The Far West (Frontier Magic #3)

by Patricia C. Wrede

  As soon as the storage area was finished, Mr. Corvales and Captain Velasquez sent half the soldiers and explorers out every day to cut hay and hunt. We built a smokehouse next to the river, to smoke the bison and deer and silverhooves that the hunters brought in. Everyone who wasn’t hunting or building walls spent at least part of every day gathering plants that would keep for a few months in a root cellar — cattail roots, late prairie turnips, sunflower and needlepoint seeds, elderberries, and so on.

  Dr. Visser’s lists came in real handy; there were a lot more things that we could eat than anyone had expected, and he found a slough a ways north that was full of a tall, reddish-purple grass, which he said would be particularly good feed for the horses. We spent three weeks cutting it and filling the wagons, over and over.

  In mid-September, two of the soldiers left, along with Mr. Gensier, his assistant, and Greasy Pierre. They took copies of all the important notes and maps and discoveries the expedition had made so far, particularly including the things like the don’t-notice-it spells that worked especially well on medusa lizards. Everyone sent letters, too, though there wasn’t room in the saddlebags for more than two per person. Since the returning party knew where they were going and what to expect, and since they didn’t have wagons to slow them down, they had plenty of time to make it to St. Jacques du Fleuve before travel got difficult, even if there was an early snowstorm in October.

  Everyone was a little solemn for a few days after the small group left. It wasn’t just because the expedition had been suddenly reduced by five people. We all knew that they’d been sent back so that we’d have a better chance of getting through the winter, with fewer men and horses to feed, and so that the things we’d learned so far would get back to people who could make use of them, even if we never did.

  Right after the return party left, Mr. Corvales and Captain Velasquez had a big argument with Adept Alikaket over the mammoth, right in the middle of the compound.

  “We’re going to have enough trouble keeping the horses fed all winter,” Captain Velasquez told him. “If we try to keep that creature around, we’ll end up starving the lot of them.”

  “It has been of much use,” Adept Alikaket pointed out.

  “Yes, yes,” Mr. Corvales said testily. “I admit the creature has been useful, but it’s also caused us plenty of problems.”

  “None of which have been serious,” the adept said, “and all of which were easy to deal with.”

  Captain Velasquez snorted. “Not serious? The day of that fire outside St. Jacques, we’d have been away at least half an hour earlier if it hadn’t been for that thing. It was just luck that the fire went east instead of south. It could have been us burning up instead of that settlement, if the wind had shifted.”

  “But it was not.”

  “No,” Mr. Corvales said. “But it could have been, and next time we may not be so lucky. And the captain here is right about the feed.”

  Adept Alikaket frowned slightly. “Mammoths live wild here, yes? There should be plenty of things for it to eat.”

  Right about then, Captain Velasquez caught sight of Professor Torgeson crossing the compound, and he called to her to come and explain things to the adept. “You’re partly right,” she said after Mr. Corvales and Captain Velasquez told her what the problem was. “The mammoth has been grazing all summer; we couldn’t have brought enough feed along with us for it. Or for the horses, for that matter.”

  “Then —”

  “There’s a reason mammoths migrate south for the winter,” Professor Torgeson went on. “Food. You won’t find wild mammoths this far north much after mid-October. And if the past five years are anything to go by, we’ll have trouble keeping this one here. It’s always tried to break out of its pen during migration season, even back in Mill City.”

  “If we gather more food —” the adept started.

  “Weren’t you listening?” Professor Torgeson snapped. “Food or no food, it’s going to try to take off after its free brethren, starting in about two weeks, and if there’s a spell to stop it, we haven’t learned it in all the years it’s been in the menagerie.”

  “And we haven’t the time to gather enough to feed it all winter, nor space to store it if we could gather it,” Captain Velasquez added.

  “And the thing is more trouble than it’s worth.” Mr. Corvales held up a hand to stop the adept’s objection. “Yes, it’s been useful, but it hasn’t been useful enough. I don’t understand why you insisted on bringing it along in the first place.”

