David Grace - The Accidental Magician

Now pale with fear, his heart racing in an adrenaline overdose, Grantin whipped out his arm and pointed it forward at an angle slightly below that of the horizon. After a few seconds he seemed to detect a decrease in his speed but suffered a corresponding increase in his altitude. Unless he was careful, in a few more minutes he'd be back in the freezing upper reaches of the atmosphere.

The ground was now composed of flatlands interspersed with a few rounded hills and humpbacked swales. Ahead these hummocks ended and a great forested plain stretched off toward the horizon. Summoning the last fragments of whatever courage he had left, Grantin adjusted his course so that his body now plunged directly toward one of the approaching hills. Grantin then pointed his arms skyward and lowered his level of flight until the top of the slope stood higher than Grantin himself. Finally he pointed his finger at the center of the hillside and waited. His velocity did seem to slacken, but not enough. Now the hill was only a few hundred yards distant. Grantin saw that the knoll was covered by a copse of feather trees, their distended fronds resembling the terrestrial weeping willow.

Fifty feet, forty, thirty… Grantin's speed was too high and his altitude too low. In utter panic he pointed his arm straight ahead.

With a noise like a stone singing through a field of tall grass, Grantin smashed through the leafy tops of the feather trees. His arms and legs flailing, he whipped through tendrils and boughs. Leaves, stems, branches, bark, and bits of vegetation, together with a family of blue-crested squawk birds, exploded around him. He found himself tumbling downward. Instinctively his arms grasped at the limbs through which he fell. Grantin's grasp slipped from its last handhold. With a dull thud he bounced off the twisted trunk and collapsed in a bed of moss.

Dazed, head spinning, Grantin lay panting and gasping for air. So addled was his brain that it was several minutes before he realized that he had come to a halt. The nightmare flight was over. There ahead of him stretched a green-blue vista as far as the eye could – the streams and forests of the borderlands. Beyond them lay the Gogol empire itself.

Commencing with his toes and working upward, Grantin began a cautious examination of his limbs. With mild surprise he discovered that his body, even if sore, bruised, and aching, was more or less whole.

Behind him lay wave upon wave of rolling foothills, and beyond them the granite vastness of the Guardian Mountains. To his left and right were scrubby tree-strewn barrens without a hint of water, cultivation, or settlement. Only in front did there appear to be habitation which might afford Grantin a few mean necessities of life. Off in the distance he thought he detected a crinkle in the forest which he took to be the sign of a meandering river.

Somewhat uncertainly Grantin stumbled down the hill and across the green-yellow grassland. The grass, tough desiccated fibers five or six inches long, bent and flattened reluctantly beneath Grantin's boots. Near its base the vegetation was interwoven into a tough springy mat.

Pyra rode high in the sky. Grantin estimated the time to be approximately the fourth hour. Soon sweat stained his forehead, cheeks, and palms. In response to the appearance of the salty fluid hordes of mites and flies arose from the soil.

Parched, hungry, and frustrated beyond endurance, Grantin carelessly swatted at the creatures and cursed them in a rasping voice. Quick as thought the powerstone seized the feeble energies created by Grantin's unplanned spell, channeled them, amplified them, then loosed them on the countryside in a nerve-shattering display.

The air was suddenly filled with an electric tension like the calm before a thunderstorm. Ahead of him a vortex began to form, not the whirlpool of a tornado but rather a transparent cylinder parallel to the ground. Ten feet in diameter and seventy long, this tube of air rotated with ever increasing speed. In only a few moments its shape was sharply defined by the dust, twigs, bits of grass, and thousands of flies which it had sucked up along its length. Like a huge spinning pipe it rolled ahead of Grantin in the direction in which he had been walking and gained speed and power until, only a hundred yards distant, it ripped out the faded yellow grasses and proceeded to roll up a strip of the meadow as easily as a householder might take up a rug. Shortly the juggernaut was more than a mile distant and, passing over a low rise, disappeared from view.

In equal parts pleased, amazed, and horrified by the powers he had loosed, Grantin ambled forward down his now vermin-free trail.

Obviously, the powerstone was useful, but very dangerous. It occurred to Grantin that the tempest he had unleashed could just as easily have rolled backward over him. A sorcerer loosed a spell like a man pushing a rock over the edge of a palisade. Once freed it moved onward of its own mindless power, beyond control until its energy was spent. Grantin warned himself that he must exercise iron control over his movements and speech. A momentary slip, an instant of forgetfulness, and he might create a field of energy which would devour him. Chastened, yet pleased at the elimination of the bugs, Grantin walked over the rise and then down the visibly narrowing path toward the forest where the whirlwind finally disappeared.

Once inside the glade Grantin noticed a tang of water in the air, the reek of mold and growing vegetation, the zesty pungence of gingerberry trees. Only a few hundred yards beyond the edge of the forest the trail opened by Grantin's cyclone became erratic in the extreme. The force of the wind spent itself against the sturdy trunks. The trail soon narrowed to ten feet, then five, two, then none. In its death throes the cyclone had meandered through the woods like a maddened snake. Less than half a mile from the edge of the forest, Grantin was confronted by a barrier of limbs marking the site of the expiration of the whirlwind.

Grantin struggled through the underbrush, determined to proceed forward in as straight a line as possible until he struck the river which he felt sure must lie somewhere ahead. In spite of his best efforts he soon found himself enclosed ahead and on both sides by a field grown rampant with thorns. Wheezing, he looked behind him. So thick was the underbrush that he could not even detect the trail he had followed.

Perhaps, Grantin thought, just the smallest, tiniest of spells might effectively clear the way for him again. Nothing so grand as the cyclone, of course, just a mild injunction to the thorns and branches to swing out of his way. His left arm extended, hand balled into a fist, the bloodstone pointing directly ahead of him, Grantin whispered the words "Out of my way!"

To the accompaniment of a great thunderclap a huge mallet of force smashed against Grantin's outstretched arm. The force of the blow lifted Grantin and propelled him backward, his body tearing a thirty-foot long tunnel through the underbrush. Stunned, scraped, and bleeding, he landed with a thud. Apparently somewhere ahead had stood a tree or a hill, or a boulder too massive to be moved, so instead of Grantin remaining stationary and the objects in front of him slipping aside, the objects remained stationary and it was Grantin against whom the energy of the spell was released.

Resigned to his fate, Grantin stood, brushed himself off, and studied the foliage for some clue to the direction in which he should proceed. To his left a family of hoppers cluttered as they searched the tamarack trees for clumps of fresh puffballs. Ahead and to his right he detected what might be the sound of rushing water. Pulling apart two small saplings, he edged off through the forest. After he had advanced only a hundred yards or so the sound of the stream retreated, but Grantin's persistence was rewarded, for there he stumbled across a narrow but well-used trail. Almost a road, the ground was rutted, green at the humped center with grass and forest herbs.