066 – The Last Leg, For Now

Rox found herself draining her water bag as they went, and stopped at a stream to fill it; she paused to remember the spell to filter the water as it went in, and was handed Steven’s and Caspian’s water bags as well while she was getting wet.

Rox got to the question before Steven did.

“Caspian, why did you not just teleport us to the top of the mountain in the first place?”

In a classroom setting Caspian might have taken a different approach, here he just went directly to it. “It is easier to teleport to someplace you have already been, than to teleport to someplace you have not ever been. It is also a lot safer.”

Steven had read enough and was experienced enough in his life to guess, and was sure he had covered this ground between himself and Caspian previously, but he still asked, for Rox’s sake and so as to be sure of being correct himself. “Why is that?”

“If you don’t know where you are landing, you might materialize with some thing stuck in or through you, or you in it.” Caspian started.

“In school, we are taught several theories of movement. One of the safety principles drilled in is not to do so blind, another is not to forget to have the spell clear the area before you land. For us, I would like to have just teleported us into Shalaia, but it would be a blind jump. I have some ability at scrying, but it is really limited, like looking at a map versus actually being there. The Sorceress, she displayed such skill as to make me think she might be able to instruct it. Add to my troubles that the elves value their privacy, and so shroud their lands, preventing me with my limited abilities from seeing anything useful.

“I could try a spell to put me down at a specific geographic location, and to clear the area before I land. But again in their shrouding they have wards against that, and I would land somewhere else; depending on the ward it could be a long way off, and usually with the safeties canceled. If I had a specific target it would bypass the wards. If I could teleport as the elves themselves do, we would have been there weeks ago.”

“You did try to ask that one elf, back there,” Rox remembered. “He acted as if you had not said anything.”

“Politely inconsiderate,” Steven muttered, in agreement with the shared frustration. Then remembering himself, Steven returned the conversation to topic. “Is there any other reason you have not tried to? I have been puzzling to myself why you have been reluctant, and it occurred to me that I may not have all my presumptions about magic travel correct to begin with.”

Caspian tossed that back to Steven. “What reasons and principles have I explained so far, so as to see if I have missed or been unclear about anything?”

Steven thought. “Safety in travel; knowing your destination; economy in energy use; that there are several methods, of which you seem to prefer a kind of compression and transmutation without loss of awareness; courtesy in using the modes; what kind of target is available to start and finish on. Usually you have deferred on the grounds of ignorance of potential safe landing sites. I have wondered if it is possible to say, jump from this hill top to the next, but presume that is not done simply for the sake of it being almost as fast and perhaps a better use of energy to walk the same distance.”

Caspian nodded as Steven ran his list. “That is most of it. As for your last, for most people that is all but the explicit reason. It is easier to walk.

“In theory, I could have teleported up the mountain, but not having ever been there, I was unsure of the landing spot. Through resonance a teleporter can always find the way back to someplace they have been. But blind jumps are just not as safe. Some with big egos do it anyway. I would rather not. I could have done it in short hops, but it’s less strenuous to walk.

“How would you have liked it if I had teleported us up, and left us all a hand’s span above the ground? Even if I had asked you to jump, it would be landing on uncertain ground. Do able, but not comfortable or advisable. Similar with a gate.

“The only other principle I can think of right off that I have not covered is theory and method of transit. You cited the one I prefer, there are also variations of mass to energy exchanges, and also the various methods of packing and unpacking the object being moved; inside to out, outside to in, top to bottom and so forth.

“The elves have a method where they visibly are there one moment and gone the next; or vice versa. That may be including an invisibility component to the spell, but I do not know, and have never been where or when I could ask. I think the one that you met actually uses some form of gate. He landed in my hay field at home that way.”

Steven interrupted Caspian as the latter drew a breath, and then a drink of water. “Some of the books I read as a child had magic characters teleporting around, without any concern for any of this. I suppose I have been operating on that presumption. What I am hearing you say is that doing that is just silly for safety reasons. Doable, but not advisable. All right, I can go with that. I will try not to bother you about teleporting again.”

Caspian thought about this over the rest of the afternoon, and also about what he expected would happen at Shalaia, and where the train with the Caplan’s son and daughter were. In his consideration, Caspian pulled the tracker disks he had made in Veradale out of a pouch, and looked at them, the color swirls holding steady in the southern direction and a long distance away. He made a decision. But there was no sense announcing it, until he had all the information, and that would require information from Shalaia, and time to remember.

