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to.”
    “Yes, that would be the way of it. But, Evold, it must be! Don’t you see? Steam! If you boil water you must get steam!”
    “Steam,” he said. We used the Kregish word, the most common word for steam,
kish.
“I can find no other mention of cayferm in all my library.”
    “You have done well.”
    “I remembered one horrific time in the Heavenly Mines where I had sweated, as number eight two eight one, to dig and tunnel for minerals. And how a little Och stylor, writing in his notebook, had jumped with alarm, deep in a tunnel through a seam, and called to the Rapa guard to prod the slaves out fast. We had not gone back to the seam. And now I recalled that over the smell of the cheap oil lamp I had sniffed the scent of squishes. I had thought of Inch, and then the little Och had near-panicked.
    Now I thought I knew why.
    “Steam made up with boiled squishes,” I said. “Cayferm.”
    Evold sneezed. “Maybe, maybe. But we must test it first. We can only talk now, we must—”
    “Yes!” I bellowed. “Everyone must gather squishes! Every perishing soul, by Vox!”
    Evold Scavander nodded, the excitement getting to him.
    “Although . . .” I said. And I felt a chill. “Although this cannot be so. It is against nature.”
    “Many things are against nature, my Prince. Every time you put on a hat to go out into the rain, it is against nature.”
    “I grant that. But I mean that boiling will produce a purity; the steam cannot possibly contain any part of the squishes! This is a matter of common knowledge.”
    He put a yellowish finger alongside his nose, which had a large brown lump on the larboard side.
    “Maybe nature winks, my Prince. For a man to fly through the air using boxes filled with dirt and air — surely that is so against nature as to make all the rest simple.”
    “Oh, the vollers work. There is no doubt of that. Aye,” I added viciously, “and they crash, also.”
    We looked at the pathetic pile of wreckage. Lish’s voller had come down hard at the end. The two silver boxes had been taken from the smashed jumble of sturm-wood and bronze orbits. They lay on the table, separated from those we had made ourselves.
    They were also well separated from each other. I walked across and gently pushed one of the boxes toward the other, along the lenken tabletop. I could feel nothing at first. And then like a thrilling of rubbed amber, like a million warrior ants of the hostile territories marching over my skin, I felt the tremble, the vibration. When the two boxes came within that certain special distance from each other they both, together, sprang into the air. Up they went, glittering in the light of Antares. We stared upward, knowing what would happen.
    The boxes flew up together until wind pressure divided them. They curved out and away and so, separated, plummeted back to the floor. One hit so heavily that the corner split. I cursed.
    Evold Scavander scuttled for the box, lifted it, and stuck it under that lumpy nose of his. His mad old eyes snapped with intelligence, with baffled intelligence.
    “Ha, my Prince! Squishes! When I was a small boy, cleaning the retorts and collecting the frogs’ legs and sweeping the floor, aye, and being well beaten by the old San, I remember a piece of squish pie as a direct gift from Oolie Opaz himself.”
    I sniffed. Squish, without a doubt.
    “It has gone, drifted into the air and gone.”
    “True. But we will do as you command, and boil many squishes. The whole fortress will be perfumed with squishes.”
    “But,” I said, fretful, seeing that first quick flash of hope utterly ruined, “if we boil squishes and put the steam in a silver box, why, then, the steam will condense and we will merely have a box of water.”
    San Evold shook his head. What I said was true. But he had no other suggestion.
    “Let me first try, my Prince. Afterward, if it does not work, we must think again.”
    “You see about the squishes and the boiling. Inform me and I shall