by James Enge
“Draw down the stirrups and buckle them on my feet,” he directed.
“What's a stirrup?” asked Hlupnafenglu.
“Something to put your feet in.” Like on a saddle, he almost added—except he didn't know the word for saddle in Moonspeech or Sunspeech, and, in fact, he realized belatedly that he had used the Wardspeech word for stirrup. “They're under the base of the wings, attached to cables.”
The werewolves found the stirrups and slowly drew them down to Morlock's feet. He stepped into them, and the two werewolves fastened the buckles over his feet.
“Chieftain,” Hlupnafenglu admitted, “we didn't do this for Rokhlenu. Is it important?”
“It might be,” Morlock said. The cables gave the wing beats extra force. That was the idea, anyway: Morlock had never actually flown one of these things. He'd kept on meaning to make the experiment…but when he came back to the cave in the evening he usually started drinking.
“Morlock, wait a moment,” Hrutnefdhu said.
“A sword,” Morlock said to Hlupnafenglu, who grinned and handed him a glass sword from the weapon rack. Morlock sheathed it over his shoulder.
“Morlock, wait.”
“Spear,” he said to Hlupnafenglu. The red werewolf gave him a stabbing spear from the weapon rack, and he placed it in the other shoulder sheath.
“Morlock. Wait!”
“Citizens, good fortune,” said Morlock as he strode from the cave.
The cables pulling against his leg muscles had a paradoxically steadying effect. But Morlock was unsure whether he could actually walk uphill under the triple burden of the wingset, the heavy wind, and his drunkenness. He breathed deeply of the air, trying to clear the wine-colored fog from his eyes and mind.
He fixed the fingers of his wooden glove to the grip inside the left wing and clamped them shut. His right hand took the grip of the right wing. It was time to fly or fail—perhaps both.
He judged the direction of the wind, the width of the slope he stood on, and what force his wings could apply at what angles to the wind. The calculation soothed him: drunk or sober he could do a little three-dimensional math. He took a few steps into the darkness and leapt off into the wind, driving the wings hard with his arms and legs.
The shoulder of the hill flashed by at an acceptable distance. Morlock felt his mind, if not his body, come a little more alive.
He pumped his arms and legs to gain height in the darkness. He dreaded the thought of smashing into some tree or unseen ridge.
Like Rokhlenu before him, he felt the empty isolation, the disorientation of night flight. But it did not bother him as much. For one thing, he expected it: he had had flightlike experiences before. Plus, he was an experienced drunk who knew he was drunk: disorientation was an old, familiar enemy.
He banked left, losing the lift under his wings and tumbling end over end a couple of times before he caught the knack of it. But finally he was on a roughly westward course, though still driven northward by the relentless south wind, and climbing as high and fast as he could.
He saw the airships then, hanging like claws over the burning settlement of the outliers. The ships stood there, defying the wind, moored by some power he didn't understand. He wondered at it as he flew toward them, and he found in the wonder an intoxication deeper and more intense than the musty, muddy pleasures of wine. Why had he denied himself this danger and exultation? Why had he denied himself the air and the light and the darkness? This was why he was alive: to make, to do, to drive, not to drown his wits in fermented juice.
As he watched the airships, he saw a shape that occasionally impinged on the fiery light glaring from the gondola ports. Rokhlenu: headed toward a gondola to board it and kill the crew. A plan unlikely of success, but not hopeless with the advantage of surprise.
But there was no surprise. Morlock saw the archers taking aim at Rokhlenu with burning arrows. He expected Rokhlenu to dive, to swerve, to do something to avoid the arrows. But he didn't. Morlock guessed he was willing to risk a wound or two if he could get close enough to board the gondola. Perhaps he was counting on the metal rings to protect him; he might not realize that they would burn like paper, having been deeply imbued with metallic phlogiston.
Morlock drove himself forward and upward; when he was above and somewhat in front of his friend he stalled in midair and kicked him savagely in the right arm. Rokhlenu lost lift and tumbled down, a dark shadow toward the dark earth, the red reflections of fire fading from the scales on his wings. Morlock heard the bows sing discordantly at the same moment, and he drove himself upward in a steep arc.
