He found that looking up helped. When he was looking at the stars and the newly risen moon, he could not see the awful emptiness under him.
There was no sense of movement, no whistle of the wind in his ears, no flapping of his cloak. He stood holding Aphrael’s hand and looking intently at the moon as it receded ponderously southward. Then there was a pale luminosity coming up from beneath them.
‘Oh, bother,’ the Goddess said.
‘What’s wrong?’ His voice was a little shrill.
‘Look down.’
He looked down and saw a fairy-tale world under them, glowing in the moonlight, stretched out as if forever. Mountains of airy mist swelled up from a folded, insubstantial plain, and pillars and castles of curded cloud stood sentinel-like between. Sparhawk’s mind filled with wonder as the soft, moonlit cloudscape flowed smoothly back below them.
‘Beautiful,’ he murmured.
‘Maybe, but I can’t see the ground.’
‘I think I prefer it that way.’
‘I need reference points, Sparhawk. I can’t see where I am, so I can’t tell where I’m going. Bhelliom can find a place with nothing but a name to work with, but I can’t. I need landmarks, and I can’t see them with all these clouds in the way.’
‘Why don’t you use the stars?’
‘What?’
‘That’s what sailors do when they’re out at sea. The stars don’t move, so the sailors pick out a certain star or constellation and steer toward it.’
There was a long silence while the swiftly receding rush of cloud beneath them slowed and finally stopped. ‘Sometimes you’re so clever that I can’t stand you, Sparhawk,’ the Goddess holding his hand said tartly.
‘You mean you’ve never even thought of it?’ he asked her incredulously.
‘I don’t fly at night very often.’ Her tone was defensive. ‘We’re going down. I have to find a landmark.’
They sank downward, the clouds rushing up to meet them, and then they were immersed in a dense, clinging mist.
‘They’re made out of fog, aren’t they? Clouds, I mean.’ Sparhawk was musing.
‘What did you think they were?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never thought of it before. It just seems strange for some reason.’
They broke out of the underside of the cloud—clouds no bathed in moonglow, now hanging close over their heads a ly ceiling that closed off the light. The earth beneath them was enveloped in almost total darkness. They drifted gliding in air and veering this way and that, peering and searching for something recognizable.
‘Over there.’ Sparhawk pointed. ‘It must be a fair-sized town. There’s quite a lot of light.’
They moved in that direction, drawn toward the light like mindless insects. There was a sense of unreality as Sparhawk looked down. The town lying beneath them seemed tiny. It huddled like a child’s toy on the edge of a large body of water.
Sparhawk scratched at his cheek, trying to remember the details of his map. ‘It’s probably Sepal,’ he said. ‘That lake almost has to be the Sea of Arjun.’ He stopped, his mind suddenly reeling. ‘That’s over three hundred leagues from where we started, Aphrael!’ he exclaimed. ‘Almost a thousand miles!’
‘Yes—if that town really is Sepal.’
‘It has to be. The Sea of Arjun’s the only large body of water on this part of the continent, and Sepal’s on the east side of it. Arjun’s on the south side, and Tiana’s on the west.’ He stared at her incredulously. ‘A thousand miles. and we only left Beresa a half an hour ago. Just how fast are we going?’
‘What difference does it make? We got here. That’s all that matters.’ The young woman holding his hand looked speculatively down at the miniature town on the lake-shore. ‘Dirgis is off to the west a little way, so we won’t want to go straight north.’ She shifted them around in mid-air until they were facing in a slightly northwesterly direction. ‘That should be fairly close. Don’t move your head, Sparhawk. Keep looking in that direction. We’ll go back up, and you pick out a star.’
They rose swiftly through the clouds, and Sparhawk saw the familiar constellation of the wolf lying above the misty horizon ahead. ‘There,’ he pointed. ‘The five stars clustered in the shape of a dog’s head.’
‘It doesn’t look like any dog I’ve ever seen.’
‘You have to use your imagination. How is it you’ve never thought of steering by the stars before?’
She shrugged. ‘Probably because I can see farther than you can. You see the sky as a surface—a kind of overturned bowl with the stars painted on it all at the same distance from you. That’s why you can see that cluster of stars as a dog’s head. I can’t, because I can see the difference in distances. Keep an eye on your dog, Sparhawk. Let me know if we start to drift off.’
The moon-bathed cloud beneath them began to flow smoothly back again, and they flew on in silence for a while.
‘This isn’t so bad,’ Sparhawk said. ‘At least not when you get used to it.’
‘It’s better than walking,’ the gauze-clad Goddess replied.
‘It made my hair stand on end right at first, though.’
‘Sephrenia’s never gotten past that stage. She starts gibbering in panic as soon as her feet come up off the ground.’
Sparhawk remembered something. ‘Wait a minute,’ he objected. ‘When we killed Ghwerig and stole the Bhelliom, you came floating up out of that chasm in his cave, and she walked out across the air to meet you. She wasn’t gibbering in panic then.’
‘No. It was probably the bravest thing she’s ever done. I was so proud of her that I almost burst.’
‘Was she conscious at all? When you found her, I mean?’
‘Off and on. She was able to tell us who’d attacked her. I managed to slow her heartbeat and take away the pain. She’s very calm now.’ Aphrael’s voice quavered. ‘She expects to die, Sparhawk. She can feel the wound in her heart, and she knows what that means. She was giving Xanetia a last message for Vanion when I left.’ The young Goddess choked back a sob.
‘Can we talk about something else?’
‘Of course.’ Sparhawk’s eyes flickered away from the constellation in the night sky. ‘There are mountains sticking up out of the clouds just ahead.’
‘We’re almost there, then. Dirgis is in the big basin lying beyond that first ridge.’
Their rapid flight began to slow. They passed over the snowy peaks of the southern-most expanse of the mountains of Atan, peaks that rose out of the clouds like frozen islands, and found that there was only thin cloud-cover over the basin lying beyond. They descended, drifting down like dandelion puffs toward the forest-covered hills and valleys of the basin, a landscape thaiply etched in the moonlight that leeched out all color. There was another cluster of lights some distance to the left—ruddy torches in narrow streets and golden candlelight in little windows.
‘That’s Dirgis,’ Aphrael said. ‘We’ll set down outside of town. I should probably change back before we go on in.’
‘Either that or put on some more clothes.’
‘That really bothers you, doesn’t it, Sparhawk? Am I ugly or something?’
‘Quite the opposite—and that bothers me all the more. I can’t think while you’re standing around naked, Aphrael.’
‘I’m not really a woman, Sparhawk—not in the sense that seems to bother you so much, anyway. Can’t you think of me as a mare—or a doe?’
‘No, I can’t. Just do whatever you have to do, Aphrael. I don’t really think we need to talk about how I think of you.’
‘Are you blushing, Sparhawk?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact I am. Now can we drop it?’
‘That’s really rather sweet, you know.’
‘Will you stop?’
They came down in a secluded little glen about a half-mile from the outskirts of Dirgis, and Sparhawk turned his back while the Child Goddess once again assumed the more familiar form of the Styric waif they all knew as Flute. ‘Better?’ she asked when he turned around.