Across the Great Barrier

CHAPTER 27

THE WHOLE SETTLEMENT HAD A TENSE AND SOLEMN AIR FOR THE rest of the morning. People gathered in little knots, talking. You could feel the fear growing as everything sank in. Settlers were accustomed to the dangers of the wildlife, but a creature that turned three horses to stone all at once was more than anyone had signed up for.

What worried people the most was the way the travel protection spells had come down. Mr. Macleod was acting like the settlement spells would stay up, especially since he knew to expect a problem, but most folks could see that he was just trying to reassure people.

The trouble was, nobody had any good idea what else to do. People came up with notions, of course, but they had no more back of them than hoping. One of the settlers took to carrying a hand mirror with him, because the Greek lady with the snake hair had finally been killed by a man who only ever looked at her in a mirror. As soon as word got out, more than half the settlers went looking for mirrors of their own. One man smashed his big looking glass and offered people the pieces. Lots of folks ended up with cuts from handling the broken glass, and slashes in their clothes, but they still carried them around, even though nobody knew for sure whether they’d help.

Pretty soon, a few folks started talking of heading back to Mill City “for a few weeks.” Mostly, it was the families with childings doing the talking, but I was still surprised to hear it. Big Bear Lake was three years into its five-year commitment — anyone who left now would be giving up their share for the Settlement Office to reassign.

Around mid-afternoon, Lan and I were sitting on the ground outside the longhouse when we saw Wash and Professor Torgeson come out of Mr. Macleod’s house. They made a bee-line for Mr. Macleod and started talking a mile a minute. Lan’s eyes narrowed. “You stay here, Eff,” he said. “I’m going to talk to them.”

He stood up and I stood up with him. He turned and glared at me. “Eff —”

“I know that look, Lan Rothmer,” I interrupted, “and I’m coming with you, and that’s that.”

Lan made a face. “I suppose I can’t stop you,” he grumbled, and set off for Wash and the others.

As we came up on them, the first thing we heard was Mr. Macleod saying, “— not. I can’t let you take a chance like that. Besides, we need you here, to protect the settlement.”

“No, you don’t,” Wash said. “The settlement protection spells are as strong as may be, and you’ve plenty of people to trade off holding them up so that they’ll stay that way. The next thing to do is to get rid of this medusa critter before it causes more trouble. Waiting here for it to show up doesn’t seem like the best plan to me. And taking chances is a circuit magician’s job.”

“It’s not a professor’s job!” Mr. Macleod said.

“Mr. Macleod,” Professor Torgeson said, “I am a Vinlander born and raised, and I’ve spent my time in the wildlands of a summer. Furthermore, my job is to find out more about the petrified animals we’ve been uncovering, and this is a golden opportunity to do so. And finally, it is not within your right to detain me should I wish to leave this settlement. Which, I must tell you, I am feeling more inclined to do the longer you talk.”

Wash hid a smile behind his hand and pretended to cough. Mr. Macleod sighed. “Professor, ma’am, I don’t — what do you two want?” he said as he saw Lan and me.

“You’re going to go out hunting the thing that turned the packhorses to stone, aren’t you?” Lan asked Wash.

Wash nodded, at the same time as Mr. Macleod said, “No, they’re not!”

“Well, I want to come with,” Lan said.

I snapped my teeth closed over an objection so fast that I bit my tongue. Telling Lan not to do things only made him stubborner about doing them.

Professor Torgeson frowned. “Mr. Rothmer, while you are not one of my students, you are in some sense my responsibility. This is not a lark, and I will not allow you to accompany us without a very good reason.”

“I have a very good reason,” Lan said steadily. “Two, actually. First of all, there’s a good chance this creature absorbs magic, the way the mirror bug beetles did, and I’m the only person here who’s had experience holding protection spells against that kind of drain.”

“Then you should stay here!” Mr. Macleod said.

“When was that?” Professor Torgeson said at the same time.

“Two years ago, at the Little Fog settlement, when my sister figured out how to beat the mirror bugs,” Lan said. “You may have heard about that part. I was inside the settlement, holding the protection spells against all the grubs and mirror bugs, while Eff figured out how to turn their magic back on them.”

Mr. Macleod’s eyes narrowed. “You held the settlement protection spells? All of them? How?”

“I held all of them,” Lan replied. “As to how — that’s the other reason I should go along on this hunting trip. I’m the seventh son of a seventh son.”

“All true,” Wash said. “I was with Miss Eff at the time.” He rubbed his beard in a thoughtful fashion. “It hadn’t occurred to me, Mr. Rothmer, but you have a point. You could be a right handy man to have along.”

“Sounds to me as if the one you want to take is his sister,” Mr. Macleod growled.

“Both of us, or neither,” I said, nodding.

