She was now sliding upright and face first towards the lip of the roof, in exactly the position she wanted to be. Only a couple of storeys separated her from the ground, the last leg as it were, and with luck she'd make it without breaking her own. For the final time she scanned the buildings ahead of her, decided on the way to go and then skied right off the roof of Dorweazle's.
She angled forwards, turning her ski-jump into a dive, and then curled into a ball. Tracing a perfect arc downwards, she fell for two seconds and then impacted with a shop's awning positioned between storeys, breaking her fall halfway. As she hit, and bounced, she uncurled herself from the ball and allowed herself to bounce again, flipping head over heels off the edge of the awning and laughing out loud as she saw her feet approach the ground. By all the gods, she'd made it. She was dow -
Something snagged and she jerked to a halt, toes a foot above the street. She dangled there for a second and then there was an ominous tearing sound. Suddenly, she dropped, the remains of her underwear remaining behind, fluttering from the awning like a flag.
Kali stared. She couldn't believe it. After all she'd just been through!
The second chimneystack, caught until now on guttering, smashed into the ground right behind her and exploded into a cloud of debris and dust. For a second she couldn't see a thing, and then the cloud cleared, and she could.
A small crowd of people stared, murmuring and pointing at her. The naked, ashen-white woman who'd just fallen from the sky. Oh, this is just great, she thought. It was the Curse of Slowhand, come to get her from beyond the grave. Damn him.
"What?" she yelled, holding her arms out. "They kicked me off Kerberos, all right?"
Bootfalls echoed suddenly, seemingly from everywhere, and Kali realised that the bells of Scholten Cathedral were still ringing, alerting everyone in the know to the fact there was a fugitive in their midst. Shadows loomed on the walls along the street, and she dashed for the nearest alleyway, double jinking and jinking again so that she emerged from another as the owners of the shadows passed it by. They could have been cathedral guard or they could have been city watch, she wasn't sure, because it was no small measure of the Final Faith's influence in the city that the livery they wore was almost exactly the same. But crossed circles or not, you never knew where you stood with the watch, because while some were indeed good men, others — sadly, an increasing number of others, along with a good percentage of the population — were in the expansive pocket of Makennon and her people, bribed to be their eyes and ears throughout Scholten by a regular pouch of full silvers or the promise of divine favour. It would be just her luck to run smack into the wrong ones.
The point was, she could trust no one, and that fact became all the more disturbing when she realised that she didn't have the faintest clue where in the city she was. She knew Scholten passably well but no one could possibly know all of its backstreets, and the rather unorthodox route she had taken to arrive here hadn't given her much chance to look for familiar landmarks, which had left her totally disorientated.
The only thing she did know was that she needed to find Slowhand's stash and the stables near to it. Where had he said it was — between the Whine Rack and Ma Polly's? Okay, the fetish house, as far as she knew, was near the eastern gate, so she'd make her way there.
Kali glanced at the stars to orientate herself and began to move, and it was then that it hit her. She ached like the hells. More, as the chimney's dust streaked off her in the rain so that she could see beneath, she was completely black and blue. Not to mention that she was limping like a trigon, her shoulder felt dislocated and a little finger throbbed like the pits, as if broken. One thing was clear, however. If she was somehow changing, then she was far from superhuman, and she'd been lucky that fall hadn't killed her. It was a handy lesson to bear in mind for the future.
Despite the night hour, the city streets still had traffic, and, regardless of the fact she was naked, Kali was forced to keep to the alleyways, take liberties sneaking through the occasional house and even return to the rooftops once or twice to avoid patrols or civilian spies. Even so, her route was not without danger, and she moved cautiously and stealthily through Gizzard Yards, Red Square and Thumper's Cross. Here and there she spotted the conical helmets, tower shields and red tabards of the watch engaged in less than official business but, in doing so, bided her time until they were done, and then moved slowly on. At last she came upon her destination, a muddy gap between the Whine Rack and Ma Polly's, confirmed where she was by looking up to see a rope dangling limply through a ring, and then searched in nearby bushes for the stash that Slowhand had told her would be there. She found it and, somewhat chilled by now and hoping for warm garb, pulled forth a filigree shirt and pair of stripy tights. She cursed. Slowhand might have been wishing to stay in his troubadour disguise but, sometimes, she worried about him.
There was, at least, a decent pair of boots and a considerable amount of coin also contained therein, and Kali took both. All she needed to do now was find the stables. That task — as it turned out — was relatively easy, because she would have been able to smell them a league away.
Kali followed her nose, slipping along more alleyways, keeping to the walls and in the shadows. The area through which she now moved was less than salubrious and she had to pick her way over collapsed drunks and weave through bins overflowing with rubbish, from which the head of an occasional scavenging polerat poked out. Cries and laughter and the louder sounds of disagreement and argument coupled with the odd smashing plate or bottle leaked from the houses all around her, echoing in the night air. At last, though, she came upon a fence, a slight whinnying and clopping of hooves from beyond leaving her in no doubt that she had found that which she sought. She scrambled up and peered over, and her heart sank. She had either found the wrong stables or Slowhand's requirement of what a horse was or could do was considerably less than hers.
There was some kind of junkyard jammed between the backs of four surrounding tenements, accessed through a covered passage between two of them. A tilting, half-chained sign declared it to be the business premises of one Poombar Blossom, Importer and Exporter of Exotica. And sure enough, the yard was piled high with exotica — if, that was, one considered rusted hunks of metal, old beds and broken cartwheels to be the mysterious produce of distant lands.
A ramshackle bank of three stables suggested that Poombar ran a little sideline in horse trading but, it seemed, his definition of what constituted a horse was about as accurate as his definition of the exotic. Only two of the stables were filled and then just barely, two emaciated nags who looked as if they'd snap in two if mounted chewing half-heartedly on carrots that were, themselves, thin and knackered. One of the horses — Flash, according to a sign on his stable — wheezed so badly that Kali suspected he'd drop dead at the merest mention of the word gallop. Dammit, she thought, this has been a complete waste of time.
She was about to drop back down from the fence when three things happened. Firstly, two men exited a shed that she presumed served as some kind of office and walked towards what looked like a tackroom near the stables themselves, apparently doing business. Secondly, something in the tackroom didn't like the sound of their approach, and suddenly the ramshackle structure all but exploded, every panel, including the roof, crashing outwards and upwards, shook by violent impacts from within. Thirdly, Flash and his mate reared in panic, snorting so badly that they hyperventilated and, with two loud thuds, fainted to the stable floors.