by Larry Niven
“You’ve found your voice. When we shared love you didn’t speak at all.”
His mind flashed back to the fishing village.
“Never mind,” she said quickly. “Shall we sleep like this?”
He nestled against her and slept without dreams.
The Warlock woke blinking in the sudden dawn. He was hungry. His face was sharply cold where it poked through the robes. The rest of him was warm and comfortable in the robes and the cloud-stuff.
Clubfoot was on his back, sprawled out like a starfish in the clouds, looking indecently comfortable. Wavyhill’s skull was where the Warlock had mounted it last night, on a billowing knoll of cloud.
The Warlock called up to Wavyhill. “Anything?”
“Nothing attacked. The mana level stayed high. It’s still high; all my senses, such as they are, are razor sharp. I think I heard something that wasn’t just the wind, around midnight. I couldn’t tell what. It might have been wings, big wings.”
“Something big enough to carry Piranther?”
“I don’t know. That’s the trouble: you think some beast has gone mythical, and then you get into a place of high magic and it swoops down at you. There might be all kinds of survivals, here in the sky…Warlock, had you thought of probing the Moon from here?”
“No raw materials. No food sources either.” The Warlock grinned. “That might not bother you, but you can’t work alone.”
“Right. Someone has to make the gestures.”
During the night much of the cloudscape had melted away. The mass they still occupied was pushing upward in the center. For some hours it must have blocked Wavyhill’s view forward.
Wavyhill asked, “Are you sure we’ve lost Piranther?”
“I…no.”
“All right. Neither am I.”
“I don’t see how he could be following us. But that’s no guarantee at all. Piranther and his people have had most of fifty years to explore the South Land Mass. What could he have found in the way of talismans?”
“Another Fistfall?”
“Or more than one. He could be pacing us on dragonback.” The sky burned deep blue, nearly cloudless, but the Warlock said, “Behind that one cloud, maybe, watching us. I was overconfident.”
“Did you have a choice? Relax. This is a fun way to travel. By the way, there has been another development. Tiptoe around this knob of cloud and you’ll see.”
Tiptoe? The clumsiest giant would not make an audible footfall here. The Warlock waded around, and saw Mirandee and Orolandes wrapped in each other’s arms in the cloud-shadow.
Perhaps he lied, to Wavyhill or to himself. “Good. I was afraid they wouldn’t get along.”
The air mass rushed steadily north and east. The center continued to push upward. By noon they were high on the slope of a billowing mountain, a storm thunderhead.
Clubfoot trekked up to the peak. “It’s steeper on the forward face,” he reported when he came back. “I don’t like the footing much, but the view is terrific. Wavyhill, let’s set you up there as lookout.”
“Lookout and figurehead. Why not?”
In the end they stayed up there, Clubfoot and Wavyhill and the Warlock. Orolandes and Mirandee declined to join them.
It was a heady view. The crackle of lightning sounded constantly from underneath them. Flights of birds passed far away, flying south. Once an eagle came screaming down to challenge their invasion of its territory. That was worrying. They had nothing to throw at the bird, and any magic might melt the cloud beneath them. Fortunately the eagle saw the size of them and reconsidered.
Wavyhill said, “We might be the last human beings ever to see this, for thousands of years, maybe forever.”
They were passing over an endless forest. To their right the cloud-shadow brushed the treetops; on the left a behemoth waded through crackling tree trunks, stopped, looked up at them with intelligent eyes. The cloudscape sloped steeply down from here, dazzling white, with shadowed valleys and rifts in it.
“We couldn’t ask for a better vantage point,” said the Warlock. “Or more comfortable seating.” And he glanced at Clubfoot. “What’s wrong with you? You look like your last friend just died.”
“Orolandes is a fine young man,” Clubfoot stated. “He is brave and loyal, and unlike many swordsmen, he has a conscience. Bearing all that in mind, would you tell me what the hell Mirandee sees in that bloody-handed mundane?”
“You could ask Mirandee.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Would it help if I told you why Mirandee turned down your offer? I think she was being polite. To me. We shared a bed once. She didn’t want to remind me of what I’ve lost.”
