Page 45 of Into the West

“Well,” Jonaton said after a moment, taking a flatbread and rolling some jam into it, “looking at the few facts as we know them, I think we are probably talking about two different origins for the three sorts of beasts. Sai, you said you were very sure the lizard-bear was the product of a Change-Circle. The mages back with the convoy seem pretty certain what attacked them and the village were mage-made creatures.”

“The flying ones have to be,” Sai said flatly. “You don’t get six limbs on an animal or bird unless it’s mage-made or one of a handful of kinds of skink. And on top of that, you don’t get a lot of creatures that all look alike out of a Change-Circle. Even if, say, a den of snakes and a pack of mastiffs got caught in a Change-Circle, every single one of them would look completely different, because every one of them gets random changes.”

“What’s a skink?” Delia whispered to Venidel.

“Kind of lizard,” he whispered back.

“So we have a singleton that seems to match all the earmarks of a Change-beast, and we have two packs of creatures of two different kinds that have the earmarks of being mage-made.” Jonaton did not seem to feel the cold as night closed down, but Delia couldn’t help but shiver when stray gusts of wind managed to get down her neck despite her collar being up. Or maybe it was fear.

Probably it’s both.

Endars pulled on his lower lip, which meant he was thinking. But Briada spoke up before he could say anything.

“If that weird forest is what Change-Circles look like, there’s good odds the bear came from there, rather than back downstream,” she said. “I can’t imagine having parts of you exchanged with lizard parts is anything but painful. A bear would have run a pretty long way after being hurt like that, and it would certainly have followed the river. They can run leagues without stopping if they’ve got a mind to or something terrifies them. And the bear doesn’t match the descriptions you gave of the terror-birds and the snake-dogs, where you can’t say, ‘Oh, that’s a snake head, and that part is a black eagle.’ It looked pretty much like patchwork: ‘Here’s a lizard belly, here’s lizard claws.’”

“According to what Rose saw of the birds and the dogs,” Amethyst spoke up, “that’s very much the case. The birds look like entire creatures, not bits of two or three thrown together. The dogs were the same, only more so. It wasn’t a patchwork where mismatched things are fitted together. It was, I would say, seamless.”

“Planned and designed, you mean?” Alberdina asked.

“I would say so, yes,” Amethyst confirmed.

“So the long and the short of it is that we have come into a land where—even if we can’t find much at the moment—magic energies must be readily available,” Endars said. “Available enough that mages can actually create living creatures—”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Sai replied, the flickering firelight making his face look slightly sinister. “We’re getting closer to where those wars five hundred years ago were fought. These things could be left over from that. The terror-birds and the snake-dogs, that is.” He brushed his long, straight hair behind his ear, a habit he had when he was thinking aloud. “If there weren’t a lot of them to begin with, they’d be inbred pretty quickly.” He poked at the fire with a stick. “The impetus for why they showed up to us or to the convoy, though, seems to be quite different as well. The bear probably found us completely by accident. But I just don’t like it that the birds attacked after Kordas drove off the dogs. What are the odds of that?”

Jonaton sighed. “I don’t like that either. It’s too much of a coincidence, don’t you think?” He looked at Endars, who shrugged, sending writhing shadows all over his torso.

“Or there are more packs of both of those creatures than we know of, and it was just a matter of time before they found us,” Endars pointed out. “If we don’t assign causality. True randomness includes clusters. And at any rate, the Gate will take us far away from this part of the river. That just might answer the question as to whether this was a targeted, deliberate attack or a mere coincidence. If they come after us when we are on the other side of the new Gates, then clearly, we should adopt the posture that they’re sent to attack us.”

Sai nodded, and the conversation turned to how quickly they could get Gates up and get moving, because winter was not “coming” anymore, it was here. Sooner or later they were going to have to stop and wait it out, and they were going to need a pretty large expanse of safe, not-flooding-in-spring land to hold all of them. But are the Gates taking us to where the lizard-bear came from? Delia wondered. And are there more monstrous things there that we haven’t any idea about? And what about that forest has Jonaton so perturbed?

The other two teams came back on the morning of the fifth day, and the work erecting the Gates began. By this point the third and fourth set of Gate uprights had arrived on their own barges, towed by a pair of mages, each riding a Charger. They weren’t mages Delia knew well, so she just greeted them and stood back.

