Its tangled form unwrapped as it approached, wobbling into a wreath of tufted vines, and finally stopped ten paces away and lifting to its full stature. It was a thornwing, a crumpled mass of thistly, snarled twine with a tiny hooked head at the crest of its amorphous shape. Long talons flexed on the ends of its two thickest vines. By the bright-green scar that creased its back, Carl knew it was the thornwing that had carried him and that Allin had wounded.
'How did you find me?' Carl asked with a jubilation that sat him up. 'How could you know?'
It stared back with the dark clarity of a shoeshine.
As Carl stood up, one of its arm-thick vines rose above the golden grass. Carl went over to it and let it coil itself about him. His feet eased o$' the ground as the creature hugged him to itself and began its loping run. The golden grass blurred beneath them, and they leaned upward against the air.
The gold-and-blue meadow pulled back to a glint near the top of a ravine-haggard skyle as they caught the lift of an outward-Fund fallpath.
The Cloudgate's iridescent clouds filled half the visible Werld, a vast sea anemone of thunderheads flicking lightning near its black mouth. They flew directly for that center. Below and behind them, skyles sparkled like charms, bright with the delicate and luminous structures of Rhene. Jumpships and flyers dusted the vast interstices with the continual flow of their movement.
The thornwing rolled, and Rhene slipped from sight. The air went cool as ether, and Carl saw only cliffs of stormcloud splintered with lightning. He stilled himself, awaiting guidance from an inner voice, a telepathic link with the thornwing or the eld skyle that was guiding it.
Nothing.
Its body shuddered with the strain of its flight. The rush of wind strengthened, a wind blue with the scent of lightning. And in the distance, the howling began.
They slashed in and out of the clouds, and Carl closed his eyes against the wind-teasing sight. The cry of the wind sharpened to a screech. He knew by 'that sound of ripping metal that they were at the neck of the Cloudgate where the shear winds were closest to becoming a garroting whirlpool.
The sound of the screaming winds sluicing through their arteries of gravity knotted in Carl's brain with the struggle of the thornwing. It was heaving itself upward through the soldering cold like a salmon.
By arching his head, Carl could see its head, the black diamonds of its eyes clasped with intensity. His insides cramped with the joltiness of the flight, stalling before the metallic shriek of the Cloudgate.
- A jumpship slid by fifty meters away, its engines spinning flames like a furnace. The thornwing twisted and unsprang into a mighty lurch, and Carl's heart almost pulled free of his ribs. The devil whistle of the
wind muted as they caught the wake of the jumpship's ascent.
The thornwing hurtled with acceleration, riding the drag wind of the large craft. Its grip slackened with its acceptance of the lift, and Carl slid low enough in its coiled grip to see beyond the skeletal frame of the thornwing to the vista looming ahead.
The clouds on all sides brailed into azure radiance, and the whirlpool of the tearing winds opened into a luminous cornucopia.
The jumpship tipped away, and they caught the drift of a fallpath through the bright ring of the Cloudgate and into the glare of the Welkyn.
Far off along the wheel of Carl's sight, black spheres clotted the spaces among the skyles. That was Galgul. The atmosphere around it was soiled with the vapors steaming from the seams of the City of Pain.
The blood banging in his skull drummed louder with the thought that Evoe could already be in the alien city, suffering. His tension was conveyed to the thornwing, and its grip squeezed more snugly. The charge in the air from their passage through the Cloudgate flickered bluely on the thorntips of the creature, crackling as it spun away from Galgul, strong as a shout.
Carl had known from the instant he recognized the thornwing that it would take him to the eld skyle that had reshaped his life, and his soul was a ferment of questions, rage, and pain. But. the Welkyn calmed him.
The silvery light smashing against the featherbraided clouds was entirely diferent from the dusky cloud towers of Midwerld.
Rainbows sheeted the spaces between skyles, and even the undersides of the forested asteroids were bright with ambient light.
The return journey to the eld skyle turned his thoughts back to his first flight through the Welkyn. He had been smallminded then, unready for the marvelous, a fool of the unexpected. And he saw then that in
his despair for Evoe he had almost wholly returned to his clangorous selfishness. That insight dispelled his anguish, and he returned to his staring senses.
Carl hung in the thornwing's sky alert as a hawk, studying the wilderness of skyles drifting by All at once, vision jumped. His whole body flinched, though their flight was smooth. He didn't understand what he'd experienced, until it happened again some long while later. While he was following the forest pattern of a skyle, it vanished in an eyeblink and he was seeing a new panorama.
He hadn't passed out. He had passed through.
A word trembled into his awareness. Lynk. He'd heard the word before . in conversation with wizan. Lynks were corridors that connected far-apart points in the Werld. Midwerld had few lynks, and that's why Carl hadn't thought much of it before. The languageinstilled knowledge informed him that the Welkyn became more and more populated with lynks near the eld. The topmost lynks were the ones of the eld skyles used to plant their spores in other universes, for the outmost lynks connected with the cosmic stream through the center of the ring singularity. But here in the Welkyn, the lynks interconnected. Somehow the thornwing knew how to find the lynks that would take them to one specific eld skyle among the millions.
Not long after this understanding, Carl recognized the dolmen slabs of rock squaring the shape of the eld skyle that had re-created him. The thornwing dangled him out over the dragon-long lake, and he saw himself cliff-faced, bearded and rugged as a Viking in the water's slick surface before it dropped him.