“All right. That was nice of her. But why—”
“Nobody can tell you.” The Warlock looked at him. “I’d have thought you were too old for this kind of acidic jealousy.”
“So would I,” said Clubfoot.
At sunset the winds around the peak turned chilly. The two magicians climbed down the back slope of the thunderhead. The cloud surface was uneasy, in constant slow-flowing motion. They ate their cold rations and went to sleep.
But Wavyhill remained on the peak, on duty.
The third day was very like the second. Orolandes and Mirandee kept their own company, finding privacy in one of the shadowed valleys well aft of the thunderhead peak. Clubfoot and the Warlock lolled on the peak.
Clubfoot seemed to have come to terms with himself. He had been stiffly polite to Mirandee at breakfast, but here he could relax. “This is the way to travel. We should have gone to Prissthil this way, Warlock.”
The Warlock chuckled. “That would have been nice, wouldn’t it? We couldn’t. No mountains to climb near Warlock’s Cave. And the only place to get off would have been high on Mount Valhalla. Without porters. Come to that, we’ll have a problem when we get to where we’re going. Just where are we going, Wavyhill?”
“It’ll be part of a mountain range, and our weather magic should work,” said Wavyhill, “unless I’m wrong from the start. At this speed we’ll get there late tomorrow. We will have to do some climbing.”
Clubfoot shifted in the cloud-stuff. “So we’ll rest up for it.”
Wavyhill studied him. “Comfortable, isn’t it? You complacent troll, you. You’ve all been sleeping like the dead. And Mirandee and the swordsman, I guess they earned it, mating like mad minks all day. I wish I could sleep!”
Clubfoot’s anger left him as suddenly as it had come. “We could block your senses.”
“It’s not the same. It’s not the same as sleeping, or blinking, or—or crying. I want eyelids.”
“Let’s try something,” said Clubfoot.
They tied a line to his jawbone, for a marker, and pushed Wavyhill a foot deep into cloud. They pulled him up a minute later, and then half an hour later. He said he was comfortable. It was not like sleeping, Wavyhill said, but it was like resting with his eyes closed.
They left him there until sunset.
In a shadowed valley, enclosed in cottony wisps of fog that resisted motion, Orolandes lay with his cheek on Mirandee’s belly. The sunlight filtered through the cloud walls to bathe them in pearly light.
“Love and madness,” he mused. “They go together, don’t they?”
“You feel your sanity returning?”
“Why, no, not at all.”
“Good.” She chuckled. The flat abdominal muscles jumped pleasantly under his ear.
“I wonder,” he said. “What makes this Roze-Kattee a god of love and madness? The gods came before men, didn’t they? Did gods fall in love? and go mad?”
Troubled, she shifted position. “Good question. We’ll have to know the answers before we do anything drastic. I’d guess that one day an anonymous god looked around itself and decided it would die without worship. There were men around. What did they need that Roze-Kattee could supply? Some gods were more versatile than others. Roze-Kattee probably wasn’t.”
“What would a god o
f love and madness do?”
“Oh…bestow madness on enemies. Ward it from friends. Love? Hmmm.”
“The same thing? Make the Frost Giants’ enemies love them?”
“Why not? And arrange good political alliances by fiddling with the emotions of the king or queen. Priests learn to be practical, if their gods don’t.”
“Do you think this god will fight us?”
She shifted again. “It needs us as much as we need it. We’ll know better when we see this dormant god.” Her long fingernails tickled his chest hairs. “Don’t think about it now. Think about sharing love on a cloud. Few mundanes have that chance.”
“It does take practice.”
“We’ve had practice.”
“I’m the only fighter among you. Magicians wouldn’t break their backs to protect a swordsman.”
“But I would.”
In the night something woke the Warlock. He stirred in seductive comfort while his eyes searched the vivid starscape. Nothing, only stars…He was dropping off to sleep when it came again: a surging beneath him, like a cloud-muffled bump.
Clubfoot’s sleepy voice said, “What?”
“Don’t know.”
