take down their tents, and they were all looking at me expectantly. The only one missing was Wash, who’d gone off to get his burns fixed up.

  I sighed. “I’m not sure how to explain it. It’s just … remember how I said all magic feels the same underneath? That’s what I meant. That was underneath.”

  “That’s your explanation?” Lan said indignantly.

  I glared at him. “It’s all the explanation I have! I don’t know how it works; I just did it. You’re the one who knows magical theory — you explain it!”

  “I suspect you have just revolutionized our basic theories of magic, Miss Rothmer,” Dr. Lefevre said with a sidelong glance at Adept Alikaket.

  The adept’s lips tightened, then he shook his head ruefully. “Theories aside, do you have any idea why and how you were able to do what you did?” he asked me.

  Professor Ochiba looked at me with a tiny smile. “She is the seventh daughter —”

  “— of a seventh son,” Lan put in, and grinned at me.

  “— making her a double-seventh child,” the professor continued with a small frown in Lan’s direction. “And she is the twin sister of a seventh son of a seventh son, and a thirteenth child.”

  I shivered, then remembered the conversation I’d had with Professor Ochiba back in day school, when she’d explained that different places didn’t all see being a thirteenth child as a bad thing the way Avrupans did. And there were all those other things, too.

  “Unprecedented, in other words,” Dr. Lefevre said in a very dry tone.

  “That is one way to look at it,” Professor Ochiba said. Lan, William, and I all looked at each other and tried not to smile.

  “We’ll have plenty of time to study this phenomenon on the trip back,” Professor Torgeson said, and I wasn’t quite sure whether she meant me or the magic. “In the meantime —”

  Before she could finish, something shivered through the air, making all the hairs on my arms stand up like a bad thunderstorm was blowing in real fast. Everyone froze, looking south toward the river. “Now what?” Lan said crossly.

  There was a distant rumble off to the south, and the prickly feeling of magic rose up all around us like a wave and then fell back. Roger went white to the lips.

  “It’s the river,” he said, barely loud enough for all of us to hear. “All the spells we were throwing around — they must have finished destabilizing the magic that’s been piling up along it.”

  “Destabilizing —” Dr. Lefevre looked at Roger, and his eyes widened.

  Roger nodded. “Eighty-three years’ worth of magic, and it’s about to go pouring down the river like an avalanche down a mountain. It’ll hit the Great Barrier Spell where the rivers come together, and …”

  His voice trailed off, but he didn’t have to say anything else. He’d told us what would happen next; it was why we’d sent Mr. Zarbeliev and the others home ahead of us. Only now there was no chance that they’d arrive in time for a warning to make any difference. Even if they got back to Mill City before the wave of magic hit the Great Barrier Spell, there wouldn’t be time to get a warning to St. Louis or New Orleans or any of the other towns along the river.

  I remembered some of the accidents that had happened in the practice laboratories at the college, and shivered. If a mistake in a college student’s experiment could punch a duck-shaped hole in every window on the west side of a building, what would eighty years’ worth of raw magic do when it hit something? And what would happen if the Great Barrier Spell collapsed and released all its magic?

  From the expressions everyone wore, they were all thinking the same thing. Lan looked at Roger. “Can we do anything to stop it?”

  Roger licked his lips like they had suddenly gone dry. “No,” he said.

  Lan scowled. “There has to be something!” he said. “Some way to prop it up, or freeze it in place, or send it in a different direction, or use it up, or … or something.”

  “Are you crazy?” Roger practically shouted at him. “We’re talking about enough magic to keep the Great Barrier Spell itself going for eighty years! All we can do is get out of the way.”

  “How long?” Dr. Lefevre demanded.

  “What?”

  “How long do we have before this avalanche of yours starts?” Dr. Lefevre said impatiently.

  Roger took a shaky breath. “I don’t know. But it’s not going to be long — hours, maybe a day or two, at most.”

  “Have you any way of narrowing the time down quickly enough to do us any good?”

  “Knowing exactly when it’s going to collapse won’t help,” Roger said, but his forehead furrowed and his frown changed from the scared-and-angry sort to the thinking-very-hard sort. “There isn’t anything we can do about eighty years’ worth of magic.”

  “It’s not eighty years’ worth,” I said suddenly. “It can’t be.”

  “It is,” Roger insisted. “Ever since the Great Barrier Spell went up —”

  I shook my head. “That’s not what I mean. You said this backup has been going on for eighty-three years, but all the magic can’t have just piled up and stayed put. The magical wildlife all along the river has to have used up some of it, and some of the rest of it has to have gone back into the earth and air, the way magic from regular spell casting does.”

  “Not enough to make a difference,” Roger said, but he didn’t sound like he was paying careful attention to the conversation anymore. “At least, I don’t think … Where’s Eliz — oh, that’s right; she was holding the protection spells. Where’s Bronwyn?”

