The Far West (Frontier Magic #3)

by Patricia C. Wrede

  Between the two of them, the professors kept the fuss and bother around the study center from getting completely out of hand, but even they couldn’t keep the college and the Settlement Office from insisting that they come back to give the adept a “proper welcome” when she arrived in Mill City. So, two days before the Cathayans were due to arrive, the professors and I went back to town to get ready to meet her.

  Lan was waiting at the ferry dock when the professors and I arrived back in Mill City. I was glad to see him, but I was more than a little surprised, too. “What are you doing out here in the middle of the morning?” I asked once we had our hellos out of the way.

  “The Settlement Office sent me down, to be your official liaison,” Lan said with a grin.

  “What do we want with a —” I stopped short as we came around the loading house and I caught sight of the street. “What on earth is all that?”

  Right in front of the warehouse, two men on tall ladders were wrestling with the ends of a red, white, and blue banner, while a third man stood in the street yelling directions. The front of the warehouse had a fresh coat of whitewash, and most of the storefronts I could see were newly painted. There were saw-horses stacked along the side of the street, ready to be set out.

  “Preparations for the adept’s visit,” Lan said. “We need to go around this way. They’ve already blocked off most of the streets between here and the train station.”

  “I always thought those people in Washington had a bee in their collective bonnet about the Cathayan Confederacy,” Professor Jeffries said, shaking his head. “Now I know it for sure.”

  “Oh, it’s not the Frontier Management Department, nor the State Department, either,” Lan said. “It’s all Mayor Brewster’s idea.”

  Apparently, Mayor Brewster had gotten more excited than anybody over the idea that a Cathayan master adept was coming to Mill City. He’d tried to persuade the State Department that she should stay in town for a night or two, but the State Department said it wasn’t possible, so the mayor had settled on making a parade out of the adept and her aides getting from the train to the ferry. He even had people washing the cobblestones along the route.

  The professors and I were to be part of the group welcoming the adept at the train platform. The mayor and the territory governor and the president of the college were going to make some speeches and present the master adept. All we had to do was stand there and be introduced. They had a band learning a Cathayan song that somebody said was their anthem, and the army had sent some men and women to be an honor guard and make it more parade-like.

  The professors thought it was a lot of fuss and bother, and no good reason to drag us all away from the study center. I had to agree, especially since I didn’t see what they wanted me for. Lan said they wanted everyone who’d been up at Big Bear Lake when the first medusa lizards were shot, but they couldn’t get Mr. Grimsrud down from his settlement in time, and they couldn’t find Wash or Greasy Pierre. They had to settle for Professor Torgeson and Lan and me.

  I still thought it was silly, but I didn’t have much choice. Two days later, I was standing on the platform at the train station in my Sunday best, along with Lan and the professors and a whole lot of other people. It was a lovely sunny day, and it looked like most of the town was milling around, waiting for the adept to arrive and the speeches to start. That’s what the mayor and the territory governor seemed to think, anyway; I was pretty sure that everyone was really there to enjoy the sunshine and a bit of a break.

  A man from the State Department had come out a week in advance to make sure everything ran smoothly. He was right in front of the group on the platform, looking uncomfortably hot and sweaty in his black frock coat and beaver hat. I never got to meet him, but he must have been good at his job, because he’d gotten the reporters to back off and he’d persuaded the mayor to keep the speeches to a minimum.

  The new express train arrived right on time. The State Department man boarded it almost as soon as it stopped moving, and everyone in the street crowded up close to the platform. For about five minutes, nothing else happened, except for the stationmaster and the conductors moving up and down along the cars, but then the adept and her aides finally emerged and everyone cheered.

  There were six Cathayans, plus the State Department man and two men in overcoats who I figured for marshals sent out with them from Washington to make sure they managed all right. All of the Cathayans were wearing loose, high-collared shirts with long, straight sleeves, and wide-legged pants. The men’s shirts were just barely long enough to sit on, but the women’s shirts came all the way down to their knees and were slit up the sides to mid-thigh. Elaborate embroidery edged every collar, cuff, and hem.

  The Cathayans looked around and began talking very fast in a language that seemed to be all vowels. The State Department man said something back, more hesitantly, and pointed in our direction, and the little group crossed the platform to meet us.

  Even though I’d never seen her before, I knew right off which one was Master Adept Farawase. She was an erect woman of middle height, with a flattish face, golden tan skin, and dark eyes that tipped up at the outer corner. Her long black hair was gathered into a single thick braid that fell to the backs of her knees, just below the embroidered hem of her tunic. Two chin-length locks had been left out of the braid in front, framing her face, and three dragon-scale ornaments, each about an inch long and made of gold, dangled along the length of the right-hand lock. Unless you looked close enough to spot the few strands of white in her hair, she didn’t look more than thirty, but I’d have known just from the confident way she moved that she was a lot older than that. The odd thing was, her magic didn’t feel like anything special. After all the fuss, I’d expected her to be as strong as Lan.