“What? No, Eff, you can’t —”

“I already said, Lan — both of us, or neither. I let you go off to Little Fog without me last time, and look what happened! Not again.” Which wasn’t exactly fair; I hadn’t particularly wanted to go with him last time, because it was supposed to be just a boring day of fiddling with the broken settlement protection spells at Little Fog and getting them to work properly again. The effect on the grubs and the mirror bugs was something nobody had expected, and it had been a very good thing that I was outside where I could do something about it, once I went chasing after Lan. But I certainly wasn’t going to point any of that out now.

I especially wasn’t going to point it out when I knew I wasn’t being completely truthful about why I wanted to go with Wash and the others. Oh, I wanted to keep an eye on Lan, right enough, but if the only thing I’d wanted to do was watch out for him, I’d have put my energy into making him stay behind. What I really wanted was to go along, too. I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t have anything to prove to myself, the way I had with the saber cat hunt the previous summer, and I knew this would be even more dangerous. We wouldn’t have anything like as many people; the settlement couldn’t spare them, and Wash wouldn’t wait for messengers to recruit folks from nearby settlements. We didn’t even know what we were hunting, much less how long it would take to find.

Even so, I wanted to go. I looked hopefully at Wash and Professor Torgeson.

“That seems reasonable,” Professor Torgeson said briskly. “Who else, Mr. Morris? We don’t want too many people, or we’ll move too slowly.”

“Pierre, if he’ll come,” Wash said. “And if Mr. Macleod can spare us a marksman who’s willing to come, I think that will do.”

“Wash, you —” Mr. Macleod shook his head. “All right, I can’t stop you. I suppose the only questions left are, what do you need and how soon do you leave?”

“Tomorrow morning, for leaving,” Wash said. “I don’t much fancy spending the night outside walls when there’s wildlife about that laughs at the travel protections. As to what we need, I was hoping you’d have some suggestions.”

The two of them walked off, deep in discussion. Professor Torgeson looked at Lan. “Mr. Rothmer —”

“Yes, I’m sure I want to do this,” Lan broke in. “Just … I’m sure, all right?”

“I was going to ask about your experience with the mirror bugs,” the professor said mildly. “Mr. Anderson indicated that whatever interfered with his spells was similar to an abrupt blow, but the accounts I’ve heard of the mirror bugs sounded more like a slow draining.”

“Oh,” Lan said. “I — well, the mirror bugs were small. One at a time, or spread out the way they normally were, they didn’t absorb enough magic for anyone to notice.” He went on describing what had happened at the Little Fog settlement, with the professor asking pointed questions every so often, and I could see some of the stiffness fade out of his shoulders.

He didn’t expect it to be so easy to get included in the hunt for the medusa creature, I thought. I couldn’t figure out why, though, much less why he’d been so keen to go in the first place. He was up to something, and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like it once I figured out what it was.

The news that there was a hunting party being sent out got most of the settlement folks calmed down. There was still some quiet talk of leaving, but it had more the sound of planning for the worst than panic. Some of them even laughed a little at Greasy Pierre’s posturing when he agreed to help hunt for the creature.

I didn’t sleep too well that night. Growing up in Mill City, and later on working with the professors and coming out to survey the plants around the settlements, had given me a powerful respect for the wildlife of the West, and there was a sight of difference between running afoul of a cloud of mirror bugs or even coming across a pride of saber cats, and going out looking for trouble. But I couldn’t let Lan go alone.

We left early the next morning. There were six of us: Wash, Professor Torgeson, Greasy Pierre, a settlement man named Sven Grimsrud, Lan, and me. It had been over a day and a half since the Anderson brothers and Pierre had their run-in with the medusa creature at the ford, and we didn’t know how close it might be if it had followed them, so Wash and Pierre and Mr. Grimsrud had their rifles ready.

After some arguing, we’d settled it that we would ride a lot farther apart than folks usually did when they traveled out in settlement country. The idea was to make sure the medusa thing couldn’t catch us all at once, the way it had with the Andersons’ packhorses.

We had two sets of travel protection spells going, one that was mostly to detect anything alive that stretched out as far as Professor Torgeson could stretch it, and one that doubled up the standard traveling spell with one to keep off magic that was as close in and as strong as Lan could make it. I was paying extra-close attention to my Aphrikan world-sensing, and I was pretty sure Wash was, too.

Greasy Pierre had the job of backtracking the route he and the Andersons had taken. It wasn’t hard; even I could sense the residue of the speed-travel spell he’d used to get them all safely back to the settlement. Wash rode next in line, then the professor, Lan, and me, with Mr. Grimsrud bringing up the rear.

We rode for about three hours, then stopped for a break. You’d think that just riding along keeping a sharp lookout wouldn’t be much harder than the normal kind of riding through settlement country, but it was. I was glad to dismount for a minute or two.

