Read Omens of Kregen for Free Online Page B

conversational voice, said: “The clouds will thin soon, I can feel that in my bones.” Then he went on: “As the bitter blast blows the leaves away, so the wide-winged bird breasts the wind and soars.”
    “San Dweloin, I think, Captain. But I could not put my finger on the exact stanza,” said Delia.
    Voromin let rip a pleased wheezing snort.
    “Aye, majestrix, San Dweloin, who, being dead these three thousand seasons or more, is a great comfort to me.”
    There was no need for me to marvel at Voromin’s love of poetry. I’d been thinking of him as a “bluff old sea dog.” Well, he was, to be sure; but the cliché rang hollow set against the pretty discussion of verse that ensued upon the deck of
Heart of Imrien
. And, as we thus discussed the niceties of poetry, so the clouds thinned and I knew the time for decision grew near.
    By quoting those two particular lines, Voromin clearly indicated what he wanted to do. I gathered the quotation came from San Dweloin’s poem “The Force of Human Nature,” written in his old age and extolling light and life over darkness and death.
    Well, that light came very often after a damned long dark tunnel.
    “Yes, Cap’n,” I said, breaking into a point of the over-use of alliteration. “If you’ll kindly signal out for the flutduins to be loosed on my signal, I shall be obliged.”
    “Quidang!”
    “Let us gain more height. Certainly I want to clear the tops of the clouds before we leave them.”
    There was no great ensuing bustle as the voller lifted, for the simple reason that the Deldar at the controls merely pushed over his levers and the vessel rose smoothly through the clouds. Aboard the other vessels of the squadron as we flew from cloud to cloud and passed alongside the flanks of the monstrous masses of whiteness our signals were picked up. There was no guarantee that all the vollers would read the signals; we might lose a few carrying straight on below us.
    Of the various classes and types of airboats manufactured on Kregen, we had since our alliance with Hamal had the opportunity of acquiring new types. Still troubled by the destruction caused to her shipyards during the wars, Hamal was not yet back to full-scale voller production. Therefore, we had very few vollers in which the onward force contains also the air within the envelope. We had to keep our heads down behind the windscreens. The clouds when we lanced through them went past like boiling milk all streaming in long lightning flashes of vapor.
    I said to Larghos Hemlok, the first lieutenant: “Fires nice and hot, Hik Hemlok?”
    He smiled with a peculiarly bloodthirsty look.
    “Bright and hot, majister. Bright and hot.”
    If I mention that the first luff’s name of Hemlok had no connotative meaning with the word hemlock in terrestrial usage, that is true; he remained a fellow who could hemlock an opponent’s drink in the middle of a passage of arms.
    “By Corg!” quoth Captain Voromin. “We’re going to have ourselves a lovely lot of bonfires!”
    Well, that was the plan. Simpleminded enough; but something better than tamely running away.
    Soaring and leaping through the air,
Heart of Imrien
sailed up between two vast expanses of white forming a chasm in which a fleet might be lost.
    So mixed up and out of formation had the squadron become by this time that I was positively gratified to spy six other vollers fleeting along with us. The other ten would be haring along between the masses of cloud. Well, what had to be done would have to be done with the ships available to me now.
    Higher and higher we climbed until, with the exception of a few towering cumulus pinnacles like Mount Everests piling away left and right, we broke through into the light of the twin suns. That streaming mingled radiance of Zim and Genodras bathed all the clouds in a rosy jade glory. The view was breathtaking. Still, we were not sightseers, we were warriors of the air, and we were after our prey.
    Tradition means a