  “Miss Hoel is with Miss Dzozkic,” Mr. Corvales said from in back. “I thought you were all supposed to be packing up?”

  “This is more important,” Adept Alikaket said, and explained.

  Mr. Corvales went as white as Roger had, then yelled for Captain Velasquez. Roger hadn’t waited for Adept Alikaket to finish; he’d gone off to find Bronwyn before Mr. Corvales had even finished his first question. The rest of us looked at each other, then Lan and William and Professor Ochiba and I went after Roger, leaving Professor Torgeson and Dr. Lefevre to answer whatever other questions the expedition leaders had.

  Wh
en we caught up with him, Roger and Bronwyn were sitting on the ground next to Elizabet (who was gradually recovering) with their heads bent over their notebooks. Roger was muttering about energy gradients and mass equivalence and Turnik’s equations and a bunch of other things. Sergeant Amy appeared a moment after we arrived with a steel-tipped dipping pen and a small bottle of ink. Roger grabbed them without looking up and said, “The very first anomaly — what was the Jivaili ratio?”

  Bronwyn flipped a couple of pages and read off some numbers. Nobody wanted to interrupt, so we all stood there silently. Gradually, the rest of the expedition members began to collect around us — first Mrs. Wilson, then one of the soldiers pretending to have a question for Sergeant Amy. Wash came next. His shirt was half off to make room for the bandages on his right arm and across his right side. There were pain creases around his eyes, and he didn’t look as if he ought to be up running around. Professor Ochiba gave him a narrow-eyed glare when she saw him, but he just smiled.

  Roger and Bronwyn didn’t seem to notice any of us. After what seemed a long time, Roger sighed and set the dipping pen aside. There was silence as he recapped the ink bottle and looked up at last. A ripple of dismay ran through the group as everyone took in the expression on his face.

  “There’s really nothing to be done?” Mr. Corvales said.

  “I don’t believe so, sir,” Roger said. “For a minute, I thought — but there’s just too much magic piled up. There isn’t any spell I know of that could stop it once it starts moving.”

  “Once it starts moving?” Captain Velasquez said quickly. “Then there’s still time —”

  Roger was shaking his head before the captain finished his sentence. “No, sir. It’s already started. Right now there’s just a trickle heading downstream, but according to my calculations, that’s enough to throw off the balance that’s been holding the large mass of magic up at this end of the river for the past eighty years. Within thirty-six hours, the rest of it will break loose.”

  “Can’t we stop it before then, if it’s only a trickle?” Mr. Corvales said.

  “It’s a trickle of magic,” Roger told him impatiently. “It’s not as if a dam made of cottonwood logs and mud will hold it back. We’d have to use magic … and that would mean putting more magic into the system. That will destabilize things even faster.”

  Beside me, Lan stiffened. “A dam,” he breathed. Then, “Mr. Corvales!”

  “Mr. Rothmer?” Mr. Corvales said as everyone turned.

  “What if we take magic out of the system?” Lan said. “We’ve been tapping it for weeks to strengthen the protection spells. If we can use up enough of it —”

  “Use it up?” Roger interrupted. “Lan, there’s too much of it! Even with all of us casting every spell we know, we wouldn’t be able to use up more than a fraction of that magic in thirty-six hours.”

  “That’s with spells we know,” Lan said, looking at Adept Alikaket. “But Hijero-Cathayans use massive group magic all the time. For draining lakes and building roads over mountains. For damming up rivers. If we use one of those —”

  Adept Alikaket was already shaking his head. “To use up so much magic would take something like the spell that raised the Great Wall along the northern border of the Cathayan Confederacy, and that took thirty circles and ten years.”

  “Maybe we can dam it up,” William said.

  Roger scowled at him. “I just said —”

  “Dam the river, I mean,” William added hastily. “The magic follows the river; if we dam the river, the magic won’t have anywhere to go. Well, at least until the dam fills up, but that would take at least a couple of years, I’d think.”

  “It’ll buy us some time,” Mr. Corvales said. He looked at the adept. “Can you do it?”

  Adept Alikaket pursed his lips. “I have no circle to work with, and even if I had, raising a dam large enough to stop so large a river is work for two circles, at least.”

  Professor Torgeson gave him a reproving look. “The question is not what you might do with more time and more resources.”

  “Can’t you use some of the magic that’s built up around the river, the way Mr. Rothmer suggested?” Mr. Corvales asked.

  The adept pursed his lips. “Perhaps. Natural magic is difficult to work with.”

  “Is it?” Wash said. When the adept looked at him, Wash quirked his lips. “We make do with what we have.”

  “Ah,” Adept Alikaket said. He smiled suddenly. “I suppose that under the circumstances, I will … make do.” He shook his head. “Still, I think you Columbians are more reckless than you need to be.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” Wash said.

