It was said that a fistful of full golds could buy you anything in Fayence, but the bigger the fist the better the anything it bought. Not that any of the personal services of this town were in any way unsatisfactory. The local Lord, who maintained a fiscal and hands-on interest in them all, made sure of that. It was merely a matter of how long it would take to recover from the relaxations on offer, whether they were mental, physical, or both. Stimulation-wise, Fayence boasted it catered for all six senses, sometimes all at once, and it wasn't for nothing that the many hotels in the town were known as convalesalons.
Kali moved through a noisy crowd of the coming night's — or possibly week's — guests-to-be, many of whom, by the look of them, should have checked in some hours before. She was making her way along Fayence's main thoroughfare — known to one and all as Sin Street — and the air was a fug of exotic perfumes, stimulating massage balms and dreamweed clouds, the odours brushing off on Kali in the jostling melee. Though she knew exactly where she was heading, she found it impossible to get there in a straight line, the sea of revellers carrying her first towards Maloof's Erotivarium, thence the Palace of Pleasure and Pain and its patented 'Sinulator' by way of the Slither Baths and the Womb Chambers, the barkers in front of which deafeningly promised a sensory experience such that "you'll wish you'd never been born!" Kali knew that the so called 'Womb Chambers' were, in fact, the extracted bladders of globe toads from the Turnitian marshes but if the owners weren't going to tell the punters that little trade secret who was she to spoil their fun? You sure as hells had to admire the inventiveness of this place.
Not that Kali was that familiar with Fayence's attractions, she would be at pains to point out to anyone who asked — no, no, no, not at all. Slowhand, of course, had been badgering her to come here since they'd first become an item, but as that prospect was the equivalent of letting a very greedy little boy loose in a very large sweet factory, she had consistently denied him her company — and knowing she knew, he hadn't dared come alone. She smiled, thinking how galled he'd be if he knew she were here now. Even if she currently had only a passing curiosity in the establishments of Sin Street and was actually heading towards one of the town's more unusual attractions, a little more off the beaten track.
That was the thing about Fayence. It hadn't always been like this. For hundreds of years, in fact, the town had been the favoured home of those who studied the old Wheel of Power, and had once even been considered as a potential site for the Three Towers, the headquarters of the League of Prestidigitation and Prestige. That it had lost out to Andon in this respect had been an early blow for Fayence but one which had ultimately served it well. When their more conformist brethren had decamped to the north-west, the mages who subsequently came here — followed, in turn, by such complementary professionals as apothecaries, herbalists and suppliers of various arcane needs — shared a certain streak of independence, an individual approach to their studies that would have made it difficult for them to gain acceptance amongst their peers elsewhere.
They had their limits, however, and while many of their experiments might have stretched these to breaking point there were areas of their craft that, by general agreement, were considered too dangerous for exploration and, therefore, forbidden. Creation magic was one. Necromancy another. Thus it was that when Bastian Redigor was discovered to be waving his wand around in such murky waters — the specifics of which had not survived the passage of time — the man was banished forthwith from Fayence, never to return. It was at this point that the town's fortunes had begun to wane, not least because it was rumoured that with a wave of his hand upon his departure Redigor had left behind a legacy in the form of an incurable and agonising taint that quite literally consumed mages' brains, reducing the skull to an empty shell within a day.
Whether the rumour were true or not, one by one the mages died, and with them gone the livelihood of the apothecaries, herbalists and suppliers went too, and while a few remained to this day — albeit providing services for a clientele with more intimate requirements — Fayence was reduced to a little more than a ghost town.
So it remained for a number of years until the present Lord of Fayence, Aristide, inherited his position, whereupon he reinvented the town to reflect his own predilections, a change of emphasis he knew would be lucrative bearing in mind the amount of coin he himself had spent elsewhere over the years.
There was one area of the town Aristide did not change, however. Whether for fear of a return of the taint, or whether because the aura of the outcast who had become known as the Pale Lord still, after all this time, lingered there, it was left to rot, untouched, abandoned.
It was where the mages had died. They called it the Ghost Quarter.
