Adept Alikaket’s expression did not change; only the shadows cast by the fire moved, flickering across his face. “I have nothing at hand, but I will consider.” He looked at Lan. “We will speak later, Mr. Rothmer.”
“Yes, sir,” Lan said.
To my surprise, the adept’s eyes turned to me. “You and Mr. Graham as well, Miss Rothmer.”
William and I nodded. The discussion kept on, but I lost track of it for a while. I was thinking back over the several journeys I’d made west of the Great Barrier Spell. When Professor Torgeson and I had traveled with Wash, he’d used the standard protections with a light hand. The second guide we’d had was more inclined toward stronger magic, but he’d still used common variations and I was sure we’d already tried those. The first trip —
“Speed-traveling,” I said softly.
I didn’t think anyone had heard me until Professor Torgeson said, “What was that, Eff?”
“The first time I went West with Papa, we had to use a speed-travel spell to get to the wagonrest by nightfall,” I said. “Something like that —”
“Speed travel interferes with protection spells, doesn’t it?” Dr. Visser asked.
“Yes, but if we moved fast enough that the wildlife couldn’t catch us, it wouldn’t matter,” William said thoughtfully.
“It’s a possibility.” Mr. Corvales looked around. “The consensus seems to be to continue on, following the river. We’ll head back to the Grand Bow tomorrow, fill up on water, then back off and camp out here for a day so that the magicians can look into as many of these suggestions as possible without worrying so much about the wildlife. Anything else? Very good. Thank you all.”
A hum of conversation rose around the fire. A few folks stood up and wandered off, but most stayed to talk among themselves. I saw Wash disappear behind the last wagon. Professor Ochiba rose and pointed William in my direction, then followed Wash.
Lan caught my eye and jerked his head toward Adept Alikaket. The adept was talking with Captain Velasquez, so the three of us waited for him to finish before Lan said, “You wanted to speak to us, sir?”
“Yes,” the adept said. “I have watched the three of you all winter, what you are doing with the skills … ways …”
“Techniques?” Lan suggested.
“Yes, techniques, of Aphrikan and Avrupan magic. It is a possible solution to this problem of the protection spells.”
“You want to try casting the travel protection spells the way Cathayans cast?” Lan said, frowning. “But you said —”
“Of course not, Mr. Rothmer,” Adept Alikaket interrupted. “It would be foolish … foolhardy to cast even a simple Cathayan spell with untrained magicians, and the training takes years. And I have said before — you are not one who can learn Cathayan magic. Also, your Avrupan spells are not suited.”
“Then what do you have in mind, sir?” William asked.
“The difficulty is holding the travel protection spells over so large a group at once, yes? But if you take the spell in pieces, as you Avrupans are so fond of doing, it will not be so difficult.”
“If we could do that, we’d have done it before,” Lan said.
“The spells have to overlap in order to protect everyone properly,” William put in. “And they interfere with each other wherever they overlap. So it ends up being a lot more work to keep up two or three small spells than it is to keep one large spell going.”
“As I thought.” The adept nodded. “But you three have been changing spells from the outside.”
“Just each other’s spells, sir,” I pointed out. “And it was really hard to get the hang of that. I don’t know if any of us could tweak the spells of someone we hadn’t practiced with.”
“But could you manage not to — tweak? — the spells, but simply hold them apart from each other where they overlap? In the opposite way from Cathayan casting.”
“So they wouldn’t interfere with each other?” William’s face went expressionless, the way it did sometimes when he was thinking real hard. After a minute, he looked at me. “I bet you could do it. I’m not sure I could do it with just anyone, but if Lan were holding one of the spells —”
The three of us started talking over the top of one another, and it was a few minutes before the adept could get another word in edgewise. We spent the rest of the evening working out the details, and we roped in Professor Torgeson and Professor Lefevre to help us test it. Holding the spells apart turned out to be a lot easier than trying to make them do anything; all three of us made it work on the very first try, even if Lan wasn’t one of the magicians holding a protection spell.