There was a more emphatic bump.
Orolandes felt it too: a surging beneath him. He stirred and felt momentary panic.
“Cloud. You’re on a cloud,” Mirandee said reassuringly. Her eyes were inches away; her breath tickled his growing beard.
“All right. But what was that—”
The cloud surged again.
Orolandes ran his fingers through her hair—it was raven black by starlight—rolled away and stood up. The others would be around the side of the puffy thunderhead peak. He walked that way, aware that Mirandee was following him.
Clubfoot and the Warlock were on their feet. Clubfoot called, “Did you see anything?”
“No, but I felt—”
Beyond the two sorcerers, beyond the edge of the cloudscape, a shadow rose up and blotted the stars. Starlight reflected faintly from huge wide-set eyes.
Mirandee was behind him, her hand on his hip.
“Don’t make magic,” the Warlock called. “Not yet. It’s a roc.”
The great bird was treading air, holding itself in position with an occasional flap of its wings. It cocked first one eye, then the other, to study the people on the cloud. Then it spoke to them in a basso profundo thunderclap.
“CAW!”
“Caw yourself!” Orolandes snarled, and he stamped toward it. His sword was longer than the bird’s beak, he thought. It would reach an eye. This would be a wild way to die. But Mirandee would be safe, if he could put out an eye.
“CAW!” bellowed the bird. Its wings rose and snapped down.
A hurricane gust threw Orolandes backward. He curled protectively around the sword blade, somersaulted twice and came up crouched. Another blast beat straight down on his head and shoulders.
The bird was overhead, stooping down on Mirandee.
Orolandes tried to run toward her. The cloud-stuff tangled his feet, slowing him.
Mirandee shouted something complex in nonsense syllables.
Soft blue radiance jumped between her outspread arms and the bird’s descending beak. Her hair flashed white, and she dropped.
Orolandes howled.
The bird fluttered ineffectually and fell into the cloudscape in a disorganized tangle.
Orolandes attacked. His blade’s edge buried itself in feathers. He set his feet, yelled and slashed again at the neck. He cut only feathers.
The bird’s wings stirred feebly. It lifted its head with great effort, said, “CAW?” and died.
Mirandee cried, “Help!”
Her hair was a black cloud spilled across white. She was buried to the armpits. “I stole its power. Gods, I feel all charged up! Lucky I remembered that vampire spell or I’d be trying to fly myself.” She was babbling in the shock of her brush with death. “Clubfoot, can you get me out of here?”
Orolandes went to her, treading carefully, knee-deep in viscous cloud. He lifted her by the elbows, pulled her out of the pit and set her down.
“Oh! Thank you. That vampire spell, old Santer taught it to me a hundred years ago, and I just knew I’d never use it. I thought I’d forgotten it. It wouldn’t even work anymore, most places. Oh, ’Landes, I was so scared.”
Clubfoot said, “You sucked that bird dry, all right. Look.”
The bird was deep in cloud and sinking deeper. As they watched it vanished under the surface.
“We can’t stay here,” said Clubfoot. “We don’t want anyone walking into that patch. It wouldn’t hold a feather, and you can’t tell it from the rest of the cloud.”
They moved far around the steeper northern face of the travelling storm.
On the third morning black-and-white mountains reared their tremendous peaks to east and north. “Aim for the northernmost peak in the range,” Wavyhill ordered.
Clubfoot began his weather magic. The Warlock pulled a band of silver from his upper arm and peered through it for a time. One distant rounded peak glowed a faint blue-white. “That’s it. There’s magic in that mountain,” he said. “Wavyhill…”
“Well?”
Slowly the Warlock said, “I’m only just starting to grasp the audacity of what we’re doing. I never tried anything this big, even when I was young.”
“What have we got to lose?” Wavyhill chuckled.
“I wish you’d stop saying that. Clubfoot, how are you doing?”
“Having some trouble.”
The cloudscape drifted east. Clubfoot continued to try to swing them north. By noon the clouds were sweeping across the foothills, and surging like a sluggish sea. It was no use trying to stand. Even Clubfoot gave up the effort.
