The Far West (32 page)

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.

When 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 their 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.

The biggest difficulty was the timing. The mapping spell had to come first, but after that, a lot of the spell casting would overlap. That meant that we had a good chance that the spells would interfere with each other, as well as the chance that everybody drawing on the stored-up magic at once would set off the very flood of power that we were trying to prevent. Of course, we’d be using up a lot of magic, too, but nobody seemed to think we could use up anything like enough to make a difference without the dam.

Once we had the spells and sequence worked out, Adept Alikaket made all the magicians have a good meal and then sleep for a few hours. I tried, just like he said, but I was too keyed up to nap. I just lay in the tent with my eyes closed, worrying about all the things that could go wrong and feeling the distant trembles in the magic around the river as it shifted and prepared to break apart.

After about an hour, I got up again and went out to help set up the spell-casting area. Mr. Corvales had already brought
out the big maps he’d been using to chart the expedition’s progress, and Captain Velasquez had his men clearing and leveling a big patch of ground, with Elizabet directing them. She said she still had a splitting headache from the backlash of whatever the rock dragons had done to the protection spells, and she didn’t think she could actually help with the big spell casting directly, but measuring and leveling land was her job and she could do that much, anyway. She sounded quite fierce, which made me think that maybe Mr. Corvales had tried to get her to lie back down and she wasn’t having it.

So I helped cart rocks out of the spell-casting area, and then I held one end of Elizabet’s measuring chain wherever she told me. By the time we finished, the other magicians were drifting back out to join us. Roger and Lan and the other Avrupan magicians started setting up the things they needed for the various spells they would be casting; the rest of us stood and watched in silence.