For her part, Roxanne seamed to absorb all that was said. She understood what Caspian said about resonance to do with her sense of magic, or energy or mana, what ever it was called, and what this communicated. The Sorceress had drilled safety into Rox in some way in every lesson. As for the other things, like Steven she still had the notions from stories read. As Caspian instructed her, she came to understand that what she needed to do was figure out what theory of teleportation she most instinctively used, and learn to use it on command.

As they crossed the summit of the foot hill into the final set of valleys, they all smelled smoke, and the animals all began to spook from it. The trees broke open to a vista across the valley between the western and central Shalalerin Mountains. But the smoke from a downwind forest fire obscured everything, and left a heavy smell of burnt wood and ash in the air. Steven and Rox wrapped bandannas around their faces as they went. Caspian likewise put a wrap around his face, and cast a bit of magic for the animals, keeping the air around the animals moving.

As they descended altitude they got under the air current that was carrying the smoke.

Caspian being unimpressed by the situation kept going, but the Caplan’s were a bit excited.

Rox particularly. “Don’t we need to tell anybody about it, or do something about it?”

Caspian could hear a bit of unusual anxiety in her tone, and simply shook his head in negative. “No. The only people who really care are the timber-men, and they have enough timber to worry about. Sure they could employ someone like me to pop around and dumb water on them, but in the long run it would be detrimental.”

Caspian glanced over his shoulder at Rox, and could see her puzzlement. So he dredged up the lesson from his own childhood, and what he had seen as an adult.

“As it is, you see all the stages of the growth cycle around you. Fire cleans and strengthens the forest by consuming the decay and dead stuff, releasing the mass back into the soil. It takes the dead and diseased lower branches off the trees, and it keeps the yearly debris from building up on the ground. That lets the water get into the soil and roots more easily and keeps the fire from burning deep.”

“How do you know all this,” asked Rox. She had a cursory education in forestry at best, mostly extending to ‘trees are our friends.’

Caspian scoffed. “I was taught it by my father while a child, and wrote a research report on it while in school on your planet. Then I also saw it first hand here. There is a kingdom to the east; they have a similar timber management pattern to what your world practices in some extreme areas: that is, cut nothing that is not absolutely necessary and let nothing burn. I suppose it is born of an overwrought sense of respect for life coupled with a lack of understanding of the true cycle of it. This kingdom’s forests are all the same age, covering huge areas. When I was last there, they had at least one section that was a fire hazard. The debris on the ground was hip deep, half the trees roots did not get far into the actual soil. Only a quarter of the trees had close to healthy mana, and there were standing and fallen trees among the living that were dead and dying.

“A tree’s generation of being left alone and the forest might begin to recover.”

Caspian shook his head at what he considered a stupid practice, and remembered something he had heard on the road over the last weeks, and from some of his further contacts.

“I have heard rumor that the current crop of wars that are working their way east across the north, will probably kill that forest, and kingdom. ‘One properly, or improperly used torch will be all it needs’.”

Steven had seen part of the Yellowstone Park fires of some years back and remembered how that had gone. As well he had been back since and it was still a mess by his standards. He had also flown over the Mt. Saint Helens destruction area, and seen the patterns of growth vs. ‘management’ there. He had compared this to his experience on Tywacomb. “The forests we crossed to get to Rox, and even the ones since, the only dead falls were fresh. I don’t remember much from ground level for the new and young stuff, but it was all green. The older the tree, the higher it’s lowest branches and more fire scars it had.”

The valley they descended into was drained to the northeast by a pair of rivers, one fed from the west peaks, the other from the east, and merged into a lake at the north end. The intervening valley showed a lot of work had been done to shape the land, with terraces through out leveling the natural roll of the hills into steps rising and falling. The road wound down from its summit to a way station at the base of the foot hill, where the road separated to go east and south.

As it was, the Caplan’s and Caspian took opportunity to use the inn and let their animals loose in a corral, as opposed to always in harness or hobble. The elves that operated the inn were slightly put out at having a schwaer and her paramour and their retainer actually think themselves good enough to stay the night in respectable lodging, simply because they could pay for such.