The Far West

by Patricia C. Wrede

  “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 th
ree 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.

  After that, we moved the dissection right to the edge of the protection spells, as far away from everyone else as we could get, and Dr. Lefevre was even more careful than he’d been before. He claimed it was because he didn’t want to ruin another one of his dissecting knives. None of us believed him, but nobody wanted to say so. He was cranky enough already.

  The rock dragon had more venom sacks in its front legs, set so that the oil could squeeze out of the long spike that rose from the back of its hands. Dr. Lefevre pressed his lips together when he saw them and said, “I believe we have discovered the source of that strange injury on the sphinx Mr. Morris brought in some weeks ago.”

  Professor Torgeson frowned. “That’s just a guess.”

  “Provisional theory,” Dr. Lefevre corrected.

  The only good news was that the dragon’s venom had so much concentrated magic that Dr. Lefevre was sure it had to stick to highly magical areas to maintain it. Professor Ochiba wondered out loud whether this was why so much of the magical wildlife we’d run into could absorb magic, which made Professor Torgeson mutter some more about speculations.

  We did a test on one of the venom sacks, and established that sucking all the magic out of it did neutralize the venom inside. Professor Torgeson said that still didn’t prove anything, but at least it gave us a way to fight it if another rock dragon got near enough to someone to spit venom at him.

  “Which is highly unlikely,” Dr. Lefevre explained when he told Captain Velasquez, Adept Alikaket, and Mr. Corvales what we’d found. “A predator such as this needs a large territory, and would not tolerate others of its kind within the area it claims.”

  “Any idea how to tell how big an area that would be?” Captain Velasquez asked.

  “I’m afraid not; not exactly,” Dr. Lefevre replied. “Given its size and speed, however, I believe it unlikely that we’ll cross into another dragon’s territory for a day’s ride, at least. However, when we do, the rock dragon’s need for high levels of magic means that it will very likely be hunting near the river.”

  “Well, at least we know what to expect now,” the captain replied with a sigh. “Would you ask Miss Dzozkic and Mr. Boden to step in? I’d like to know if they can estimate how much farther we have to go before they’re satisfied.”

  We had just left the tent to look for them when one of the guards shouted, “Rock dragons!”

  There were nine of them, coming straight for us across the plains from the south, and if we hadn’t camped on a rise, we wouldn’t have seen them until they were on top of us. They moved with the familiarity and coordination of a pack of wolves, and I realized that nobody had thought of dragons hunting in packs. Why would we? Ice dragons and steam dragons were solitary hunters; so were the extinct mountain dragons of Ashia and the sand dragons of the Sahara.

  Rock dragons were, apparently, different from other dragons in more than size and meanness. I ran for my rifle, like almost everyone else who wasn’t carrying theirs around in camp. The guards were already firing. I heard the deep boom of one of the elephant guns, and then another.

  “It’s flying!” someone yelled.

  A hand grabbed my arm and spun me around. It was William, panting like he’d run after me. “The venom,” he gasped out. “We have to neutralize it. Magicians’ job.”

  I stared at him for a second, then nodded. I’d never really thought of myself as one of the magicians; I’d always figured that I was better with a gun than with spells. But I was one of the six people left in the magicians’ section of the expedition, even if I was only Professor Torgeson’s assistant, and except for the folks we’d just told, we were the only ones who knew about the venom and what to do about it. And with nine rock dragons —

  The air trembled and I felt the same sucking I’d felt by the river. The protection spells around the camp shivered and shrank. “Fall back to the shield line!” Captain Velasquez shouted behind me, and the row of people with guns moved back until they were inside the protection spells again.

  I felt another pull, and off to one side I saw Elizabet Dzozkic collapse, along with the protection spells. She must have been the one holding them, I thought. Then I felt a familiar surge, and the protection spells were back, stronger and solider than before.

  “Lan!” I gasped. “What’s he doing?”

  “Never mind!” William said, and pointed past the line of soldiers facing the rock dragons through the protection spells. Two of the dragons had taken to the air and were almost to the soldiers. “You do that one; I’ll get the other. Then go for the ones on the ground.”

  I nodded and reached out with my world-sensing. It was a lot harder with live rock dragons; at first I couldn’t find any of them. Then I realized that I was feeling a rock that was up in the air and moving, and I latched onto it and cast the spell Dr. Lefevre used to drain magic from the venom sacks of the one we’d dissected.