  She’d brought four men and a woman with her. One of the men was nearly as short as she was, with thick, wavy hair and skin that was almost as dark as Professor Ochiba’s. He wore a mustache; the rest of the men were clean-shaven. He moved like quicksilver, examining everything and making comments in Cathayan. The second man was medium tall, with the same straight, jet-black hair, golden skin, and slightly tilted eyes as the master adept. The third was round-faced and stocky, and seemed suspicious of everything. He was the one who kept answering the first man’s comments, and from his tone of voice, he was annoyed.

  The fourth man was tall and broad-shouldered, with a rectangular chiseled face, a hawk nose, and teeth as even as piano keys. His skin was a warm, light brown, and he had dark brown hair that fell thick and loose to his shoulders. Like the master adept, he had an inch-long dragon scale woven into the hair on the right side of his face, but he had only one, and his was made of silver instead of gold.

  The last member of the Cathayan group was a slender young woman with dark, wavy hair, black eyes, and a heart-shaped face. At first I thought she was as tall as Master Adept Farawase, but then I realized that under her wide-legged pants she was wearing high-button boots with the tallest heels I’d ever seen. As the group reached us, she said something to the adept, bowed, and then stepped forward.

  “Permit me to introduce us,” she said, bowing again. “I am Speaker Bizen Sayo; you would say Miss Bizen. I am honored to be translator for Master Adept Farawase Rin.”

  The State Department man stepped forward and bowed back. “We are honored in turn, Master Adept Farawase, Speaker Bizen.”

  Miss Bizen turned and went down the line of Cathayans, giving their names and positions and a string of titles for each of them. I got lost very quickly, so I made Lan get me a list from the Settlement Office later on. The only one I remembered right off was the tall man wearing the silver dragon scale. Miss Bizen introduced him as Adept Alikaket, the master adept’s second in command.

  The State Department man was a lot better at names than I was, or else he’d memorized them all in advance. When Miss Bizen finished, he bowed to each of the Cathayans and welcomed them by name. Then he presented us, one at a time, starting with
the territory governor. Whenever he paused, Miss Bizen would turn and rattle it off in Cathayan; Master Adept Farawase would incline her head, and the State Department man would bow and go on to the next person. The adept didn’t seem too interested in the governor or the mayor or any of the other dignitaries, but she gave the State Department man a sharp look when he got to Professor Jeffries, and I thought she was paying much closer attention when it finally came down to Lan and me.

  The speeches that came next took even longer than the introductions, even though all of them boiled down to “Welcome to Mill City. We hope you like our town. Have a good time while you’re here.” The idea seemed to be that if the Cathayan master adept wouldn’t stay in Mill City, they’d drag out the time she was there for as long as they possibly could. Finally, it was all finished and we got into the carriages for the parade to the ferry.

  Since we weren’t particularly important people, Lan and I were in a closed carriage at the end of the line. I was just glad they’d put us together, so I had someone to talk to while we waited.

  “Do you think all of them are magicians?” I asked doubtfully.

  “They must be,” Lan said, half to himself. “A normal Cathayan circle has at least ten people. Adepts can handle twice that many, and a master adept can work with multiple circles. At least, that’s what Professor Warren —” He stopped short. Professor Warren was the man who’d died when the Hijero-Cathayan spell had gone wrong at Lan’s college.

  “Maybe they couldn’t all leave the Confederacy for so long,” I said. “Or maybe she didn’t figure she’d need all of them. It’s not like she’s going to be damming up a river or cutting a road through a mountain while she’s traveling.” Hijero-Cathayan spells are mostly large-scale; you didn’t need ten magicians at once to light a cookfire or seal up a storage barrel. Cathayan master adepts handle the biggest spells of all, the kind that only a double-seventh son could cast on his own.

  “What is she here for, anyway? She can’t have come all the way from Cathay to look at the medusa lizards, but they apparently didn’t think the Settlement Office needed to know about anything else.” He sounded a mite disgruntled.

  “Trains, the State Department man said.”

  Lan looked at me in disbelief. “Trains?”

  I shrugged. “The Cathayan Confederacy is building railroad lines all across their country, and they want the best trains they can get to run on them. They came to the U.S. because they’d heard that the Rationalist engineers have made a bunch of improvements to the engine, and they wanted to see for themselves. I don’t think they really believed that a bunch of folks who don’t believe in using magic would come up with anything good.”

  “Who else would?” Lan said. “The Rationalists may have loony ideas about magic, but you can’t deny that they’re brilliant when it comes to machines.”

  “Well, I guess the Cathayans know that now,” I said. “That was the new express train they came in on.”

  Lan nodded absently, like he’d already moved on to thinking about something else. “I wish I could talk to her,” he said wistfully.

  “About that spell?” I said, meaning the one that had gone so wrong the year before.

  Lan nodded. “The Northern Plains Riverbank College doesn’t have anyone who’s really studied Hijero-Cathayan magic, and I … don’t want to write anyone at Simon Magus. I need to know what went wrong.”

  “But you know —”

  “I mean exactly what went wrong,” Lan said. “But even if I could wrangle some time to talk to her, I’m not sure she could tell me what I need to know. Translating technical questions can be a problem.”

  “Why don’t you write to William?” I suggested. “There have to be people at Triskelion who can answer your questions.”

