Darkness & Light

by Paul B. Thompson

  "Hai, Sturm Brightblade! Hai-yah!" She waved one hand at him. "You should try this!"

  The gnomes set up a cheer as Cupelix banked into a steep climb. Sturm watched the dragon soar away with Kitiara.

  He felt a strange uneasiness. He wasn't afraid for Kit. There was something about the image of a human riding on the back of a dragon that chilled him deep inside.

  "Well, I'm glad they're enjoying themselves," Sighter said sourly. "But can we get underway, ourselves?"

  Sturm waved to Kitiara and called for her to come down.

  After several mock diving attacks at the rubble, the gnomes, and Sturm, Cupelix landed and Kitiara jumped to the ground.

  "Thank you, dragon," she said. Her face was flushed. She pounded Sturm on the shoulder and said, "Well, let's get going. No need to stand around here all day."

  The humans and the gnomes trekked to the tethered flying ship. In a moment of creative vandalism, Flash and Birdcall had agreed to sever the useless wings and tail, so the ship presented an austere, clipped appearance. Kitiara was smiling and humming a marching song.

  "Pick up your feet, soldier," she said, linking an arm in Sturm s.

  "What are you so pleased about?" he said. "The ship may not take flight."

  "Believe that we will fly, and we will."

  "I'll think lightheaded if it will help." She laughed at his morose tone.

  The ship was reloaded with what food and water the gnomes collected, and a few items for emergency use -

  spare lumber, tools, nails, and so forth. Sturm bent down and saw that the keel was firmly set in the red dirt.

  The gnomes filed up the ramp. Sturm and Kitiara paused, each with one foot at the ramp, the other on the soil of the red moon.

  "Will anyone ever believe we were here?" he asked, taking in the panorama."It all seems like a wild dream."

  "What difference does it make?" Kiiiara replied. "We know what we've done and where we've been; even if we never tell another soul, we'll know."

  They walked up the ramp and hauled it up behind them.

  When the hatch was secure, Sturm went up to the main deck. Kitiara disappeared into the hold.

  Cupelix swooped in, beat his wings hard and alighted gently beside the Cloudmaster. "Glorious, my friends! I am reborn - no, born for the first time! Freed of the stone sar-cophagus in which I dwelt, I am a new dragon.

  "Henceforth, I am no longer Cupelix, but Pteriol, the Fly-er!"

  "Pleased to meet you, Pteriol," said Fitter.

  "We'd best be off," interrupted Sturm. "While it's still light."

  'Yes, yes," said Stutts. "Listen, all of you; each fellow is to stand by the mooring ropes. When I give the word, slip the knots and let us rise."

  "Tell them to pull in the ropes. They're all we've got,"

  advised Roperig.

  "And pull in the ropes!" Stutts said. "Everyone ready?"

  The gnomes piped their readiness. "Very good. All hands, slip your ropes!"

  They managed to get most of the lines loose at the same time, though Rainspot at the stern had a hard knot and lagged behind. The ship rolled sideways, the hull planks groaning.

  "We're too heavy!" Wingover shouted.

  The distinct sound of splitting wood erupted below their feet. The starboard side rose, throwing everyone to port.

  Sturm banged the back of his head against the deck house.

  Then, with an ear-piercing crack, the Cloudmaster righted itself and lifted into the air.

  "Halloo!" called Pteriol. "You've lost something!"

  Sturm and the gnomes filled the rail. They were rising very slowly, but from a height of fifty feet, they could see a wide section of the hull planking and a mass of dark metal on the ground.

  "The engine!" Flash cried. Birdcall uttered a hawkish scream of dismay.

  They rushed from the ladder down to the hold. Near the deck hatch, Flash fell into the arms of Kitiara. She was whistling a Solacian dance tune.

  "Quickly!" said the excited gnome. "We've lost the engine! We must go back and get it!"

  Kitiara stopped whistling. "No," she said.

  "No? No?"

  "I don't know anything about aerial navigation, but I do know this ship was too heavy to get off the ground. So I arranged for the extra weight to stay behind."

  "How'd you do that?" Sturm asked.

  "Sawed through the hull around the engine," she said.

