like a horn from its head. Once it was through the door, I hit the DOWN button and then walked ahead of my monstrous delivery. Driving a little two-legged dirt dude was nothing; making a forty-ton, four-legged behemoth walk took all my concentration and a huge amount of power, so I kept my head down as I walked it to the site marked by a brick and timber outline.
There I paused to read the spells written and carved into the concrete. Here, a mini mountain range would rise; over there would be a flat plain, continually windswept by the Air spells woven underneath. Here, a mini-river would spring up from the ground and flow downhill to a basin where the water would pool before seeping magically back uphill to start again, commanded by chalked symbols and a woven grass doll lying on the floor beneath it. The fire witches had created a space that would be hot, maybe hot enough to burn wood and would certainly dry out clay and mud. Tami’s part of it was a beautiful picture of blue, orange, yellow, black, and white ash—a desert landscape under a hot sun.
My aunt had outlined a model landscape, one that would set itself up for the most part when I delivered the raw material. It would be about a foot thick across much of its space but much higher in the middle.
I looked up at my aunt to see how things stood. She was looking at my dirt beast, studying it with a careful eye. I decided that she was maybe, just maybe, a little impressed. She looked at me and raised one eyebrow.
“A léiríonn as?” she asked, wondering if I was showing off.
I glanced at my audience. Most eyes were wide and more than a few jaws were dropped. Delwood looked impressed and even Jenks appeared uncertain.
I looked back at my aunt and shrugged while holding my thumb and forefinger an inch apart.
“Well, go on wit ye. Put the dirt where it goes, We’re wasting class time,” she said.
I waved the earth lizard over the course, its massive feet lifting over the brick border, shaking the building when they came down, the head coming closest to the class side of the room. The students backed up a couple of feet, even though the earth lizard never left the outline. Another wave of my hand and it settled into place, like a monstrous crocodile lying down, features crumbling as the dirt flowed outward. A second later, the preset spells activated and the center of the model lifted up into a ridgeline while dirt flowed outward to fill in the rest of the space.
I helped the mountains along by moving much of the broken concrete up to the top, a cliff of manmade stone. The area set up for water collapsed down into a basin that had an asphalt bottom, and a miniature riverbed climbed halfway up the escarpment. I can’t do shit with water, but the ice and snow were easily moved by an earth wave I used to convey it to the basin. It shifted and slid into the basin, where I melted it with heat borrowed from the building around me. Almost as soon as liquid water was available, the spells that Britta and Ryanne had scribed set the water to circulating, pouring down the riverbed.
“And jest what’s the point of that?” Aunt Ash asked. I looked at her finger, pointing at the little bare-limbed sapling up near the end of the course.
Another shrug; what I was supposed to do, let it die?
“It doesn’t fit the rest of it, now does it?” she pressed.
I frowned, then waved my right hand. The tree and a portion of its surrounding dirt left the model and slid fifteen feet away, leaving a trail of mud.
“Too soft to let it jest die then, are ye, Warlock?” she challenged. I met her gaze with a steady calm. Her eyes narrowed. “Tami? Would ye be so kind as to burn that decrepit tree for me?” she asked, never taking her eyes off mine.
Tami tilted her head to one side in consideration, then simply formed a fireball in one hand and threw it at my tree. Without taking my eyes off my aunt’s, I shunted the fireball into the snow still clinging to parts of the model. A cloud of steam puffed upward as dirty crystals exploded outward for a few feet in every direction.
Tami frowned at me and formed another fireball, but Ashling