The Far West (21 page)

She turned the sack end-up and shook it out. Two jackets fell out, slightly smelly and crudely stitched. Mrs. Wilson wrinkled her nose. “If you didn’t get paid to haul those things away, I’d say so.”

“They’re made of medusa lizard skin,” I said. “They’re real, if that’s what you wanted to know. But …” I couldn’t help making the same kind of face as Mrs. Wilson. From the look and smell, the skins hadn’t been properly cleaned or tanned, and I could see places where the seams were already coming apart. “I don’t think they’ll last long. And even if they do, I don’t know that I’d want to wear one, protection or not.”

“As long as they’re the real thing, I can deal with the rest,” Sergeant Amy said confidently. “A couple of the men used to quick-tan gildenslink hides for fun, back at the fort. I’m sure they can fix these right up.”

“Not if they try to use magic to do it,” I said. “The skin is resistant, just like the lizards. That’s the whole point of making it into jackets.”

“That’s probably where the fellow who made these went wrong,” the sergeant said with unimpaired cheerfulness. “I’ll warn them, never fear.”

“I don’t really care what went wrong or what you do with them, as long as you get them out of this tent,” Mrs. Wilson said firmly.

“All right, all right, I’m going.” Gingerly, Sergeant Amy gathered up the jackets and stuffed them back in the bag.

“And that one’s your bedroll tonight!” Mrs. Wilson called after her as she left the tent.

“By the time I get back, I doubt I’ll notice!” Sergeant Amy shot back just before the tent flap fell shut.

Leaving St. Jacques du Fleuve was harder work than I’d expected. Captain Velasquez had warned everyone that he wasn’t making any allowances; whatever shape anyone was in, he wanted us on the road by sunup, just as usual. A couple of the soldiers decided that the best way to be on time was to stay up all night drinking; they were still plenty cheerful when we rode out, especially compared to the folks who’d quit early enough to have morning hangovers, but they weren’t much actual use.

It wasn’t just the soldiers who’d been taking advantage of their last night in town, either. The exploration-and-survey group wasn’t in any better shape than the army folks, and several of the people in the science team looked to be under the weather. So it was no surprise that we didn’t make very good time that first day.

Once everyone recovered from too much celebrating in St. Jacques, the days fell into a pattern. We started off every morning as soon as it was light enough to ride. Those first few hours were long and cold, especially when it was cloudy. We stopped at mid-morning to rest the horses for an hour, and then went on until about two in the afternoon, which was generally the
end of the day’s ride. Wash or Mr. Zarbeliev and some of the soldiers would go off to hunt while the rest of us made observations and did tests and set up camp. There was plenty of game, and the hunters nearly always came back with more than enough meat for dinner.

Every three or four days, we spent a full day in one spot, so the animals could get a good rest and all the scientists and survey people could work at the jobs they’d come along for. Nobody complained about how slowly we were moving. The horses were nearly as important as our rifles, and they were a lot harder to keep in good condition.

The maps we’d brought along from the McNeil Expedition were less help than you might think. West of St. Jacques, the land flattened out, and there were so few trees that it was hard to tell where the mirror bug plague had stopped. That really frustrated Professor Torgeson. She had a bunch of theories about the mirror bugs, and she’d been hoping to map out the far edge of the damage they’d done, but without all the trees they’d killed, it was nigh on to impossible to tell where they’d been.

One good thing about the lack of trees and hills was that you could see trouble coming a long, long way off. We had a couple of hours’ warning when a thunderstorm was coming in from the west, and several times we shifted course to avoid attracting the attention of a flock of terror birds or pack of prairie wolves. Mostly, though, all we could do was loosen up our rifles and ride close in to protect the wagons.

The Western Plains were a lot more crowded than I’d ever expected. By the time we were three days out of St.
Jacques, we were sending curly-horned antelope bounding away from our path nearly every time we topped a rise, and there were so many mammoths and herds of bison and antelope and silverhooves grazing, the whole plain looked like it had freckles.

The mammoths made everyone uneasy. They wandered around in groups of ten or fifteen, which was too many for us to handle if they took a notion to ignore our protection spells and all charge at once. Mr. Corvales and Captain Velasquez had five men with elephant guns spaced out around the wagons, but nobody was quite sure that even an elephant gun would take down a mammoth in one shot. Also, they took a while to reload. If a whole group of mammoths attacked, they would flatten the wagons for sure.

We met up with our first medusa lizard on the fourth day. One of the soldiers spotted it crouched at the base of a low rise to the south, maybe half a mile away. It looked like an oddly shaped grayish-tan rock poking up out of the new green prairie growth. The soldier had just time to call a warning when the critter started moving toward us.