  Adept Alikaket glared at the three of them. “I will think about this,” he said at last. “If any of you have any other ideas, I hope you will let me know.”

  “Personally, I think we should shoot it now, smoke the meat, and tan the hide,” Professor Torgeson muttered.

  I could understand her saying that. Though it wasn’t quite full-grown, the mammoth was large enough to provide meat for half the camp for a good part of the winter, and a mammoth-hide blanket would keep several people warmer than just about anything else. I hoped it wouldn’t come to shooting it, though. I’d been working with the mammoth since my first year in upper school, and I’d much rather turn it loose to take its chances than kill it outright.

  The argument continued, off and on, for several days, and pretty much everyone had an opinion. Most of the soldiers were with Professor Torgeson, and thought we should shoot it, at least until Mr. Zarbeliev told everyone that he’d had mammoth a time or two and it was stringy and rank and nothing you’d want to eat unless you were a good way beyond desperate. There were a few folks among the scientists and magicians who thought we should try to keep it — Dr. Lefevre was the most outspoken of those — but most everyone else thought we should let it go, and the sooner the better.

  Professor Torgeson’s remark about the mammoth getting ornery during migration put me in mind of how hard it had been to keep it contained, even when it was small. It had gone right through a rail fence once, early on when it was still a baby, and Professor Jeffries had had to improve the fence nearly every year after that. Finally, he got a bunch of his students together to build a stone wall, ten feet high and three feet thick, and after that we hadn’t worried so much about the mammoth escaping. Now, though, I didn’t think our log wall would be enough to hold the critter, and even if it was, the mammoth could do a lot of damage to it trying to get out.

  I mentioned as much to Professor Torgeson, though I didn’t expect much to come of it. She frowned and told me that I’d spent more time caring for the mammoth than anybody except Professor Jeffries, and therefore if anybody was an expert on it, I was. Then she marched me off to talk to Adept Alikaket and Captain Velasquez. Adept Alikaket didn’t look happy, but he had to admit that keeping the mammoth inside the log wall was dangerous as well as crowded. Eventually, he agreed to staking the mammoth in the corral outside the wall whenever we weren’t using it. The corral had just as many protection spells on it as the compound, and if the mammoth did get restless and try to get out, we wouldn’t have as much trouble fixing up the damage.

  In the last week of September, just about sunrise, we woke to loud snarls, and the shouts of the sentries, and something slamming into the log wall around the compound. Everyone scrambled to grab a rifle and get out of the tents to find out what was happening.

  I wasn’t the first one out, but I wasn’t the last, either. The first thing I saw was the front end of something hanging on to the top of the log wall. It had large, upstanding, triangular ears and a pointed muzzle like a fox’s, full of teeth, but it looked to be almost as big as a saber cat. It was making noises like a cat, too. Its fur was dark brown, streaked with lighter brown in places. It clawed at the logs, leaving long gouges in the wood. Its hindquarters were still outside, and it didn’t seem to have enough purchase to haul itself over and in.

  As I rolled away from the tent, I heard two shots almost together, then another. The creature on the wall snarled and fell backward, disappearing behind the
wall. A second later, something large and heavy crashed into the wall from outside. The timbers creaked and cracked, and there was a yowl.

  “Three more outside!” the sentry shouted down from the platform.

  Wash swung himself up to the narrow walkway that ran just below the top of the wall. “Concealing magic, too,” he reported a second later. “Anybody have a neutralizing spell?”

  “Me,” Professor Torgeson said, climbing up beside him. I was right behind her, and the minute my feet were firm on the walkway, I looked around for something to shoot.

  Right on the other side of the log wall, three of the giant fox-things were attacking the mammoth. The body of a fourth one lay at the foot of the log wall, twisted and unmoving. Now that I got a good look at the whole of them, they looked even more like giant foxes; they were tall and built for speed, and their tails were long and bushy.