  The spell took hold, but slowly. Too slowly. The rock dragon would be on us before the venom’s magic was fully drained, and the rest of the pack was right behind it — there wasn’t time to take care of all of them.

  I sank deeper into the magic, looking frantically for a way to tweak the draining spell so that it would work faster and cover more of the rock dragons. And then, suddenly, I fell through into the quiet that was just magic and no spells.

  It was like being deep underwater, knowing that above me there were fish swimming, and higher up there were boats and people fishing and swimming and splashing, but none of it could reach where I was. It felt like the ocean in my dreams. It felt right.

  I took a deep breath, struggling to keep a sense of the world around me as well as all the magic. All the magic … I had more magic than I’d ever need, but I didn’t know how to make it do what I wanted. I didn’t know enough, and there wasn’t enough time for me to figure it all out. But there were other people who knew.

  I reached out, up through the currents of magic, until I felt the spells that people were weaving. I recognized Lan’s magic first, holding the protection spell around the camp with every bit of power a double-seventh son had. Pushing more magic up to him was easy, because he had so much already that I didn’t have to worry about burning him out.

  The protection spells solidified into a glimmering dome. I saw the first of the airborne rock dragons crash into it and bounce off, hissing. It spat, but the venom hit the barrier and ran down it like raindrops running down a windowpane. The ground at the bottom smoked and bubbled, but the spell was undamaged; magic couldn’t burn magic.

  William came next, because I’d worked with him enough that his magic was almost as familiar as Lan’s. I tried to be more careful with pushing magic at him, but the minute I started, he sort of slid down through all the water to join me.

  “What on earth —?” I heard him say.

  “It’s just magic!” I said aloud. “Use it!”

  “Right.”

  I felt his world-sensing spread out, shaping the raw magic to drain the rock dragons’ venom. That gave me an idea, and I looked up. Sure enough, Wash and Professor Ochiba both had their world-sensing working as hard as ever they could make it go. I reached for both of them, and this time, instead of pushing magic at them, I pulled them down through all the types and layers of magic to the place where I was, where it was all the same.

  I didn’t stop to see what they’d do
with it; I looked around to see who I could pull in next. I saw Adept Alikaket, practically glowing from bringing his magic up as high as it would go. I saw him blow the wing off a rock dragon that had just launched itself into the air, and I hesitated. The adept was doing just fine without any extra power, and I didn’t want to distract him. On the other hand, he probably knew more about using extra power than anyone else there, what with the way Hijero-Cathayan group spells worked. I stretched up.

  It was harder with Adept Alikaket, because I didn’t know him the way I knew Lan and William, and I didn’t know much about the Cathayan magic he was using, not the way I knew the Aphrikan magic that Professor Ochiba and Wash used. Then he seemed to sense what I was trying to do, and a bit of his spell opened up to let me in. I didn’t go in; I grabbed the edges of the opening and pulled him down to join the rest of us.

  I did Dr. Lefevre and Professor Torgeson next, then looked for anyone else who was using magic to fight. Roger was standing next to Sergeant Amy; she was reloading a repeater rifle while he threw blasts of fire at a dragon who hissed and spat against the protection barrier, less than three feet in front of them. I shoved magic at him, and his next blast charred the dragon’s leg to the bone. Mr. Corvales was using his magic to aim the elephant gun; I waited until he’d finished the shot, then pushed magic at him, too.

  I was running out of magicians, and I still didn’t know how to work with all the magic. I let myself float up to the surface of the magic, figuring I could let everyone else handle the spells now, while I got my rifle.

  I didn’t need it. The pack of rock dragons were all dead. Some had been shot; some had been burned or crushed by spells; one of the flying ones had crashed into the ground from too high up. The shimmering dome of Lan’s protection spells slowly faded back to normal as I watched.

  All around me, people lowered their guns or relaxed from their spell casting and started taking stock. We hadn’t gotten off scot-free. Elizabet was still unconscious, with Bronwyn minding her. Wash had a burn down one side where he’d been caught by a spray of venom, one of the soldiers had been badly clawed, and two of the horses were dead. All of the magicians were wobbly on their feet, though it was hard to tell whether it was from what I’d done to most of them, from too much spell casting generally, or just from having been in a big fight. Still, we hadn’t actually lost anyone, which was a lot better than it could have been.