The Far West (Frontier Magic #3)

by Patricia C. Wrede

  “Forgot what?” Professor Jeffries asked, straightening up from studying the map.

  “I forgot I was using an undelimited symbol set,” Roger said.

  “It wasn’t the lizard’s magic resistance?”

  “No — well, maybe a little.” Roger lifted his head, looking sheepish. “But the resonance doesn’t pass through the primary focus object; the geologic samples are the real conduits, so the blockage was really inconsequential. The real problem was that I kept waiting for it to finish.”

  Professor Torgeson looked like the only thing keeping her from rolling her eyes was politeness. “You were trying to map the whole of the Far West.”

  “Of course not,” Roger said. “I know better than to try anything that stupid; it’d take more power than you could get even with a team of Hijero-Cathayans. All I was trying to do was trace the creature back to its point of origin, which of course is out in the unexplored territory somewhere.”

  “What went wrong?” I asked.

  “I forgot it was —”

  “— an undelimited thingamabob,” I said. “I know, but what does that mean?”

  “The map he was using doesn’t have a proper end,” Professor Torgeson said. “It just fades out into the unknown.”

  Roger shook his head. “No, it doesn’t.” He pointed at the line of mountains drawn along the western edge of the map. “And that’s the problem. We know there are mountains out there, but not how far away, or even whether there’s more than one range. So the map isn’t accurate. When you track something back into unknown territory or off the edge of an accurate map, the trace just stops. Using a map that’s not accurate … well, you saw what happened. I’m sorry, professors.”

  “Nonsense,” Professor Jeffries said. “You’ve provided a good deal of useful information, more than you realize. No, no, you sit there. We’ll take care of cleaning up.”

  Roger looked doubtful, but he sat in silence while the rest of us put the rocks and the lizard’s foot back where they belonged and cleaned off the table. He didn’t speak up again until Professor Torgeson reached for the map. Then he said, “Er, Professor? There was one thing …”

  Both professors turned to him, and he flushed. “The point of using maps and symbols in geomancy is to control and confirm the divinatory aspects. Because divination is unreliable.” Roger sounded as if he were reciting something.

  “And?” Professor Torgeson said a little impatiently.

  “And because of that, geomancers aren’t supposed to talk about anything that … happens during the spells, unless there’s a physical reaction to confirm it. Like the flares, or the symbols on the map. Because divination is unreliable without confirmation. Only —”

  “Only there’s something else you think we ought to know,” Professor Jeffries said gently.

  Roger nodded. He looked down, then took a deep breath and said rapidly, “I think there are more of those lizards coming east. Quite a lot of them. I … felt them, right before the spell turned on me.”

  “That’s not exactly a surprise,” Professor Torgeson said after a minute. “Nobody really thinks there were only two of them in the whole of the Far West.”

  “Nevertheless, I think I’ll have a word with Mr. Parsons at the Settlement Office,” Professor Jeffries said. Roger straightened up in alarm, and Professor Jeffries made a reassuring motion. “Never fear, I won’t bring your name into it. Though if we do indeed have additional medusa lizards moving toward the settlements, we have a good deal more to worry about than your professional ethics.”

  We finished cleaning up and went off into the snow. I didn’t expect much of anything to come of Roger’s information; after all, it was pretty vague, and in my experience, both the Settlement Office and the Frontier Management Department hated to take action until they absolutely had to.

  This time, I was wrong, but I didn’t find out about it for a while.

  In March, the next batch of experts from the Frontier Management Department started arriving. This time, they came in ones and twos instead of mobs, and they were folks who actually knew something about Western wildlife. Senior Magician George Ingolseby came from the New Bristol Institute of Magic, and Professor Donald Peppins from Franklin State University, and Dr. Corinna Ivanova from the Ladies College of Arts and Magic in Virginia. Dr. Martin Lefevre from Simon Magus came, which was a surprise — I’d met him in Philadelphia when Lan was recovering from the accident, and he’d been real interested in the petrified animals that Professor Torgeson found, but I hadn’t figured him for the type to come all the way West just to look at a dead lizard, even a brand-new magical one.