  Outside the corral, I spotted a ripple in the air, like a heat haze in high summer; if Wash hadn’t said something, I’d never have noticed. I figured there were others, but I didn’t look for them right then. I could only shoot one at a time.

  I raised my rifle, keeping my eyes on the shimmer. Beside me, Professor Torgeson started muttering rapidly, her hands weaving an invisible pattern in the air. A rifle cracked, and one of the critters on the ground by the mammoth yelped and rolled head over tail as the bullet hit.

  The mammoth lowered its head and made a sideways swipe faster than anything that large ought to have been able to move. When its head came up, the tips of its tusks were red and another one of the fox-things lay still.

  Professor Torgeson finished her spell on a shout, and magic ripped outward from her in a great circle. The heat-shimmer in the air that I was watching blinked into another of the fox-things. I squeezed the trigger and chambered the second round without even thinking.

  The giant fox-thing yowled and went down, injured but not dead. I looked for another target. Several more of the creatures had appeared out of nowhere when Professor Torgeson neutralized their concealing magic. They were moving too fast for me to get a good shot. I picked one and tracked it, waiting for it to pause long enough for me to be sure of hitting it.

  One of the fox-things leaped onto the mammoth’s back, digging in with its long, curved claws. The mammoth bellowed and shook itself. The thing on its back clung to its place, barely. Two of the creatures that had been concealed streaked toward the log wall; they seemed to know that their concealing magic was gone … and who to blame for it. I fired at one of them, but I missed.

  More shots rang out, and more of the fox-things dropped. One of them made it to the log wall and leaped, but it fell short of the top. The mammoth moved again, dodging and shaking, and swept the fox-creature from his back at last. Then he swiped his tusks at the fox by the log wall, knocking the critter halfway across the corral. I shot a third time, and so did nearly everyone else.

  And then it was over. We all stayed on the wall for a while, ready and waiting, until we were positive that there were no more of the fox-things, while the mammoth did his own check, stomping and snorting all around the edges of the corral. When we were finally sure it was safe, Captain Velasquez ordered a double watch along the wall, and the rest of us set about cleaning up.

  We counted nine of the creatures lying dead in and around the corral. The log wall needed repairs, and the protection spells on the corral were completely gone.

  That last part worried everyone the most. The fox-things had not only gone right through the spells, they’d also taken them down without anyone noticing. Even the log wall hadn’t been as much of a barrier as we’d hoped; from the marks on the outside, that first critter hadn’t had any trouble clawing its way straight up it.

  “We need an alarm spell,” Mr. Corvales said when he heard about the protections on the corral being gone. “Something to tell us if the protection spells drop.”

  “We had one,” Captain Velasquez told him. “The giant invisible foxes took it down along with everything else.”

  “Then we need something that won’t go down if the rest of the spells do,” Mr. Corvales said firmly.

  Captain Velasquez looked like he was only just barely preventing himself from groaning, but nobody could argue that Mr. Corvales was wrong, so the captain and Wash and a couple of the magicians put their heads together and came up with an alarm spell that was anchored a ways back from the wall or fence that the protection spells were tied to. They figured that since it wasn’t hooked to the same thing as the protections, it wouldn’t go down at the same time, and we’d at least have notice that something was wrong. Nobody knew if it would actually work against the invisible foxes, though, and nobody really wanted to find out the hard way.

  All of the magicians got busy with the dead foxes right away, dissecting them and studying them to find out what made them tick. We hadn’t really had the need or time to examine any of our other new specimens so closely, and if it hadn’t been so important to learn everything we could as fast as we could, studying the giant invisible foxes would have been a nice change of pace. Captain Velasquez’s name for them stuck, though Dr. Lefevre complained every time he heard it that it was misleading, because the fox-things weren’t actually invisible, just magically concealed temporarily. Nobody else thought it was much of a difference.