Kali approached this forgotten part of town between the ignominious landmarks of a derelict comfort parlour called Whoopee Kushen's, outside of which an out-of-date courtesan swatted flies, and a grimy street stand trading in spit-roasted mool and bottles of thwack that gloried in the name Abra-Kebab-Bar. It was doubtful if either enterprise was licenced by Lord Fayence, but they had attached themselves to the outer periphery of his salacious empire to engage in its spirit nonetheless. As Kali neared the latter, its proprietor — a huge, fat, greasy-bearded man three times the size of his stand who presumably was Abra — almost fell off his stool at the prospect of an actual customer. But his ear-to-ear grin faded as Kali nodded, smiled and passed on by.
"Girly, lady, madam, missus-woman," he protested as she passed, "I assure you, there is nothing for you beyond my small but perfectly formed establishment." He stroked his beard. "A little like yourself, if I may say…"
Kali smiled. "You can forget the flattery, Abra. I'm not looking for food or drink."
Abra coughed, and actually looked embarrassed. "Ah, I see."
The man's redness made Kali flush too. "No, no, not that either — not anything." She resorted to her failsafe tactic when she found herself in an impasse situation. "Actually, I'm trying to save the world."
"The world?"
"Umm. Think so, anyway. Not quite so sure about what's going on this time."
"The world," Abra said again and then, aghast, "My advice to you is forget the world, save yourself."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because if you are heading within, you must be heading for the Pale Lord's house yes? There can be no other reason to go there. I say do not do so, because those who do, they do not come back."
"Other people have gone there?"
Abra made a dismissive sound. "Oh, not often. The occasional mage or relic hunter, eager for a memento of our infamous son. Young, drunken couples with their underknicks already about their ankles, clearly acting upon a dare." He sighed and shook his head. "I do not see any of them again, other than as a stain upon a wall, a smear across a window, a splatter beneath my feet." Abra emphasised his point by suddenly squeezing a large dollop of kebab sauce onto the ground with a loud and flatulent plop, making Kali jump.
"I see," Kali said. Redigor had obviously trapped his old home the same way he'd trapped his books, which made her destination all the more interesting. "Thanks for the warning, Abra. I'll watch my step."
Abra sucked in an amazed breath. "You still go?"
Kali placed her hands on her hips in what she hoped was a heroic stance. "It's what I do."
"Then you are the loopo," Abra exclaimed, rotating a finger at his temple.
"That's what people keep telling me."
Kali moved on into the Ghost Quarter, shaking her head as Abra produced another sigh and flatulent plop. But she had soon left the Abra-Kebab-Bar behind her, Sin Street far behind her. The difference between the two locations could not have been more marked. Kali was now the only living thing in a warren of utterly silent streets, shattered glass cracking underfoot, the odd piece of rubble skittering away from her. There were no birds in the azure night sky, not even any vermin peering from the empty houses on either side — rich nesting grounds though they'd be. Lifeless and dark, the houses themselves were remarkably well-preserved, some even retaining the black 'T' daubed there long ago to warn others that their owners had succumbed to the taint. Kali was pretty certain that the 'T's would have served no useful purpose. The Pale Lord was powerful and, if his taint had your name on it, sooner or later it would have got you, no matter what.
The Pale Lord's home was the eeriest in the eerie warren of properties — a foreboding, rambling structure at the end of the street which, despite being long-abandoned, seemed to glow faintly of candlelight from within. Kali approached slowly, looking around to make sure she was alone, and climbed the step to the entrance. The door was half-obscured by thick cobwebs and half-hanging off its hinges and, when pushed, fell to the floor in a cloud of dust. Shadows danced slowly within. Kali eased into the hallway, and could have sworn she heard the sound of footsteps from the upper floor. She swallowed.
Disappointingly, though, as Kali cautiously began to explore, there were no ghosts — and very little of anything else — to be found. Apart from a couple of fairly obvious traps which she carefully defused, the house seemed exactly what it appeared to be: empty and derelict. For an hour, she worked her way minutely through all its rooms, finding nothing and ending up in the building's main parlour where, from the looks of what remained, Redigor had once kept his library and laboratory. But as elsewhere, there was little to see. What the passage of time had not rotted had been removed, most noticeably in the bookshelves lining the room. Even the laboratory was a disappointment. A dust-covered and vaguely horseshoe-shaped workbench occupied the heart of the room. Kali could imagine Redigor standing there conducting his 'unique' experiments, but the only evidence which now remained of them was the odd upturned belljar or shattered pipette. Kali pursed her lips. Not quite what she'd expected of an infamous necromancer's laboratory, it had to be said.