  "It's not fair! It's not right!" Flash said, blinking through angry tears. Birdcall made similar noises.

  Sturm patted the two on their shoulders. "It may not be fair, but it was the only thing to do," he said gently. "You can always build another engine once you get back to Sancrist."

  Stutts and Wingover squeezed past Kitiara and started down the ladder. "We'd better inspect the hole," said Stutts.

  "The hull may be seriously weakened. Not to mention drafty."

  Drafty was an understatement. A yawning hole, twelve feet by eight feet, showed where the lightning-powered engine had been.

  "My," said Stutts, peering down at the receding ground.

  They were already a hundred feet up. "This is rather interesting. We should have built a window into the bottom of the ship from the first."

  "Keep that in mind," Sturm said, who kept well back from the hole. "We'll have to patch this somehow, if only to keep ourselves from tumbling out." He wasn't too surprised by Kitiara's deed. It was typical of her: quick, direct, and a bit ruthless. Still, they were off the ground at last.

  Pteriol's brass scales glistened as he passed under the ship.

  The dragon circled in a rising spiral, wings flapping slowly.

  The Cloudmaster moved very slowly westward, away from the fallen obelisk.

  Wingover stepped forward until his toes were off the edge of the hull timbers. He pushed back the swath of bandages that shrouded his head. His disturbing black eyes focused on something far below.

  "What is that?" he asked, pointing at the distant ground.

  "I can't see anything," Stutts said.

  "There's someone down there walking."

  "A tree-man?" suggested Sturm. "It is daylight."

  "Too small. It walks differently, more like -" Wingover scrubbed his eyes with his small fists. "No! It can't be!

  "What, what?"

  "It looks like a gnome - like Bellcrank!"

  Sturm frowned. "Bellcrank is dead."

  "I know! I know! But it looks just like him. His ears have this funny shape." Wingover brushed his own ears. "But now he's red all over!"

  There was a shout from the upper deck. Sighter had spotted the walking figure with his spyglass. Sturm, Stutts, and Wingover hurried up. The astronomer gnome identified the figure as Bellcrank, too.

  Fitter shivered. "Is it a ghost?" he asked plaintively.

  "Hardly," Sighter responded. "It just stumbled on the turf."

  "Then he's alive!" said Cutwood. "We have to go back for him!" Flash, Roperig, and Birdcall all seconded this notion.

  Stutts cleared his throat to get their attention.

  "We can't go back," he said sadly. "We've no control over direction or altitude." Rainspot began to sniffle, and Cutwood dabbed his eyes on his sleeve.

  "Isn't there anything we can do?" Sturm asked.

  Just then, Pteriol flashed by the port side, banked steeply, and rolled over the top of the bag. Everyone on the Cloudmaster felt his telepathic whoops of delight.

  "The dragon! The dragon can fetch him!" said Rainspot.

  "He might," said Kitiara.

  "You're his favorite. You ask him," said Cutwood.

  The brass form arrowed past the starboard rail, the wind from his wings stirring the drifting ship into a slow eddy.

  "Hai, dragon. Cupelix! Suffering gods, I mean Pteriol!" Kitiara yelled. The dragon swept under the stern and raced along the underside of the ship.

  "He can't hear me," she said, peeved. "Big, dumb brute."

  "He's drunk with freedom," Sturm said. "Can't blame him,
after all the centuries he spent in that obelisk."

  "We're losing Bellcrank!" Fitter cried as the ship floated over the valley cliff walls.

  The tiny red figure shrank from even Wingover's powerful sight and was lost in the scarlet terrain. The gnomes watched, wordless, as the Cloudmaster drew away from their lost friend. Amid quiet weeping, Cutwood broke away and went below deck. He returned shortly with a hammer, a saw, and a pair of pliers. He threw these items overboard.

  "Why did you do that I" Sturm said.

  Cutwood turned his round pink face up to the taller man.

  "Bellcrank will need tools," he said.

  Sighter, Stutts, and Wingover left the rail. Flash and Birdcall lingered a while longer, then they, too, departed.

  Roperig pulled Fitter away. Rainspot and Cutwood stayed, even as the valley fell farther and farther behind.