I’d never seen anything cover ground like that lizard did, not even the saber cats or the antelope. Those of us who’d been riding on the south side of the wagons barely had time to shoulder our rifles before it was in range. I heard one of the elephant guns boom, and a couple of rifles, but they all missed. I waited, tracking the thing as best I could, with my world-sensing stretched as far as I could make it go.

A few yards off, the creature paused. I heard more rifles, and saw the medusa lizard jerk, but I held my fire. I kept my
eyes fixed on the knob in the middle of the lizard’s forehead, waiting for it to open. As soon as it did, I fired.

I wasn’t the only one who’d waited; at least half a dozen other rifle shots cracked off right along with mine. The medusa lizard’s head snapped back from the impact, and it fell. I chambered another shot in case it wasn’t quite dead or another one was around.

Distantly, I heard Captain Velasquez shout orders to his men. Two of them dismounted, keeping their guns ready, and approached the lizard from opposite sides. “It’s dead,” one of them called.

Some of the tension went out of the line of men, though everyone kept alert. Sergeant Amy rode up to the captain, and a minute later the captain gave orders to skin the lizard. Everyone was twitchy while we waited, and glad to get moving again.

As soon as we stopped for the day to set up camp, Mr. Corvales ordered extra watches, and Professor Torgeson and Professor Ochiba spent a fair lot of time setting up spells they hoped would detect medusa lizards from a distance. Dr. Lefevre thought that the lizards were daytime critters, and wouldn’t come around at night, but nobody wanted to take a chance, and anyway Professor Torgeson wanted to test the spells.

I helped with the spells as much as I could, which mostly meant running back and forth to fetch candles and herbs and bowls, or to move them a few inches once they’d been set out. As soon as the casting was finished, all of the magicians and half the exploration team started talking about how to improve
the spells, especially ways to make them work while we were moving.

That night, I lay awake for nearly an hour before I gave up and crawled out of the tent to sit by the fire. After a little while, I pulled out the wooden pendant. What with all the business of getting out of St. Jacques and into new territory, it had been a couple of days since I’d studied it. I’d tried a couple of different things, and I thought I had a fair notion of the sort of magic that made up each layer. Now I wanted to try working my way down through the layers one at a time.

The first layer, the one that felt like my magic, was more complicated than I’d expected. I couldn’t sort out the Aphrikan spells from the Avrupan ones. Then I realized that most all the time I’d had the pendant, I’d been using both kinds of magic side by side, especially when I tweaked my Avrupan spells with Aphrikan magic to make them work. When I stopped trying to make them be two separate things, studying the magic got a whole lot easier.

Somebody sat down beside me. I pulled myself back from concentrating on the pendant and looked up. “Hello, Wash,” I said, smiling. I hadn’t seen him to talk to since the expedition started. He’d been too busy to spend much time with the magicians during the first part of our trip, because he knew that part of settlement territory so well.

“Evening, Miss Eff,” Wash said. He glanced back at the tent. “Trouble sleeping?”

“Some,” I said. “Mostly I’m just not tired. So I thought I’d work at this a while.”

Wash smiled. “And?”

“It’s a record of spell casting,” I said. “Every bit of magic I’ve done is on there, so I can look and see what worked and what didn’t and why.”

Wash nodded slowly. He looked pleased, but he also looked like he was waiting for more.

“And every bit of magic that anybody else did while they were wearing this is here, too,” I went on. “Not like spells written out in a book. It’s how spells feel when you cast them, and … and the
shape
of the magic.” I paused. “It works a lot better for Aphrikan magic than for Avrupan spells. For learning them, I mean.”

“It
is
an Aphrikan study tool,” Wash pointed out.

“Yes, but —” I frowned. “There ought to be a way to keep just a little more of the spell casting, so that when you study on it, you can tell what tools you need for the Avrupan ones. Just knowing that there’s an Avrupan spell that shoos off blackflies doesn’t help much with learning to cast it.”

“Looking for that one in particular, were you?” Wash asked with a grin.

I started to shake my head, then paused. “Not exactly,” I said. “But I was sort of checking to see if there were any spells that’d be of use to the expedition. And I expect that that one will come in real handy in another month or so.”

“Very likely,” Wash said.

“Now that I have some notion what it is, I thought I’d start working my way down, one layer at a time,” I said when it was clear he wasn’t going to say anything more. “Is that all right?”

“It’s one way to tackle it,” Wash said. “There are —”

“— other ways,” I finished with him. “I don’t expect you’d be willing to suggest some?”

“I’ve already done more explaining than is usual,” Wash said, frowning slightly.

