Across the Great Barrier

CHAPTER 16

THE ROCK FELT AS LIGHT IN MY HAND AS THE ACTUAL BIRD WOULD have been, could I have held it. Carefully, I brushed the last few bits of dirt from the stone feathers. The legs and feet were broken off, but the rest of the bird was perfect. The pointed part that had caught my eye was the tip of the tail feathers poking out of the dirt. The bird’s head was tilted, as if it was looking down at something. Two of the wing feathers weren’t quite lined up right, just like a real bird that hadn’t closed its wings all the way when it landed.

“Professor Torgeson!” I called. “I think you should see this.”

“I found it!” Champ yelled at almost the same time. “Look, Professor!”

He was closer to the professor than I was, so by the time I reached them, they were both bent over his find. He held the head of the squirrel. One ear was chipped off; except for that, it was as finely detailed as the paw and the bird. The squirrel’s teeth were bared as if it was going to attack something. I wondered what the whole statue would look like if we ever found enough parts to put it together.

The professor was just as excited about my swallow as she was about the squirrel head, but she told us not to dig around on the slope anymore. She said the excavators would want it to be undisturbed, and we should look through the dam instead, since that was already all mixed up.

Inside of an hour, we’d both found a heap of broken statue bits. All of them seemed to be bits of animals, and all of them were perfectly detailed. Most of them were too small to tell what the whole statue had been of, but there were a few that were obvious: a duck’s head, a deer hoof, and a whole shrew. Some of them had obviously been magical animals — there isn’t anything else that looks quite like a slitherrat — but for the most part we couldn’t be sure whether the bits we were looking at had come from statues of natural animals or magical ones.

Finally, the professor told us to stop. “We’ve already piled up more than we can reasonably carry back to Promised Land, let alone haul along all the way to Mill City,” she pointed out. “We’ll sort through this and choose the best specimens, and leave the rest for the excavators.”

So we sat around the pile of broken statues, hunting for the best bits. Champ and I worked quickly, but the professor went more and more slowly and examined each piece more and more carefully. I could see she was looking for something; she was acting the same way she had when she thought up the business about the mirror bug traps, but hadn’t told anyone what she thought because she hadn’t checked it yet.

“I wonder why anyone would make so many statues way out here,” Champ said after a while.

“I am beginning to wonder whether anyone did,” the professor said. “But one way or another, here they are. I expect the excavators will —”

She broke off in mid-sentence and went pale, staring at the rock she held. It was a sizable chunk, nearly as large as my head, which meant we for sure wouldn’t be hauling it back with us. On one side there was a patch the size of my hand covered in a pattern of scales. The other sides were all smooth surfaces and sharp edges where the rest of it had broken away.

“Oh, that one,” Champ put in. “I knew when I found it that it was too big to take back, but I wanted to show you. See, it looks like the skin on a snake, but it can’t have been from a snake statue. The scales are way too big, and so’s the rock. I thought maybe you’d know what it was meant for.”

“It wasn’t a snake,” Professor Torgeson said in a strangled voice.

“Professor?” I said cautiously when she didn’t say anything more.

“This pattern … it’s just not possible,” she said. She looked up after a minute and shook her head. “This is a perfect rendering of the scales of an ice dragon. Perfect. No one who hasn’t actually seen a sample ever gets those waves right, or the overlap. It’s a bit off indent, and most of the drawings are either too much or too little.”

“But ice dragons can’t get this far from the tundra,” I said. “And why would anyone here carve a statue of an ice dragon, anyway?”

“I don’t think anyone did,” the professor said more strongly than before.

“How else did they get here?” Champ asked. “For sure nobody would haul a bunch of statues out here and then dump them.”

“I don’t believe these were carved,” the professor told us. “They don’t show any tool marks, at least to the naked eye, and they’re far more detailed than any sculpture I’ve ever seen. I wish I’d brought my magnifying glass down with me, but I hadn’t thought I’d need it. I’ll know more when I’ve had a chance to look at these in camp. At least, I hope I’ll know more.”

“If they weren’t carved, how were they made?” I asked.

Professor Torgeson pressed her lips together, and I knew right then that she had a notion but she wasn’t going to tell it. Sure enough, after a moment all she said was, “I don’t know. Yet.”

Wash was still having his think at the edge of the landslide, so the three of us began hauling statue samples up the slope to camp. The professor took the big piece with the ice dragon scales on it first thing. She stayed in camp to dig her magnifying glass out of the saddlebags, while Champ and I brought the rest of the bits up a little at a time.

