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 offl"
"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 foot 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.