  The really big surprise, though, came in the last week of March. I opened the door to Professor Jeffries’s office and my jaw dropped when I saw the two people standing by his desk.

  “Miss Ochiba!” I said. “William! What — When —”

  William Graham was the first friend Lan and I had made when Papa moved us all to Mill City when I was five, and after all that time he knew me better than anybody except Lan. Miss Ochiba had been one of our teachers from the time we were ten, teaching us Avrupan magic in class and Aphrikan magic every afternoon after the day school finished up. Two years after I started upper school, she’d gone back East to teach at Triskelion University in Belletriste. William hadn’t ever said, but I’d always thought that it was partly on account of her that he’d decided to defy his father and make his own way at Triskelion instead of attending Simon Magus College with Lan.

  It was two years since I’d seen William, and four since Miss Ochiba had left Mill City. She looked just the same: tall, with darker skin than most other black folks and an enormous bun of crinkly black hair at the nape of her neck. William looked different, but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly how. He was still thin and sandy-haired; he hadn’t grown much, and he still wore the same thick eyeglasses. He didn’t look as pale as I remembered; I figured that came from living in Belletriste, which was a good eight hundred miles south and bound to be sunnier than Mill City, even in winter. His shoulders were a bit broader from working summers building railroad cars, but that was all.

  William pushed his eyeglasses up on his nose and grinned at me. “Hello, Eff. It’s good to see you again, too.”

  “Just so, Miss Rothmer,” Miss Ochiba said. “I trust you are doing well?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I replied, still feeling half stunned.

  “Professor Ochiba and Mr. Graham are here to have a look at Lizzie,” Professor Jeffries put in from behind me.

  Neither of them had made a point of Miss Ochiba’s proper title, but I felt myself flushing. “Of course. I’m sorry, Professor Ochiba, I just —”

  “It was an understandable error, Miss Rothmer,” she said with a little smile, and I wondered if I would ever get to calling her “Professor Ochiba” in my head. I hoped so. If there were anybody in the whole wide world I didn’t want to be impolite to, even by accident, it was Professor Ochiba.

  “Miss Rothmer has been assisting me with the menagerie for several years now,” Professor Jeffries said with a pleased smile.

  “We’ll have to get together this week, so you can tell us all about it,” William said to me. “Letters just aren’t the same.”

  “Your letters certainly aren’t,” I said, sticking my nose up in the air and pretending to be cross. “I sent you pages and pages about the trip Professor Torgeson and I took through the settlements last year, and I was lucky to get three sentences back.”

  “They were very good sentences, though,” William said earnestly.

  I smiled. “I’m so glad you’re back, even if it’s only for a week.”

  “We are staying at Mrs. Jablonski’s,” Miss — Professor Ochiba said. “Perhaps you could join us for dinner one evening.”

  “I would love to,” I said, carefully not looking at William. So he and his father still hadn’t made up. Not that I was surprised. Professor Graham, William’s father, had a terrible temper, and he was almos
t as stubborn as William. “May I bring Lan? I’m sure he’d be glad to see you both.”

  “He still hasn’t gone back to Simon Magus, then?” William said. “That idiotic —” He looked at me and cut himself off. After a minute, he said, “So how is he, really?”

  “Better,” I told him. “He still has ups and downs.” William was the only person besides me and Lan who knew the whole story of Lan’s accident. I’d been a little surprised to find out that Lan had written him about it — William had always been more my friend than Lan’s, I thought — but then I reminded myself that they’d been at boarding school in the East together for a year, and that Lan had been the first person William told about going to Triskelion, so it wasn’t as surprising as I’d thought.

  “We will have plenty of opportunity to catch up with Mr. Rothmer’s doings over dinner,” Professor Ochiba said. “At the moment, I believe we have a lizard to examine.”

