The Far West

by Patricia C. Wrede

  All four candles went out. The hot cloud of magic went flying over to the medusa lizard. It hit right at Lizzie’s shoulder joint — and vanished without leaving so much as a warm spot.

  My eyes widened, and beside me, William made a startled noise. Shoving magic around like that wasn’t something you normally did with Aphrikan magic. Even when I’d been pushing at my Avrupan spells to make them work, I’d mostly just nudged things into place. And to have the magic vanish completely … well, magic just doesn’t behave that way.

  “What on earth …” Professor Torgeson was staring at the candles. Being strictly an Avrupan magician, I figured she had no idea why her spell hadn’t done what she expected it to.

  “I beg your pardon, professor,” Professor Ochiba said. “I needed an outside source of magic, and your spell casting was the fastest and easiest way of getting one.”

  “Were four candles enough?”

  “Yes, thank you. One more test, I think. Mr. Graham, would you hold the carcass open for a moment? Professor, if you would be so kind?”

  The two professors repeated their spells. This time, I felt the cloud of magic head into the lizard’s body, where it disappeared just as quickly and just as completely as it had before.

  Professor Ochiba nodded at William to let go of the lizard, then dropped into a chair. She looked tired, but her eyes gleamed.

  “You found something?” Professor Torgeson said.

  Professor Ochiba nodded. “Your dead lizard is still absorbing magic. Inside and out.”

  There was a brief, stunned silence. “Absorbing magic?” Professor Torgeson said finally, half to herself. “How is that possible? The thing is dead.”

  “I don’t know,” Professor Ochiba said. “But every time a spell touches it, it soaks up the magic and converts it directly into more spell-resistance.”

  “No wonder no one’s been able to get the evaluation spells to work,” Professor Jeffries commented.

  Professor Ochiba nodded. “And if people have been trying to evaluate this creature magically, I’m surprised your preservation spells haven’t failed already.”

  “Perhaps it would be best to stop working on Lizzie directly for the moment,” Professor Jeffries said. “We do have a few samples from the other lizard, and there are always the petrified animals.”

  For the rest of the day, the three professors left the whole medusa lizard in the main lab while they ran tests and looked at other bits. When they found that all of the other samples absorbed magic, too, Professor Jeffries got all excited and got out a couple of the dead mirror bugs to compare. It turned out that the dead mirror bugs didn’t absorb magic as much or as well as the medusa lizard, but they still absorbed it.

  That caused a whole flurry of talk, with nearly every professor of magic at the college weighing in with an opinion, and a couple of folks from the Settlement Office besides. Nobody knew what to do about it, and everyone was worried about what it would mean if more medusa lizards showed up.

  Since Professor Ochiba’s world-sensing was about the only magic the lizard hadn’t soaked up right off, the Settlement Office let her do some more work on Lizzie while they argued about what to do next. Professor Ochiba and William never did find a way to keep the medusa lizard from absorbing magic, which was what the Settlement Office wanted, but on their last day in Mill City they did come up with a spell to drain the magic back out of the medusa lizard carcass after it had been absorbed.

  “The trick was making it fast and not very strong,” William told me. “And not trying to make it perfect.”

  “That doesn’t sound much like Aphrikan magic to me,” I said.

  “It’s the same kind of combination as your mirror bug spell,” William said. “Aphrikan and Avrupan both. Anyway, it’s Avrupan magicians who are going to be casting it most of the time, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose,” I said. “What do you mean, it’s like my mirror bug spell?”

  I should have known better than to ask. I’d lived most of my life around the college, and I could usually follow the kind of explanations that Papa gave his students, but I got lost pretty quick when things got technical. William liked being technical. The part that made sense was that the spell had to be weak because the medusa lizard was absorbing it at the same time the spell was draining magic back out. They had to be sure that more magic was coming out of the lizard than the spell was putting in. The rest of it was something about combining a Hardison Relay with a Möbius twist according to the Nandelian Principles, and since I’d never heard of any of those things, it made about as much sense to me as Mr. Schwarz when he started cussing in Prussian.

