where it is like a cliff. All I need to do is make it possible for them to get past that new deposit and onto the firmer footing of the older ones. Can I do it with two blasts? One from the front to get rid of the fragile stuff, and the other slanting up from there to here?”
He took a short leap and glided past the surface of the recent flow and dropped down in front of it. He took three paces back—no sense in getting hit by the debris—and took out the wand. He braced himself, held on tightly to the light blue strand of the flying spell, and made the quick series of gestures to activate the wand. The last gesture ended with the wand directed straight ahead at the lava flow. There was a deafening clap of thunder, and the fragile black wall in front of him exploded into a cloud of tiny black beads that settled softly to the ground in front of him and rolled slowly to a stop.
Where’s the recoil?
A moment later, a soft puff of air bounced past him, barely ruffling his robe and dusting him with the fine black particles.
Is that it? In Hedreth’s, the wave of force had propelled him backward as if he were a tiny leaf. But here? A tiny puff of air? He waited, watching the little black beads flutter softly to the ground, much like snowflakes falling on a calm day.
Nothing.
He lowered the wand and surveyed the damage. There was a tunnel. It started out fairly narrow—scarcely wider than five feet—and fanned outward in a growing cone that bit into the new deposit of lava, the older rock beneath it, the roadbed, and upward through the older flow.
How far?
He took a step forward, the glass-like fragments grinding together between his boot and the roadbed. He stepped back from his footprint and frowned. If he hadn’t been holding the light blue strand, he would have slipped….
He bent down and examined the blanket of shards. The road was covered with a half inch of not-quite-powdery residue. He picked up a few of the smooth, rounded granules and pinched them between his finger and thumb. They slid easily from his grip and shot outward. “The horses will fall,” he muttered. “So will we.”
He tweaked the strand of sky magic and rose unsteadily upward until he was about a foot above the roadbed. Then he eased himself slowly forward, studying the smooth sides of the cone, counting the various layers of each eruption, and rapidly calculating the approximate distance of the wand’s effect.
Twenty-five feet, he decided. Possibly a bit more. The effect tapers significantly toward the end.
He reached out for the rough edges of the exposed rock at the end of the tunnel and decided a second blast would be enough. But he wouldn’t be able to do it from within the tunnel, not if he wanted the bottom to be level. He would have to do it from above. If he did it right, the two cones would intersect at their wider termini, thereby making a gradual slope for the horses to travel between them. If he started at the bottom, there was no guarantee that a single blast would reach the surface, and there would be a ridge the horses would have to jump up to—and that only if he could maneuver his body at the right angle.
Where should he start the tunnel? He needed to measure it; he didn’t want to waste a third blast just because he came up a few feet short. But how?
He turned and flew rapidly out of the tunnel he had created and continued on down the road until he nearly crashed into his companions. “I need ropes,” he said.
“How long?” Hobart asked as he moved to the new horse, the one heavy-laden with ropes. “We have several.”
“One that’s about—” How long would it need to be? He closed his eyes. “The slant side of the triangle would be twenty-five feet. The vertical side would be about twenty. That would make the horizontal side….” He mumbled through a series of numbers and finally said, “Fifteen feet. I need a rope that is about fifteen feet long.”
“All ours are longer than that,” Hobart said, pausing in his efforts to free one of the long coils of rope.
“My net is about the right length,” Giorge offered.
“Let me have it,” Angus said. “Quickly, before the spell escapes me.” The pressure from the thread was already causing his shoulder to ache and his fingers to cramp; it wouldn’t be long before it escaped him altogether.
Giorge detached the net from his belt and handed it to him.
“When you hear thunder,” Angus said as he turned, “it will be safe to come forward. But don’t go into the tunnel until we clear out the debris.”
“Debris?” Hobart asked. “Will it be difficult to move?”