  We’d had a string of warm, clear days, so much of the winter’s snow had melted and the walk over to the laboratory building was a pleasant one. As we passed the menagerie, Roger Boden appeared from in between the mammoth pen and the small field where we kept the small animals like the chameleon tortoise and the porcupine that weren’t too dangerous and wouldn’t eat each other. “Professor Jeffries,” he called.

  “Roger,” the professor called back. “Come and meet our latest visitors.”

  “Beg pardon for interrupting,” Roger said as he joined us, “but you said you wanted to be notified as soon as the daybats broke their hibernation.”

  “Excellent! You and Eff can move them to their summer quarters tomorrow, then.” Professor Jeffries turned to the rest of us. “Professor Ochiba, Mr. Graham, I’d like you to meet Roger Boden. He’s just returned from studying in Albion, and he was most helpful with the medusa lizard. You recall the geomancy notes we sent along? That was his work.”

  Roger shook hands with the two of them. “Welcome to the frozen North. The weather’s atypical today, but if you stick around long, we’ll try to arrange a blizzard for you.”

  “Roger!” I said. “Stop playing scare-the-Easterners. It won’t work; William grew up here, and Professor Ochiba taught us both in day school before she went back East.”

  “Oh, is this the William you mentioned in your letters? I hadn’t realized.” Roger gave me a sideways look, then nodded a bit stiffly at Professor Ochiba and William. “Welcome back, then.”

  William tensed, but he returned the nod with careful politeness.

  “Thank you, Mr. Boden,” Professor Ochiba said. She sounded mildly amused about something. “It’s nice to be in Mill City again, even if it’s only for a few days.”

  “So you’re a geomancer?” William’s eyes drifted from Roger to the mammoth pen and then to Professor Jeffries.

  “Not quite yet, but I will be,” Roger said easily. “It’s not a quick process. I’ll need a couple of years of fieldwork after I finish my degree before they’ll let me take the certification exam.”

  “Fieldwork.” William’s shoulders relaxed a bit, though he still seemed wary. I barely kept from snorting. The two of them were behaving just like my older brothers used to, when one of them wanted to impress the other. “Where are you planning to do it?”

  “I’m hoping for a job with one of the Settlement Offices,” Roger said. “I understand they have a hard time finding people willing to work west of the Mammoth River. Too many of the best people head back East for school and then stay there.”

  I frowned. I’d been back East twice since we moved to Mill City: once for my sister Diane’s wedding and once when Lan was hurt. I hadn’t enjoyed it either time. I looked at William uncertainly, wondering if he liked it out East better than I did. I realized I’d always expected him to come back to Mill City when he finished school, but now that I thought about it, his letters had never said anything about it one way or the other.

  “We’ll certainly be pleased to have you for as long as you’re willing to stay, Mr. Boden,” Professor Jeffries said. “I’ll have a look at the daybats as soon as we’re through with Lizzie; in the meantime, we’d best be on our way.”

  We left Roger to go back to the daybat cages and made our way to the laboratory where Professor Torgeson kept the medusa lizard. She was waiting for us when we arrived. Professor Jeffries introduced Professor Ochiba and William, then said, “Lizzie is over here. Can you work through the preservation spells? I’d rather not take them down unless I have to.”

  “Which preservation spells did you use?” Professor Ochiba asked, and the discussion got very technical for a while before she said she didn’t need the spells removed. Professor Torgeson nodded at me to get my notebook, and Professor Ochiba got started.

  Watching Professor Ochiba work wasn’t anything like as interesting as watching the Avrupan magicians who’d been through in the past couple of weeks. Avrupan spells are well-defined and precise; they need particular words and arrangements and ingredients to cast. The really powerful ones take lots of magicians working together, each one performing a specific part of the spell just so, so that each part fits everyone else’s part perfectly, like the pieces of a steam engine. Watching Avrupan spells being cast is interesting, even if you aren’t trying to feel what the magic is doing, because Avrupan magicians are always moving — saying something, or mixing and sprinkling ingredients, or making gestures, or shifting something else into the right position.

