• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 591 0

leading, they continued to walk the airship end to end, the Rover explaining what everything was as they went. Each time he finished an explanation, he made Bek repeat it back to him. Each time, he seemed satisfied with the answer he received. He explained the pilot box and the connectors that ran to the parse tubes, hoods, rudders, and main draws. For the most part, the crew raised and lowered the sheaths and set the draws, but in an emergency, everything could be controlled from the pilot box. There were anchors and stays for landing. There were weapons of all sorts, some handheld, some attached to the decking of the ship. The Rover took Bek into the sleeping quarters and supply bins. He took the boy all the way up the pegged climbing steps of the masts to see how the sheaths were attached to the draws, then down to the parse tubes to see how the draws were attached to the diapson crystals. He was quick with his explanations, but thorough. He seemed intent on the boy’s learning, and Bek was eager to comply.

There was only one component of the airship that the Rover avoided assiduously, a large rectangular box set upright against the foremast in front of the pilot box. It was covered with black canvas and lashed to the mast and decking with a strange type of metal-sheathed cable. They walked right by it repeatedly, and after they had done so for about the third or fourth time, Bek could contain himself no longer.

“Captain, what’s under the canvas?” he asked, pointing at the box.

The Rover scratched his head. “I don’t know. It belongs to the Druid. He had it brought aboard in the dead of night without my knowing two days ago, and when I found it there, he told me it was necessary that we take it with us, but he couldn’t tell me what it was.”

Bek stared at it. “Has anyone tried to get a look under the canvas?”

The Rover laughed. “A lad after my own heart! Shades, Bek Rowe, but you are a wonder! Of course, we tried! Several of us!” He paused dramatically. “Want to know what happened?”

Bek nodded.

“Try looking for yourself and see.”

Bek hesitated, no longer so eager.

“Go on,” the other urged, gesturing, “it won’t hurt you.”

So Bek reached for the canvas, and when his hand got to within a foot of it, lines of thin green fire began to dance all over the cables that lashed the box in place, jumping from cable to cable, a nest of writhing snakes. Bek jerked his hand back quickly.

Redden Alt Mer chuckled. “That was our decision, as well. A Druid’s magic is nothing to trifle with.”

His instruction of Bek continued as if nothing had happened. After Bek had been aboard for a time and his initial excitement had died down, he became aware of a movement to the airship that had not been apparent before, a gentle swaying, a tugging against the anchoring lines. There was no apparent wind, the day calm and still, and there was no movement from the other ships that might account for the motion. When Bek finally asked about it, Redden Alt Mer told him it was the natural response of the ship to the absorption of light into their sheaths. The converted energy kept her aloft, and it was only the anchor cables that kept her from floating away completely, because her natural inclination was to take flight. The Rover admitted that he had been flying for so long that he didn’t notice the motion himself anymore.

Bek thought it gave the airship the feel of being alive, of having an existence independent of the men and women who rode her. It was a strange sensation, but the longer he stayed aboard, the more he felt it. The ship moved like a great cat stirring out of sleep, lazy and unhurried, coming slowly awake. The motion radiated through the decking and into his body, so that he soon became a part of it, and it had something of the feel of floating in water that was still and untroubled.

Redden Alt Mer finished with him at midday and sent him off to help inventory supplies and equipment with a bluff, burly fellow Rover called Furl Hawken. The Rover everyone called Hawk barely gave him a second glance, but was friendly enough and pleased