  "It's so hard to believe," Rainspot said. "Bellcrank was dead. We buried him."

  "Perhaps there's some truth to what the dragon said," Kitiara offered. Cutwood asked what she meant. "He said nothing ever died on Lunitari."

  "You mean that wasn't Bellcrank down there, just something that looked like him?"

  "I don't know, I'm no cleric or philosopher," she said.

  "The dead have been known to walk, even on Krynn. With all the magic rampant on Lunitari, it doesn't seem too strange that Bellcrank should return."

  No one could answer her. Kitiara turned up the collar of her cloak and went below, leaving Rainspot and Cutwood alone at the rail.

  * * * * *

  They flew over many of the places they'd crossed on foot - the field of stones (alive with growth by daylight) and the oreless range of hills. From above, the short-lived jungle had a disquieting appearance. The plants writhed and undu-lated, like swells in a wind-tossed sea. Even that grew boring after a while, and Sturm went below to see what was being done to the hole in the ship's belly.

  He almost choked when he saw what the gnomes were doing. Cutwood and Fitter were lying on their bellies on thin lengths of planking stretched across the gap. Less-than-inch-thick wood was all that stood between them and a long, long fall. Rainspot and Flash passed them other, shorter pieces of wood to nail crosswise. In this knockabout, trial-and-error style, the gnomes were repairing the hole.

  From the stern, Kitiara looked down at the red moon.

  Three hours aloft, and the land had fallen away far enough to lose its surface features. Now it was just a rolling bolt of red velvet, no more real than the permanent black of the sky. Cupelix (for Kitiara scoffed at the dragon's new name) was behind and slightly below them. The continuous effort of flying was tiring him out, and he no longer swooped and danced through the air. Now it was long, slow, steady work.

  How do you do it?

  "How do I do what?" said Kitiara.

  How do you in the ship fly so effortlessly?

  "The ethereal air holds us up," she said. "That's all I know.

  Shall I fetch Stutts, so he can explain?"

  No. Gnomish explanations give me a headache.

  She laughed. "Me, too." A thin veil fell between the ship and the flying dragon. "Clouds," said Kitiara. "We're getting pretty high."

  My chest aches. I am not used to so much exertion.

  "It's a long way to Krynn."

  How long?

  "Many days, at this rate. Maybe weeks. Did you think Krynn was just over the horizon?"

  There is not much sympathy in your tone, my dear.

  "You're not master of your own world anymore. Take this as a lesson in discipline."

  You are a hard woman.

  "Life's hard," said Kitiara. She turned away from the rail.

  The air was growing steadily colder and thinner, and she needed to don her gloves. In the former dining room (now without table or benches) Kitiara slipped into her boots. She did up her leggings and drew the string tight around her calves. The old knot passed by in the drawstring. She'd lost weight. No matter, she thought; I've traded ten pounds for the strength of ten men.

  Kitiara tied a bow in the drawstring. Distracted, she pulled too hard and one end fell out, making a hard knot.

  She stared at the result, puzzled - not for mistying the bow, but because she hadn't snapped the string like a cobweb.

  No one was around. Kitiara grasped the woven silk cord in both hands and pulled harder. It did not break.

  Chapter 30

  Little Red Man

  On high the air was as clean and sharp as an elvem sword. Without the constant beating of wings, there was no sensation of movement aboard the Cloudmaster. Quite to the contrary, it seemed as if the sun, stars, and Lunitari itself were moving, while the ship stood anchored in the sky. The effect of this mode of flight was curiously timeless. Only the wind-up clock in the wheelhouse showed that time was passing at all.

  After they had been airborne almost five hours, Lunitari was far enough below them to resemble a sphere again. Of Krynn there was no sign, and that worried the travelers.

  Sighter assured them that their home world would appear as Lunitari turned on its course through the heavens. "We have a better than even chance of reaching Krynn," he said severely. "As the largest body in the heavens, it naturally has the greatest attraction for us, just as it attracts a greater amount of sunlight than Lunitari. Still, we must be wary and release the proper amount of ethereal air when the pro-pitious moment comes, so that we can descend homeward."

