The Flying Sorcerers

The morning was crisp, but rapidly warming.

The sea was a plate of restless blue far below. We seemed higher than we’d ever been in the airship. The edge of the world was almost curved.

Purple said that was an optical illusion. We were much too low to see any real curvature. Gibberish again.

We stretched the blankets across the rigging to dry them in the sun. Our togas as well. Even Purple shed his impact suit and stretched out against the bright morning.

The wind continued to blow steadily north, and Wilville and Orbur were resting on their outrigger cots.

I splashed around in the front of the boat, looking for any foodstuffs that either Purple or the water had missed. I found a half of a sour melon and glumly split it with Shoo-gar. None of the rest wanted any.

We still had water in the airboat, up to our knees, but Purple refused to let us dump it. “Look how high we are already,” he said. “There’s no point to throwing this water away. Later, when the windbags leak a little more, then we’ll need it. Besides, I may want to make some more hydrogen first.”

“Do you have enough electrissy?”

He smiled sheeplishly. “I — uh, I sort of miscalculated when I filled windbags. I didn’t realize they still had as much hydrogen in them as they did. I have enough power left to fill three airbags. Or to fill four if I don’t want to call my flying egg down.” He looked about him. “That should be enough. We should have at least four days of flying time left before the balloons are too weak again and I’m out of power. If we can’t make it by then, we’ll never make it.”

We sailed on hungrily; and steadily, steadily north.

We fought crosswinds for a while, but always the general direction of our motion was north.

We had lost our course line of hills under the water sometime during the thunderstorm. That we had been unable to find it again didn’t worry Purple as much as it might have. He still had measuring devices, and he charted our course by them.

When I asked him about it, he shrugged it off, “Well, it seemed like a good idea, Lant — but I think those hills of yours are too deeply submerged now to be seen. Maybe we’ll be lucky though, and see them again when we get over shallower water.”

The next day, he recharged the windbags, leaving himself only enough power to fill two bags completely until full, or one windbag and a call to his flying egg.

Toward evening we finally pulled the plug and drained away the knee-high water which had been our companion for the last two days. “I had thought his trip was going to be over water,” Shoogar grumbled, “not through it.”

Purple grinned as he watched the water spill away. We were too high to see if we were rising, but the feel of the craft told us that we were. He said, “But it was obvious, Shoogar, we should have thought of it sooner — always keep a quantity of water in the boat. It helps us to balance the craft so that it doesn’t rock so much when we move. It’s there for re-charging the airbags — we never have to go down to the water any more. And we can use it as ballast too.”

“I tell you that that’s nonsense!” Shoogar exploded. “Ballast, drinking water, gas-making water, wash water — What kind of a spell is it when you arbitrarily change the name of the object to suit your needs?”

And he stamped off to the bow to sulk, his sandals making wet squishy sounds as he went.

He was still there when darkness came, peering forward at the sky and chanting a moon-bringer spell.