“The sky,” Khamwas said hoarsely. “Look.”
Samlor drew the long dagger from his belt and lifted Star to his chest with his free arm. The semicircle of demons waited, crouching slightly, with their spindly, steelstrong arms interlocked. They were close enough that if one of the creatures leaned forward, it could rip the caravan master’s face away in its pointed teeth.
“Look!” Khamwas screamed, and even so his voice was smothered by a sound like the scream of a giant snake.
Samlor looked up. He could see almost a mile into the sky, up the lightning-lit throat of a descending tornado funnel.
The lower end was shaggy with tentacles of water vapor condensing in the lowered pressure surrounding six separate suction vortices. They ex- tended toward the ruined house.
“Down!” cried the caravan master, but Star twisted like an eel from his arms and stood while the two men tried to flatten themselves.
One of the demons leaped away, covering twenty feet of the distance toward the street before being caught by a suction vortex- The creature reeled upward into the main funnel, like a crab being lifted into an octopus’s crushing beak. Blue-white lightning licked soundlessly but with coronal radiance from one side of the void to the other-
The funnel hovered at the level of what remained of Setios’s roof. A miniature vortex snaked past Star’s erect head, so close that it should have touched her hair but didn’t. It was no more than the diameter of a wine jar, spinning widdershins though the main cloud rotated with the sun.