Once we were sure the adept’s idea would work, we told him, and he told Captain Velasquez and Mr. Corvales. We tried it out the next day, with Lan holding the protection spells over the middle section of the group and Professor Torgeson and Professor Lefevre on either end, while William and I kept the edges of the spells from interfering with each other where they overlapped. It worked really well, and between that and the speed-travel spell, we got a lot farther than we had in a long while.
We worked our way up the Grand Bow in little arcs, camping out in the plains each night, swinging back to the river at mid-morning to water the horses and fill the barrels, then moving back out to travel quickly through less crowded and less dangerous country until it was time to make camp again. Between Bronwyn’s dowsing and Roger’s geomancy, we had no trouble following the river even when it was well out of sight. William and I were exhausted every night from holding the spells apart all day, and even Lan was tired. The other magicians could trade off casting and holding the protection spells, but the three of us were the only ones who knew how to do what we were doing.
The magic levels along the Grand Bow kept rising, until all of us, even the ones who weren’t particularly strong magicians, could feel it on our skin like a constant case of goosebumps. Elizabet and Roger got more and more worried about it, especially since they couldn’t explain why it was happening. The number of dangerous critters we saw leveled off after a while — Professor Torgeson said it was because there was a limit to how many of them the land would support, magic or no magic — but they started getting larger. At least, the magical ones did.
On the second of June, Wash came back two hours late from scouting out ahead of us. The soldier on watch saw him coming, and right away, most everyone who could scare up half an excuse was hanging about, hoping to find out what had happened. He had a Columbian sphinx slung across the saddle in front of him that was nearly as big as a saber cat, and the minute they laid eyes on it, Professor Torgeson and Dr. Lefevre launched themselves straight into an argument over whether it was a whole new giant species or whether it was just an ordinary sphinx that was overgrown on account of the high magic levels. They’d barely gotten a good start when Wash cleared his throat.
“Excuse me, Professors, but I do believe that can wait. I was hoping for an opinion on something else.” He wrestled the dead cat down from his horse (which was purely glad to get away from the critter, in spite of all the calming spells I could sense on it) and turned the carcass over.
An eight-inch-wide strip of fur was missing all down the sphinx’s side, from the base of its black mane to its hindquarters. The skin that showed as a result was purple and twisted up into knots and ridges, and right smack in the center of the strip was a thin white scar like the slash of a razor blade.
“Would either of you happen to have a notion what sort of thing might have done this?” Wash said into the sudden silence.
“Whatever it is, I don’t want to meet up with it,” one of the soldiers muttered.
Dr. Lefevre squatted to examine the dead sphinx more closely, and Professor Torgeson followed suit. You’d never have known they were almost at each other’s throats a moment before. “Burn scars,” Dr. Lefevre said, tracing some of the knotted skin with one finger.
Professor Torgeson nodded. “Old ones. This, though —” She gestured at the long scar. “It ha
s to have happened at the same time as the burns; it’s too perfectly centered for it to be otherwise. But —”
“— it’s too straight.” Dr. Lefevre leaned forward precariously. “I think the slash was shallow, barely a glancing blow, really. I’m surprised the creature survived.” He frowned. “Unless the burns were not as serious as the scarring would indicate.”
“I don’t see how that could be possible, not with scarring like this.”
“For ordinary burns, that would be true.” Dr. Lefevre sat back. “If the injury was magically induced, the surface damage might be far greater than one would expect.”
“You’re theorizing in advance of your data,” Professor Torgeson said reprovingly. “We won’t know how deep the scarring goes until we do the dissection.”
Dr. Lefevre gave her an exasperated look. “Speculation is also part of the scientific process. And a shallow, magically induced injury would be consistent with the slash scarring, and also with the animal’s survival.” He turned to Wash. “It’s an old injury, thoroughly healed —”
“That’s healed?” someone said, sounding horrified.
