The Flying Sorcerers

As one person we jumped for shore, Shoogar and Purple and I scrambling over each other.

At last we stood on solid ground again. The land was desolate, mostly naked rock, blood-colored in the westering light of Ouells and the overhead glow of Virn, but it was solid. No more standing in air, no more standing in water. No more standing in both at the same time.

If ever I returned safely home, I swore, I would never again risk my life in so foolhardy a venture. The skies were not friendly.

Wilville and Orbur had slung up the airpushers and pulled the Cathawk high on the shore, out of reach of the lapping waves. Immediately they began filling the ballast bags, and the interior of the boat as well, with a low level of water. They began checking the rigging, the bicycle frames, and even the watertightness of the boatframe and the balloons. They acted as if they expected the Cathawk to fly again. How, I could not imagine. The gasbags were all limp from leakage, and I did not trust the seams on several of them. They still extended upward from their ropes, but none were very determined about it.

How they hoped to refill the windbags, I did not know.

Shoogar was walking around and chuckling to himself. “I won’t have to acquaint myself with the local spells or the local gods at all. I can start as soon as I check the moons…” and he wandered off toward a distant blackened hill, carrying his spell kit.

A strange black crust covered everything. It shattered when one stepped on it and left miniscule shards, or stinging dust which went up in wisps before the surly wind. Curious, I crunched across the ground toward the hill where Purple stood. He was attaching his big battery to another of his endless spell devices.

He looked both sheepish and defiant as I came up. “Well, I have to try it, don’t I ?”

“But you said it was dead.”

“Perhaps I’ve come to believe in magic,” said Purple. “Nothing else seems to work.” And he finished attaching the wires to the disc-shaped thing from his belt.

He twisted a knob, but nothing happened.

“This yellow eye should light up to show it’s working,” Purple explained, smiling foolishly. He twisted the knob again, harder this time, but the yellow light still did not appear.

“Magic doesn’t work either,” he said. He sighed.

I knew just how he felt then. I longed to be going home myself.

How strange! — that I should consider an area that I had lived in for only a short time as my home; while this bleak map, the blasted remains of the village where I had spent most of my life, was no longer home but a strange and alien land. “Home” was a new land and a different life across the sea.

For that one terrible moment Purple and I were alike. Two strangers, marooned on a bleak and blackened shore, each longing for his home, his wives, and his Quaff.

“All I needed was one surge of power,” said Purple. “Shoogar was right. You can’t mix symbols.”

He picked up his useless devices and trudged slowly down the hill. The ground crunched beneath his feet.