The fiery arrows passed in midair between Morlock and Rokhlenu. Morlock turned his wings and let himself drop, spinning in the air so that his head was aimed almost directly at the ground. His stomach, full of wine and very little else, disliked this maneuver intensely and told him so noisily, but he did manage to escape the archers’ second hasty salvo: he saw the arrows lay red tracks across the sky between his feet.
Looking groundward, Morlock saw that Rokhlenu had succeeded in recovering from the tumble he had kicked him into and was coming back up toward the gondola.
“Meet you on the keel!” he shouted to the startled werewolf as he fell past. He hoped keel was the right word; he had learned it from Hrutnefdhu when they were talking about boats in general (and the wickerwork boat Morlock had made in particular).
He came out of his dive in a sharp curve upward; it strained the wings until they creaked loud enough to be heard over the storm winds, but it saved some of his momentum, helping him to fly upward. He was now headed almost directly toward the underside of the gondola; the archers inside had no clear shot at him. Those in the gondola of the other airship did—but the closer he got to the gondola of their sister ship, the less likely they were to risk it. He got close fast. Soon he was directly under the gondola; he stalled in the air, seized a handhold on the rough planking with his right hand, and dangled there, gasping.
Apparently keel was the right word, or Rokhlenu had known what he meant by it, because a winged shadow hanging from the gondola some distance away started to shout at him in Rokhlenu's voice.
“…you…crazy?” he heard his old friend say.
People were always saying this to Morlock, and he couldn't see the point. If he was, what was the point in asking him?
“—in…now…dead…half of them—” Rokhlenu shouted on, half of his words carried away by the wind. But Morlock guessed he was complaining about the ruin of his attack on the crew of the airship.
“The wings will burn!” Morlock shouted several times. It was possible that he was shouting loud enough for the werewolves to hear him through the planking of the airship's floor. It didn't matter: Rokhlenu had to know this.
“…metal…protect…” Rokhlenu shouted back—anyway, that was all Morlock heard of it.
“The metal will burn!” Morlock roared.
“Metal burns?” Rokhlenu asked. He asked it several times.
“Everything burns!” Morlock replied. It was not strictly accurate. Dephlogistonated objects did not burn. Immaterial objects did not burn. There were other classes of exception, but none of them mattered at the moment.
Rokhlenu said something that might have been a curse.
Morlock released the clamp on his wooden glove by striking the winged arm against his knee. He swung over, handhold by handhold, until he was hanging next to Rokhlenu.
“You need to get your feet in the stirrups,” he said.
“What are stirrups?”
Morlock repressed a curse of his own. “Things to put your feet in. They're under the base of the wings.”
“Those ghost-bitten things! They kept smacking around, throwing me off!”
“Put. On. Feet.”
Rokhlenu bent one foot up. Morlock, hanging from his right hand, used his wooden glove to catch a stirrup from under Rokhlenu's wings and pushed it toward the werewolf's free hand. Using the one hand, Rokhlenu managed to put it on his f
oot and buckle it. They repeated the process with the other stirrup.
As Morlock struggled to refasten the clamp of his wooden glove to the grip of his left wing, Rokhlenu stretched out his legs and said, “It makes the wings feel different.”
That was the point: the pulleys attached to the stirrups helped provide power to the pseudo-musculature of cables and wings that drove the wings. Morlock didn't have the vocabulary to say this, and besides his stomach had finally reached the point of open rebellion. So he just said, “Yes,” and turned his head to vomit.
When he had finished and wiped his face on his sleeve, he turned back to Rokhlenu.
“What now?” the werewolf asked.
Morlock had been thinking about that, between convulsions of his belly, and he pointed at the buoyant part of the nearby airship.
“Attack the other airship?” Rokhlenu asked.
“Bag of air,” Morlock said.
“What?”
“Not the gondola. The bag of air.”
Rokhlenu turned to looked at the nearby airship. It was too dark to see his face, but his shout was pensive as he asked, “You think it's held up by air?”
“Hot air!” Morlock shouted.
