Thorarinn Gunnarsson - Dragons 03 by Dragons on the Town

Author:Dragons on the Town
Format: epub
Published: 2013-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

PART SEVEN

A Most Unfriendly Altitude

Jenny wanted nothing more than to let the little airship loose and see just what it could do, but she did not trust the ship’s handling enough to push it past sixty knots. That would have been a very respectable speed indeed for the old Wind Dragon, but Jenny was only using power from the forward lift vanes. That seemed to be the most stable application of power, pulling the ship like front-wheel drive rather than pushing it from behind with the thrust vanes. Jenny had already wrecked one ship in the last few days and she had felt guilty enough because of that. Building a new, better ship had helped her to feel that she had paid a part of the debt that she owed Mira for the loss of Wind Dragon.

Besides that, they simply could not afford the delay of another extensive repair. The Emperor’s fleet was ahead of them by at least several days and possibly several weeks, and they had to begin making up that lead in a hurry. After some thought on the subject, Dalvenjah and Holmes had agreed that they did not need to track the Emperor and the Dark Sorceress Daija, something they could not figure out how to do anyway. They could possibly save a great deal of time and trouble by proceeding directly to the very center of the magical singularity, the source of all magic. That was more easily said than done. Some argued that the center of the singularity must be the source of light and heat, but Dalvenjah found that answer a little too easy.

The Dragon Sorceress had a surprisingly simple answer to the problem of determining the direction to the source of magic, although it sounded so silly that all the others had assumed that she was teasing. All except for Mira the reconstituted, who was

fond of silly ideas. They took Jenny down into the ship’s main hold, the largest single cabin aboard, shut the door and placed wet towels around the cracks. Then Jenny was told to allow herself to drift, an exercise that had always before left her hanging in mid-air for hours at a time. This time, however, she drifted slowly toward the floor, no matter how many times they repeated the experiment. If they turned the ship upside-down, she would drift toward the ceiling. As Dalvenjah then explained, Jenny was now a creature entirely of magic with no physical presence at all, and she was reacting to the source of magic.

The trick now was trying to decide whether Jenny was being pulled toward the source or pushed away from it, indicating whether the source of magic was also the source of light or in the opposite direction. At least the choices had been narrowed down to only two. Holmes argued that the source of light had to be driven by some other force, most likely the source of magic. Dalvenjah agreed that he was probably right, but not necessarily so.

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