Still, though the dwelling seemed to offer her nothing, Kali couldn't shake the feeling that she was missing something. She had the feeling there was something wrong with the room that she couldn't quite put her finger on, something to do with space. For some reason, it felt bigger than it was, more open. Kali backed up to the door and studied it anew — nothing. Maybe she'd been wrong to come here after all, she thought, frustration flooding her.
It was in that moment, her mind returning to the bigger picture, filling with images of the Sardenne and what lay within it, that she stopped looking — and that was when she saw.
It wasn't much, like something in the corner of her eye right in front of her, but it was there. Something odd about the way the workbench curved, as if its relations with the rest of the room were oddly misaligned. She noticed then how it wasn't just the bench that appeared odd but the other trappings, too — bookcases, furniture, even the tiling on the floor. Where their lines should have been straight, they curved ever so slightly, and where surfaces should have been flat, they were very gently concave. The only comparison Kali could draw was that it was like looking through a very weak fish-eye lens, but what she saw was there — something bending the reality of the heart of the room.
Kali moved into the 'u' of the bench and waved her hand slowly back and forth where light seemed to bend the most. She felt a slight thickening of the air and, for a moment, her fingers brushed against something almost, but not quite, insubstantial. Dammit, she knew what this was now. It was a glamour field like the one she'd encountered at the Crucible, only in this case highly localised, highly concentrated. So concentrated it was able to confound every sense. To manipulate reality with such finesse would have taken great skill indeed, and such a degree of skill would surely only have been used if, as she suspected, Redigor had something very significant to hide.
Kali's elation was fleeting. The problem that remained was finding out what. Even though she knew there was something there, her perception remained too wrong-footed to tease it out into the open. Frustrated, she flopped down against a wall, clucking her tongue as she stared at the field.
Come on, Hooper! There has to be a way to work this, a way to skew my senses so that I'm not looking at what the field wants me to look at.
For a while no solution presented itself and then, slowly, she smiled. What was that old adage about mixing business with pleasure?
A moment later, Kali was out in the street, racing back through the Ghost Quarter to Abra's stand.
"Your thwack," she said. "I want it."
Shock at her sudden appearance mingled with surprise at actually making a sale. "H-how many bottles?"
"All of them."
"All of them?"
"And flummox. You got any flummox?"
"I–I think I may have a few bottles, yes…"
"Those, too. What about twattle?"
"Twattle?" Abra gasped. He glanced about himself guiltily. "I have one bottle. But it is deadly. And illegal. It is also very, very expensive."
Kali pulled a coinpurse from her pocket and emptied its golden contents into Abra's hands. "I'll take it. I'll take everything. The lot. But I'll need you to wheel it to Redigor's house."
The suggestion brought even more sweat to Abra's face than was already running down it but, as he watched Kali bite the cork from the bottle of twattle and down it in one, he realised she was not to be messed with. He had, after all, once seen a bottle of twattle make someone's ears drop off. Quickly, he began to unlock his stand's complex arrangement of brakes and supports. Kali, meanwhile, grabbed two armfuls of bottles and was gone.
Back at the house, she ploughed into the various ales with industrial zeal, popping out to Abra when necessary for more, and the wall where she slumped was soon stacked with a small mountain of empties. The booze hadn't yet achieved its desired result, however, her preternatural capacity for the stuff preventing her from getting drunk enough to loosen her hold on reality. Not that it wasn't having some effect.
As she once more sought out Abra for supplies she felt an overwhelming desire to tell him what a very nice fat man he was — no, no, really, Abra — and, on returning to the laboratory, she accidentally booted half the bottle mountain across the room. Kali hopped up and down flapping her arms, trying to shush them as they rolled and rattled everywhere, but the little farkers wouldn't listen, so she called them names instead.
She dropped to her knees, snorting, eyes moving in circles over her fresh supply. Which to pick? Which to pick? Which to pick?