  The strange, motionless flight bothered Sturm, so he kept below deck. There the hull and deck creaked as a proper ship should, and it comforted him. He'd always been fond of sailing ships.

  The patch over the hole in the hull was finished, but it was not the finest example of the shipwright's art. Planks and laths and blocks of wood were nailed and mortised over the gap wherever they could fit. The gnomes strolled across the patch without a care, but Sturm did not trust it to support his weight. He prowled on past the patch to the forward end of the ship, which at sea would have been the forecastle.

  The hull there was barren of gear, and all the interior partitions had long since been ripped away. There was nothing forward at all but beams and planking. It was like being inside the skeleton of some great beast, all bones and no flesh.

  Sturm ascended the fore ladder into the wheelhouse.

  There was no wheel, for there was no tail to be turned by a wheel. All the finely wrought brass fixtures had been ripped out for scrap or merely to lighten the ship. Only Stutts's chair remained, though its plump velvet cushions were gone.

  Kitiara was there, sitting on the deck, gazing out the windows at nothing.

  "Are you ill, Kit?"

  "Do I look ill?"

  "No." Sturm sat down on the deck opposite her.

  Kitiara looked away, toying with the drawstring of her leggings. "Sturm, are you still having visions?"

  "No, not for some time."

  "Do you remember them?" she asked.

  "Of course I do."

  "What was the first one?"

  "Why, it was the - when I saw -" A perplexed look came over Sturm's face. "Something about my father?" His high forehead became a mass of wrinkles as he tried to recall what he'd seen.

  "What about the last one?" Kitiara asked.

  He shook his head. "There was a sorcerer - I think."

  "We've lost it," Kitiara said softly. "The effect the natural magic of Lunitari had on each of us. You've forgotten the substance of your visions. I'm losing my strength. Here

  - look." She took out her dagger and planted her thumbs on the back of the blade. Fingers knotting, Kitiara slowly bent the slim steel blade to a blunt angle.

  "You seem very strong to me," said Sturm.

  "Yesterday I could've folded this blade in half with two fingers." She tossed the bent dagger aside.

  "We're better off without the powers," Sturm said.

  "That's easy for you to say! I like being strong -

  powerful!"

  "Mighty fighters live and die
in every generation, the past ones forgotten by the present, the present destined to vanish in the memories of the future. Virtue, not ferocity or cunning, are what make a fighter a hero, Kit."

  Kitiara straightened her stooped shoulders and said reso-lutely, "You're wrong, Sturm. Only success is remembered.

  Nothing else matters but success."

  He opened his mouth to reply, but the wheelhouse door flew open and a blast of icy air rushed in. Cutwood, swathed to the top of his pink bald head in flannel rags and quilting, posed dramatically in the doorway, one stubby arm flung out, pointing astern.

  "The dragon!" he said. "Cupelix is faltering!"

  The whole crew was assembled aft. When Sturm and Kitiara joined them, the concentration of weight made the ship tip steeply back. Stutts said, "Spread out! We can't all stand in the same p-p-place!"

  Wingover shook his head. "You stuttered," he said.

  "Never mind that now," said Kitiara.

  Cupelix was far back and nearly fifty feet below the rising Cloudmaster. He was holding his wings out in glide position, flapping only once every few seconds. His long neck was arched down, his head low. The dragon's large hind legs, normally held tightly against his belly when in flight, likewise dangled limply.

  "Cupelix! Cupelix, can you hear me?" Kitiara called through cupped hands.

  Yes, my dear.

  "You can make it, beast. Do you hear me? You can make it!"

  No. Done in... too weak. The dragon's tail dropped, making him waver.

  "Flap, damn you! Don't give up. Remember, you're a brass dragon!" she cried. "This is your chance, Cupelix!

  Your chance to come to Krynn."

  Can't fly... not meant to be, dear Kit.

  Sturm called, "Is there anything we can do?"

  Tell others, I live. Tell others to visit Lunitari.

  "We will," shouted Rainspot.

  Bring books. Bring philosophers. Bring - His thought trailed off. Cupelix was flapping weakly now.

  Kitiara grabbed Wingover by his collar. "Why can't he fly? Why does he keep going down?" she demanded.