rises sharply from the edge. There’s another, higher one just beyond it, but it must be several years old; it’s overgrown with wildflowers. There aren’t any trees or shrubs, though, so it can’t be that old. There are other, older flows beyond it. It must have been erupting for a long time.”
“That rules out the wand,” Angus said.
“Why?” Ortis asked.
Angus shrugged. “The wand’s range is limited.”
“To how far?” Ortis asked.
“I’m not certain,” Angus admitted. “But it certainly won’t go through that many layers.”
“Why not test it and find out?” Hobart suggested. “If it can get us to the older lava flows, we should be able to climb them. Once they settle and get rained on, they become much more solid, and the roots of the plants add stability. We can walk our horses single file across them, if we can get up that high.”
“You know,” Giorge added. “This new one has to be covering up an older one. They layer that way. The brittle stuff might only be a few feet thick.”
“Or it could go much further,” Angus said. “There’s no way to know.”
“Yes there is, Angus,” Ortis said. “We paid a considerable amount to get you out of Hellsbreath, and we’d like to see what we paid for. Use the wand.”
Angus frowned. How could he explain how precious the wand was? How rare? Wasting its power like this…. “Let’s take a look at my map, first,” he said. “If there’s an alternate route, I’d rather take that.”
Ortis shrugged, waited for him to remove and unroll the map, and then pointed. “The quickest and easiest route lies beyond this lava flow. They may not have rebuilt this road the whole way, but it was there, and they were using it. Even after a thousand years, the remnants of it should be easy enough to follow, as long as the volcanoes haven’t buried other parts of it like they have here. Now, as you can see, it goes around this mountain and turns west, straddling the top of that cliff, and then turns southwest. At that point, we’ll follow along the valley floor for a considerable distance, and then come to a mountain with three summits. The temple will be nestled in among those summits, and the road—if it’s still there—will lead us there.”
“Which mountain is it?” Hobart asked, shielding his eyes and looking west.
“We can’t see it from here,” Ortis said without looking up. “The other mountains are in the way.”
“I understand that,” Angus said. “What are the alternatives?”
“We can’t get there by going through the valley down there,” Ortis said. “It’s a bottleneck. Even if we could climb out of it, we wouldn’t be able to take our horses with us.”
“I am not abandoning Leslie,” Hobart said, in a deadpan tone that suggested an unflinching position. “She has been with me since I started soldiering.”
“Millie’s too good a steed to leave behind,” Giorge added.
“Now,” Ortis said. “The river near Hellsbreath. You wanted to go that way, didn’t you? Well, if we had, we would have had to go over those two mountains.” Ortis pointed at a pair of tall peaks looming above them to the southwest. “They are too high. There are no known trails or passes through them, and a lot of dangers.”
“I’ve seen them up close,” Giorge said. “I’m an excellent climber, and I’d be hard-pressed to get past them. A lot of people have died trying.”
“We can’t come around from the Western Kingdoms, either,” Ortis continued. The mountains are even higher on that side of the range. Hellsbreath Pass is the only route west that we—or anyone else, for that matter—would risk taking, and it runs farther south before it turns west. That leaves only one other option. We can try to go around the other side of this mountain.”
“Let’s do that, then,” Angus suggested, eager to hold onto his wand’s power. “Surely it can be done.”
Ortis shook his head. “Don’t you think they would have done it if it were possible? They built the road on this side of the mountain for a reason. Twice. Besides, even if we can make it through the wilderness on that side of the mountain, our time is too short. The detour will add several days to our journey there, and several more on the way back. The winter will hit us before we’re out of these mountains, and I do not relish the idea of getting caught in an early blizzard. The Tween would claim us as its next victims.”
“So,” Hobart finished for him. “We seem to have two choices. First, we go somewhere for the winter, maybe Wyrmwood or joining a caravan, and come back to try again in the spring. Second, you use the wand to see if we can cut a path through this lava that our horses can follow.”
