The Vraidish boy said slowly, “People have what they can hold. Only that.”

“So? Morlock did them no harm by making their gold as worthless as paper?”

“Paper isn’t worthless. It can carry a promise—a love letter—news.”

“You’re getting subtle, my friend. Perhaps you should go in for philosophy rather than kingship. No matter what some people have written, the two things have little to do with each other.”

“I’m not interested in being king and I’m not going to be king, but you haven’t seen what I mean yet.”

“Maybe you haven’t said it.”

“People had a choice of what to do with the knowledge Morlock gave. If they used it as a weapon, it was because they were already at war. Morlock did not help that. But he did not begin it, either.”

“You’ve given me something to think about,” Ambrosia admitted, and none of them spoke for some time.

They were high enough now that the city below was getting hazy. Aflraun, across the steep river valley, was even vaguer, wrapped in its own smoke. The vistas opened up in every direction were terrifying to Deor, but he would not look away from them. He filled his eyes and his mind with cold light and empty distance. The fear didn’t go away, but it began to seem a small thing—smaller, even, than he was.

They continued to rise. And they were drifting northward: Narkunden was now under their keel.

The land was a vague memory below them, and the cities on the Nar well behind them when Deor broke a long silence to say, “It is warmer.”

“And we’re moving faster,” Ambrosia agreed. “We’re entering the sunstream.”

The change was gradual but unmistakable. The distant earth began to blur even more. The clouds, nearer to them now, gave their real sense of movement. The wind at their backs drove them faster, ever faster.

“This is faster than a hippogriff!” Deor called back, and Kelat laughed.

“That ridiculous cart you were riding?” Ambrosia called forward.

“No—actual hippogriff.”

“What a liar you are, Deor. When did you ever ride a hippogriff?”

Deor ignored the fact that his harven-kin had made a remark that, under Thrymhaiam, would have entitled him to kill her with impunity. They were not under Thrymhaiam, and Ambrosia never had been. Instead, he and Kelat told her the tale, which involved telling other tales.

The wind at their backs held all through the day. They worked the pedals and manuals sometimes, to build up charges in the impulse wells and to give their arms and legs something to do: there was no room to move about the little gondola.

When the sun set, the wind faded. It did not quite disappear, and it was difficult in the dark to say how much they had slowed.

“Should we set down?” Deor called back. “Anchor and, er, stretch our legs?”

“No,” Ambrosia said firmly. “It’s not like we’re going to crash into anything. Any progress is better than no progress; we have a long road before us.”

“But . . . I mean. . . .”

“And if ‘stretch your legs’ is some kind of Dwarvish euphemism, then I encourage you to swing your ass over the side and let go.”

“Madam.”

“Deor. Should I have put it more sweetly?”

“No! I suppose you’re right.”

“I’ll go first, if you gentlemen don’t mind. I should relieve Morlock, but I have to relieve myself first.”

“Only one of us is a man, madam, but I don’t suppose we object.”

Actually, Deor thought he could hear Kelat goggling from where he sat, two benches back, but the young fellow would have to come to terms with life’s undignified details sooner or later.

“Thanks, all. You make up in gentility what you lack in humanity.” She kicked off her underclothing and climbed over the side to relieve herself while Deor and Kelat looked politely away and Liyurriu watched with patient interest. When she was back aboard and dressing herself she said, “Carry on, gentles. I think we should go one at a time, lest we overbalance.”

Or in balanced pairs, Deor almost suggested . . . but that might be impossible. Since his fellow males seemed disinclined to take the plunge, Deor skinned off his trousers and climbed over the edge of the gondola.

Now it was his turn to be watched with shameless and unflinching interest by the werewolf Liyurriu. It made concentrating on the task at hand almost impossible. Then Liyurriu reached forward and grabbed Deor’s forearms with his apish hands. Deor was so startled he almost lost his grip—and then he realized the werewolf was doing his best to help.

Deor appreciated it. He was terrified of falling. But Trumpeter, the minor moon, was standing in the western sky right behind him, shining with bitter brightness directly into the werewolf’s eyes. Deor felt he was making an unpleasant spectacle of himself. But mounting terror, in the end, came to his aid and he evacuated his bowels and bladder and climbed back aboard while his gifts were still speeding their way toward the distant earth.

“And this is the worst,” he shouted back to Morlock. “The worst. Nothing on this trip will be worse than this, not if we die the second death.”

Morlock, by now returned from visionary rapture, but just barely, said, “Eh.” The fact that he was four benches back saved Deor from the guilt of kinslaying.

Morlock was groggily aware that Deor was angry at him, but he wasn’t really sure why. He hoped it wasn’t important. Perhaps Deor was simply backing into anger to avoid fear. If that were so, Morlock would fight all night with his harven-kin, once he shook the shadows from his head.

They drifted northward through a dark sea of air, past towering islands and continents of cloud, bright as the major moons in the west, blue and mysterious as Deor’s mood in the east.

Morlock answered the call of nature with the only reply possible, and ate and drank sparingly from the stores in his pack. Kelat had cocooned himself in a sleeping cloak, and Morlock felt much inclined to follow his lead and do the same. Visionary rapture was not sleep, despite how it seemed to onlookers, and Morlock was deeply weary.

But there was something he must attend to first.

He climbed onto his bench and stepped across to Kelat’s. The Vraid started and pulled back the hood of his sleeping cloak to peer curiously at Morlock.

“You,” Morlock said to the werewolf on the next bench. “What are you, really?”

The wolvish face looked on him, its reflective eyes as bright as little moons. After a moment, it opened its jaws and said carefully, “Liyurriu.”

“I didn’t ask your name,” Morlock said. “Though I don’t doubt you are lying to me about that. I asked what you are.”

The wolvish eyes looked at him. The wolvish mouth did not answer him.

“You may not speak this language,” Morlock said. (He was speaking the vulgar Ontilian they used in Narkunden and Aflraun.) “But I think you understand it. You showed me you did when you told me your name just now. Do you understand me?”

Liyurriu did not say anything, but after a moment he nodded curtly.

“Will you tell me what you are?” Morlock asked.

Hesitantly, the wolvish head shook: no.

“Will you tell me why you are here?”

Liyurriu shook his head again—reluctantly, it seemed to Morlock, but definitely.

“Is it because you cannot? I can see that you might be able to understand a language but not speak it. We can bring Ambrosia out of her vision so that she can translate. Or you can tell her rather than me. Will you?”

A long pause. Liyurriu closed his moonbright eyes, opened them. A slow shake of the head.

“Then.” Morlock reached down and grabbed the werewolf by the scruff of his hairy neck.

“Morlock, no!” Deor screamed.

When Liyurriu realized what Morlock was about, he slashed with his claws and snapped with his jaws, but Morlock easily avoided these dangers and tossed Liyurriu off the airship. The werewolf body fell, writhing like a snake but silent as a stone, into a bank of cloud and out of sight.