Paul Thompson - Darkness and Light

"One thousand, eighty-one hours, twenty-nine minutes. I can work out the exact seconds in a moment."

"Hold my arms, Sturm; I'm going to throttle him!"

"Hush, Kit."

"Could we unfasten the wings? That would bring us down," said Roperig.

"Yes, and make a nice big hole when we hit," Bellcrank observed tartly.

"Hmm, I wonder how big a hole it would be." Cutwood flipped open a random slip of parchment and started figuring on it. The other gnomes crowded around, offering corrections to his arithmetic.

"Stop this at once!" Sturm said.

Kitiara's face was scarlet from ill-concealed rage. When the gnomes paid him not the least heed, he snatched the calculations from Cutwood. The gnomes broke off in midbabble.

"How can such clever fellows be so impractical? Not one of you has asked the right question. Flash, can you fix the engine?" A gleam of challenge grew in Flash's eyes.

"I can! I will!" He pulled a hammer from one pocket and a spanner from another. "C'mon, Birdcall, let's get at it!"

The chief mechanic chirped happily and followed on Flash's heels.

"Wingover, where will we go if we keep flying as we are now?" Sturm asked.

"The wings are set on 'climb', which means we'll keep going higher and higher," Wingover replied. The gnome wrinkled his beaky nose. "It will get cold. The air will thin out; that's why vultures and eagles can only fly so high. Their wings are too small. The Cloudmaster shouldn't have problems with that." "Everyone will have to dress warmly," said Sturm.

"We have our furs," Kitiara said, having mastered her anger at the situation. "I don't know what the gnomes can wear."

"Oh! Oh!" Roperig waved a hand to be recognized. "I can make Personal Heating Apparatuses out of materials I have in the rope locker."

"Fine, you do that." Roperig and his apprentice hurried away with their heads together. Fitter listened so intently that he walked under an engine part and into the door frame. Rainspot moaned. Forgetting his burden in the excitement, Sturm had tucked him under one arm like a loaf of bread. The gnome coughed and groaned. Sturm set him on the deck. The first thing Rainspot did was to ask for his kite. Cutwood explained how it was lost, and tears welled up in Rainspot's eyes. As they trickled down his cheeks, they scored clean tracks in the soot.

"One thing more, Wingover," Kitiara said. "You said the air would get thin. Do you mean as it does on very high mountaintops?"

"Exactly like that."

She planted her hands on her hips and said, "I once led a troop of cavalry over the high Khalkist Mountains. It was cold, all right, and worse, our ears bled. We fainted at the slightest exertion and had the worst headaches. A shaman named Ning made a potion for us to drink; it eased our way."

"What a primitive shaman can do with m-magic, a gnome can do with t-technology," said Stutts.

Sturm looked out the engine room porthole at the darkening sky. A rime of frost was already forming on the outside of the glass. "I certainly hope so, my friend. Our lives may depend on it."

It was quiet on deck. Sturm worked his way around the starboard side to the bow. Sighter had mounted a telescope on a spindle there, and Sturm wanted a look around. It wasn't easy moving in his thick fur coat, hood, and mittens, but he decided that it was no worse than being in full body armor. The flapping of the wings scarcely could be heard as the Cloudmaster climbed steadily upward. The flying ship had pierced a layer of soft white clouds, which left a coat of snow on the deck and roof. Once it cleared the cloud layer, however, the rush of air over the wings swept the snow away. Great pillars of vapor stood around them, fat columns of blue and white that looked as solid as marble in the moons' light. Sturm studied these massive towers of cloud through Sighter's spyglass, but all he could see was their sculpted surfaces, as smooth and still as a frozen pond. He hadn't seen a gnome in over an hour. Wingover had tied the steering wheel again, and they'd all disappeared below to work on their inventions. Occasionally he heard or felt bangs and crashes under his feet. Kitiara, fully and fetchingly buried in her fox fur coat, had gone to the dining room and stretched out on the table for a nap. Sturm swung the telescope left, over the pointed prow. Solinari shone between two deep ravines in the clouds, silvering the airship with its rays. He scanned the strange architecture of the clouds, seeing in them a face, a wagon, a rearing horse. It was beautiful, but incredibly lonely. He felt at that moment like the only man in the world. The cold crept through his heavy clothes. Sturm clapped his hands on his arms to stir his blood. It didn't help much. Finally he abandoned his frosty post, and returned to the dining room. He watched the sleeping Kitiara sway gently with the motion of the ship. Then he smelled something. Smoke. Something was burning. Sturm coughed and wrinkled his nose. Kitiara stirred. She sat up in time to see the entry of a bizarre apparition. It looked like a scarecrow made of tin and rope, but this scarecrow had a glass jar on its head and smoke coming out of its back.

"Hello," said the apparition.

"Wingover?" asked Kitiara. The little scarecrow reached up and twisted the jar off its head, and the hawkish features of Wingover emerged.

"What do you think of Roperig's invention?" he asked. "He calls it the Refined Personal Heating Apparatus, Mark III."

"Mark III?" said Sturm.

"Yes, the first two prototypes were not successful. Poor Fitter has a burn on his… well, he'll be standing at dinner for a while. That was Mark I. The Mark II took off most of Roperig's whiskers. I warned him not to use glue on the Perfect Observation Helmet." Wingover held out his arms and spun in a circle. "Do you see? Roperig sewed a continuous coil of rope to a set of long underwear, then varnished the whole suit to make it watertight and airtight. The heat comes from a tin stove, here." He strained to point at a miniature potbelly stove mounted on his back.

"A fat tallow candle provides up to four hours of heat, and these tin strips carry the warmth all over the suit." Wingover finally dropped his arms. "Very ingenious," said Kitiara flatly.

"Has anything been done about the engine?"

"Birdcall and Flash can't agree on the cause of the damage. Birdcall insists the fault lies in Flash's lightning bottles, while Flash says the engine is fused in the 'on' position." Kitiara sighed. "By the time those two agree on what to fix, we'll have run out of sky."

"Could anything fly as high as we are now?"

"There's no reason why another flying ship couldn't get this high. It's largely a matter of aerodynamic efficiency."

He thumped a dial or two and added, "I suppose a dragon might get this high. Assuming they still existed, that is." "Dragons?" Sturm repeated. "Dragons are a special case, of course. The really big ones, Reds or Golds, could achieve very high altitudes."

"How high?"

"They had wingspans of 150 feet or more, you know," said Wingover, enjoying his lecture. "I'm sure I could do a calculation, based on a fifty-foot animal weighing forty-five tons — of course, they couldn't glide worth shucks — "

"It's freezing on the inside now," interrupted Kitiara, scratching the frost off a small pane of glass. She breathed on the cleared spot, and it instantly turned milky white. Stutts started up the ladder from below, but his Personal Heating Apparatus caught on the ladder and there were some moments of struggle to free him.

"Everything sh-shipshape?" he inquired.

"The controls are fine," Wingover responded, "but we're still going up. The height gauge has gone off the dial, so Sighter will have to calculate how high we are."