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thought about women. "Bloody
women."
    Another explosion shook seeds from the tree,
bringing them down like hail. Keeble took one from the top of his
head and examined it for a moment, spinning it in his fingers,
before tossing it away. He set to work again, a smile on his face.
Explosions came more regularly. And they came closer. He could
almost chop with the rhythm of the explosions.
    It was only a dozen strokes before Keeble
made a breakthrough. He jarred his good hand badly and almost bent
his mechanical one when a thin wall of wood fell apart. It showed
empty space beyond. At almost the same time Meledrin grabbed his
shoulder and pulled him back from the tree. The woman was stronger
than she looked, but he twisted free and glared at her.
    "What do you think you are doing, Keeble?"
Her voice was shaking with rage. "How dare you touch the Ohoga
tree. You profane this sacred place just by being here."
    "Do you really think that matters now?" He
gestured to the sky, and there were still dozens of the huge bats
there. Each had an assembly of shining metallic cylinders strapped
to its belly, and they all wheeled about as if looking for
somewhere to land. The clearing where the huge tree was located was
an obvious choice.
    The first of the creatures shook the trees
with its enormous wings and settled to the ground even as Keeble
and Meledrin watched.
    Keeble had a vague feeling he should be
afraid, but he wasn't. "The Song gives me strength," he said. Or
perhaps it just distracted him.
    Fires were sending thick blankets of smoke
through the forest. People were shouting, screaming.
    "Perhaps it isn't a bat," he said, cocking
his head to one side as he looked. "It isn't quite a bat and isn't
quite a bird." Either term would probably do.
    For a tree, the tree was huge, but the
bat-bird would've crushed it had it tried to find a perch. It
flared its leathery wings for a moment to get its balance, and it
was like a storm cloud had passed across the sun.
    "Forty meters across," Keeble said. "It has
to weigh a few ton. Something like that shouldn't be able to get
off the ground. Especially with those cylinders."
    But the Song was still echoing around the
corners of his mind, and he'd broken through to a hollow section of
the giant tree, so he didn't want to spend time working out size to
weight ratios. He turned and started chopping again.
    Another explosion shook the ground, and
Keeble almost lost his rhythm. The Song kept him working steadily
though, kept his mind focussed.
    "Stop." Meledrin's face was even paler than
usual.
    "The tree is hollow, woman." He took a great
chunk of the tree away and crouched down to look into the hole.
There was nothing to see.
    "Keeble."
    The dwarf turned. Meledrin had backed away a
few steps and was pointing her bow at him. An arrow was drawn back
to her cheek. He looked into her green eyes and shivered at what he
saw there.
    "Guess you'll just have to
kill me. The tree is hollow . Don't you think that's
strange? And there's a huge bat behind you with cylinders strapped
to its belly." What they did to flight dynamics was unthinkable.
Dwarves had been working on flight for a few years. "If anyone had
come up with something like that bat they'd have been laughed out
of the mountain. And quite possibly the forest as well, though who
knows with you strange dwarves."
    The bat had crouched and brightly armored
figures were emerging from the two outermost canisters. The first
such person was almost as tall as Meledrin and wore a chunky,
riveted suit of armor with flaking green and purple paint. The
second was the same. They were only thirty meters away.
    "There's a huge bat behind you that seems to
be a vehicle for people." His subconscious calculations of flight
dynamics were thrown into the forge, and he began to recast them.
"Can those people move about in the canisters, do you think? Or are
they strapped in? What are they strapped to? What are those suits
made from? They could use a gas that's lighter