  Professor Ochiba and William took the train back to Belletriste the next day. I saw them off at the train station, which was about the only time we’d had to talk since the day they arrived. I found out later that on the last evening, Mama tried to get Professor Graham to come to dinner with all of them. I think she was hoping to get him to start talking to William again, but he refused to even consider it. I think if it had been anyone but Mama who suggested it, he’d have stopped speaking to them, too. William wasn’t happy when he found out, either, though he didn’t say anything more to Mama than what was polite.

  The first thing I did after William left was to sit down and write him a letter, apologizing for Mama’s meddling. I’d said it to him already at the train station, but it felt more true to do it in writing. I thought about asking whether he planned to come back to Mill City when he finished school, but I couldn’t think of any way of putting it that didn’t sound a whole lot nosier than I wanted to be, so in the end I didn’t say anything.

  Having had William around, even for a few days, made everything harder once he was gone again. Working on the medusa lizard was still interesting, but I couldn’t seem to work up as much enthusiasm without him and Professor Ochiba. Going home was even worse. Rennie and Allie had taken to complaining that I wasn’t doing my share of the chores, and they wouldn’t listen when I tried to explain that I had to stay late at work to get the menagerie animals ready to move to the almost-finished new study center.

  Lan was no help, either. Mama had started dropping hints about how Lan should be studying so he wouldn’t be behind when he went back to Simon Magus College, and almost as soon as she did, Lan began staying late at the Settlement Office. I didn’t blame him; I just wished I could do the same without getting an earful from Rennie.

  And then, early in April, a party of circuit magicians showed up down in St. Louis with eight medusa lizard heads, and it came out that the Settlement Offices had been sending out hunting parties since mid-February. Apparently, Mr. Parsons at the North Plains Territory Homestead Claim and Settlement Office had taken Roger’s warning seriously, even though there hadn’t been any real proof. The day after Professor Jeffries talked to him, he’d sent telegrams out to the directors of all the Settlement Offices in the Middle and South Plains Territories, and then he’d called in every circuit rider and territory guide he could find and sent them out to hunt medusa lizards. And so had everyone else.

  The Settlement Offices hadn’t made a big secret out of what they were doing, but nobody had really noticed. Normally, the circuit riders and guides don’t work much in midwinter, at least in the North Plains, so nobody thought it was odd that they weren’t around. It wasn’t until they started coming back that folks finally caught on and got upset.

  When more hunters showed up with more lizard heads, the lines of people wanting allotments from the Settlement Office evaporated. So many advertisements showed up in the paper offering to sell settlement shares for hardly anything that the paper had to double its pages. Most of the ads were from folks who’d paid their fees and gotten an assignment from the Settlement Office, but who hadn’t actually gone West yet. The folks who were already out in settlements weren’t so interested in giving up and coming back.

  At first, I thought it was a little peculiar that it was the people who were safe on the east side of the Great Barr
ier Spell who were the most scared, but when I thought about it, it made sense. Folks in the settlements were used to dealing with wildlife; the medusa lizards were worse than most things, but not enough worse to make them pack up and leave, especially since the hunters all said they’d had to go quite a ways out to find the lizards they’d killed.

  Mama alternated between fretting about my brother Jack, who’d been out in the Bisonfield settlement for four years, and remarking on how happy she was that Rennie and Brant and their childings were safe in Mill City. So she was more than a mite put out when Brant came home from the shipping company one evening and broke the news that the Society of Progressive Rationalists in Long Lake City was considering sponsoring another settlement.

  “Now?” Mama said when Brant brought it up over dinner. “With the medusa lizards and goodness knows what else coming out of the Far West? Shouldn’t they wait until it’s safer?”