Having decided that the fourth of the identical bottles was by far the prettiest, she stood precariously and raised it in a toast to the glamour field. There was still no change in its appearance but the small manoeuvre threw her off kilter and her feet momentarily forgot which of them was which. Kali staggered into one of the bookcases, bowed and apologised profusely, then soothed its hurt feelings by drawing shapes in the dust of one of its shelves. It was as she was doing this that she realised she could murder a kebab.
Kali staggered to a window and shouted to Abra at the top of her voice. As she turned back, it suddenly occurred to her that she had stumbled upon actually quite a cool concept, having food delivered to your door. Maybe she ought to jack in all the world saving stuff, go into partnership with Abra and open a home delivery shop. Hells, with Horse she could have the food anywhere in a five league radius in no time, still warm and at no extra charge. Now, what would she call it? Kebakali? Kalibabi? Kebabkalbulbu -
Pitsh!
There was something wrong with her lips.
The realisation suddenly struck Kali that for the last few seconds she'd been staring at a spiral staircase in the centre of the room. Mouth gaping, bottle dropping to the ground, she half walked, half stretched towards it, as if any sudden move might make it vanish once more. It didn't. It was there, all right, as real as everything else in the room, solid beneath her touch. Kali burped and pulled herself in, turning sinuously around its metal core like a dancer, head angled to peer up the spiralling steps into shadow.
"Boo!" She said suddenly, and giggled, blowing a hole in a thin blanket of cobweb, which dropped down onto her face like a flap of skin.
Kali puffed it away, peered through the hole and frowned. Even sobered up slightly. From what she could see through further cobwebs, the staircase went up high. Higher than the house itself. Maybe it was something to do with her pickled brain, or maybe it was because she had become used to such things, but Kali didn't find anything odd about that at all. Nor did she find its shadowed heights unnerving or daunting. Far from it, because she knew she was staring at a threshold that hadn't been crossed since Redigor had abandoned the house. This staircase was what he had been hiding, his little secret, and at its top she might very well find out just what the Pale Lord was really all about.
Did she go up or didn't she? Kali placed a finger on her lips. Difficult one.
Under normal circumstances, she'd have taken the spiral steps slowly, but, fuelled by booze, she raced up them as fast as she could — which was just as well, as they seemed to go on for ever. It was only after she had passed through the house's attic and found herself still going up that she began to slow, but this was more to do with the ever thickening cobwebs — almost like netting now — than any dwindling enthusiasm.
Becoming swathed in so much of the stuff that she began to resemble something bored of its sarcophagus, even Kali's boundless energy was taxed as she went round and round, but she found strength in the realisation that she had to be ascending some kind of magically constructed tower hidden from the outside world by the same kind of glamour that concealed its base. She found it slightly disconcerting that, in a sense, this meant she was climbing up into thin air, but the tower felt solid enough about her. Solid and very old. Old enough, in fact, to explain the preternatural thickness of the cobwebs: this, for some reason, was the growth of thousands and thousands of years.
The tower's top was becoming visible, now, and the shadows above lightened. Not much, the kind of illumination one might expect if daylight were projecting through a number of narrow windows, but enough to suggest the presence of a chamber above.
Kali didn't know what to expect up there. But it wasn't this.
Bastian Redigor waited for her at the top of the stairs.
"Shit!" Kali shouted, and almost fell back the way she had come. Saved only by a patch of the thick, sticky cobweb, she clung to the tower for a moment, fully expecting the clang of footsteps from above, but Redigor did not appear. Very slowly, she peered back around the last turn of the stairs. "Girl," she chastised herself.
Kali climbed into a chamber dominated by a portrait of the Pale Lord. It, too, was almost entirely obscured by cobweb, as indeed was the rest of the room, but the part she could see — had seen — showed the piercing black eyes, flowing raven hair and handsome, aquiline features she was familiar with from illustrations in books. Even represented in oils, Redigor had presence, and he wore expensive robes of a fashion not seen on the peninsula for a very, very long time.
Kali drew her gaze away from the portrait, turning her attention to the chamber, and tore away blankets of cobweb. If she had been looking for information, she guessed she could pretty much say she had found it.