A moment passed, and Rokhlenu laughed. “Like ash carried up by a fire! Hot air! Are you sure?”
“No!”
“How do they keep it hot?”
“Don't know!”
“This is a great plan!” Rokhlenu howled at him.
“What's yours?”
“Wake up! It's all a dream! Live happy!”
“Never works.”
“We'll try yours, then. Back up on the east side of this ship.”
Morlock closed his eyes to try to gather the points of the compass, then opened them rapidly to escape the whirling drunken vortex behind his eyelids. “Yes!” he said. He was almost sure the east was the side they had first approached from; the airship itself would screen them from its sister ship.
A hatch opened in the underside of the gondola; werewolves, somehow distorted in form, stood there, holding bows with burning arrows nocked to shoot.
Morlock and Rokhlenu both fell away in power dives. An arrow passed by Morlock's elbow like a red meteor. Morlock bent his flight sharply upward, trying to catch the steady south wind to give him lift. It worked and he flew swiftly past the windows in the gondola, close enough to see a werewolf archer's startled face.
The werewolf wasn't the only one startled. He had at least three eyes, two human and one lupine, in a twisted mouthless face, and the brief glance Morlock had of him was startling indeed.
Morlock flashed past and upward, finally coming to land on the side of the airship. It was covered with a wooden framework, and he grabbed onto the frame with his right hand.
“What took you?” Rokhlenu shouted cheerfully in his ear.
Morlock snarled, “Your mother couldn't make change.” His stomach was unhappy, but there was nothing left in it to vomit. Morlock hated the dry heaves, even when he wasn't hanging by one hand a dozen bowshots above the ground.
“…not to bandy words with you when you're drunk,” Rokhlenu was saying. He didn't seem to be angry.
Morlock nodded. He unclamped his wooden glove from the wing-grip and hooked it on the airship frame to support himself, at last drawing his sword with his right hand. Rokhlenu did likewise. At more or less the same moment they plunged the blades into the fabric surface of the airship.
Morlock had expected a rush of hot air, perhaps fire. He was disappointed. The rift he was tearing in the surface spilled forth a cool bluish light, but nothing else.
“Guess we were wrong!” Rokhlenu shouted.
Morlock shrugged. That was one possibility. Another was that the bags of hot air were inside. He continued to hack away at the fabric. Rokhlenu did as well, and eventually they had a rip large enough for one of them to slide through, wings and all.
Rokhlenu seemed to want to discuss who should go through first, but Morlock unhooked his wooden glove from the cable and dove through without a word. It wasn't even worth discussing. He was the one who was dying; if he died a little sooner it was no great matter.
In his mind, Morlock had already sketched out several possible designs for the interior of the airship proper. One or two were actually ingenious and he hoped to see them at work. In this he was disappointed, because the interior of the ship was nothing like he had imagined.
The interior was all one great chamber, nearly empty. The only thing in it was a glowing stone near one end of the chamber and an oddly spidery being standing next to it.
Morlock drifted down to the bottom of the chamber, bemused. The stone and the entity by it (the keeper? the steersman? a guard?) were on a wooden platform; the rest of the chamber was an empty cylinder, tapered at both ends.
He heard Rokhlenu land behind him.
The being standing on the platform did something to the glowing stone.
Its light fell on Morlock more intensely. It struck him like an invisible hammer. He felt the fabric of the chamber rippling around him. There was a ghostly murmur in the air. He had no idea what was going on.
“I feel strange,” Rokhlenu said thickly.
Bracing himself against the hammer-blows of the light, Morlock turned to face Rokhlenu. He looked strange. The light was causing the werewolf's flesh to ripple and twist, as if he were assuming the night shape. But he was not becoming a wolf. It was more as if a wax image of a man and a wolf were merging, distorting each other, but neither one growing and neither one shrinking. A wolf's head was emerging from Rokhlenu's neck, its eyes dead and empty, its maw toothless. Needle-toothed mouths were opening in the palms of his hands, and twisted canine legs were sprouting from his torso to join his arms and legs, giving him a nightmarishly spidery look—like that thing on the platform.