“The wand is yours, Angus, and so is the choice,” Ortis said. “But I believe the rest of us are in agreement; we would like you to use it.”
Angus frowned. The decision was, as Hobart put it, simple. Use the wand and try to go further, or go back and wait until spring. And it was up to him to decide. What should they do? He could try Teffles’ flying spell, but it was risky; it wasn’t designed for more than one person, and trying to incorporate the horses and his companions into its effect was not nearly as easy as he had made it sound. He flexed his wrist and forearm, felt the wand slide into his palm. He lifted it up to his face, turned it around so he could see the number of sigils remaining, and counted off each group of three as if it were one. Eight spells remained, and each one was precious. How many would it take to clear a path through the lava flow? One? Two? All of them? And what about the recoil? If it sent him flying off the mountain….
A slow smile fell into place. He wouldn’t fall; he would fly. He wouldn’t have a lapse of concentration on the flying spell while he used the wand; activating the wand only involved a simple series of gestures, and they wouldn’t interfere with his grip on the spell’s thread. Surely he could manage both at the same time….
“I need to see this for myself,” he said.
“You can climb?” Giorge asked, studying him for a reaction.
“I can fly,” Angus said, drawing the magic into focus. It was not at all difficult to find the pale blue strands of magic he needed; there were strong clusters of them around mountains. “I suggest you take the horses back around that outcropping and stay with them,” he said as he dismounted and began tying the knots together. “I’ll let you know when to return.” If I am able to.
13
There was something liberating about flying—and something nauseating. But most of all, he wasn’t very good at it. Teffles’ instructions for the spell had given only rudimentary directions for how to go up, down, left, right, forward, and backward, but it didn’t have any indications for controlling speed. At first, he did everything too quickly, rising above the lava flow several hundred feet before redirecting his momentum sideways. Then he sped out over the valley at a dizzying speed. Fortunately, he was able to turn his face away from the wind he was creating before he vomited, and it scattered behind him instead of onto his robe.
Mostly.
Then he figured out how to orient his position and began moving in a wide circle over the lava field. His speed was now constant, but still remarkably fast, and it took time for him to figure out how to slow down. When he finally did, his speed dropped rapidly to a near crawl until he floated high above the edge of the mountain. Fortunately, despite his discomfort, he had not lost control of the spell, and he began experimenting with it, gradually shifting his position and altering his speed until he was able to wobble over the lava field and estimate the extent of the blockage. It was a sobering calculation, particularly if he was right about the wand’s limitations.
The city wall had been forty feet thick, and Hedreth’s was near the outer edge. The wand had penetrated through the ten feet or so of the wall, but it couldn’t have gone much further. If it had, it would have disrupted the dome protecting the city, and that was not one of the charges against him. If it had been, he would not have gotten out of Hellsbreath alive. As Hobart had put it, “Interference with the functioning of the dome or the efforts to con
trol the lava flow is punishable by death, swift and without mercy.” He had listened very carefully to that one, and even an accidental disruption would have cost him his life. In fact, they likely would have let him die from the injuries caused by his mistake; it would have been quicker. Still, the dome was no more than fifty feet from Hellsbreath’s wall, and the range of the wand had to be between ten and sixty feet.
He dipped down lower, until he was a dozen feet or so above the newest lava flow. It was a relatively thin layer draped over the older flows. It had flattened out and dripped over the sides of those old flows just before it reached the roadbed. The next older flow was probably about the same thickness, stacked on top of an even earlier one, which was stacked on another one….
There was no way to tell how many times the volcano had erupted, but the mountain had clearly been bleeding from an open wound for some time. The wound would scab over until the pressure popped it loose and another bubbly flood of lava sputtered out. But it all started from the same general location a few dozen feet above the roadbed. He landed roughly on the older flows, and the grassy ground easily held his weight.
“So,” he muttered, testing his footing. “The horses should be able to walk on this. All the lava seems to have built up from the north, where it tapers easily down to the roadbed, to here,