Heart and Soul by Sarah A. Hoyt

more to it.
    Nigel looked at Mr. Perigord, to find the man drawn and white-faced, staring back at him in as much confusion as Nigel himself felt. Because the sirens made them all deaf, he pronounced, with exaggerated care so the man could read his lips, “I wonder what could be causing the alarm?”
    Mr. Perigord shook his head—but whether he was unable to hear what Nigel was saying, or unable to answer, Nigel did not know. Nigel, in turn, thinking of all the confusion that could be caused by the approach of a magical flying creature—say, a dragon—and knowing that not all such creatures were friendly, reached into the box he kept beside his flight chair for the lion’s tail and ears. The magic in the powerful fetishes, imbued with Masai incantations, allowed Nigel to envelop the whole ship in a protective field that would repel any magical interference. And yet, the alarms went on.
    Now, joining the alarms, came screams. Unlike the first screams Nigel had heard when the ship fluttered—which came a bit from all over the carpetship—these came from the upper levels only. The levels in which the passengers lodged.
    “What the—” Mr. Perigord said, his pale lips forming the words, which Nigel couldn’t hear above the din. He turned, clearly with every intention of heading for the wrought-iron spiral staircase at the back of the room.
    At that moment, from either side of the glass wall that ran across the front of the flight room, dragons appeared—one blue, one red, one pale green and yet another an indefinable shade of violet. It took Nigel a moment to recognize them as dragons because they were nothing like the dragon that his friend Peter turned into. Peter’s dragon wouldn’t have been out of place gracing the prow of a Viking ship, but these dragons were mere zigzags of color, like lightning bolts given animated form—flying serpents with no visible wings.
    “Chinese dragons,” Nigel said to himself—because he was not foolish enough to think anyone else could possibly hear him.
    And yet Mr. Perigord’s voice echoed behind him: “Man your stations. Grab your powersticks,” he bellowed with certainty and command, loud enough to pierce the noise of the alarms.
    The other men in the flight room—the minor magicians, the map experts, others who allowed Nigel to do his job, ran to the rack at the back. These were strapped with Smith-Henry powersticks, charged with enough loads to conquer most of a small country. They took positions on either side of Nigel’s chair, in classic style, one knee on the floor, bracing the powerstick for a possible shot. Nigel wished that, as aboard the Victoria Invicta on his trip to Africa, there had been a group of Royal Were-Hunters aboard. But there weren’t. And most powersticks aboard carpetships were not spelled against weres, the dangers of finding weres on most routes being vanishingly small—and from Europe to Africa, nonexistent.
    The dragons flew closer, seemingly heedless of the danger. Suddenly, as if on command, they all flamed. A curtain of flame covered the glassed-in front of the room, blazing red and orange and gold and obscuring everything else from sight. Nigel sat, holding his fetishes and refusing to get up, while he gritted his teeth and kept the ship flying, despite all the disturbance.
    He was fairly sure that the men on either side of him discharged their powersticks, but the magical charges got lost in the dragon flame. The glass pinged, turned red hot and melted. A blast of fiery air, as from an open furnace, burst in on Nigel and the others. For a moment, he felt as if he were breathing heat. Not air. Not oxygen. Just heat. His hair seemed to curl away from his face in the blistering heat. His eyes teared.
    The flame ceased as soon as it had started. Blinking away the tears that the heated air had brought to his eyes, Nigel found himself staring at the blue sky and surrounded by howling winds. The dragons had moved to the side, and in front of