Two hours later, Professor Torgeson signaled for a stop and motioned everyone to come close enough to hear. “There’s a … blank area over that way,” she said, pointing at a slight angle to the direction we’d been traveling. “No animals, hardly any birds.”

“This is suspicious,” Pierre said solemnly.

“Is it moving?” Mr. Grimsrud asked.

Professor Torgeson looked irritated. “There are animals everywhere else, and they are moving. Up that way, there is none.”

“How large is the quiet area?” Wash asked.

“About ten degrees at the far edge of the spell,” the professor replied. “We’re about a mile and a half away, as best I can estimate. It doesn’t exactly have sharp edges.”

“We’ll head in that direction,” Wash said. “Let us know when we’re close, or if anything changes, Professor.”

We rode a lot more cautiously after that. Wash took us north and around, hoping to come up behind the critter, if that was what it was that had caused what the professor’s spell had detected. I was a bit annoyed because even with my Aphrikan world-sensing, all I could tell was that the animals nearby were more nervous than usual. It wasn’t until we were nearly right up to the quiet area that I felt anything different.

Right about then, Wash stopped and signaled everyone to dismount. He and Pierre had a quick talk in low voices, and then Wash took the lead. The forest was dead quiet, except when a breeze rustled the trees. It was even spookier than the grub-killed forests farther south; those at least had birds and mice and ground squirrels coming back. Everyone tried to make as little noise as possible. Even the horses moved carefully.

Suddenly, Pierre let off a low whistle. Even though I knew it was a signal to Wash, the unexpected noise made me jump. He and Wash examined the ground, and Pierre pointed. We started off again, angling more toward the north. When we got up to where Wash and Pierre had been, I looked down and saw a paw print — four long, thin, triangular toes stretched out from a squared-off pad. I moved my horse around so it didn’t step on it.

A short while later, we found the first petrified animal — a rabbit, caught in mid-leap. Wash had us spread out even farther, for safety. And the farther apart we got, the more nervous I felt.

We didn’t know how the petrification magic worked, really. Mr. Macleod had said that Mr. Anderson’s leg had still been part flesh on the inside, and I couldn’t help wondering whether the horses and the animals that turned to stone had been, too. The ones we’d found at Daybat Creek had been stone through and through, but they were old. Maybe the magic had changed. Or maybe it didn’t work all at once; maybe it turned things to stone slowly, from the outside in. I wondered what that would be like. Would it hurt? Would you feel the stone creeping slowly inward, knowing what was happening, or did the magic just kill things and then turn them to stone? It hadn’t killed Mr. Anderson, quite. I shuddered, and decided not to think about it anymore.

We followed the tracks for a long way, until Pierre signaled again. “Not far now,” he said.

Wash nodded. “I think —” He broke off, raising his head like a deer scenting a saber cat on the wind. I felt it, too — a ripple right at the edge of my world-sensing, from the direction we’d come. Wash muttered something I figured it was just as well I hadn’t heard clearly. “It’s cut back toward the track we made coming in. At this rate, we’ll circle each other for hours.”

Mr. Grimsrud gave Wash a puzzled look, but he didn’t ask how Wash could know such a thing.

“It likes horses,” Lan said. “We could use ours for bait.”

Pierre and Mr. Grimsrud looked at him as if he was clean out of his wits, but Wash thought on it for a minute, then nodded. “It’s worth a try. If we lose them, we’re still close enough to walk back to the settlement. Professor, you can drop your detecting spell for now and grab a gun. Miss Eff—” He paused, scanning the woods. “You have your rifle? Good. Take yourself back there behind those boulders, and keep an eye out. Don’t make a sound, and if you think something’s coming, shoot first and ask questions later.” He pointed out positions for everyone else, then turned to Lan. “Mr. Rothmer —”

“Lan.”

“— Lan, as soon as we have the horses tied and are in position, drop the travel spells and get back to the boulders with your sister.”

“Drop the travel spells?” Mr. Grimsrud said doubtfully.

“So the critter can find us,” Wash said. “And so it doesn’t get a big boost to its magic by draining Lan here the way it did your Mr. Anderson.” He’d already fastened his horse good and tight to a tree. “Hurry up, before it gets out of range.”

Mr. Grimsrud still looked doubtful, but he went ahead and did what Wash had told him. I went back to the little heap of boulders and crouched down behind it. I was surprised that Lan hadn’t objected to Wash’s directions. He’d never much liked being left out of whatever was happening. I was even more surprised when I felt the travel spells drop and he didn’t join me back of the boulders.

There was a long, tense silence. I could still feel the strange ripple out at the edge of my world-sensing, but it didn’t seem to be getting nearer. Lan made no move to find cover; he just stood there next to the horses. And then I felt a bright blaze of magic all around me, and the ripple paused and began to move straight toward us. I whipped around to glare at Lan, and as soon as I saw the reckless grin on his face, I knew exactly what he was doing.

Lan was using himself as bait.