Morlock drew his sword, repressing a sudden temptation to pass it through his friend a few times and end his misery, and turned instead to slash an opening in the chamber wall.
“You can't stay here!” he shouted at his friend, who was now howling mindlessly from all his mouths. Morlock kicked him through the gap into the night; his howls faded into the storm.
Morlock hoped that his old friend had enough self-command to use the wings and glide to safety—or, if not, that the levity of the phlogiston-imbued scales on his wings would cushion his long fall. But the worst thing that could happen to him from the fall was death, and it was not impossible that the light from the strange stone had done worse than this to him already.
The intensity of the light falling on Morlock grew. He dreaded the thought that it would distort him as it had his friend…but that didn't seem to be happening. It must be something about werewolves that made them vulnerable to the bitter blue light.
Morlock grabbed the grips of his wings and kicked off into flight. He arced upward to land on the platform beside the distorted creature.
It was a werewolf—or had been, Morlock guessed. It had four crooked lupine limbs as naked as a rat's tail, and approximately human arms and legs that were strangely muscled and covered with doglike fur. It had a lifeless wolf head dangling from one human shoulder, a single gigantic human eye peering out from what appeared to be a neck, and on the side of the neck was a gray-lipped human mouth that squealed with terror as Morlock landed beside it.
“Don't do this!” it begged him. “If I obey, he says he can change me back, but if I don't obey, he says he'll leave me like this. Please don't do this. Let me do what they tell me to do.”
“How do they tell you?” Morlock demanded. “How does this thing work?”
“I can't tell you. I can't tell you anything. He'll know. They'll hurt me.”
The glowing stone was set in a sort of barrel on a spinnable disc, with handles protruding like spokes around the rim's edge. The inner part of the barrel was covered with mirrors, to reflect the light upward and forward. There were lenses mounted atop the barrel and in front. Levers around the lenses made them focus the li
ght more or less intensely. Morlock badly wanted to examine these assemblies; it seemed as if the levers somehow changed the shape of the lenses themselves, which was very interesting. But in more immediate terms, the more intense the light, the greater the force driving the airship. The lens pointing upward kept the ship aloft, could perhaps drive it even further up into the sky. The lens in front steered the ship and drove it forward…or backward: the wheel seemed to spin in a full circle. Now they were veering away to port—eastward, if Morlock's sense of direction was not totally deranged by dizziness and wine.
That was contrary to the plan emerging in Morlock's mind. He said, “Watch out,” and grabbed one of the handles, rotating the barrel so that the light was pointing toward the pointed prow of the great cloth-covered chamber. The steersman (or former steersman, as Morlock had taken his job) hissed and skittered out of the way.
The fabric of the chamber rippled: they were now headed straight into the eye of the wind. There was a brief swirl of vertigo as the direction of the craft spun around. Morlock's stomach had been trying to crawl out of his belly ever since he stood up in his cave, so he found this relatively easy to ignore. He cranked the levers on the vertical lens until the light was more intense, glaring a bright cold blue on the prow.
There was a kind of wailing in his ears that was not quite a sound. It said words that were not quite words. His heart began to pound and his breath grew short, as if he were afraid. He recognized these signs: he had often felt them in graveyards or other places swarming with what some called ghosts, but which those-who-know called…
“Impulse clouds!” he said to the late steersman of the ship. “This craft is powered by impulse clouds! Maybe you call them ghosts.”
“I don't call them anything!” the steersman screamed. “I don't talk to anyone about them, and no one talks to me. Don't tell me anything. I’m trying to do what they say, but you won't let me!”
Morlock ignored him (or her; it was impossible to tell).
Impulse clouds. They were a material part of any living body, but the most tenuous and usually invisible part. Sometimes they could survive the death of the body they had been associated with, in which case they often became a nuisance. Sunlight gathered them up or dispelled them, but moonlight did not. Some said that moonlight actually forced impulse clouds back to earth. That was why ghosts were often reported in moonlight: the moons kept them from rising into the air, then into the sky. Was it possible that the moons, sweeping through bands of impulse clouds raised up from the earth, drove them down again wrapped in moonlight?