Urza - Airships

The finished fuselage of Urza’s flying war engine took up one corner, sitting atop the rolled animal-skin balloon that was to haul it into the sky.

***

Moments after this announcement, crews hoisted the balloon of animal skin and the metal fuselage from the corner and bore them up toward the crest of the Giant’s Pate. Behind them went more workers with massive bellows hooked to specially designed forges meant to heat air. Ropes borrowed from the docked New Tolaria followed in their turn, and crates of dark orbs carried gingerly by pairs of workers.

“It is crude, I know,” Urza said with chagrin as he sat across from Barrin, who was rapidly filling his mouth with too-hot forkfuls of fried loon eggs, “but until we have full laboratory capacity, I am not willing to cobble together an ornithopter. Besides, this floating behemoth can hold one hundred times the number of powder bombs as an ornithopter.”

***

By midmorning, the great war machine of skin and metal was fully inflated atop the Giant’s Pate. Its air-bag shone in the sunlight gold and brown, crossed in a thousand places with sewn seams. Beneath, the metal fuselage gleamed, its base spotted with dew from its early morning trek. Strong winds up from the bay tugged and teased the dirigible, and its anchor lines moaned.

***

Meanwhile, the flight team of five was receiving its final instructions from Master Malzra. One team member was assigned to each vector of the balloon’s movement—an officer of altitude, another of radius, and a third of tangent. Through a system of signals, these officers would instruct the ground team to accomplish the desired movement through a combination of rope trim and wind utilization. As Malzra’s most accomplished artificer, Jhoira was made officer of altitude, in charge of the elaborate onboard forge bellows that provided the machine its lift. The final two fliers, a scholar and her protégé, were the school’s best cartographers. They would lie prone in belly-holds on opposite ends of the device and would each make maps of what they saw.

***

Time Streams, Chapter 9