I’d found a couple of chunks of rock the size of my fist that looked as if they had stone fur on one side when I saw a pointed shape sticking out of the hillside. I leaned forward to grab it. It was stuck pretty firmly in the hard-packed dirt, but eventually I wiggled it free. When I got a good look at it, my jaw dropped.
It was a perfectly formed statue of a barn swallow.
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.”