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.
Deor roared and grabbed for Morlock, as if he would send him by the same path. Morlock stepped back to his own bench and sat down.
“Are you completely crazy?” shouted Deor, and Kelat, too, was looking at him as if he were a dangerous lunatic.
“Kelat,” he said. “Harven Deor.”
“Am I harven to a murderer?” Deor continued, hardly less loud than before. “What in the Canyon do you think you are doing? Which one of us will you throw out next?”
“None of you,” Morlock said. “As for Liyurriu, he is not what he seems. He should never have been with us.”
Deor glared at him for a while, saying nothing. Morlock met his gaze and said nothing more.
Kelat finally broke the silence, saying, “What do you mean? Liyurriu was not a werewolf?”
“Eh.”
Deor unleashed a thunderblast of semicoherent Dwarvish profanity.
Morlock ignored him and addressed himself to Kelat. “Your question does not have a yes or no answer. Liyurriu, as you may think of him, did not exist.”
Kelat sat back and pondered this.
“Do you mean he was a mere illusion?” Deor said in a more nearly reasonable voice. “Impossible, Morlock. He did work on this airship. He—” Deor’s voice choked off and he turned away.
“His physical presence was real,” Morlock said, “but it was not inhabited by a mind. Not as your bodies are—as mine is.”
“What do you mean?” Deor demanded. “What can that mean?”
“His body was simply a sort of puppet, controlled by another mind far distant from here. A seer of great power.”
“Who? Why?” Deor demanded.
“That was what I wanted to know,” Morlock reminded him. “It is what Liyurriu would not say.”
Kelat asked, “Did you see it in your vision? Is that how you know?”
“Yes.” In his mind he could still see the tethers of talic force glimmering through the world, east and south. That was where the puppeteer of Liyurriu-puppet was.
“Why didn’t Lady Ambrosia know it?”
“She has long known it, I think.”
“Then she must have had some purpose in concealing it. Shouldn’t you have . . . er . . . consulted with her?”
Morlock reflected briefly and said, “No.”
Kelat reflected briefly and then climbed into the now empty bench behind Deor.
Morlock shrugged. It was no skin off his walrus. If it helped the boy sleep better, then it was all to the good. He wrapped himself in a cloak and courted sleep. It came quickly, and he was wrapped in a darkly golden dream where he lay beside his darkly golden wife, when his sleep was shattered by Deor’s voice.
“Whazzit?” he said, or words to that effect.
Deor was sitting in the bench Kelat had vacated, leaning over so that his head was near to Morlock’s.
“Morlocktheorn,” Deor said.
“Deortheorn,” Morlock replied.
“Why did you give the knowledge of goldmaking to the Narkundans?”
“Ah.” It was an unexpected question, but his harven-kin deserved a fair answer. He thought it over for a while and said, “I was angry at those smug pink parasites.”
“Excuse me?”
“Those teachers who hated teaching, swarming around the stationer’s shop, talking about money as if it were virtue, arguing fine points of grammar while others were starving.”
“Oh. Oh. I shall have to apologize to Ambrosia, I think.”
“About what?”
“We had an argument about something, and I’m beginning to see her point a little.”
“She usually has one,” Morlock said.
“Yes. Do you think Liyurriu is dead?”
“The entity who was using Liyurriu is not dead. The body may or may not survive the fall.”
“We’re miles in the air, Morlock.”
“Werewolves drink strength and health from moonlight, it’s said, and Trumpeter is bright tonight. But there is no Liyurriu, Deor. That person does not exist.”
“Eh,” said Deor pointedly, and climbed past the snoring Kelat to his own bench.
Morlock shrugged, descended again into the depths of his cloak and sleep. His dreams this time were dark and cold, and Aloê showed herself in none of them.