They managed to get most of the lines loose at the same time, though Rainspot at the stern had a hard knot and lagged behind. The ship rolled sideways, the hull planks groaning.

"We're too heavy!" Wingover shouted.

The distinct sound of splitting wood erupted below their feet. The starboard side rose, throwing everyone to port.

Sturm banged the back of his head against the deck house.

Then, with an ear-piercing crack, the Cloudmaster righted itself and lifted into the air.

"Halloo!" called Pteriol. "You've lost something!"

Sturm and the gnomes filled the rail. They were rising very slowly, but from a height of fifty feet, they could see a wide section of the hull planking and a mass of dark metal on the ground.

"The engine!" Flash cried. Birdcall uttered a hawkish scream of dismay.

They rushed from the ladder down to the hold. Near the deck hatch, Flash fell into the arms of Kitiara. She was whis tling a Solacian dance tune.

"Quickly!" said the excited gnome. "We've lost the engine! We must go back and get it!"

Kitiara stopped whistling. "No," she said.

"No? No?"

"I don't know anything about aerial navigation, but I do know this ship was too heavy to get off the ground. So I arranged for the extra weight to stay behind."

"How'd you do that?" Sturm asked.

"Sawed through the hull around the engine," she said.

"It's not fair! It's not right!" Flash said, blinking through angry tears. Birdcall made similar noises.

Sturm patted the two on their shoulders. "It may not be fair, but it was the only thing to do," he said gently. "You can always build another engine once you get back to Sancrist."

Stutts and Wingover squeezed past Kitiara and started down the ladder. "We'd better inspect the hole," said Stutts.

"The hull may be seriously weakened. Not to mention drafty."

Drafty was an understatement. A yawning hole, twelve feet by eight feet, showed where the lightning-powered engine had been.

"My," said Stutts, peering down at the receding ground.

They were already a hundred feet up. "This is rather inter esting. We should have built a window into the bottom of the ship from the first."

"Keep that in mind," Sturm said, who kept well back from the hole. "We'll have to patch this somehow, if only to keep ourselves from tumbling out." He wasn't too surprised by

Kitiara's deed. It was typical of her: quick, direct, and a bit ruthless. Still, they were off the ground at last.

Pteriol's brass scales glistened as he passed under the ship.

The dragon circled in a rising spiral, wings flapping slowly.

The Cloudmaster moved very slowly westward, away from the fallen obelisk.

Wingover stepped forward until his toes were off the edge of the hull timbers. He pushed back the swath of bandages that shrouded his head. His disturbing black eyes focused on something far below.

"What is that?" he asked, pointing at the distant ground.

"I can't see anything," Stutts said.

"There's someone down there walking."

"A tree-man?" suggested Sturm. "It is daylight."

"Too small. It walks differently, more like -" Wingover scrubbed his eyes with his small fists. "No! It can't be!

"What, what?"

"It looks like a gnome – like Bellcrank!"

Sturm frowned. "Bellcrank is dead."

"I know! I know! But it looks just like him. His ears have this funny shape." Wingover brushed his own ears. "But now he's red all over!"

There was a shout from the upper deck. Sighter had spot ted the walking figure with his spyglass. Sturm, Stutts, and

Wingover hurried up. The astronomer gnome identified the figure as Bellcrank, too.

Fitter shivered. "Is it a ghost?" he asked plaintively.

"Hardly," Sighter responded. "It just stumbled on the turf."

"Then he's alive!" said Cutwood. "We have to go back for him!" Flash, Roperig, and Birdcall all seconded this notion.

Stutts cleared his throat to get their attention.

"We can't go back," he said sadly. "We've no control over direction or altitude." Rainspot began to sniffle, and Cut wood dabbed his eyes on his sleeve.

"Isn't there anything we can do?" Sturm asked.

Just then, Pteriol flashed by the port side, banked steeply, and rolled over the top of the bag. Everyone on the Cloud master felt his telepathic whoops of delight.

"The dragon! The dragon can fetch him!" said Rainspot.

"He might," said Kitiara.

"You're his favorite. You ask him," said Cutwood.

The brass form arrowed past the starboard rail, the wind from his wings stirring the drifting ship into a slow eddy.

"Hai, dragon. Cupelix! Suffering gods, I mean Pteriol!" Kiti ara yelled. The dragon swept under the stern and raced along the underside of the ship.

"He can't hear me," she said, peeved. "Big, dumb brute."

"He's drunk with freedom," Sturm said. "Can't blame him, after all the centuries he spent in that obelisk."

"We're losing Bellcrank!" Fitter cried as the ship floated over the valley cliff walls.

The tiny red figure shrank from even Wingover's power ful sight and was lost in the scarlet terrain. The gnomes watched, wordless, as the Cloudmaster drew away from their lost friend. Amid quiet weeping, Cutwood broke away and went below deck. He returned shortly with a hammer, a saw, and a pair of pliers. He threw these items overboard.

"Why did you do that I" Sturm said.

Cutwood turned his round pink face up to the taller man.

"Bellcrank will need tools," he said.

Sighter, Stutts, and Wingover left the rail. Flash and Bird call lingered a while longer, then they, too, departed.

Roperig pulled Fitter away. Rainspot and Cutwood stayed, even as the valley fell farther and farther behind.

"It's so hard to believe," Rainspot said. "Bellcrank was dead. We buried him."

"Perhaps there's some truth to what the dragon said," Kiti ara offered. Cutwood asked what she meant. "He said noth ing ever died on Lunitari."

"You mean that wasn't Bellcrank down there, just some thing that looked like him?"

"I don't know, I'm no cleric or philosopher," she said.

"The dead have been known to walk, even on Krynn. With all the magic rampant on Lunitari, it doesn't seem too strange that Bellcrank should return."

No one could answer her. Kitiara turned up the collar of her cloak and went below, leaving Rainspot and Cutwood alone at the rail.

They flew over many of the places they'd crossed on foot – the field of stones (alive with growth by daylight) and the oreless range of hills. From above, the short-lived jungle had a disquieting appearance. The plants writhed and undu lated, like swells in a wind-tossed sea. Even that grew boring after a while, and Sturm went below to see what was being done to the hole in the ship's belly.

He almost choked when he saw what the gnomes were doing. Cutwood and Fitter were lying on their bellies on thin lengths of planking stretched across the gap. Less-than inch-thick wood was all that stood between them and a long, long fall. Rainspot and Flash passed them other, short er pieces of wood to nail crosswise. In this knockabout, trial-and-error style, the gnomes were repairing the hole.

From the stern, Kitiara looked down at the red moon.

Three hours aloft, and the land had fallen away far enough to lose its surface features. Now it was just a rolling bolt of red velvet, no more real than the permanent black of the sky. Cupelix (for Kitiara scoffed at the dragon's new name) was behind and slightly below them. The continuous effort of flying was tiring him out, and he no longer swooped and danced through the air. Now it was long, slow, steady work.

How do you do it?

"How do I do what?" said Kitiara.