The first and second sets of uprights had already been unloaded—not by magic, nor Fetching, but by the simple expedient of putting planks under each end and sliding them down to the riverbank. They didn’t roll, because they were curved, but they slid just fine. The new uprights came off their barges the same way, and went back on the scouts’ barges while the mages worked on the first Gate.

The meeting and greeting didn’t take long. The two mages turned the empty barges to point downstream, hitched up the horses, and were away before anything but a few courteous words, some warning about the terror-birds, and a quick meal in the form of flatbread wrapped around steamed fish filets and herbs.

Delia couldn’t help but notice the two mages kept one eye on the sky as they rode off. She didn’t blame them. According to Amethyst, the birds hadn’t gone after human adults in the convoy, but they were huge, and they might consider a massed attack on two humans with two horses to be worth the risk.

The uprights for the temporary Gate were spaced so closely together on the narrow shoreline that there was just enough room for the Tow-Beast to get through, dragging two of the uprights behind him. If Delia understood correctly, they’d have had to make the opening that small no matter what; the amount of power coming via the anchor right now just wasn’t enough for anything larger. They could make a temporary Gate on that side, but not only did it have to be small, they couldn’t keep it open for long. Once the proper Gate had been set up, there would be enough power for both Gates to operate all day and all night.

Now they split the party in half. Jonaton went through the Gate to the other side accompanied by Ivar and Hakkon; obviously, being the expert, he’d be able to get the receptive Gate up in the course of the morning, and that new ley-line would be feeding magical energy to the entire arcane construct in no time. As soon as his crew was through, Sai set about the work of creating a mooring point for the water-side upright. Jonaton would be doing the same, of course; in fact, that would be his team’s first task.

Delia had no idea what Sai was doing, and he didn’t bother to explain any of it to her. It was obvious that he was doing something; he kept staring at a point in the river that was about a cart-length from the bank. Far enough that the barges would be able to move smoothly through it even if their roofs were laden with things that stuck out over the sides. He made odd little movements in the air with his fingers, and his furrowed brow had little sweat beads on it.

Then she spotted something dark just under the surface of the river, right where he was staring. It wasn’t long before it rose slowly to the surface and broke it, like a fish coming up for a fly: a perfectly square pillar of what looked like rock. Gray rock. A bit darker than the water today. Is it rock? Or is it made of magic, somehow? It looked a lot like the rocks here on the shoreline, but what did she know? The Emperor had mages that could build entire manors with magic, after all.

When the top of the pillar was just about exactly even with the shore, Sai straightened and dropped his hands to his sides. “Well, that’s the hard part done,” he said to Delia. “The hard part on our side, at least. All of the uprights are tuned to each other, so they all resonate at—” Delia must have looked baffled, because he barked a short laugh. “I’ve spent too much of my life with other mages. Doesn’t matter. Endars, Venidel, and I will move the upright and make it one with the pillar, do some other things you won’t be able to see, and invoke a full Gate spell with the power for it coming from Jonaton’s ley-line. Jonaton will be doing all the work on his side, and everything will be controlled from his side. Then Endars, Venidel, and I will need to fall into our beds for a while, Jonaton will need to do the same, and the Fairweathers will be in charge of bringing the barges through to Jonaton’s side.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked anxiously.

He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. “Police the campfire, make sure no one’s left anything that should be in the barges, load whatever’s been left onto a barge—it doesn’t matter which one—and make sure the fire is out, the embers soaked and scattered. Oh! And if there are any fodder balls left, or wood bundles, load them on a barge. No point in wasting them.” He then turned to Venidel and Endars, who had waited until he was done talking to her to approach, and the three of them went into a conference. They were stopped by Sai for a moment, and he said, half-turned her way, “You’re adapting to the life of a scout pretty well.”

Delia felt a blush, and beamed.

Bret and Bart were already harnessing up the horses and either putting them in place to tow, or tethering them on very long leads to the other barges. Amethyst, Alberdina, and Briada vanished inside barges to make sure everything was stowed and secured. That left her with the camp—which was not a great deal of work. Sai hadn’t left so much as a cucumber seed behind, it was the work of a moment to Fetch the last four bales of fodder and secure them to the already-secured wood on the top of the supply barge, she Fetched about four bucketfuls of water right down on top of the fire with a sploosh, and after that, there was nothing left to do but make certain the embers were stone cold and scatter them.

And meanwhile, all three mages were practically staring holes in the Gate upright, as it drifted smoothly and serenely toward its stone pillar, eased softly down to its proper place—