“— and I have no idea what could have made it. Assuming it was another animal —”
“— which is quite an assumption,” Professor Torgeson put in. “It could have been a plant, or a bird, or some natural feature we have yet to discover.”
“Assuming the injury was caused by an animal … well, if this was the work of a horn, the unknown creature is probably half the size of this sphinx or smaller.”
“And if it was a claw?” Wash said.
“Unlikely,” Dr. Lefevre said. “There’s only one slash mark, not four or five. However, I’d guess such an animal to be roughly the same size as this sphinx, possibly a bit larger.”
Professor Torgeson snorted and started scolding him again, and I slipped off to set up for the dissection I knew they were going to want to do next. I was just laying out the last of the tools when they showed up with three men carting the dead sphinx.
The dissection didn’t prove anything, to hear Professor Torgeson tell it. Dr. Lefevre almost agreed with her, as much as he ever did; he said it didn’t tell him nearly as much as he’d like. The whole incident made everyone even warier than they’d been before. Columbian sphinxes are good at hiding, yet something had got at this one anyway — and had caused a great amount of hurt with a swipe that hardly touched it. Mr. Corvales doubled the watches and kept the elephant guns handy, just in case.
A few days later, we came to a spot where the Grand Bow split into two, and we had to stop to decide which branch to follow. Captain Velasquez and Mr. Corvales argued about it for a bit, and then they sent Wash and one of the soldiers out along the river that went mostly west, and Mr. Zarbeliev and another soldier out along the river that went mostly south. After another argument, they offered to send one of the elephant guns along with each of the groups. Mr. Zarbeliev allowed as how he thought that was a fine idea, so he took one, but Wash said he’d rather stick with the rifle he was accustomed to.
They were supposed to be gone four days. Wash and his companions showed up at the end of the fifth day; the soldier who’d gone with him had slipped on a rock by the river and busted his arm, so they’d had to come back a bit slower than they went out.
On the sixth day, we had storms in the morning, with rain so heavy that the waterproofing spells on the tents had to be reinforced twice, and thunder rumbling back and forth across the sky. The storms cleared off after a couple of hours, but they came back again in mid-afternoon, making everyone so miserable that we almost forgot to worry about Mr. Zarbeliev.
About mid-afternoon the next day, a week after he’d left, Mr. Zarbeliev showed up at last. He was alone and on foot, with a bad burn all down one leg that he’d covered in a paste made of plantains and blinkflower to keep himself going.
“Steam dragons,” he said when the flurry of his arrival died down and someone thought to ask what had happened.
“Dragons? Plural?” Mr. Corvales said.
Mr. Zarbeliev nodded. “Three of them at once. They got Jonathan, and both horses.”
Everyone was silent. We all knew we’d been awfully lucky to come so far and only lose a couple of horses, but facing that first death was still a hard shock. Even for those of us who hadn’t known Jonathan Miller particularly well.
“We should have turned back when we saw the first one,” Mr. Zarbeliev went on after a moment. “It was too close and too low. But we were barely a day out, and Jonathan stood on his orders.”
Captain Velasquez nodded heavily. “Private Miller was a good man.”
“So we kept going. We saw three or four more before the group that spotted us. The big one must have been forty feet long, and the other two were about fifteen feet each. Not that I got out of my hidey-hole to measure exactly, you understand.”
“Youngsters,” Wash said.
“Must have been. The three of them were out hunting early. We were just saddling up to head back when they hit.
“The littler ones whistled as they dove. Saved my life, that whistling did. I had just time to dive for the pile of rocks next to the camp.”
“Whistled?” Mr. Corvales said, frowning. “I never heard of a steam dragon doing that.”
Mr. Zarbeliev shrugged. “They sounded a bit like my ma’s old teakettle going off, but not as loud. Maybe it’s just the young ones that do it. Anyway, I saw quite a few more on the way back.”
“How many?” Professor Torgeson asked.