  Lan squirmed and looked away. “Maybe I will,” he said, and I knew that he wouldn’t.

  “Be that way, then,” I told him. I wanted to smack him for his stubbornness, but I knew there’d be no point to it. If Lan was too embarrassed to ask William something, nothing I could say or do would change his mind.

  When we reached the ferry at last, things started to speed up some. The adept and her aides were already on board, along with the two marshals; the professors were waiting for me. I gave Lan a hug and a last-minute reassurance for Mama, and went to join them.

  As the ferry pushed off, everyone gave a sigh of relief, even the Cathayans. They immediately went forward to look at the shimmer of the Great Barrier Spell, and after a minute Miss Bizen came back to ask Professor Jeffries about it. He spent the rest of the ferry ride talking with the adept and her aides.

  West Landing hadn’t put on anything like the show that Mill City had set up, but there were still plenty of curious people lined up to get a look at a Cathayan master adept. The Cathayans seemed unsurprised by it. The one with the mustache amused himself by making faces at the littlest childings along the street until the master adept saw and stopped him.

  By the time we got to the study center, it was late afternoon and everyone was tired. Professor Jeffries suggested that we all have dinner, and save the tour of the center and the medusa lizards for the next day.

  That night, I had a dream, one of the special ones. It was completely different from any of the ones I’d had before; the only reason I knew it was one of those dreams was because it was so sharp and clear and unforgettable.

  I was standing at one end of a large, darkened room. The floor was covered with a thick wool carpet with a complicated pattern in dark red and brown and deep green, but there weren’t any chairs or tables or lamps. The wall to my left was covered with built-in bookcases, floor to ceiling. Most of the bookshelves were full of books, but there were a couple that held little gadgets and mechanical toys, and in the dream, I knew what each of them did and what most of the books were about, even though I hadn’t read them all yet.

  I looked to my right. The wall on that side was paneled in a hundred different kinds of wood that made an even more complicated pattern than the one in the carpet. Every so often, the woods shifted into a new design, almost like something living. At intervals in the pattern, there were hooks holding pots of plants. Some were vines that trailed almost to the ground, and some were cooking herbs that we grew in the garden, and some were odd shapes and colors that I’d never seen before.

  Directly in front of me, at the far end of the room, was a set of heavy, midnight blue curtains that covered the whole wall. I hesitated. I looked at the wall of books, and then at the wall of plants. Finally, I walked slowly down to the end of the room and pulled the curtains aside.

  Light spilled into the room, blindingly bright. I raised my hand to block it out, and the movement woke me. I sat up, shivering in the darkness, and pulled at the comforter to wrap it more closely around my shoulders. The little wooden pendant that I always wore thumped against my chest, and I shivered again.

  The dreams and the cold had something to do with the pendant, I’d figured out that much, but I didn’t know what. Wash knew, I was sure, but he wouldn’t tell me. I’d meant to ask Professor Ochiba, because whatever the pendant was doing, it pretty much had to be Aphrikan magic, but thanks to Mama’s dinners, I hadn’t gotten the chance to ask in person when she was visiting, and it didn’t seem the sort of thing that would be a good idea to put in a letter.

  After a bit, I stopped shivering. I tucked the pendant away and lay back down. I knew I didn’t have to worry about waking up like that again; I only ever had one of those dreams in a night. It still took me a long time to fall back asleep. Right before I did, I remembered what I’d seen through the blinding light at the very end of my dream.

  Mountains.

  In the morning, I woke up feeling pretty good in spite of not having had as much sleep as I should have, but I was still almost late to breakfast on account of taking extra time to write down the dream. Professor Jeffries and Professor Torgeson were already there, and the six Cathayans arrived a moment later.

  While we ate
, Professor Jeffries gave a summary of how we’d found out about the medusa lizards and what we’d learned about them from studying the dead one. It took the whole meal, because he had to keep pausing so Miss Bizen could translate. Every once in a while one of the Cathayans had a question, and that would have to be translated back and forth, too. I noticed that the master adept and her chief assistant were paying careful attention to Professor Jeffries while he talked, and I wondered whether they understood more English than they’d let on.

  Once we finished eating, Professor Jeffries showed the Cathayans around the study center, and then we walked out to the supply building where the medusa lizard hatchlings were kept. They’d grown a lot in just the few weeks since I’d first seen them; they were nearly three feet long now, nose to tail, and we’d had to enlarge the pen we kept them in. They still got excited and ran to Professor Jeffries whenever they saw him. They didn’t pay any attention to me, even though I was the one who’d been feeding them every day since Professor Torgeson and I had arrived.

  We’d cleared the supplies out of the whole back half of the building to make plenty of room for the Cathayans in front of the pens. Master Adept Farawase looked around and gave a small, wintry smile of approval. Then she turned, gave a formal nod to Professor Jeffries, and said something in Cathayan.

  Miss Bizen bowed to the adept, then to Professor Jeffries, and said, “Master Adept Farawase requests that you allow her to perform some close examinations of these creatures. Is this acceptable?”

  One of the marshals stepped forward, frowning slightly. “What sort of close examination? If you please,” he added.