  “There remains a problem,” the adept went on. “To dam a river, especially one so large, needs a place that is suited, somewhere that the river cannot spread out too far and flow around it. This area” — he waved his hands to indicate the way we had come up the river — “is not well suited, and we have no time to look farther ahead.”

  Something was niggling at my mind. I tried not to listen to the conversation while I concentrated on remembering, and then I heard Roger’s voice again, and I had it. “The undelimited thing!” I said out loud.

  The argument broke off and everyone looked at me. I ignored them all, except for Roger. “Right after you came back from Albion, when Professor Torgeson asked you to look at the medusa lizard in the lab and the map went funny, she wanted to know if you were trying to map the whole of the Far West, and you said it would take more power than a whole team of Hijero-Cathayans, even. Did you mean it?”

  Roger’s eyes went wide. “It might work,” he said, half to himself. “Especially if — Lan! Do you know the Laurencian Protocols?”

  “Of course,” Lan said. “Why? And would you explain what you two are talking about?”

  “Mapping spells,” Roger said. “If I understand Adept Alikaket correctly, the problem with damming up the river is finding the right place — a gorge or canyon that we can block off, for instance — which we can’t do because we haven’t mapped the rest of the river. And everybody knows that mapping spells only work with a well-defined symbol set; it takes too much power to cover an undelimited space.”

  “But we have plenty of power here,” Dr. Lefevre said with a slow smile. Then his eyes narrowed. “Even so — will you be able to control it, Mr. Boden?”

  “I don’t know that I could if it were just me,” Roger said. “But if Lan helps …”

  “That’s why you asked about the Laurencian Protocols!” Lan said. “Coordination!” The two of them went off into a technical conversation that had most of the senior magicians nodding and everyone else looking confused. When they finished talking, Mr. Corvales asked how soon they could start, obviously meaning for them to begin right away.

  “I don’t think that would be wise,” Adept Alikaket said just as Roger shook his head. “We are all tired already from fighting the rock dragons; it would be better to rest before we try another major spell casting. Also, I think we will only have one chance to do this. We must be careful.”

  Roger switched from shaking his head to nodding. “The spells we used against the rock dragons are what started the destabilization,” he said. “Tapping the built-up magic directly could make it much worse, very quickly. We’ll want to have everything ready to cast, one spell right after another, before we start any of them.”

  “And we have another day,” William pointed out. “More. Thirty-six hours, didn’t you say, Roger?”

  “He says that like it’s a lot of time,” Dr. Lefevre muttered, but too softly for very many people to hear.

  “Well, then, let’s get started planning,” Captain Velasquez said briskly.

  For all Adept Alikaket’s talk about resting, Wash and Elizabet were the only magicians who got much that night. We camped where we were, despite the worry about more rock dragons finding us, because moving to anywhere else would have taken time that we didn’t have. Roger and Lan went over thei
r plans for the mapping. First, Lan would cast a spell to define the edges of the map they were making, so that Roger’s spell wouldn’t try to just keep going and going. Then Roger would work the primary spell, tapping into the vast pool of magic around the river to power it and keep it working until the map was filled in. It sounded simple enough, but Lan said that the amount of power rose too rapidly compared to the size of the area being mapped for it to be a useful way of mapping most places.

  Meanwhile, Adept Alikaket gathered up the rest of us to plan the spell to dam up the river. That was complicated, because the Hijero-Cathayan spell he said would work best was one that normally needed a large circle of Cathayan magicians to do the casting, not just to provide power, and all the magicians we had knew only Avrupan or Aphrikan magic. Professor Ochiba and Professor Torgeson stayed up most of the night with him, going over the spell and breaking it down into parts, while Dr. Lefevre tried to come up with spells that would do each part without interfering with each other.

  By dawn, they’d worked out a sequence of spells that everybody agreed would probably work. Captain Velasquez didn’t like the “probably” part, but it was the best anybody could come up with. Lan and Roger would do the mapping spell; as soon as enough of the river was mapped, Wash would use Aphrikan magic to find a spot for the dam. Professor Torgeson and Dr. Lefevre would cast the spells to anchor the ends of the dam to either side of the river, while Adept Alikaket worked the main spell that collected material and moved it into place.

  By then, Lan and Roger would be finished with the mapping spell; Lan would do the spell that welded all the rocks and other things into one solid structure, while Bronwyn anchored the base of the dam to the bedrock and Roger carved a spillway. Professor Ochiba and Wash would be checking with their world sense to make sure the dam was solid and that we’d contained both the river and as much of the stored-up magic as possible. William and I were the balancers; our job was to tweak any of the spells that looked like it was wobbling or starting to interfere with another one, so that the whole process would go smoothly.