A desk in front of her overflowed with books, journals, scrolls, notes and charts, most of which pertained to necromancy in one way or another. The assorted papers were not limited to the desk, either. The floor was littered with more of the same, the walls covered in diagrams and maps of every size and description, including, interestingly, one of the sprawling expanse of the Sardenne. Across this Redigor had marked in sweeping scrawl the location of Bellagon's Rip.
Kali sighed. What she needed was new information. It was here, she was sure of it, but she didn't have a clue where to start digging. She decided after a second to thrust her hands into a stack of papers to see what came out.
For the next few hours Kali ploughed through notes on anatomy, alchemy, conjuration, revivification, holding and other kinds of magical constraint. She flicked through sketches of Twilight and of Kerberos, and through diagrams of what appeared to be the pillar of souls she'd seen at Scholten. There were starcharts, too — in the kind of detail she'd heard only the Final Faith's astronomer had compiled — but she had no idea why. She had no idea, either, of the meaning of endless reams of calculus, columns of figures in their thousands, that Redigor seemed to have constantly annotated in his strange, sprawling script. One document did, for a moment, seem to bear out the Faith's theory that Redigor planned an invasion — a map of the peninsula overlaid with countless thin, sweeping lines — but unless the Pale Lord planned to despatch his soul-stripped on a thousand or more fronts, it made little tactical sense.
That was the problem. All this effort and the only conclusion she had drawn was that nothing here made sense.
Gahh! She needed a break.
Dumping a batch of papers, Kali strode to one of the windows that lit the tower, stretching, and froze.
Instead of staring out high over Fayence, she was gazing on a sprawling panorama of glistening towers whose architecture she had never seen but which, after her time in Domdruggle's Expanse, was cloyingly familiar — architecture out of the distant past. Except that it couldn't be out of the distant past. It was new and thriving, figures moving along the streets below, sleek objects darting through the sky between towers, and between them a crystal clear river meandering into the distance.
It was a vast, Old Race city. An elven city. The warm breeze from it was fresh.
It was real.
The conclusion was inescapable. Somehow she and the tower in which she stood were in the past. It was incredible, not only the wonders she could see but the sorceries that must have brought it about. Maybe that was what Redigor had done with the tower, she thought. Maybe it wasn't concealed from Fayence with a glamour field because it didn't need to be. Maybe it projected itself further into the past the higher it rose.
My Gods, I'm there, she realised. The time of the Old Races. The temptation to climb out of the window, regardless of the insane height, was almost irresistible. But why would Bastian Redigor have done this? Why would he have expended the vast amounts of energy needed to stare out over a vista long gone? Maybe he just had a thing for elven architecture, she thought. Or maybe he couldn't stand looking out over the depravity in which Fayence excelled. Or maybe -
Maybe it simply made him feel at home.
Kali's heart thudded, and she spun back to face the inside of the chamber. That was what had been missing from all this, why she hadn't been able to make any sense out of what she'd studied, because all along she'd been trying to work out the plans of your average human, world-dominating necromancer. But there was much more to him than that, wasn't there?
Kali raced to the portrait, tearing away cobweb to reveal more of its detail. Of course. In pictures of himself elsewhere, Redigor had appeared as he wanted to appear, but here, in a portrait that would be seen by no eyes other than his own, he seemed almost to have taken pride in sweeping back his hair.
It was an ear thing.
Bastian Redigor was an elf.
Kali swallowed. It wasn't just the revelation that somehow this bastard had survived down the long years but what she saw in the rest of the exposed portrait.
The woman next to him bore a striking resemblance to Katherine Makennon. It wasn't her, of course, because even had she been alive when the picture was painted, there was no way Makennon would allow herself to be pictured garbed as this woman was — which was to say, in very little at all. That Redigor, smiling slightly, also held a fine chain attached to a collar about her neck, put paid to the possibility fully.
Kali's mind reeled. The woman was clearly mu'sah'rin — in human terms, somewhere between forced consort and slave — and that could mean only one thing. Redigor wasn't only an elf, he was Ur'Raney. The most misogynistic, cold-hearted, sadistic so-called 'family' of the elves there had ever been. The Ur'Raney were the same family who had relentlessly pursued and slaughtered the dwarves at Martak, who had brought both Old Races to the brink of war, and who, because of their gleeful, unremitting cruelty, were reviled even by their own kind.
