He jumped like a yard in the air and nearly fell over in surprise! Fuck! Then the full impact of what he’d just done hit him. Yeah! He hadn’t really believed it would work. Not really! His heart was thumping out an African drum solo in his chest, and he felt so light-headed he abruptly sat down on the packed dirt of the track and almost started hyperventilating. He sat for a couple of minutes until he had the incipient hyperventilating under control, and his breathing had calmed back down to almost normal. Then he grinned to himself. He was a sorcerer! He looked at the broom handle and changed the word for east to the one for north. He knew the word from the tablets, along with the words for the other three cardinal directions. He ran through the spell, and the broom handle, sorry, axle, disappeared and reappeared four or so yards north! Oh yes! After using the spell, he felt extremely light-headed again and decided it would be better to continue sitting on the ground rather than try and get up.

He looked over at the hillside beyond the road and thought about moving the broom handle east about thirty paces so it would reappear inside the hill. Then he realized that moving the broom handle into the same space as the hill could cause the atoms to fuse, well, maybe. Oooo. A fusion bomb, possibly. Right here. Not a good idea. He could be wrong, of course. He probably was, in fact. Particle physics wasn’t his area of expertise after all, but he decided that interpenetrating solid objects was something he would experiment with from a long, long way away! If at all! He went to stand up and immediately saw stars, so he reluctantly sat down again and tried to calm himself some more.

After about five minutes, he felt his body had calmed down enough to get up, and it was then that he realized that his real problem was going to be the lack of vocabulary. He really didn’t have the words he needed to do other magic. If that was what it was. It was possible that what he was doing was simply redefining the position of certain atoms in the space-time continuum. Uh-huh. It was an interesting explanation of the teleportation thing that he had come up with after Urasmian’s little disappearing act. Was that what was happening, or was he just rationalizing an effect of real magic? He looked at a spot on the road about a hundred yards up the slope. Right….

He grinned to himself and fiddled with the spell. It didn’t take him long to develop a modified version of the spell in his head, and then he said it with power. And he was a hundred yards up the road, slightly off-balance, as his reappearing a foot higher variable was only just enough to keep him above the road… but whoa! He thought about the spell and then looked at the ground near the truck, about a hundred and twenty yards away. He removed the distance component and changed the height to be two inches above the ground level at the spot he was looking at. He ran it through his head again and decided he had indeed made a spell to simply move there. As in that spot right there. Focus. Cast the spell, and there he was! He dropped two inches and nearly collapsed while seeing stars and feeling faint! He sat down, which this time didn’t really help as he still kept seeing stars, so he lay down completely on the dirt track while feeling very strange.