  “The West won’t get any safer unless people move out into it,” Lan grumbled.

  Brant nodded. “And right now, the society can buy allotments for less than the normal fees the Settlement Office charges.”

  “Why would anyone want to, with those creatures around?” Allie said, shuddering. “Imagine a whole herd of them, coming —”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Allie!” Robbie interrupted. “They’re predators; they don’t travel in herds!”

  “Packs, then,” Allie said stubbornly. “Like wolves.”

  I couldn’t stand it any more. “They’re lizards, Allie. Not wolves or cows.”

  “Do you even bother to read the paper?” Lan added. “They don’t travel in packs either; the biggest group the Settlement Office teams have found was three, and they’re not really sure they were actually traveling together.”

  “And there can’t be very many of them near the settlements,” Robbie put in. “It’s a long way from the mountains to settlement territory, with a lot of dangerous wildlife in between, so even if all of them headed east at once, a lot of them would probably be trampled by mammoths or eaten by swarming weasels before they got anywhere close. And the Settlement Office teams don’t seem to be having much trouble bagging the ones that have.”

  “The hunting teams all went out with the latest long-range repeaters,” Lan said. “Makes it a lot easier to kill the lizards before they get close enough to petrify people. They’re still losing a lot of horses, though.”

  Allie glared at the two of them and subsided unhappily. She hated being outargued. Mama was still looking at Brant. “I’d have thought the Rationalists had had enough of settlements,” she said. “Oak River proved their point, surely!”

  “Oak River proved that it’s possible for a settlement to survive without using any magic,” Brant said. “But nobody considers it an unqualified success, for all it’s still in operation.”

  Rennie snorted. “I should think not! The trouble Albert and Seren Louise are having adjusting to —”

  “Yes, exactly,” Brant cut in before she could go off on one of her rants. “We’ve been looking at ways to avoid those mistakes next time.”

  “We?” Mama set her fork down very carefully. “You’re not considering taking your family West again, are you?”

  Brant and Rennie exchanged looks. “Not at this time,” Brant said carefully. “I’m happy to help the society plan its next settlement, but I’ve had enough of being beholden to them for my stake.”

  “A very reasonable attitude,” Papa said, nodding.

  “You should keep an eye on the ads, though,” Robbie put in. “If the prices on allotments keep dropping, you might be able to pick up a share in one of the established settlements for cheap.”

  Lan frowned. “You’ll have to be quick if you want to try that, though. Mr. Parsons said that he’s already had trouble with land speculators trying to get him to swap the allotments they’ve bought for ones they think are better, and most of those are out along the western edge of settlement territory. They’ll be all over anything closer in.”

  “Land speculators?” Robbie looked interested, and we ended up spending the rest of the meal talking about where the best places would be to buy up land, compared to which places were most likely to be selling. Allie got bored fairly quickly, but Mama had just as much to say as anyone else. She didn’t have any objection to investing in settlements, only to any of us going off into danger.

  All the uproar over the lizard hunts actually made things easier when the study center finally got finished enough to start moving the menagerie animals to their new home, because the ferry wasn’t busy with all the spring settlers. We got almost all the smaller natural animals, like the porcupine and the prairie dogs, across the river in one trip, though we had to take the three bison one at a time on account of their size. The magical animals were harder, especially the scorch lizard and the pseudogriffin, because they reacted badly to going through the Great Barrier Spell.

  The two biggest problems, in a manner of speaking, were the medusa lizard eggs and the mammoth. The eggs were a problem because the college still didn’t want anyone to know that they had such potentially dangerous things anywhere east of the Great Barrier Spell, even if they were still under the professor’s preservation spell. We ended up wrapping each one individually in cotton wool, burying them all in two crates of straw, and labeling the crates as special laboratory equipment for Professor Torgeson and Professor Jeffries. Professor Jeffries took them to the study center himself on the very last ferry trip.

