The Far West (30 page)

Everyone could see that Sergeant Amy was right; the best choice for the lone rider would be one of our circuit magicians, and it’d be good to have one leading the small group, as well. Unfortunately, we also needed one with the expedition that was going on, and we only had two: Wash and Mr. Zarbeliev. Mr. Zarbeliev was still limping from the steam dragon’s burn, so Wash seemed like the logical choice to head back alone … except that Wash had the most experience with the Far West, so he was also the best choice to stay with the main expedition.

Another problem was who’d go in the small group. Mr. Corvales didn’t want to just send the data; he wanted to send someone who could explain the problem with the magic levels firsthand and answer questions. That meant sending Roger or Elizabet or maybe Bronwyn, but when Mr. Corvales suggested sending Elizabet and Bronwyn back, both of them and Roger insisted that they all needed to go on and continue making readings. And both the group that was heading back and the group that was going on wanted Lan, because the sheer strength of his magic could make the difference if either group ran into serious problems with the wildlife.

Finally, Mr. Zarbeliev pointed out that his having a bit of a limp wouldn’t slow his horse down any, and that he’d made it home in much worse shape before, even if it wasn’t over quite such a distance. Wash laughed, and they started swapping stories of being out on their circuits, and in the end Captain Velasquez reluctantly agreed that Mr. Zarbeliev would be the single rider.

Sergeant Amy issued Mr. Zarbeliev one of the jackets made of medusa lizard skin, and a pair of pants to go with it, and he left next morning. Adept Alikaket and Mr. Corvales and Captain Velasquez took another day to decide for sure who’d go with the small group. In the end, they sent Mr. MacPhee, the minerals expert, because he was a geologist and could explain what Roger and Elizabet had found, even if he wasn’t the one who’d actually found it; Dr. Visser, the agricultural magician, and Dr. Lefevre’s assistant, Mr. Melby, because they were both good with the travel and protection spells and because the rest of the expedition could get along all right without them; and Private McCormick and another soldier, to have some people with a bit more experience of wildlife and the Far West (though by then all of us had plenty).

The small group left the next day, with one of the elephant guns, another one of the medusa-lizard outfits, a copy of Elizabet and Roger’s data, and all the research notes. Mr. Zarbeliev had only taken the data on magic levels, because that was the most important, and anyway, we didn’t have time or paper to make a third copy of everything else for him.

The rest of us cached the last wagon so as to travel faster and started upriver again in a sober frame of mind. We were
down to nineteen people: the three expedition leaders, five magicians, four exploration-and-survey people, five soldiers, Bronwyn, and Mrs. Wilson.

Over the next week, the river got shallower and rockier. We stuck close to the bank, so that Bronwyn and Elizabet and Roger could take readings every time we stopped, but we didn’t have as much trouble with the wildlife as we’d expected. Nobody thought anything of it for the first few days, but on the fourth day, we passed a big bison herd, five elk, two small families of silverhooves, and a pack of prairie wolves, all heading east at a steady pace. I saw Wash talking to Mr. Corvales after the fourth batch of animals went by, and as soon as they finished, we were asked to double-check the protection spells and make them even stronger if we could. From then on, we rode closer together than usual, so that the magicians didn’t have to cover quite so much space with the spells. Captain Velasquez doubled the guard shifts, and nobody even complained.

The lack of complaining wasn’t just on account of people being nervous. It was excitement, too, because on the fifth morning, we rode to the top of a rise and caught our first sight of the mountains we’d spent so long heading for.

We heard wolves howling off to the south that night — proper howls, not the yippy noise that the prairie wolves make. The howls got more distant, then faded away, as if the wolf pack was moving away from us the same way the herds had been. I don’t think anyone slept well, even after the howling stopped.

Around mid-morning of the sixth day, we reached a tumble of boulders along the riverbank. Most were just big enough
to be a nuisance, but some ranged from sitting-on size to bigger than me and my horse put together. One had a tall, skinny pine tree growing out of a crack in the top. A stand of pines grew a ways back from the water, but the ground around the boulders had only some stunted blinkflowers and a bit of windthistle.

As soon as he saw the boulders, Wash raised his hand to bring us to a halt. We stopped about thirty feet shy of the rocks, crowding our horses together so we could hear what he had to say.