Most contemporaneous texts had been of the opinion that Twilight would be better off without them.
Kali calmed herself. So, Redigor was an elf. The fact was, she couldn't say she felt that surprised, because something had occurred to her in Scholten that seemed to have been missed by everyone else. The Engines of the Apocalypse being what they were, lost to and forgotten by countless generations, should have been exactly that — lost and forgotten. Unless the Pale Lord had stumbled upon their control centre while out for a walk one day — an unlikely turn of events, to say the least — they had to have been activated by someone old enough to know it was there. Well, that was Redigor, all right. He had revealed his true heritage at last. But the question remained, what the hells was he up to?
Here They Lie Still.
Kali replayed the phrase Slowhand had quoted in the library through her mind, analysing it in a different light now she knew Redigor's true identity. As she did, she studied the assorted papers again, trying to piece together the jigsaw that was the Pale Lord's experimentation. Why should an ancient elf wish to unleash an army of soul-stripped onto the peninsula? What the hells was he going to get out of that? Unless, as she had suspected, that wasn't what he was planning at all. Her gaze rose back to the portrait of Redigor and the woman and once more she asked herself — what the hells did the Pale Lord want with Makennon or the other 'dignitaries' his soul-stripped had snatched from all over the peninsula? What was special about those thirteen people?
Another question. With so much power at his disposal, why had Bastian Redigor allowed himself to be banished? From what she had seen here, he could have wiped the floor with any mage on Twilight, and certainly the berobed fops and jesters who made up Lord Fayence's court wouldn't have stood a chance in the hells against him, and he could have taken the town any time he wanted. So why? Why move from what was clearly his home, as well as a well-equipped base, to the unforgiving wilds of the Sardenne? And just why did he already have a map showing the Sardenne and Bellagon's Rip?
Kali studied the map again. If she expected to see any previously unseen feature she was soon disappointed, but her eyes were drawn once more to Redigor's flowing script. Bellagon's Rip. It was written there as plain as day and yet there was something not quite right about it. She suddenly realised that her mind had been filling in the gaps and she was reading what she expected to read, because that was the name by which that area of the forest had always been known. But what if it was misnamed? What if some more modern cartographer had chanced upon some previously scrawled notation of Redigor's on some other map, and had misinterpreted it as she was doing now? Maybe this was a matter of perception rather than interpretation, because although Redigor had used human script on everything she had so far read there was still an elvish flourish to his hand that potentially gave a whole new meaning to what was written. Bearing that in mind, Kali reread the name, seeing each letter on its own rather than as a component part of a word, and gradually they began to flow together. That was it. It wasn't a name at all but an elven phrase. Not Bellagon's Rip but Bel'A'Gon'Shri. She concentrated hard, eyes closed, trying to pull together all the elvish she knew to make sense of the phrase, and her eyes snapped open in alarm.
Bel'A'Gon'Shri.
Here They Lie, Still.
Gabriella DeZantez hadn't been far wrong in her theory about its meaning. But the phrase wasn't referring to the Engines and it wasn't suggesting that anything was lying idle. It was suggesting that 'they' were lying where they'd lain for a long time and were waiting. And Kali suspected she knew who.
The charts, the maps, the diagrams, the calculations, they suddenly all made sense. Rather in the manner of an Eye of the Lord, she imagined herself descending from the sky into the map, the image no longer two-dimensional but a living canopy of trees through which she swept down, down, down. And waiting for her beneath was a structure of gothic horror overgrown with the vegetation of thousands of years, a structure that she knew was sitting deep in the Sardenne.
An elven necropolis.
An Ur'Raney necropolis.
Oh Gods.
The Faith, as she'd suspected, and as farking usual, had got it all wrong. There was going to be an invasion, all right, but not in the way they thought. She had to shut down the Engines of the Apocalypse and then get to the Faith, let them know what was really going on.
She ran for the stairwell, trying to ignore the staring eyes of Bastian Redigor, and heard a click beneath her feet. She looked down.
Trap, she thought. Dammit.
In her eagerness to leave she'd triggered something she'd missed, and as a result could already sense that something was coming. Something from outside.
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."