When we finished, Professor Torgeson was still studying the first few pieces we’d brought up, so it was plain she’d be a while. Champ and I went back down to the river to see if Wash had finished thinking yet.

We found him crouched at the near end of the landslide, almost sitting on his heels. He looked up as we walked toward him and raised an eyebrow. “Where’s Professor Torgeson?”

“Camp,” Champ said, and frowned. “We aren’t childings, you know.”

“Could have fooled me,” Wash said. “Or have you learned to cast a continuous protection already?”

“It’s near mid-day,” I said, ignoring his troublemaking. “Are you coming up to eat, or do we have to bring something down?”

Wash unfolded himself. “I’ll come up. I need to ask the professor something.”

Neither Champ nor I had quite enough nerve to ask Wash what he’d been doing by the creek so long, but we found out as soon as he commenced speaking with Professor Torgeson. He’d been working out what to do about the dam, and he said apologetically that he’d need an afternoon of quiet to set up the spell for the next morning.

Professor Torgeson said she didn’t mind staying away from the creek all afternoon, but she was more than a mite perturbed by the notion that he intended to do something about the dammed-up area all on his own.

“What are you thinking of?” she demanded. “It would take at least a five-magician team to remove all that mass, and even if we’d all trained for it, there are only four of us. If you’re thinking of burning yourself out by trying it alone —”

“I’m hardly such a fool as that,” Wash said. “I have something else in mind.”

“You’re going to do a working!” Champ cried. “Can I watch? Please?”

“A … working?” Professor Torgeson looked startled. Then she gave Wash a narrow-eyed look. “An Aphrikan working? I was under the impression you were born in Columbia.”

“That I was,” Wash said agreeably. “But there are ways to learn Aphrikan magic even here.”

“I know just as much of it as I know Avrupan magic,” Champ said. He sounded angry, like he thought the professor was questioning his skills.

“Miss Ochiba taught Aphrikan magic to eight or nine of us after school for six years,” I put in.

“All right, all right,” the professor said. “I just thought … Never mind. I, too, would like to watch, if you’ll permit it.”

“Not this afternoon,” Wash said. “It’ll be simpler if it’s just me. Tomorrow, you can watch if you like. There won’t be much for you to see, though.” He put just the smallest extra stress on you, which made me wonder. Then he said, “Miss Eff, Champ, you can watch, too, as long as you keep yourselves strictly under control,” and I knew what he’d meant.

Avrupan spells could do a lot of things, but I didn’t know of any that did what Aphrikan world-sensing did. And world-sensing was one of the earliest bits of Aphrikan magic we’d learned from Miss Ochiba. It wasn’t exactly a spell. Spells work on things outside you — rocks and tables and weeds and candles. World-sensing is something you do to yourself, inside your own head, so that you can feel more of what’s going on around you. Growing up as he had, Champ had to know even more Aphrikan magic than I did, so for sure he knew how to do world-sensing. Professor Torgeson didn’t, so she wouldn’t be able to tell much of anything about Wash’s spell casting.

Suddenly, I felt a little embarrassed. I hadn’t really practiced my world-sensing since the hunt for the saber cats. Oh, I’d used it off and on, but I hadn’t been working at it the way I should have. At first, I’d just been extra sensitive to the unpleasant, dead feel of the land where the mirror bugs had been, and I’d taken to putting off doing a proper practice session. Lately, it flat-out hurt whenever I tried, so I’d pretty much given it up.

I frowned slightly. Wash and Champ didn’t seem to be having problems, and I bet myself that there were plenty of people in Promised Land who did world-sensing every day. I thought back, trying to remember when I’d started having problems. Right after the saber cat hunt, that was when I’d started avoiding my practice. And it had gotten painful after Novokoros … no, just before we got to Novokoros, at the failed settlement where Professor Torgeson had taken the bluehornet specimen.

Right after I’d had the dreams.

I frowned harder. I couldn’t see any reason why those two strange dreams should have mucked up my world-sensing, but I was willing to bet they’d done something. I resolved to start doing a proper practice from then on, headache or not.

Professor Torgeson decided that since we couldn’t go down the slope to the banks of the creek without bothering Wash, we’d all of us do some plant lists in the woods. With most of the trees dead, the sunlight got all the way down to the ground, and a lot of new bushes and trees had sprouted. Even keeping close to the campsite, so as to take advantage of the temporary protection spells, we found plenty enough things to list.

Next morning, we all went down to the creek to watch Wash work his spell. He sat us down a ways from the end of the dam and told us not to move from there and to be real quiet. Then he walked a few feet out onto the landslide, picking his way over stones and broken branches until he came to a spot that was clear. He sat down cross-legged, facing upstream toward the dammed-up lake, and for a minute nothing seemed to happen at all.

