They had little else to do, so they worked on the airship whenever they were awake. It was a weird looking beast when it was done. The gigantic frame looked like the skeleton of an open-hulled ship. It was filled with gasbags and an enclosed glass furnace to heat them. Around it all they sewed a fabric skin—tight, but not airtight, to contain the gasbags. Anchored onto the lower half of the frame was a sort of not-very-long longboat for the travelers and their gear.

“Won’t we want propellers, or something?” Deor asked Ambrosia.

“What are propellers?” she replied.

He explained, sketching a little in the dirt so that the idea would come across.

“Ingenious!” Ambrosia said. “Yes, I can see how an airship might use them, but this airship won’t need them. Have you looked at the clouds, Deor?

Deor looked up curiously. The sky was half filled with clouds . . . but there was something odd about them, a twisting channel wherever the clouds crossed a line running from north to south. “The sky is cut in two,” he said.

“Yes. Whatever is killing the sun is drawing air with it toward the edge of the world. If we get up that far, we can simply swim in the current.”

“What about the road back?” Deor asked.

Ambrosia did not answer at first, or look directly at him. She smiled, but not at anything Deor could understand. After a while she said, “Maybe we should worry about the return journey when it’s before us. One problem at a time.”

Deor shook his head. He guessed that meant she thought that a return trip was unlikely—unlikely enough not to worry about.

“I think you’re wrong,” Deor said, after some thought. “Suppose the stream fails—at night, say? We might need to maneuver to get to it, also. We could attach the propellers to the gondola or framework—perhaps power them with pedals and impulse wells as on our lost and lamented four-wheeled Hippogriff.”

“Put it to Morlock,” Ambrosia said resignedly.

Morlock heard him out and agreed with a nod—didn’t even say a word. It added a few days to the job, but in the end even Ambrosia agreed it was worth it.

The thing was finally done and they had loaded their gear into the gondola when Morlock said, “What should we call it?”

“It’s an airship, Morlock,” Ambrosia said. “That’s what we’ll call it.”

“It’s supposed to be bad luck to sail on a boat with no name,” Deor pointed out. “We can use all the luck we can get.”

“Any suggestions?” Ambrosia said patiently.

“Sky-Sword of the Vraids!” cried out Kelat. He’d obviously been holding the thought for a while.

“Gasbag,” suggested Deor, less grandiloquently.

“Skyglider,” proposed Morlock thoughtfully. Deor guessed he was thinking of the short-lived Boneglider.

“Wuruklendono!” suggested Liyurriu. At least, it seemed to be a suggestion.

“Viviana,” decided Ambrosia. “Everyone agreed? Think I care? Let’s get aboard and get aloft, then.”

They wedged themselves into the gondola, sitting sideways, each of them at a set of pedals and manuals.

“I’ll take us up,” Morlock said, and closed his eyes. Presently, they saw his irises glowing through the thin skin of his eyelids.

This was the part that Deor knew but didn’t fully understand. Somehow, the two Ambrosii could keep the warmer air in the gasbags and expel the cold air. Eventually, the gasbags would all be full of hot air and lift into the sky and float away, like a politician’s promise.

The body of the airship began to lift from the ground.

Presently, its vast bulk was overhead and they were sitting upright. Ambrosia took her belt and lashed Morlock’s left arm to the rail of the gondola. “Can’t have him falling out,” she observed.

Deor was not afraid of heights. He had spent much of his life in mountains, and had frequently amused himself by climbing crumbling rock faces with his bare hands and feet. He was able to look down and see clouds below him with nothing more in his mind than a mild curiosity about whether it was raining below.

What he didn’t like, what he had never been able to like, what he never would like, was the knowledge that nothing was beneath him. The ground out of which he had been hatched would never betray him; he knew it too well. But he had not been hatched for the air.

Now they were getting high—several man-lengths above the ground and getting higher. Kelat was looking over the edge with considerable interest. Ambrosia was eyeing the glass furnace overhead. Liyurriu, seated just behind him, began a subvocal murmur that carried shrill tones of panic.

Deor was afraid, too. He was afraid that the wooden frame would fall apart and that they would fall. He was afraid that the glass furnace would run out of control, the gasbags would burn, and they would fall. He was afraid that the wind would come and tip them over and they would fly out of the gondola and fall. Then the earth, whom he had betrayed by leaving, would kill him for his betrayal. He was afraid.

But he was bored by his fear. It was always the same. And would it really be so terrible to die? There were worse things, if the teachers of his youth spoke true.

He looked over the rail of the gondola.

They were now quite high and it was becoming quite cold. Kelat’s teeth were chattering, and it was not because he was frightened. He looked as eager as a miner following a vein of ore. It was strangely cold. It must be—

“Ambrosia!” said Deor. “The cold air is cascading down the gasbags.”

“Yes,” said Ambrosia. “That—that should be fixable.” She closed her eyes and ascended into vision. Deor saw blue circles through her closed eyes. But she sat upright and one of her hands rested lightly on the gondola rail; the other was on Kelat’s shoulder.

She was a great seer—far greater than Morlock, who was great enough to have defeated Bleys in at least one notable test of power. Deor wondered at it, but the Sight was not one of his talents, even in the smallest degree.

The light in her eyes faded, and she opened them. The chill draft from above had ceased.

“We’ll try to keep the cold air away from the gondola,” she said. “It depends—”

“Madam, I don’t mean to be rude, but I would hate to see you waste your time. Unless you think that Kelat can benefit by the explanation.”

Ambrosia grinned. “Canyon keep you then, you stiff-necked dwarven non-seer.”

“The same to you, harven.”

They were well over the city of Narkunden now, and the face of the city bore the scars of violence. Two factions were demolishing buildings to make walls around their neighborhoods. Much of the city seemed to be empty. The docks down at the base of the bluff were burning and the bridge between Narkunden and Aflraun was broken.

“Morlock, Morlock,” Ambrosia said sadly. “What were you thinking?”

Deor was stung by this. “He was thinking that many in the city were starving while others grew fat. Or so I believe, madam.”

“Of course he was. But good intentions are no substitute for skill in any art, least of all the art of governance. A man named Ambrosius came to a town. His intentions were not malicious, at least not wholly so. He ignited a civil war and then went his way, and the evil he had begun continued to burn its way through the city. Am I talking about Merlin in Grarby or Morlock in Narkunden?”

“It’s not the same,” Deor said stoutly.

“Why not? Either Morlock knew the harm he would do by destroying the monetary system of the city, or he did not. He was either malicious or ignorant.”

Deor wanted to defend his harven-kin. But he could not quite. Deor knew Morlock understood something of the economics of scarcity: they depended on it when they sold gems and other goods in the marketplace in A Thousand Towers. So why had he let the golden genie out of the bottle?

Deor muttered something and would have let the subject drop, but Ambrosia squeezed Kelat’s shoulder and said, “What do you think, Prince Uthar?”