Ships had sailed the seas for centuries uncounted: ships, aye, but none likeHabakkuk. Ships had been wood and canvas, riding wind and wave.

Then, as magecraft and manufacturing grew more sophisticated, they’d been iron and steel, traveling the ley lines of the world’s energy grid in defiance of wind and wave. Now… Leino took another step. His hobnailed boots bit into the icy deck again.

Habakkukwas a thing of ice, ice and a little sawdust for strength. Leino and his fellow mages had planed the top of an iceberg flat, down in the iceberg-ridden seas bordering the frigid austral continent. They’d hollowed out chambers in the ice, chambers that held men and supplies and-the point of the exercise-far more dragons than any ordinary ship could haul.

Magecraft had shaped theHabakkuk. More magecraft propelled it along the ley lines. And still more magecraft kept it from melting away to nothing as it sailed these warmer (though still far from warm) waters farther from the land of the Ice People. Leino wondered what the natives of the tropical continent of Siaulia would think if theHabakkuk ever had occasion to sail there. Most of them had never seen any ice in all their lives, let alone a great floating mountain of it that refused to disappear even in that blood-warm sea.

High overhead, a dragon screeched. Leino glanced up not in fear but in wariness, lest it prove an Algarvian beast diving to the attack. But it wasn’t; it was painted in the Kuusaman colors of sky-blue and sea-green, which made it hard to spot for a moment against the drifting clouds. Down it spiraled: long, snaky body; short, clawed limbs; great batwings now gliding, now beating; long neck and fearsome, big-eyed head. So much ferocity, all governed by a brain the size of a plum-and by the dragonflier who sat strapped into his harness at the base of the beast’s neck.