“All right,” I said, but I didn’t even try to pretend I wasn’t grumpy about it. “I figured you wouldn’t say, but I had to ask. Couldn’t you at least have warned me about the don’t-notice-it magic, though? It took me years to figure out that that was why I kept forgetting to work at understanding this.”

Wash’s eyes widened. “I do apologize, Miss Eff,” he said after a minute. “It hadn’t occurred to me that you’d have a problem with that, though it surely should have. I take it you’ve found a way around?”

I nodded. “I figured out how to make the don’t-notice-it spells let me in.”

“Just you?” Wash asked sharply.

“Just me.”

“That’s right useful,” Wash said after a thoughtful pause. “Would you mind showing me?”

“I’d be happy to,” I said. “But you’ll have to do the don’t-notice-it spell. I haven’t figured out how to cast that yet, just how to change it after.”

I spent the next hour fiddling with Wash’s don’t-notice-it spell, showing him what I’d done to the ones on the pendant. I found it a lot easier to work on his spells, now that I’d figured out the pendant ones on my own. Finally, Wash sat back and gave me a long, considering look. “That’s well done, Miss Eff,” he said. “I’d purely appreciate it if you wouldn’t pass that trick along, though.”

It sounded more like a command than a request, but I nodded. “Not if you don’t want me to. Is that don’t-notice-it spell a special kind of Aphrikan magic? It doesn’t feel quite like the rest of it.”

Wash hesitated. “It’s not exactly Aphrikan, though it was folks from Aphrika who invented it,” he said finally. “I suppose you’d call it slave magic. Back before the Secession War, plantation owners didn’t take too kindly to their slaves working magic, especially a kind of magic they didn’t know much about. Any magic a slave wanted to learn had to be … quiet. Or cast so that no one would notice.”

“Oh.” That explained a whole lot of things that had puzzled me about the pendant, from the way Avrupan magic suddenly started showing up to why there were don’t-notice-it spells and magic in every layer after. And maybe why I’d had such trouble with the don’t-notice-it spells — I was willing to bet money they’d been designed to work especially well on anyone whose family had originally come from Avrupa, rather than Aphrika. “Thank you for telling me.”

“You’re welcome, Miss Eff.” Wash rose and brushed himself off. “I’ll be heading back to catch some sleep now; I’d recommend you do the same. Mr. Corvales is right determined when it comes to getting an early start.”

“I think I’m tired enough to sleep now,” I said. “Good night, Wash.”

He touched his hat brim and vanished into the darkness. I studied the pendant for a few more minutes, then tucked it away and went back to the tent to sleep.

We met up with three more medusa lizards over the next four days, and we lost a horse to one of them, but no people got turned to stone, not even partly. Every day, Dr. Lefevre and Adept Alikaket had some new spells to add to the travel protections, but none of them worked very well. The minute we came in sight, the critters would head straight for us, sometimes from over a mile away. It was a good thing the country was so flat that we could see them coming.

Finally, Mr. Zarbeliev suggested that maybe the medusa lizards were attracted to magic, the same way the mirror bugs had been. That caused quite a ruckus, on account of some folks wanting to go without the travel protection spells and others insisting on keeping them up. While they were all arguing, I pulled Wash aside.

“Do you think that the don’t-notice-it spells would work on medusa lizards?” I asked. “And would it be all right to use them?” I figured that if he didn’t want me telling other folks how to add Avrupans to the don’t-notice-it spells on the pendant, he sure enough wouldn’t want me showing everyone how to work them, especially if it wasn’t going to help. On the other hand, it was pretty clear that we needed to do something different, and if the spells
would
work….

Wash’s eyes narrowed and he didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he replied, “That’s a good thought, Miss Eff, but let me consider on it some before you go saying anything.”

“I figured you should do the saying anyway,” I said. “I haven’t learned how to cast them yet, and it’d be a mite hard to explain how I know them. And it’s your pendant.”

Wash frowned. “It’s your pendant now, Miss Eff, and has been for quite some time.”

“You know what I mean,” I said, frowning right back at him.

A little while later, I saw Wash talking with Professor Ochiba. It was the first time I’d seen them exchange more than a word or two since the expedition started. I didn’t hear what they said to each other, but the professor started off looking kind of stiff and disapproving and then unstiffened some and looked more interested as they talked.

After dinner that night Professor Ochiba went to talk with Adept Alikaket and Dr. Lefevre. The three of them stayed late by the fire, and the next day, they had another spell to add to the travel protections.

The new spell worked better than anything else we’d tried. The first day it was active, we managed to pass a medusa lizard that for sure was close enough that it would have attacked without it. After we were well and truly past it, I saw Wash catch Professor Ochiba’s eye and tip his hat slightly. The corners of Professor Ochiba’s mouth turned up a hair and she nodded once.