  The other thing that the fox attack did was to settle the argument over the mammoth. It had pushed the log wall out of true and cracked a couple of logs, and it had just been attacking the invisible fox, not the wall. Everyone could see that the rail fence of the corral wouldn’t hold it for a minute if it decided to get out, and nobody wanted to chance the mammoth making a serious attack on the wall. Adept Alikaket tried pointing out that the mammoth had killed two of the nine foxes, but you could tell his heart wasn’t really in it.

  So a couple of days after the attack, Wash and Professor Torgeson and I took the mammoth across the river and let it go. I had mixed feelings as I watched it amble away, but Professor Torgeson grumbled that we should have shot it just on general principles. I never did find out why the adept had been so set on bringing it along on the expedition.

  From then on, we were even more careful when we sent groups out to cut hay and hunt and gather for the winter. We didn’t see any more of the invisible foxes, but Wash shot another medusa lizard.

  As the days shortened and the weather got colder, there was less and less forage to be found, and everyone stuck close to the compound. The wall proved its worth more than once in those months. The terror birds had started south early in September, but the saber cats and Columbian sphinxes and prairie wolves didn’t leave until the herds of bison and the migrating mammoths went south in October. Twice, a pride of cats tried to come over the wall, just like the invisible foxes, and once Captain Velasquez called out the whole army unit to head off a woolly rhinoceros. The first snowstorm came in early November. It was kind of a shock for the soldiers who’d been born and raised in the South Plains; they’d been complaining about the cold since September, and they hadn’t really believed any of us Northerners when we told them it was going to get a whole lot worse.

  Adept Alikaket still got up early every morning to do his practice, and as folks got less busy with gathering, more of them joined in. Even Lan started coming again. At first, I was pleased to see him, but by early November I could see that he was getting restless. And then suddenly he stopped coming.

  I might have thought he’d lost interest, except that I caught him scowling at the adept when no one else was looking. He had the exact same expression he always got when he was sulking about something Mama had forbidden him to do. Nine times out of ten, he went off and did it anyway, and got into terrible trouble. I couldn’t let him do that on the expedition, so three days after he stopped showing up at the adept’s morning practice, I collared Lan and dragged him out to a corner of the compound where we could talk more or less in private.

  At first, he didn’t want to tell me what was up, but I kept at him. “
You can’t tell me it’s nothing, Lan Rothmer — I know better. And you should know by this time that I’ll get it out of you, sooner or later, so you might as well tell me now and save us both a fair lot of aggravation.”

  “All right,” he said finally. “It’s that Cathayan.”

  “Yes, I already figured out that much,” I told him. “So what about him?”

  “I asked him to teach me, and he said no.”

  I stared for a minute. “But he’s teaching everyone, every morning. You just have to show up.”

  “Not the silly exercises!” Lan said, exasperated. “Magic! Proper Hijero-Cathayan spells, not the halfway theory that they teach — taught —” He stopped. I waited. After a minute, he went on, “Anyway, he didn’t even consider it.”

  “The practice isn’t silly,” I told him sternly. “It’s part of the magic. And I don’t think he can teach ‘proper Hijero-Cathayan spells’ to anyone here, really. From what he said —”

  “He’s teaching William!” Lan burst out.

  I blinked at him. “He is?”

  Lan nodded.

  “Then maybe we’d better talk to William.”

  “I don’t want —”

  “Maybe not, but we’re going to do it anyway,” I interrupted him. “Because if we don’t, you’ll keep stewing until you decide to go off and try something all on your own.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Lan said, but his eyes slid sideways.

  “You were thinking about it, though, weren’t you?”

  “Maybe.” He looked down, then straightened. “But I really wouldn’t actually try to do anything. Not after what happened last time.”

  “I hope not,” I said. “But I bet it will be a lot easier for you to not do anything if we talk to William and Adept Alikaket before you think yourself into a bowline knot.”

  William was working on the invisible foxes with Professor Ochiba. We still didn’t know how they’d taken down the protection spells on the corral, or how they’d gotten around them in the first place, because most natural magic doesn’t leave traces the way Avrupan spells do, so it’s really hard to study unless you actually see it happening.