  Aphrikan magic isn’t showy like that. Aphrikan magicians don’t look like they’re doing much of anything, even when they’re casting a really big spell. Unless you’re extra good at sensing magic, you often can’t tell they’re doing anything at all. That’s why the first thing an Aphrikan magician has to learn is world-sensing — being real quiet in your own head and at the same time letting your magic pay close attention to everything that’s going on outside you. It takes a long time and a lot of practice to get good at it. I’d been working on it for seven years, ever since Miss Ochiba started teaching me when I was thirteen, and it was only in the last couple of years that I’d actually been able to use it for anything besides just watching.

  Professor Ochiba had learned Aphrikan magic from her parents. Her mother had been an Aphrikan magician who’d been kidnapped and brought to North Columbia as a slave, and her father was a South Columbian magician from New Asante who’d been sent north to try to stop the slave trade. Mr. Ochiba had bought several shiploads of slaves and set them free. Most of them had gone back to Aphrika, or to one of the colonies in South Columbia, but Professor Ochiba’s mother had stayed in the United States with him to work with the abolitionists. The professor and her brothers had learned Avrupan magic in day school like everyone else, but both her parents had taught them Aphrikan magic at home. So she was a first-rate Aphrikan magician as well as an Avrupan one, and I was real interested in what she’d do with the medusa lizard.

  From the outside, it looked like she just stood there. At first, even my world-sensing couldn’t tell that she was doing anything. Then she started talking, and I realized that she’d been using her own world-sensing. I felt a little better. World-sensing is a subtle kind of magic, and you have to be really, really good before you can feel someone else doing it.

  Every magician and scientist who’d come to see the medusa lizard started by describing what it looked like, and Professor Ochiba was no exception. Her description was more detailed than most, though. She got through all the usual things — that it was fifteen feet and some odd inches, nose to tail-tip, with gray-brown scales, short front legs and long, muscular back ones, and a mouth like a bird’s beak as long as a man’s arm and full of sharp, triangular teeth — and then she started in on things no one else had mentioned.

  “The scales lie in two layers,” she said. “The scales in the top layer are thicker at the base than at the outer edge, irregular in shape, with a rough surface; they are also particularly resistant to direct magical interference and observation. In most natural environments,
they would therefore provide both visual and magical camouflage as well as protection. The underlying scales are thin, smooth, and nearly transparent; they are covered almost completely by the outer scales and it is not clear what function they perform.”

  William and I scribbled away as she moved on to the lizard’s teeth, pointing out that all of them were in perfect condition, which was surprising in an adult creature. She speculated that worn or broken teeth fell out and the medusa lizard regrew them, and she estimated its age as twenty-two to twenty-six years, which was a good ten years more than most of the other scientists had guessed.

  When she finished at last, she looked at Professor Torgeson and said, “Internally?”

  Professor Torgeson nodded and we slid the carcass around so that the slit in its belly opened up.

  Looking at the lizard’s innards took even longer than looking at its outside had. By the time Professor Ochiba was done with her observations, I had five pages of notes and it was late in the afternoon.

  The next day was even more interesting. Professor Ochiba had finished with just inspecting the lizard and moved on to doing more active magic. It still didn’t look like much from the outside, but with my world-sensing I could feel when she poked at Lizzie with her magic.

  The trouble was that Lizzie didn’t have a speck of magic to be poked, as far as I could tell. I’d been wondering about that ever since we started in studying her properly. A critter that could turn animals and people to stone had to have some magic, but Lizzie didn’t feel any more magical than the young mammoth we had out in the menagerie.

  Professor Ochiba asked to look at the lizard’s innards again, but it was the same thing. She’d been at it for over an hour when she frowned and straightened up. “Professor Jeffries, Professor Torgeson, I’d like to try something a bit unusual, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Try anything you like, as long as you don’t damage the lizard,” Professor Torgeson replied.