Wash was frowning, a wary, puzzled frown the like of which I’d never seen on his face before. “Miss Maryann,” he said to Professor Ochiba, “would you do me the favor of making a careful examination of that batch of rocks up ahead?”

Mr. Corvales’s eyebrows drew together, but Professor Ochiba just looked at Wash, then closed her eyes. I felt something brush past me and through the protection spells I was helping to hold. Professor Ochiba’s expression didn’t exactly change, but it hardened up. After a moment, she opened her eyes. “That’s —” She shook her head.

Professor Lefevre frowned and cast a couple of wildlife-detection spells. “There’s nothing there,” he announced. “Nothing living, that is.”

“So it seems,” Professor Ochiba said. “But the flow of magic isn’t … quite right. I think we should give those boulders a wide berth.” She never once took her eyes off the boulders as she spoke, and neither did Wash.

“So do I,” he said, “and I do thank you for the confirmation.”

“How far do you recommend?” Captain Velasquez asked with a small sigh. I could tell he didn’t care for the notion, but he wasn’t going to overrule a circuit magician’s advice without a darned good reason. Mr. Corvales looked from Professor Ochiba to Wash and back, but he didn’t add anything.

“I’d suggest —”

Right then, I saw something moving at the edge of the pines. I couldn’t make out what it was, and a second later it was too late. One of the boulders unfolded into a blur of gray-brown teeth and claws and wings, and pounced on it.

“Holy God, what is that thing?” one of the soldiers whispered.

The critter turned as if it had heard, and we all got a good look at it. It was smaller than a medusa lizard — about the size of a cougar or a saber cat, if you didn’t count the batlike wings. It had a lean, long body, with powerful back legs and a thick tail that rested on the ground between them like the third support on a tripod. Its front legs were shorter, though still long enough for it to run on all fours, and they ended in long-fingered paws that had a long spike on the back side and two-inch claws at the end of each finger. The head looked like a giant snake, with big yellow eyes, slits for a nose, and a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth. The whole thing was covered in a pattern of bumpy scales the same color as the gray boulders around it.

Beside me, Professor Torgeson gasped and went for her rifle. Wash and three of the soldiers raised theirs at the same time as the professor; the rest of us were a hair behind. The critter was faster than all of us; it blurred into movement and
dodged in among the boulders before anyone had a chance to fire.

I had my own rifle out by then, and I didn’t lower it. I reached out with my world-sensing, hoping to get some warning of which way the creature was going.

I couldn’t sense anything. Well, I could feel the ordinary magic of the rocks and the river and the trees, but as far as the world sense was concerned, there was nothing else out there.

That had never happened before, not even with the chameleon tortoise. I hesitated, then sank deeper, down to where everything was just magic swirling in slightly different directions. At that level, I wasn’t sure I could tell which swirls were river and which were rocks and which were the travel protection spells we had up, much less which bit was tied to a brand-new kind of wildlife, but I didn’t figure it would hurt anything to try.

For a minute, I thought it hadn’t worked. All the magic felt the same; it was like diving into a full-up washtub and trying to tell one thimbleful of water from another. Then I felt a kind of sucking, and I shifted my aim and pulled the trigger just as the creature burst out of the rocks, heading straight for us as if the protection spells and
nontuamos
spell weren’t there at all.

My shot scored a long gash down the thing’s right side and dug into its wing. I heard the
crack-crack
of other shots as I chambered the next round, and felt a series of shivery zings as Lan and some of the others cast spells. The creature shuddered under all the impacts, but it didn’t stop coming, or even slow down. Then there was an even louder crack as Captain Velasquez fired his elephant gun.

That shot threw the critter back on its haunches, its wings beating against the air as it tried to keep from going right over backward. Almost as one, we all fired again. The critter screeched and fell at last, but it still wasn’t dead. Its claws scored deep gouges in the ground as it tried to claw itself closer to us.

“Hold,” Captain Velasquez snapped, and all of us stopped firing. He kept the elephant gun trained on the dying creature, so I kept my rifle aimed and ready, too. We all watched, silent and tense, until the thing stopped thrashing. Even then, nobody lowered a weapon until the captain signaled his men and then lowered the elephant gun.

There was a long silence, and you could feel some of the tension going out of the air. Then Wash swung down off his horse, and the tension spiked again.