“I wasn’t counting,” Mr. Zarbeliev said sourly. “I was mostly worried about keeping out of their way. Lucky for me, I passed a herd of mammoths heading southeast, and the dragons all went after them. There must be a — a steam dragon colony or a rookery or whatever you’d call it, somewhere farther south. I wouldn’t recommend heading that way.”
“I should hope not,” someone muttered.
“I realize the steam dragons were distracting,” Adept Alikaket put in, “but did you notice anything along your route that might explain seeing so many of them? Larger herds of silverhooves, or an additional increase in the ambient magic levels, for instance? You are the only one who has seen that area.”
“Huh.” Mr. Zarbeliev frowned. “I disremember seeing anything unusual, but now that you mention it, I slept a lot better that last night, on account of not feeling prickly all the time.”
Elizabet pushed forward, her face intent. “So the ambient magic level was perceptibly less, going up that branch of the river?”
Mr. Zarbeliev shrugged. “I don’t know about that. But it was real nice, getting that extra sleep.”
“Mr. Corvales, Captain Velasquez, Adept Alikaket.” Elizabet turned toward the expedition leaders. “Would it be possible to send another party up that branch to take proper readings? No more than a day’s ride, perhaps less. I would —”
“You want us to send men back toward a colony of steam dragons?” Mr. Corvales interrupted, frowning. “I won’t ask Mr. Boden or anyone else to do that.”
“I believe Miss Dzozkic was volunteering to go herself,” Captain Velasquez said. His tone was mild, but his eyes were slightly narrowed as if he disapproved of something. “And the protection spells —”
“— are obviously not perfect, or your man would have come back along with mine!” Mr. Corvales retorted.
“Perhaps we three should speak of this tonight,” Adept Alikaket put in. “I can see good reason to acquire more information, but I would like to understand the dangers more.”
That ended the argument, at least in public. The upshot of their talking was that we settled in to camp for a couple of days while Elizabet, Bronwyn, Wash, and two privates went out along the south branch of the river and came back. Mr. Corvales looked sour about it, and absolutely refused to let Roger go along, too, but even he had to agree when Professor Torgeson pointed out that Mr. Zarbeliev could use a couple of days to rest and heal up a bit before we went on. Captain Velasquez, on the ot
her hand, went out of his way to make it clear that he had no objection to Bronwyn going along with.
Adept Alikaket didn’t say much of anything either way, but I thought he had a small smile on his face as he watched the group of them leave.
The whole camp was jumpy until the survey team got back. Luckily, they didn’t spend nearly as much time away as we’d expected. It was just a little before noon of the second day that they turned up again, and from the minute they were close enough to make out their faces clearly, it was plain as day that Elizabet was excited about something.
“Roger!” she yelled as they reached camp. “Roger, come here and look at this!” She swung down from her horse as she spoke and started rooting in the saddlebags.
“A little decorum, Miss Dzozkic, if you please,” Mr. Corvales said, frowning, but Elizabet ignored him. He frowned harder and cleared his throat. “If you could present your findings —”
“We’re not certain yet what we found, Mr. Corvales,” Bronwyn told him. She smiled at Elizabet, who had pulled her black surveyor’s notebook out of the saddlebag at last and was flipping rapidly through it. “Excuse me — I believe they’ll be wanting my notes as well.”
People were collecting, as they always did when something interesting seemed to be happening. Roger arrived at last, with Lan trailing behind. Roger shoved through to Elizabet’s side and she thrust the notebook at him.
“Look there! Allowing for the usual effect of running water, the readings drop to normal along exactly the same curve as they do heading out into the plains.”
“You’re in my light,” Roger said absently to Lan. He turned slightly.
I saw Lan glance at the page as he started to step back out of the way. He froze and his eyes went wide. “Miss Dzozkic, what’s this column for?” he asked, pointing.
“Nothing important,” Elizabet replied. “It’s just the difference between the normal sequence up this river and the readings we’ve been getting on the Grand Bow. I thought the intervals might tell us something useful, but they aren’t consistent.”