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.
CHAPTER 17
CHAMP AND THE PROFESSOR AND I JUST SAT STARING AT THE CREEK while Wash stretched. The creek was filling rapidly with muddy water, but it didn’t look like too much, too fast. The front side of the landslide had a long, sloping channel carved through it about three or four feet wide, starting just below the level of the lake and running down into the newly re-formed creek. The water rushed and swirled around rocks and trees, but it wasn’t coming through quite strong enough to sweep them away. It looked like it would be a particularly nasty set of rapids, if you were in a boat.
“What did you do?” Professor Torgeson croaked as Wash came over to us. “That’s … What did you do?”
Wash gave her an extra-wide grin. “It’s a mite hard to explain in Avrupan terms,” he said. “The best way I can think to put it is that I invited the water that had backed up to soak into the dam and do what it would eventually do, anyway, only faster. Then when I had as much done as I wanted, I asked it to stop.”
“Asked it to stop,” the professor said faintly. “But —”
“But the creek is still eating away at the landslide,” Champ said, pointing. “If it wears through too fast, the rest of the dam will go.”
“It won’t,” Wash said. “Though even if it did, things wouldn’t be as bad now as they would be in a few months, when four or five times as much water was backed up.”
“How can you be sure?” Champ demanded.
“It was Miss Eff’s idea. There’s magic in flowing water. Once I got the water flowing through the blockage, I coaxed a little of its magic into the dam. That earth is set to stay put for a while. If I did it right, the water will wear a new channel and empty the lake, but slowly.”
“If you did it right?” the professor repeated.
“I’ll keep an eye on it for the rest of the day, just in case,” Wash promised. “And I’ll give it a good looking over tomorrow morning. That’s plenty long enough to see the signs, if there’s a problem. But I think all Promised Land needs to worry about now is Daybat Creek running a little high and a little muddy for a year or two.”
The professor had a lot of questions, but the more Wash tried to answer them, the more questions she seemed to have. Finally, he told her politely that she’d do better to write to one of the professors of Aphrikan magic down at Triskelion University, as they were more accustomed to explaining. Then he took a two-hour nap, and after that he went back down to check on the dam.
I didn’t say much through the discussion. It was clear from the way Champ kept sticking his oar in that he’d seen and understood a lot more of what Wash was doing than I had. It didn’t sit right that a boy two years younger than me was so much better at world-sensing, even if he’d probably been learning Aphrikan magic his whole life long. I decided right then to study up, even if doing world-sensing in the grub-ravaged areas was unpleasant.
Wash didn’t find any problems with the creek or the dam, that afternoon nor next morning. As soon as he said it was clear, we started packing up the camp. The professor and Champ had a few words over all the statue pieces the professor wanted to bring back with us. Champ said there were too many, and they’d be too heavy for the horses, but the professor said we’d already picked out the best ones and she didn’t want to leave any more behind.
Finally, Wash put his foot down. “Champ won’t be coming with us any farther than Promised Land,” he pointed out. “We’ll have one less horse to carry whatever we take. I expect you can fit a few more rocks in the saddlebags if you took out some of those specimens you’ve been collecting.”
“These are specimens,” the professor said firmly. “Possibly even more so than you think.”
“I thought it was plants and animals you were collecting,” Champ said. “Not statues.”
Professor Torgeson got a stubborn look on her face for a minute, then sighed. “These are not statues,” she said.
“They surely do look like statues to me,” Champ said. “Broken ones.”
The professor shook her head. “They aren’t carved; even under a magnifying glass, there are no tool marks. And look here.” She pulled out the magnifying glass and grabbed one of the rocks. “You can see every hair individually. Look at the way they lie — they’re not straight and neat when you get this close, even though they look that way without the glass.”
We all looked. She was right. They looked like real hairs, too, not just lines scratched into wood or stone like most of the statues I’d seen.
“No artist in the world could create that kind of detail,” Professor Torgeson said. “There are no tools that will carve that finely, and no spells, either. And there are hundreds of these here, from all kinds of animals, and every one I’ve studied has that level of detail. But this is the real key.”
She flipped the stone over, so that we could see the broken-off surface. It looked to have cracked off nice and smooth, until she held the magnifying glass over it. Then we could see faint lines. Champ’s eyes widened. “That looks like …”
“Blood vessels,” the professor said, nodding. “On the inside of the stone. They go all the way through; I broke off a corner of one to make sure. Bones, too. I’m almost afraid to get these back to the college and find out what they look like under a microscope.”
“Nobody could do that,” Champ said with conviction.
“But if they aren’t statues …” I didn’t finish the sentence. It was pretty obvious what the professor thought, because we all thought it, too, after seeing blood vessels and bones inside solid rock. I just didn’t want to hear her actually say it.
“Just so,” the professor said, like she didn’t want to say it out loud, either. She hesitated, then went on. “Old Scandia has legends of creatures that would turn to stone if sunlight touched them. That can’t be what happened here; we’ve found too many different species, and too many that aren’t magical at all. It could be something similar, though — something about this place, perhaps. That’s why I want to bring as many different specimens as we can, so we can find out what they have in common.”
Champ yelped. “Something about this place turned all these animals to stone? And you let us camp here?”
“We don’t know that for certain,” Professor Torgeson said reprovingly. “It’s one possible theory, that’s all.”
“Seems like the obvious explanation to me,” Champ muttered. “And I still don’t think we should be camping here.”
“Whatever did this, it happened long ago,” Professor Torgeson said reassuringly. “Centuries, probably. None of the specimens is of recent origin. And we aren’t even sure yet that the stones are … were animals at all, much less how they got this way. Fossil bones have been found in other places; it’s quite possible that these creatures were converted to stone after their deaths, by some natural process we do not yet understand.”