Deor roared and grabbed for Morlock, as if he would send him by the same path. Morlock stepped back to his own bench and sat down.

“Are you completely crazy?” shouted Deor, and Kelat, too, was looking at him as if he were a dangerous lunatic.

“Kelat,” he said. “Harven Deor.”

“Am I harven to a murderer?” Deor continued, hardly less loud than before. “What in the Canyon do you think you are doing? Which one of us will you throw out next?”

“None of you,” Morlock said. “As for Liyurriu, he is not what he seems. He should never have been with us.”

Deor glared at him for a while, saying nothing. Morlock met his gaze and said nothing more.

Kelat finally broke the silence, saying, “What do you mean? Liyurriu was not a werewolf?”

“Eh.”

Deor unleashed a thunderblast of semicoherent Dwarvish profanity.

Morlock ignored him and addressed himself to Kelat. “Your question does not have a yes or no answer. Liyurriu, as you may think of him, did not exist.”

Kelat sat back and pondered this.

“Do you mean he was a mere illusion?” Deor said in a more nearly reasonable voice. “Impossible, Morlock. He did work on this airship. He—” Deor’s voice choked off and he turned away.

“His physical presence was real,” Morlock said, “but it was not inhabited by a mind. Not as your bodies are—as mine is.”

“What do you mean?” Deor demanded. “What can that mean?”

“His body was simply a sort of puppet, controlled by another mind far distant from here. A seer of great power.”

“Who? Why?” Deor demanded.

“That was what I wanted to know,” Morlock reminded him. “It is what Liyurriu would not say.”

Kelat asked, “Did you see it in your vision? Is that how you know?”

“Yes.” In his mind he could still see the tethers of talic force glimmering through the world, east and south. That was where the puppeteer of Liyurriu-puppet was.

“Why didn’t Lady Ambrosia know it?”

“She has long known it, I think.”

“Then she must have had some purpose in concealing it. Shouldn’t you have . . . er . . . consulted with her?”

Morlock reflected briefly and said, “No.”

Kelat reflected briefly and then climbed into the now empty bench behind Deor.

Morlock shrugged. It was no skin off his walrus. If it helped the boy sleep better, then it was all to the good. He wrapped himself in a cloak and courted sleep. It came quickly, and he was wrapped in a darkly golden dream where he lay beside his darkly golden wife, when his sleep was shattered by Deor’s voice.

“Whazzit?” he said, or words to that effect.

Deor was sitting in the bench Kelat had vacated, leaning over so that his head was near to Morlock’s.

“Morlocktheorn,” Deor said.

“Deortheorn,” Morlock replied.

“Why did you give the knowledge of goldmaking to the Narkundans?”

“Ah.” It was an unexpected question, but his harven-kin deserved a fair answer. He thought it over for a while and said, “I was angry at those smug pink parasites.”

“Excuse me?”

“Those teachers who hated teaching, swarming around the stationer’s shop, talking about money as if it were virtue, arguing fine points of grammar while others were starving.”

“Oh. Oh. I shall have to apologize to Ambrosia, I think.”

“About what?”

“We had an argument about something, and I’m beginning to see her point a little.”

“She usually has one,” Morlock said.

“Yes. Do you think Liyurriu is dead?”

“The entity who was using Liyurriu is not dead. The body may or may not survive the fall.”

“We’re miles in the air, Morlock.”

“Werewolves drink strength and health from moonlight, it’s said, and Trumpeter is bright tonight. But there is no Liyurriu, Deor. That person does not exist.”

“Eh,” said Deor pointedly, and climbed past the snoring Kelat to his own bench.

Morlock shrugged, descended again into the depths of his cloak and sleep. His dreams this time were dark and cold, and Aloê showed herself in none of them.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Wreck of the Viviana

They flew the blood-warm wind from the dying sun northward, day after day. At night they drifted. Sometimes they drove the propellers with the pedals and manuals to have something to do and to keep warm. Sometimes they talked, although infrequently. They watched the distant land and the bright ring of the horizon and they waited for the end—of their journey, of the world.

They saw below them a great tidal wave of beasts fleeing from the bitter blue death that roamed the north. From their airship miles above they could see it, black, brown, and red against the pitiless white and silver of snow and ice.

North of the great migration, there were still shapes moving in the wild, wind-carved wastes of snow, but they could not quite see them or understand what they saw.

And there was a long, straight line running ahead of them, all the way to the northern horizon. When they talked, they talked a little about that.

“You know what it is,” Ambrosia said eventually. (Morlock was in trance, keeping the Viviana aloft.)

“I do not know what it is,” Deor replied emphatically.

“It’s the weight of the sun’s death. It’s the footprint in the snow of the warm air we’re riding north.”

“Ah,” said Deor and Kelat in chorus and with equal satisfaction.

The Ambrosii grew hollow-eyed. It was hard to spend much of a day in visionary rapture, day after day. It made the soul’s relationship to the body more tenuous. If the bond finally broke, that was death. They were not about to die. But they were not well either.

One day, around noon, Deor said, “We’re lower than we were. Are the gasbags getting cold?”

Morlock looked up into the body of the airship. The glass furnace was still burning its fuel. He looked back at Ambrosia. Though deep in vision, she looked at him with eyes closed, the dim glow of her irises visible through the lids. She shook her head. And the ship still seemed to be buoyant.

“Unlikely,” Morlock said. He glanced all the way around the horizon and added, “Look north.”

“The sky seems . . . bigger there,” Deor called back. “Or the land higher.”

“The sunstream is dropping down—carrying us closer to the Soul Bridge?” Kelat asked.

“Likely,” Morlock said.

He wondered if the very sky curved down at the edge of the world, closing in the world’s air like a glass bowl enclosing water. The idea gave him a breathless, locked-in feeling that he disliked strongly. He said nothing of this, however.

As Viviana flew lower, they could see the wild beasts of the snow fields better. But it was hard to understand what they saw. Many shapes were white-on-white, their borders hard to distinguish. Others glittered like glass in the bitter, pale sun.

“Are those plants?” wondered Kelat, as they flew past a dense, tangled chaos of bitterly bright ice things.

“Of course!” Deor said. And Morlock agreed: it was very like a forest seen from above, except that it was a forest after an ice storm, with no green or brown to be seen. There were skeletal shapes of black, though—very like thin tree trunks and bare, wintry branches.

“What kind of creatures would feed on such plants?” Kelat wondered.

“Ice-bunnies?” speculated Deor. “Frost-deer?”

“And who feeds on the ice-bunnies?”

“Us, maybe. A nice frost-bunny stew sounds good right about now, doesn’t it?”

“Not really, no.”

Morlock noticed that the glittering plants did not grow near the narrow road leading into the deep north. Nor did the hulking white shapes tend to travel there.

“What’s that?” Deor called back, pointing to the east. “Quake sign?”

Morlock looked at a long, serpentine break in the snow crust. “Hope so,” he called back. But he didn’t think so. Fault lines from an earthquake would have been more angular.