Later, when Morlock was in trance, keeping the Viviana aloft, Deor made some reference to “throwing more of us off the airship.”

Ambrosia, who had stepped past Morlock to talk to the other males, said, “You’re still angry with Morlock about Liyurriu?”

Deor was taken aback. After a moment he answered, “Yes.”

“You realize there is no Liyurriu? He was simply a fraud, sent to beguile us?”

Deor said slowly, “If you say so.”

“I do say so. It stood out like Chariot in a cloudless winter sky when you looked at him in the talic realm.”

Deor lowered his head. He was remembering the werewolf sewing beside him—holding his arms when he was hanging outside the gondola. It had felt as if there was someone behind those moonslit eyes. “Why didn’t you notice it, then?” Deor asked. He could hear the anger in his own voice, but he couldn’t keep it out.

“Of course I noticed it. I suspected it when we met, and confirmed it that first night, when I stood watch while you were all sleeping.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I thought Liyurriu might be useful. Even an enemy can be useful, if you know him for what he is. And it was not clear that Liyurriu (or his puppeteer, rather) was an enemy.”

“Then Morlock was wrong.”

“I didn’t say so. He doesn’t trust people who lie to him; it’s a fool who does. Liyurriu could have been sent by someone who wants the world to end, to wait until we were vulnerable, then turn on us and kill us.”

“Who would want that?”

“The people Morlock calls the Sunkillers.”

“Surely there are none in our world? That’s why we are going to find theirs.”

“It’s not sure at all, Deortheorn, if I may call you so.”

“Harven.”

“There was one in the world, our world. I’m pretty sure there was. The Balancer, the unbeing that lived in the Waste Lands. Did Aloê ever tell you about it?”

“I heard something about it,” Deor admitted.

“It had a relationship with the Two Powers. It was to keep them working, engaged in the destruction of the world. It was some plot of the Sunkillers, who lived in our world before the sun was born, and ached to return. That plot failed; this is another attempt, it would seem.”

Deor thought long about this. “So you think Liyurriu was sent by them, or one of them—by the Sunkillers?”

“No, I don’t. I doubt one of them would trouble to learn the night speech of werewolves, for instance. But what if I were wrong? I was willing to take the risk; Morlock wasn’t. A difference of opinion.”

“And of method.”

“Because he acted arrogantly and alone, without saying a word to anyone? So did I, you know. And he gave Liyurriu, or whoever was pulling Liyurriu’s strings, a chance to speak up. Whoever they are, they should not have tried to bandy words with Morlock Ambrosius.”

There was an implied rebuke there, Deor decided. If the stranger behind the Liyurriu-mask should have not bandied words with Morlock, still less should his harven-kin, perhaps. And, if he was going to do it, he might as well do it to his kinsman’s face.

He turned away from Ambrosia and his own thoughts and looked off Viviana’s left bow . . . “port” they’d say on a sea ship, although he never understood why.

There was a glittering ice-forest there, running west as far as Deor could see. They were flying low enough now that he could see things moving among the crystalline leaves. Icy birds? Perhaps. He couldn’t quite catch their shapes.

Ambrosia and Kelat continued to talk in low tones behind him. They were not saying much, but the way they were saying it made him wonder if they would be mating soon. He hoped they wouldn’t do it in the Viviana. He never enjoyed witnessing the mating of the Other Ilk—it was so violent, so hard to distinguish from an act of hate.

In the event, he found that he need not have worried. The Viviana had not long to live.

The first sign came that night.

Morlock was awake; Ambrosia was in trance. Deor had thought and thought and thought about what she had said to him earlier. So he nerved himself to stand up on his bench.

The moonslit snows below were bright as a skull’s teeth, ready to devour him if he fell.

He sneered at them and gently stepped onto the bench where Kelat was snoring. The boy didn’t waken.

Ambrosia was still sitting on the bench behind Kelat. Her closed eyes glowed eerily in trance. Even more eerily: she raised her right hand in greeting as he passed. Morlock couldn’t do that in rapture. If Noreê or Illion or any of the great seers of the Wardlands could do it, Deor had never seen it. But it was effortless for Ambrosia. He raised his own in reply.

“Excuse me,” he said gruffly, as he stepped past Morlock’s bench, and then he seated himself on the vacant bench behind Morlock.

Morlock was enjoying some dry bread, salted meat, and a mold-speckled slab of pale, crumbly cheese. He held his hands out to Deor, silently offering to share.

Deor took a piece off the moldy end of the cheese. They sat there, chewing and not talking. Deor enjoyed a good talk, but he had grown up among seven clans of dwarves whose notions of conversation more nearly approximated Morlock’s. And it was easeful to sit there, not saying anything because nothing needed to be said.

Then: something needed to be said.

Chariot shone brightly over the western horizon, and Horseman stood high overhead, eclipsed by Viviana’s bulk but adding its light to the world. Except for color, it was nearly as bright as day . . . and in this northern icescape there was little color to be seen.

So Deor saw quite clearly when a cloud of the fluttering things left the ice-forests below and arrowed toward low-flying Viviana.

“Morlock!” Deor shouted, and pointed.

Morlock looked, saw, stood. “Rouse Kelat and my sister, if you can.” He ran forward recklessly, drawing his sword as he went. He stood on the prow of the gondola, his sword, bright with reflected moonslight, in his right hand; his left hand grasped the rigging.

Deor followed with more cautious speed. His shout woke the already twitching Kelat. Deor turned to look at Ambrosia, wondering what to do. He feared to touch her, lest he be drawn into her vision. Also, he had to admit to himself, he simply feared to touch her.

She raised both her hands now. He took that to mean, Stop. I know what I’m doing. He didn’t doubt it. The Ambrosii always knew what they were doing. But they didn’t seem to ever know what the other was doing.

Deor turned to look outboard of Viviana’s gondola.

The flying things were nearer now, the nearest ones enough to see. They weren’t like birds—more like insects. They had great membranous wings that flapped so swiftly that they seemed to glow in the moonslight. Heads with many eyes, glittering like polished diamonds, turned on their narrow necks jerkily, as if moved by ill-made gears. Their long, curving bodies were filled with some dark sloshing fluid, clearly visible through the transparent chitinous plates they had for skin. They kept their long, spiny legs folded up over their great bellies, like self-satisfied club men after a good dinner. At the end of each broad tail was a long, glittering sting.

The foremost was heading straight for Morlock. Of course it was.

Deor watched, motionless, as the crystal beast arrowed in, swinging the fat weight of its body to direct the sting at Morlock. Then the dark fluid in its center seemed to boil, and a jet of it came out of the sting as it drove it to strike.

Morlock dodged the sting and its venom, if that’s what it was.

The dark fluid fell among the ropes. The ropes stiffened and shattered like glass.