The Wide World's End (42 page)

Morlock never saw her again. But the next day when he went down to the market to cheapen some thread, he found that the price of food had doubled overnight. Many of the buyers were hollow-cheeked young people in academic gowns who seemed to have plenty of gold.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

The Flight of the
Viviana

The round-faced man had been weeping: the marks of tears still gleamed on his cheeks, but his voice was carefully even as he said, “I'm talking about the mansion on the bluff north of town—the one with the beautiful view.”

“Yes,” said the hard-faced butcher, “and I'm talking about a full-grown ylka-beast on the hoof—enough to feed a family of four through a cycle of Trumpeter, if they're thrifty and are fairly fond of soup and organ meat.”

“But I paid three thousand shields for this place last summer! I have a lifetime of savings in gold—”

“This is
this
summer. It's today. I wouldn't let a piece of offal out of my shop for all the gold coins in the twin cities. Straight-up trade: the beast for the property's deed. Do we have a deal, or shall I call back Master Dinby?”

“Deal,” said the round-faced man glumly. “Can you have someone bring it to my house on Shull Street?”

“Delivery is extra.”

The round-faced man considered this briefly, and then he leaped at the butcher, flailing with his linen-gloved hands and his silk-shod feet. The butcher, surprised, went down in front of his shop. The round-faced man was simultaneously screaming and gnawing at the butcher's wobbly neck. The resulting sound was a strangely shrill burping or farting effect. But the sight of a butcher being attacked swiftly drew other people into the fray: some defending the butcher, some more intent on getting a kick or a punch in, and still more trying to loot the butcher's stop, in spite of the armed guards within. People were rushing toward the fight with wheelbarrows of gold; they were rushing away with wheelbarrows of bloody meat; there was screaming and pleading and somewhere, unseen but heard, a chorus of women was chanting a spell meant to rekindle the dying sun.

“I was worried about trying to sneak a werewolf through town,” Ambrosia remarked to Deor as they walked carefully around the fringes of the riot. “Now, not so much.”

“I thought you said Narkunden was the orderly place,” Deor replied.

“It
was
. You never saw so many laws and regulations. I wonder what can have happened?”

They trudged through a drift of gold-dust. Someone had been carrying it in bags that had come apart. No one passing by was even bothering to pick it up.

“Morlock may have been in town for several days,” Deor observed when they were past the drift and into a quieter street.

“Yes, but he
can't
have. . . .” Ambrosia's voice trailed off.

“
Several
days,” Deor reminded her.

She shook her head, not quite as if she were disagreeing.

They sneaked through the tangling streets of south Narkunden, climbing steadily higher until the buildings petered out and they passed beyond the city. There was no need for walls there, since the Narkundans feared no incursion from their trading partners to the south, the dwarves of the Endless Empire.

In the ragged field south of town was a fire; beyond it, Deor thought he could detect an occlusion well-hidden by wilderments. To the left of the fire was an odd framework, clearly a work in progress, and many bolts of ulk.

In front of the fire was Morlock, lying supine on the ground, his eyes faintly glowing in rapture. Overhead a cluster of ulken bags, strangely shapeless, floated in midair.

“Morlock,” Ambrosia said drily, “if you can attend to what I say, please join us in the merely material realm. If need be, I will ascend into rapture and drag you back down.”

Morlock raised one hand. The light filtering through the thin skin of his eyelids slowly faded. He sat up.

“I have approximately ten thousand questions,” said Ambrosia with a dangerous tone in her voice. “If you respond to any one of them with, ‘Eh,' or a grunt, or a shrug, then one of us will go down the dark canyon of death before the ailing sun sets.”

“Eh,” said Morlock predictably.

Ambrosia let him live, possibly because she had not actually asked him any questions yet, and in the end she got her answers.

The floating ulken bags were, not surprisingly, floating ulken bags. Morlock's cunning plan was to build a big sort of basket, fill it with the ulken bags, cover the basket with more fabric, and float all the way to the end of the world.

“What keeps those things in the air?” Ambrosia said.

“Air's hot,” Morlock said.

“But it doesn't stay hot,” Ambrosia said. She pointed at the babble of gasbags, even now sinking toward the ground beside the fire.

“It could,” said Morlock.

“No it can't.”

“How can it, Morlocktheorn?” Deor asked.

The answer was quite lengthy; the making of things was one of the few subjects that made Morlock communicative—even wordy. Deor wasn't sure he understood it. Apparently, in deep rapture, one could see the particles of air. Because they were very small, they were easier to herd about. And one could keep the warmer particles of air in one place and shove the colder particles of air away.

“How can you tell them apart?” Kelat wanted to know.

“The warmer they are, the faster they are,” Morlock explained. “The trick is to see them at all, as they are merely matter. But—”

Then he and Ambrosia became embroiled in an extremely technical discussion about seeing, where phrases like “pretalic imprintable foothold” were tossed about pretty freely. Deor stopped listening, although Kelat continued to watch and listen as if it were a fencing match.

Deor walked around the camp. He found a scrap of paper on which the framework of the airship was sketched in Morlock's spare but detailed style.

He nodded with satisfaction. Deor was no seer, and was not even a master of makers. But he could follow a design that had been made by one. Morlock had collected some lumber, but there wasn't nearly enough. Then there was the question of the fabric shell for the thing. . . .

He walked up to Kelat and nudged the young man in the ribs. Kelat looked at him bemusedly.

“Can you sew?” Deor asked him.

It took a few tries before he could even get Kelat to understand what he meant, and then the Vraid was indignant. “That's women's work!”

“I'll take that as a ‘no' then. Well, you're clever enough to learn. And a word to the wise: don't use the phrase ‘women's work' when Ambrosia is paying attention.”

“Her?” Kelat looked at the Regent, hungrily and reverently. “She's not like other women.”

“She is and she isn't. Anyway, you've been warned. Come with me, unless you want to walk all the way to the end of the world.”

Kelat managed to learn how to use needle and thread, despite his gonadal arrangements, and soon he and Deor were seated side by side in the field, sewing silken gasbags.

The werewolf, Laurentillus or Liyurrriyu or whatever it was, came over and was looking at their activity with interest.

Deor didn't understand a single howling syllable that the werewolf ever sang, nor was he sure the werewolf understood him, no matter what language he spoke. But Liyurrriyu was no fool and had hands. Deor taught him what he needed to know by example, and soon they were sewing companionably together.

There was no conversation, though. There could not be, between Liyurrriyu and the others, and Kelat was still intent on eavesdropping on Morlock and Ambrosia. Their argument now sounded more like a strategy session. Deor still didn't understand it, but he had a task on hand to keep him busy and that was enough for now.

They avoided town as much as possible. It had divided up into warring neighborhoods, each jealously protecting its storeholds and sources of food.

But the warehouse district in the city's center was more or less abandoned. Deor and Kelat made a journey there one day to get beeswax to help seal the gasbags. They left some gold in payment, even though they knew that gold was essentially worthless in Narkunden now. Deor didn't like the thought of stealing: the hate of it was hot in his mind.

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.