Morlock slashed with Tyrfing and shattered the icy wing of the beast.

It tumbled away in the night, silent, strangely like Liyurriu, striking a few of its fellows and taking them with it as it went, but there were more, so many more.

Then all of Deor’s ancestors roared in his ears. He was a Theorn of Theorn clan, and his harven-kin was fighting for his life—for all their lives. So what if it was futile? So what if they all died? No dwarf lives forever.

He seized his axe and flourished it. “Ath, rokhlan!”

“Ath! Ath!” Morlock replied. He waved his sword at the moon in the west. “Khai, gradara!”

Deor leaped forward to stand beside Morlock on the prow, now swinging a little because of the shattered ropes.

Ambrosia spoke. “Ware impulse!” her toneless, entranced voice said.

Morlock and Deor had time to look at each other when the airship lurched forward.

They tumbled together back onto the empty bench at the front of the gondola.

There was a humming in the night: the Viviana’s propellers were spinning. Ambrosia was releasing the pent up energy of the impulse wells.

The cloud of icy insects was left behind, glittering in Viviana’s airy wake.

Deor, looking back, shook his free hand at them and shouted derisively.

Morlock tapped his shoulder and pointed ahead.

Another cloud of icy insects was rising to approach their prow.

“Gleh,” said Deor.

“Yes,” said Morlock. He jumped up on the bench and swarmed up a surviving rope using his feet and his left hand. As Deor watched, open-mouthed and uncomprehending, he swung Tyrfing with deadly force, shattering the keel of the airship and severing its fabric envelope. He climbed up onto the broken keel and slashed again and again. He shattered the glass furnace, scattering its long-burning maijarra coals among the ulken-cloth gasbags and the gondola. Gasbags were drifting away in the dark air.

“Deor! Kelat!” he called down. “Come on!”

Someone using Deor’s voice said, in a remarkably cool tone, “Come on and do what exactly, harven?”

“Grab a gasbag and ride it down to the ground.”

Of course. Of course. Deor looked about him sourly. Ambrosia was already swarming up the ropes. Kelat saw this and immediately followed suit.

The gondola was burning. The gasbags in the Viviana’s heart were afire. Ice-spewing crystal insects the color of moonslight were closing in on them from all sides. This was not the time to calmly discuss alternatives. If they had been just a little lower, Deor would have jumped, and to Canyon with the gasbags and Morlock’s kindly meant suggestion. But they were still high enough to kill a falling dwarf. Deor thrust the axe handle into his belt and climbed up the ropes. He grabbed the first gasbag he came across. (Was it a good one? How could he tell?) He kicked off from the Viviana and drifted away into the moonslit void.

He was the first away. Morlock was still busy hacking away at the airship’s shell. Ambrosia and Kelat were quarrelling about something. Irritably, Ambrosia seized a gasbag and drifted away from the dying airship. Kelat followed, gripping the seam of a gasbag with one hand, his sword with the other. Morlock at last grabbed a gasbag and kicked off.

The Viviana was now heeling badly, lit with internal fire in the bitter, night-blue air. Burning balloons were leaking from her wounded belly. The clouds of ice insects met her in midair and attacked.

Then, and only then, did Deor understand what Morlock had done. Abandoning the airship and scattering burning globes through the night air gave some cover for their escape.

Away from the glass furnace and the kindly tending of the seers, the bitter night air cooled Deor’s gasbag quickly. His descent became something more like a fall. Soon he let go of the balloon and tossed his axe well away from him so that he would not disembowel himself on impact. The bone-white ground leapt up at him, and he committed himself to the care of his ancestors.

The surface was so soft that he didn’t even feel his boots strike it. He passed from a world of moonslight to a world of darkness in an instant. He ground to a halt, not because his boots had struck earth at last; his fall simply seemed to have compacted a little island in the snow.

Deor took a cautious breath. There was little air to breathe: the snow had collapsed around him and he was quite thoroughly buried, perhaps to a depth that was twice his height, perhaps more—certainly not less.

But now he knew what he was doing. He started making a way for himself with his hands and feet, compressing snow, making a kind of slope to crawl out of the hole. It took time, but he wasn’t worried. It was no worse than travelling over the glaciers of Mundjokull, though perhaps a little colder. A lot colder. No matter: he knew what to do and he did it. On the way up he came across his axe. It made him heavier, but he was glad to see it.

He broke back to the surface at last, after many a recollapse of the snow around him. The wind-carved crust of snow was very tenuous, but it could hold him if he stretched out his weight carefully.

He saw three other snowholes with floundering figures in them: his comrades.

Beyond them all, encircled by glittering clouds of ice-bugs, the Viviana fell from the night-blue sky. Horseman, rising in the west, lit her with fierce light; beyond her in the eastern sky, Trumpeter seemed to watch somberly. Her front section completely empty of balloons, the rear section in flames, she dropped prow first toward the snowy fields and crashed, the remains of her wooden framework and gondola screaming on impact before silence fell, even the fires silent, quenched by the bitter, moonblue snow.

Deor watched it all through a haze of tears. He had hated the journey on the Viviana more than any other he had ever taken. But she was the work of their hands and minds, fearfully and cunningly made with great labor, and she had died protecting them. He wiped the tears away and snarled at himself for a fool. But he did not look away until the fires were gone and the ice insects had flown off again.

Deor crawled across the surface crust to where Morlock and Ambrosia were arising from their own impact craters, crooked shadows in the moonslit snow.

“What now, Ambrosii?” he called.

“The wreck of the Viviana,” said the shadow with Morlock’s voice.

Of course. Their packs, if they could recover them.

“And maybe we can salvage some of her for snowshoes,” he said, thinking aloud.

“A good thought,” Morlock said.

Deor looked at the ruins of the Viviana, half sunk in snowdrifts.

“She was a brave ship,” he said, and—Canyon keep it!—his voice broke in mid-sentence.

The shadow that was Ambrosia turned to look at him. “Yes,” she said. “I should have known better than to name her after a woman so mortal and so crazy. But maybe that’s why she was so brave.”

“Could be,” said Deor with Morlockian gruffness, and crawled off to help Kelat out of his snow pit.

CHAPTER SIX

The Narrow Road

to the Deep North

Their packs survived more or less intact. Morlock and Ambrosia had placed fire-quell magic on them, as they did out of habit with most things they wore, and the only losses were from the crash. In Morlock’s, for instance, the impact had shattered a jar of some horrible mushroom liquor he had received as a gift from the Blackthorn masters of making.

“Eh,” said Morlock. “I could have used a drink.”

“You drink too much, harven,” Deor said.

Morlock shrugged and turned away to harvest fabric and wood for snowshoes.

They each made their own snowshoes, even Kelat, who proved to be quite good at it.