At first it wasn’t bad, riding a continual earthquake on an infinity of damp featherbed. Then Orolandes grew seasick. Twice in his life he had ridden out a storm aboard a warship; but in a way this was worse. They were trying to steer the storm itself. Clubfoot wore a grim look Orolandes didn’t like at all. Sections of cloudscape roiled into sudden ridges and hills; others tore away and drifted off in white puffs. Once the limping magician tried to stand and gesture, and a hill of cloud-stuff surged up under him and sent him spinning downslope. After that he stayed down.
The spell-hardened cloud deformed like taffy as it surged against the dark mountain slopes. Orolandes clenched his teeth against the tumbling of his belly. Ships didn’t do that! He was flat on the cloud now, like all the others, with his arms and legs spread wide.
The cloudscape slid up the mountain face; slowed; and finally, balked from crossing the range, the mass slid north instead. The ride became less chaotic. Orolandes began to relax.
“At least we’re going in the right direction,” Clubfoot muttered. He stood up. “Now let’s see if I can—” And he stopped, astonished. He was hip deep in cloud.
And Orolandes was sinking deeper, deeper in cloud. He couldn’t see the others.
Clubfoot bellowed, “Stay down! Flatten out!” He began to sing in the Guild tongue, unfamiliar words in a tone of desperation. He was chest deep and sinking, like a captain going down with his ship, as the clouds converged over Orolandes’ head.
He sank through white blindness. He held his breath and readied himself—he thought he was ready—for the moment when he would drop out of the cloud.
Too long. He gasped for breath, and found he could breathe cloud-stuff.
Somewhere above his head Clubfoot was still singing. If Orolandes yelled for Mirandee he might interrupt that spell; but it was very lonely to die like this. The white had turned light gray. The seconds stretched excruciatingly…then rough ground brushed against him and spun him head over heels.
He was on his back on solid, solid ground, with dirt and small stones beneath him and gray cloud all around. He stayed there and shouted. “Mirandee!”
Nothing.
“Clubfoot! Warlock!” He was afraid to move. To find soli
d ground in a cloud was too much of sorcery with too little warning. And he was still blinded by cloud!
Then a shape formed in the cloud, and resolved. He saw a pale, blond, very hairy warrior. The armored man walked in a furtive, silent crouch, his eyes shifting nervously, trying to see in all directions at once. His spear was poised to kill. But he didn’t look down.
This, at least, was in Orolandes’ field of experience.
The stranger’s first glimpse of Orolandes showed him much too close, in the air, with sword drawn. The stranger’s jaw dropped; then he tried to scream and thrust at the same time. Orolandes batted the spearhead aside and stabbed him through the open mouth.
He waited. No more blond warriors came. Presently Orolandes allowed himself to look down.
The dead man was armored in leather reinforced by brass strips. He carried sword and dirk in addition to the spear. He looked to be just past twenty, and well fed; and none of that was good. A well fed populace could support many soldiers, and a young man wouldn’t be wearing the best of the armor. A good-size, well-equipped band could be moving out there in the…fog.
Of course, fog! Orolandes grinned at himself. A cloud on the ground must be fog! Clubfoot must have managed to land the cloud while it was still viscous enough to hold them. That must have shaken the soldiers: sticky fog, and a hillside seeded with magicians.
Orolandes walked into the fog. He was painfully alert. In this white blindness you could kill friend as easily as foe. He spent some time stalking a small tree. Later two man-shaped shadows formed faintly in the mist, standing motionless above…a seated man? Orolandes charged in silence, and killed one of them before they knew they were threatened. The other fended Orolandes off long enough to scream for help. He fought badly…and lost.
The Warlock did not get up. He looked bad; as if he had collapsed in upon himself. He blinked and spoke in a feeble whisper. “Orolandes?”
“Yes. They’ll be coming, we’ve got to move. Are you hurt?”
“Youth spells worn off. No mana here. Take—”
“Where are the others?”
“Don’t know. You can’t find them. Take Wavyhill. Go up.”
“But—”