“Mr. Morris?” Mr. Corvales said tentatively.

“Somebody has to make sure it’s dead,” Wash said calmly. He didn’t move forward; instead, he reached down and picked up a handful of dirt and pebbles and started tossing them ahead of him, getting closer and closer to the critter with each throw. The thing didn’t twitch, even when he hit it a couple of times directly, but nobody really relaxed until he walked cautiously forward, examined the body, and announced that it was well and truly dead.

“Rope that thing to a horse,” Captain Velasquez commanded. “We need to examine it, but we’re not stopping here.”

Wash and a couple of the soldiers went for rope, and everyone else shifted so as to be out of the way. I heard a whoosh of breath behind me and turned in the saddle to see Lan rolling his shoulders. “Phew!” he said when he caught me
looking. “That was even worse than that first time with the medusa lizards.”

“Aldis?” Dr. Lefevre’s voice sounded almost concerned. I turned to see him frowning at Professor Torgeson, who was staring at the critter, her face white as a sun-bleached sheet.

“Professor?” I said.

Professor Torgeson shivered and looked up at last. Her eyes were dark. “Ice dragons,” she said. “That thing is related to ice dragons.”

“What?” Dr. Lefevre gave her a stern look. “Impossible. Ice dragons are tied to areas of permafrost; I doubt that one would be able to come so far south even in midwinter, and certainly not at the height of summer.”

The professor’s eyes narrowed and some of her color returned. “I didn’t say it was an ice dragon,” she snapped. “I said it’s related. The pattern of the scales is unmistakable.”

“It bears a certain resemblance to the diagrams,” Dr. Lefevre conceded, “but —”

“It’s an exact match. If you’d ever seen an actual sample, you’d know that.”

“You’ve seen actual ice dragon scales?”

“Vinlander, remember? Dragons can’t cross open water to get to us, but they come down to the mainland coast nearly every winter. Back in my grandfather’s day, when we got back in contact with Avrupa, we bought a batch of cannons and tried them out one winter. It took two volleys and they lost three men, but they managed to kill a dragon, and the skin’s been hanging in the meeting hall ever since.”

Dr. Lefevre looked thoughtful. “That may be useful to know. If there are similarities —”

“There are plenty of similarities!” Professor Torgeson snarled. “About the only differences I can see is that this thing is smaller, faster, and even meaner than an ice dragon, it’s obviously not limited to areas with permafrost, and it’s the color of rocks instead of ice-white.”

“So we’ve got rock dragons, then,” Mr. Corvales said heavily. “Wonderful. Just the news I wanted to hear.”

“Happy to oblige,” Dr. Lefevre said. “Now, how far are you planning to drag that thing? I certainly don’t object to working on it elsewhere, and it’s clearly too large to get up on a horse even if one would put up with it, but I’d rather not have it any more battered than it already is, if that’s possible.”

While Mr. Corvales and Dr. Lefevre argued about that, Wash went off to the pine stand and cut a couple of branches. He lashed them together and got the rock dragon up on them so it wouldn’t be dragging straight across the ground, and we were ready to go. Mr. Corvales and Dr. Lefevre seemed almost put out that they couldn’t keep on arguing, but even they didn’t care to hang about when they didn’t have to.

Captain Velasquez took us two miles out onto the plains before we stopped and made camp. He made a point of choosing a site that didn’t have a rock anywhere near it that was bigger than my fist.

Dr. Lefevre, Professor Torgeson, and Professor Ochiba went to work on the rock dragon right away. Since it was obviously a magical animal, rather than a natural one, Professor
Ochiba worked on getting a feel for its magic, while Professor Torgeson and Dr. Lefevre dissected it and argued about what they were finding and what it meant. William and I took notes for all three of them, since Dr. Lefevre’s assistant had gone back to Mill City with the last group.

As near as we could tell, the rock dragon was pretty much just like Professor Torgeson’s description: fast, mean, and deadly. Dr. Lefevre found two sacks in the roof of its mouth that Professor Ochiba warned him to be extra careful about the minute she saw them. When he finally teased them out and cut a slit in one, it oozed a thin, oily liquid that melted the tip of Dr. Lefevre’s knife and set fire to the wooden trestle table he was working on. Water kept the fire from spreading, but the part where the oil fell went right on burning until every bit of magic in the venom was used up.