Cautiously, I started in on world-sensing. It was confusing at first, and my head hurt just the way it had been doing since the bluehornet settlement, but I made myself go on. After a minute or two, the headache stopped and everything settled. To my surprise, the area around Daybat Creek didn’t feel anywhere near as icy dead as most places had since we crossed the Mammoth River, just sort of cool with colder patches. The water felt warmest; the coldest part was the dam itself.

Wash reached in his rear pocket and pulled out a jack-knife. He opened it up and threw it down into the ground like he was playing mumblety-peg, so that the blade stuck. He dragged it forward along the way the blade was facing, cutting a line in the earth. Then he pulled the knife out and threw again.

Five times, he threw the knife and cut lines in the ground, all in dead silence. I could feel a kind of pressure building up, the way the air feels some days right before a thunderstorm, still and heavy and menacing. Then Wash took the knife and made a cut across the palm of each of his hands. Leaning forward, he slapped both hands down on the pattern he’d made.

I more than half expected something dramatic to happen, but nothing did. The professor stirred and whispered, “What is he doing?”

“Shh!” Champ hissed, and we were still.

I felt a warm spot in the dam. It wasn’t very big and it wasn’t very warm — just a small patch near the creek bed on the side nearest the water. I focused on that place, trying to sense what was different about it, but at first all I could sense was the warmth.

Then something shifted in my mind, and I knew what was happening. The water that was building up in the lake put pressure on the dam everywhere, but since the dam wasn’t really a nice, even shape, the pressure wasn’t quite the same all over. The warm bit of the dam was the place where the water was pressing hardest and soaking into the fallen dirt. The warmth of the water was sinking into the dam along with the water itself.

I still couldn’t feel Wash’s spell casting. I frowned, trying to concentrate harder, and almost lost my focus. Then I realized my mistake. I knew what Avrupan magic felt like, from doing world-sensing in my magic class at the upper school, and I’d been expecting something like that: a cage of magic built up all around the outside of something, to make it change. But Wash’s magic was inside the dam somewhere.

As soon as I thought that, I felt it — deep and firm, but also gentle, like Wash’s voice. It was all through the dam, but especially in the warmer part, and it felt like it belonged, like it was just another part of the rocks and dirt and trees. I figured that was why I’d had so much difficulty in sensing it in the first place.

I waited, expecting the magic to do something, but it just seemed to sit there. Then I noticed that the warm spot in the dam was growing, and not because Wash was pushing magic into it. It was growing because the water was soaking into it faster, and bringing the warmth of the lake with it. For the life of me, I couldn’t see why that should be happening, but it was.

The gentle deepness that was Wash’s magic pulled in toward the warm spot in the dam. I still couldn’t tell that it was doing much of anything, but the warm spot kept growing and going deeper into the dam.

I don’t know how long we all sat there, quiet and near motionless, watching Wash and the lake and the dam. It seemed like only a minute or two. Then the professor’s eyes widened and she grabbed my arm and pointed. I lost my focus and the world sense, and I would have been annoyed with her, except that what she was pointing at was water, seeping out from under the landslide on the downstream side.

I grinned and nodded at the professor, then went back to feeling the spell. It took me a minute to get focused again. By that time, the warmth and the water were nearly all the way through the dam, but only in a section about two feet wide. A minute or two later, I could see a rapidly darkening stripe on the front slope of the dam, and shortly after that, water began oozing out of the dirt and running down to join the seepage at the base of the landslide.

Wash hadn’t moved a muscle since he’d leaned over and slapped his bloody hands to the ground. I’d have been worried, if I hadn’t been able to feel his magic all through the dam. The professor shifted restlessly. Champ glared at her like she was interrupting, and the middle of the dam began to collapse slowly.

It was like watching a dry pea sink through a jar of honey. First the water running down the outside started eating away at the dirt, carving a little channel as it ran. The water ran faster and faster, and then pieces of the softened earth just above the channel started to fall and get swept away. The rut got deeper and wider, and larger chunks began dropping down. Sometimes, everything would pause for a minute when an especially large section fell and blocked up the channel. It took longer and longer for the water to soak through and start washing it away again.

Gradually, the middle of the landslide wore away. When the lake water started spilling over the top, instead of just soaking through, I felt something about Wash’s magic shift. I still couldn’t tell exactly what he was doing, but the warm, soaked-through part of the landslide settled, like it was hunkering down for a long stay. A minute later, Wash straightened up with a sigh.