  The mammoth was a lot harder to deal with. It had been a baby when the McNeil Expedition brought it back to Mill City in 1850, and they’d had trouble getting it on the ferry and through the Great Barrier Spell even then. Nine years later, it was nearly full grown and much too large for the ferry. Professor Jeffries suggested hiring one of the grain barges to get it across the river to West Landing, but even he looked doubtful when he said it.

  “A grain barge might work if that creature were thoroughly tame, and mild-mannered to boot,” Professor Torgeson said, glaring at him. “But since it is neither, there’s no point in discussing it.”

  “We could keep it here for another year,” Professor Jeffries said. “When they finish the new bridge, it’ll just be a matter of walking him across it.” The territory governor had finally given in and let Mill City and West Landing start building a bridge across the Mammoth River to connect the two towns, but putting it up was a tricky business because they didn’t want to do anything that might disrupt the Great Barrier Spell. They’d been working on it for a year and a half already, and they still had nearly a year to go.

  Professor Torgeson shook her head. “Do you really think Dean Farley will let you keep that animal here for another year? Getting rid of the mammoth was half the reason he agreed to fund the study center in the first place.”

  “I suppose,” Professor Jeffries said.

  In the end, the only thing to do was move the mammoth overland — walking it upstream to a ford and then back down and out to the study center. Mama was not pleased when she found out that Professor Jeffries wanted me to go along with the crew that was moving the mammoth to its new quarters. She and Allie and I were in the kitchen, clearing up the breakfast dishes, when I finally got around to mentioning it.

  “Haven’t you had enough of running around out West yet?” she asked in an exasperated tone when I told her.

  I sighed. “It’s not really ‘out West,’ Mama. Half the trip is on this side of the Mammoth River, and we won’t ever be more than a few miles from it when we come back down the other side. It’s all territory that’s been settled for years and years.”

  “It’s still not safe,” Allie said with a sniff as she set the last dry plate on the stack and reached for the first cup on the drain-board. “Look at all those lizards they’ve been catching. What if they miss one? And anyway, working with wild beasts is —”

  “— not a proper way for a lady to behave,” I finished along with her. “Maybe not, but it’s my job and I li
ke it. You’re the one who cares about propriety, Allie, not me.”

  Mama looked from me to Allie and back, and her eyebrows drew together just a little. Allie went on without noticing. “Just tell Professor Jeffries that you can’t go. I’m sure he can find someone else.”

  “Allie, I’ve been helping to care for that critter for a good four years now,” I said. “Six, if you count the first two years in upper school when I was just helping out for fun. The mammoth is accustomed to me.”

  “That doesn’t mean —”

  “And when it comes to the spells for controlling it, I’ve had more practice than anyone but Professor Jeffries, just from working with it for so long.” I’d had a lot of practice with the mammoth other ways, too. Ever since my first year in upper school, I’d been using it to practice Aphrikan magic on — nudging it to eat first and then drink, or to move from one part of its pen to another. I’d gotten pretty good at it, but I wasn’t bringing that up in front of Allie.

  “But I’m sure you —”

  “Allie.” Mama’s voice had that firm, no-nonsense edge that meant you’d best sit up and snap to, right this minute. Nobody argued when Mama used that voice, not even my oldest sister, Sharl, who’d been married for over fifteen years and had four childings of her own. “I think you’ve made yourself clear. Why don’t you run upstairs and help Rennie with her mending? I swear, those childings are harder on their clothes than the last six of you put together.”

  “Yes, Mama.” Reluctantly, Allie put down her dish towel and left.

  Mama picked up the dish towel and started in drying, right where Allie had left off. She didn’t say anything until the swing door had settled and I’d finished washing the forks and started on the knives. Then she gave a little sigh and looked at me.

  “I know you worry, Mama,” I started, “but this really isn’t so —”

  Mama held up her hands and I stopped. “This trip may not be so bad, but it won’t be your last, will it, Eff?”