Angus half-smiled, tilted his head toward Hobart, and said, “No more than sand would be.” He leapt into the air and flew low and fast; the spell was nearly free of his control, and if he fell, he didn’t want to fall far. But it held until he topped the lava flow and deposited him in a tumble atop the second newest layer, the part that had the least amount of support left beneath it. He rolled forward several feet and came up in a crouch. Part of the ground had given way where he had landed, and there was a rough-edged gap in the smooth arc carved out by the wand. He frowned. He needed the rope to stretch almost to the edge so he could count off the fifteen feet he needed to cut through. How—
He looked down at the weighted rope in his hand and half-smiled. Giorge had been twirling it around and tossing it at a bush several feet from him. If he did that….
But Giorge kept missing. He never once got close enough to graze the bush’s leaves with a soft breeze, and the weights kept getting tangled up. What hope did he have to do it? How many times would it take him?
It didn’t matter. He couldn’t fly until he primed himself for the spell again, and if it took him ten times—a hundred times, even—he would eventually succeed. First, though, he needed to find out how long the rope was. He set it down and walked its length, estimating each pace as a yard. If he was correct, the rope and the net together were seventeen feet long. Now, he needed to start about eight feet from the lip—the tunnel he’d made went deeper than the lip itself. That meant he needed to be twenty-three feet from the lip. The length of the net’s rope plus two yards — about two paces. He moved close enough to the rim to toss the rope without risking falling through, and gripped the weighted end of the net in his right hand, the way Giorge had done. But Giorge had twirled it around, and that didn’t feel right to him. Instead, he held the weights in his hand, let the rope dangle loosely on the ground, and threw it overhand, as if it were a spear. It flung outward until it reached the end of the rope and snapped back. The net spread out suddenly, landing just short of the rim.
“Well,” he half-smiled. “Not bad, eh? A near-perfect toss on the first try! And I’ve never even held one of these things before.” He set the rope on the ground, stretching it out the way he had when he had measured it, and stepped two more paces, turned, and made a mark with his heel. Then he retrieved the net, winding it up the way Giorge had done it when he retrieved the net. He set it on the ground behind him, and flexed his forearm and turned his wrist. The etched surface of the ivory felt rough against his fingers as he stepped up to his mark. Then, like he had done below, he backed up three places. He adjusted the angle of his arm to make sure the three parts of the triangle he saw in his mind would meet, practiced positioning the wand a few times, and then went through the sequence to release the wand’s spell.
The thunder was softer this time, and the recoil was almost completely absent. But a gaping hole formed in front of him, and a cloud sprayed outward along the cone’s length. As the particles of dirt and rock settled, he stepped forward to get a better look at what he had done. If it didn’t meet up with the first tunnel….
Light shone through from the other end of the tunnel he had created, and when he knelt before it, he could see the two cones had intersected as he had expected. But there was a bit of a problem. This one was too deep, cutting into the rock further than he had expected—but not so far that it would create a problem for the horses, if they went slowly.
Why is it deeper? he wondered, stepping into the tunnel and counting the paces. What’s th
e difference that would make this one five feet longer than the other? There has to be one, doesn’t there? Voltari always said magic followed strict laws, and if something went wrong, it had an explanation. Usually, he said it was my incompetence. But the wand? Could it vary like that? And what about the recoil? Why was it so fierce in Hedreth’s but negligible here?
He didn’t have time to work through the puzzle; his companions were coming….
14
It took nearly an hour to clear a path for the horses to go single file through the tunnel, and then another half hour to regain their footing on the roadbed. They rode at an easy pace, and the roadbed continued to hug the mountain’s slope, gradually rising and falling with the contours of the mountain. In the late afternoon, they came upon a clearing carved into the mountain’s face where it was somewhat leveler than the surrounding areas. It was mostly bare rock, but near the mountain’s upslope where the wind swirled there was a thin layer of dirt with small plants clinging to it.
“They must have used this for their campsite while they were building the road,” Hobart said. “They would have turned it into a caravan stop after they finished.”
“Why bother?” Angus asked. “What was the point of building this road in the first place? There’s not much here but mountains,