The Tiger's Eye (Book 1) (23 page)

“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 control 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, 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 the 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….