Kali raced to a window, seeing the same wonderland as earlier. Now, thin, grey shapes were hurtling towards the tower through the sky. Whatever they were, they had the same aura about them as the death coach that had taken Makennon, as the tapers in the library, and had again to be born of the black threads. As Kali looked on in horror, the shapes resolved themselves into the figures of hags, skeletal things clad in translucent shrouds. Their talons were grotesquely overgrown, blurred streaks of things that seemed to stretch from this world into another.
Kali swallowed, knowing now what had caused Abra to see stains upon the walls, smears across windows and splatters beneath his feet, and she stumbled back from the window as the hags shrieked into the tower. They seemed, though, to have no interest in her, tearing around the circular chamber like a dark whirlpool. They moved faster and faster, Kali ducking under Redigor's desk, trying to work out what the hells was going on as a loud tearing sound rose over the creatures' shrieking. Kali looked out and saw flashes of sky. The hags' talons were slicing through the tower, not as the Deathclaws might slice through stone but seemingly through its very existence. Redigor had conjured the tower for his secret researches but must have booby-trapped it so that, if discovered, it would be obliterated.
The whole place was coming apart around her. Being erased.
Kali lurched from under desk, the flight of the hags — nothing more than blurs, now — whipping at her bodysuit and hair. She stared in horror as she saw great streaks of sky visible where, moments before, there had been a roof. Her heart began to pound as, around and beneath her, the walls and floor began to disappear slice by slice.
Kali dashed for the stairwell, hoping she would be able to outrun Redigor's trap, but then staggered back as the hags' talons eradicated the entrance to the stairs.
Oh, fark, that was not good. Not good at all.
Kali looked around the room in desperation, searching for an alternative means of escape, but the only one that presented itself was to jump. Despite the fact that was ancient sky out there — thousands of years before her time — it was better than the alternative of staying where she was and being sliced from reality. Hells, if by some miracle she survived the jump, she could leave the Faith a note and experience the wonders of the Old Races first hand.
She wasn't completely suicidal, though, and needed something to slow her fall. The rope in her backpack would be nowhere near long enough. There was only one other thing that she could see might work, even if it was one hells of a gamble. Moving almost in a blur herself, Kali spun around the remains of the chamber, gathering its thick and sticky coating of cobwebs about her body in layer after layer, then, when she felt she had gathered enough, turned to face the remains of one of the windows, took one deep breath and ran and leapt. The coating of cobweb wrapped about her body pulled masses of the stuff after her, almost stripping the tower clean.
Kali plummeted. And marvelled. As she fell, she travelled not only downward, but forward through the ages. In a flash, the elven city crumbled and disappeared, and clouds scudded across wasteland. The course of the river changed, twisting like a striking snake. Another city arose, then fell, and one after that, though none were yet Fayence. Faster and faster the images came until Kali could no longer keep up, each year, maybe even each century, a flash in the mind, gone before she could register anything she saw. The feeling was incredible, marred only by her sadness at falling through all she had ever wanted to know. Then, building by small building, Fayence appeared below.
Kali was keenly aware that the next thing that might flash through her mind could be the pavement. Though still distant, the ground was coming up fast and the cobweb wasn't yet slowing her fall. Just as she started to worry that her plan wasn't going to work, the thick layers wrapped about her jerked subtly and began to tear themselves away in ever increasing strips. That was it, cobweb's end, and all she could hope for now was that her descent would be slowed enough to negotiate some kind of safe landing.
What she hadn't counted on was that, as the strips tore away, they twined about and adhered to each other until they had formed a kind of elasticated rope. The only thought that went through her mind as she reached the end of her drop and continued on was that jumping from great heights attached to something that, if it didn't smash you into the ground, was going to snap you back into the air like a pea from a catapult, wasn't a pastime she could ever see anyone choosing to do for fun.
Unless she wanted to be on nodding terms with Kerberos, she needed an anchor.
And there was one, still distant but coming up fast.
"Abra!" She shouted.
"Yes?" A puzzled voice responded from below.
The fat man was waiting patiently at Redigor's front door, clutching an immense and, by now, stone-cold kebab. The vendor slowly rose before her, and, catching a glimpse of a pair of Hells Bellies' socks while thanking the gods that the cobweb seemed to have stretched its furthest, Kali grabbed onto his belt. Momentarily they were face to face — albeit with her upside down — and Kali stared Abra in the eyes and smiled. "Never mind," she said.
The pair of them shot into the air where, to his credit, Abra remained stoically silent, as if this kind of thing happened every day. He managed a weak smile.
The return flight reached its apex and they dropped again. Then rose. Then dropped. At last the cobweb seemed to recognise that enough was enough, and they ended up dangling a foot above the ground.
As the remains of the cobweb began to tear themselves slowly apart, dropping them towards the pavement, Abra coughed.
"Did you," he asked slowly, and with a crack in his voice, "discover what you needed to know?"
Kali stared back up at where the tower had been.
"Oh, yeah," she said after a second. "The Ur'Raney. He's planning to bring them back."
Chapter Ten
Head down, Kali rode hard and fast, pushing Horse to his absolute limit. The bamfcat was, as usual, loyal and uncomplaining, though he did seem somewhat confused at being unable to do what he normally would and shorten the journey. But he could not jump; for the last few leagues they had been riding across the Plain of Storms.
It was one of the peculiar features of the area. Surrounded by the temperate farmlands of mid Pontaine, the almost perfectly circular valley was a meteorological anomaly, prone to a stultifying heaviness of air and battered by constant electrical storms. Those who lived on the periphery of the area said that sometimes the catastrophic conditions on the plain affected other weather it had no business affecting, pulling at the northern lights and bending them toward the ground, or even snatching a maelstrom from the Storm Wall, far away on the coast, for a few hours. If this were true — and Kali had seen enough of the raw potential of Old Races creations to believe it could be — it was likely that the energies of the control centre for the machines, what she had nicknamed 'the hub,' were responsible.
In other words, she guessed she was in the right place.
Nearing the centre of the plain, Kali slowed Horse to a stop and stared into the rain-lashed, thundering vista before her. She dismounted, took her squallcoat from her saddlebag and slipped it on, fastening it securely. From there on in, she led Horse by the reins.
It was hard going, fighting the unnaturally heavy atmosphere and taking deep, grasping breaths as she went. Here and there, tornadoes whirled across the barren ground, threatening to pluck her up if she strayed too close. Not that it was much safer out of their path — where the whirlwinds didn't manifest themselves, Kali found herself having to dodge sudden bolts of lightning that struck the ground about her, leaving small, smoking craters where they hit. One or two almost got her, but she soon learned to anticipate their arrival, the dense air further thickening a few seconds before each strike, as if someone were pressing down hard on her head. No pitsing wonder the area was so desolate, she thought. Other than a few scattered hardy plants, tanglevine and redweed among them, it was like walking through a bad dream. No one had ever tried to fully explore, let alone colonise the region, but why in the hells would they?