Still meshed, Rafe activated his levitation tat and the post he’d brought floated over, rotated, and dropped into the hole. It stuck out six feet above the rock.
Rafe and I stood and dropped our hand hold, but maintained our meshing. He picked up the roll of copper and handed it to me. “Unroll about three feet.”
I removed the fastening on the copper and began to unroll it while Rafe took his knife from his boot. When I had three feet unspooled, he stepped back from me.
“Another foot,” Rafe said as his knife grew into a katana.
I did as he asked.
“Now, hold it up and let the slack hang.”
I could see where he was headed and looked cautiously at the long blade in his hands.
Rafe had nothing to prove to me so I raised the copper and held still. A moment passed and then his blade cut through the copper just beneath my hands, cleaving the copper sheet smoothly along a horizontal line. The wind threatened to carry the copper sheet away, but Rafe caught it with a spell while I set the remaining roll down.
He began to read from his grimoire, and I felt the power growing around us as he did. Moving his finger across the copper sheet, he traced a pattern onto its surface. When he finished, the pattern glowed momentarily as he applied power to it.
Rafe read another spell from his grimoire. The copper curved up and around, forming a globe with the spell on the outside surface. Material separated from the top of the sphere, forming a hole the diameter of the brass rod. It rolled into a ring and floated through the air to Rafe. He slipped the small ring into a pocket.
Triggering the tat he’d used to dissolve rock, Rafe touched the top of the post and held it there for a few seconds. Canceling the spell again, Rafe picked up the brass rod, poked it through the center of the copper sphere, letting the sphere slide down the rod until it reached the closed end of the sphere. Raising the rod to the top of the post, Rafe dropped the rod into the hole, and it sank until the copper sphere stood pointing at the sky.
“That’s one,” Rafe said.
Our next stop was near the summit of Pikes Peak. We stayed far away from the parking lot and observation building that overlooked the Springs. It was a lot colder above fourteen thousand feet, and a strong wind blew the ground snow around us. Rafe repeated the actions from the top of Cheyenne Mountain while I joined in by observing and studying his technique in casting the spells.
We finished up there, mounted our familiars, and flew northward, descending as we flew. We passed over some kind of amusement park in the forest at the base of Pikes Peak and then over the four-lane Highway 24 that connected Colorado Springs with Woodland Park, a small town just west of Ute Pass.
Still traveling north, we soon came to a peak that Rafe identified as Ormes Peak, a tree covered mountain that didn’t extend above the tree line. All sides of the mountain were blackened from a burn scar that covered many square miles. The peak itself was an island of green in a sea of desolation. I had asked Rafe about the burn scar when I first spotted it at Garden of the Gods. He’d said it was a few years old, but he didn’t know much about it. Once down on Ormes Peak, Rafe used the last of the posts, copper, and brass rods to set up one more antenna. He hadn’t called his devices antenna, but since he hadn’t had a name for them and that it was Tesla who had given him the idea, I decided they had to be antennae of some sort.
We were just finishing when I had a thought.
“Rafe, that spell you used on the stone to cut a hole.”
“What about it?” he asked.
“What do you call it?”
He shrugged and looked a little sheepish. It was a strange look on him.
“I call it rock eater,” he said.
“Rock eater?” I repeated.
“Yes, I guess I could call it disintegrating touch, but that sounds silly.”
I laughed lightly. “Yeah, that sounds more like something out of D&D. Have you ever tried it as a weapon?”
He frowned a little in thought and then shook his head. “No, I haven’t. I have to be nearly touching the object I’m using it on for it to work. Most of my offensive spells are ranged, meaning I cast them from a distance. It’s smart when you’re dealing with some of the things we have to tackle.”
“But could it be used offensively?” I persisted.
“I guess I could, but there’d still be the problem of range.”
“You couldn’t modify it to work over a distance? I mean anything that can vaporize rock would pretty much take out anything if you cast it on a person, a weapon, or even a vehicle. Hell, even if it didn’t have a range capability, imagine using it against anything you could touch. You could take out a tank,” I said excitedly.
Rafe nodded and grinned. “I don’t usually go up against tanks, but you do have a good suggestion. If I could stretch it out to even a dozen or more feet, I could take out weapons that were being used against us. I tell you what. I’ll give your suggestion some more thought, and you keep thinking. Even if this one doesn’t pan out, your next idea might.”
I was grinning, and I felt more elated than I could understand at first. Then I realized that Rafe had accepted my idea as valid for study and encouraged me to mention anything else I thought up. Now that was a big plus. I was just an apprentice, and I couldn’t do much magic yet, but I still had
