Wraiths of Time Read Online Free PDF

it was reaching for the rod. But before it settled close enough to grasp it, the rod itself shifted. Not upward again, but, snakelike for all its stiffness, across the floor.
    Again the will seized upon Tallahassee, whirled her about, and gave her what amounted to a vicious shove after the slithering rod. The ankh flew up at her, as if to dash itself into her face and was warded off by what she could not see, so that it hovered, making effectual darts as she was forced to obey the orders of her strange captor. She must get the rod into her hands—that was the imperative now filling her whole mind.
    Again a voice called out. And Tallahassee realized dimly that the chanting had ceased. The ankh swung away from her, skimmed through the air, to remain poised in one corner of the room toward which the rod was moving with Tallahassee stumbling after it. Since she moved puppetwise by the other will, she was clumsy, slow, trying always to break away from that hold.
    But the will was implacable and its hate hot. Not that that hate was turned wholly against her, as a very inept tool it must make use of, but rather more at the enemy it fronted. She saw now that the rod lay quiet.
    Once more, a ghostly outline moved across the glow at its head. Meanwhile the will hurled her forward. She tripped and fell as her outstretched hand closed on the other end of the rod just as it was plucked upward. Tallahassee held as she was commanded and forced to. Wraith-like that grasping hand might be—if hand it was—but there was strength in its hold upon the rod. The ankh dipped and touched the gleaming head of the staff.
    It was like being caught in an explosion. There followed light, heat, pain, and such a noise as deafened Tallahassee. The girl had a terrifying sensation of being swung out over a vast void of nothingness. That other presence was left behind. Her hands were no longer glued to the rod by its command. But she kept her grasp for her very life’s sake. In her welled the knowledge that, should she let go, the answer was death—a death that was unnatural enough to be worse than any her kind had feared since their first beginnings.
    She centered every bit of the force and strength left in her to retain her hold. There was nothing around her, a nothingness so negative as to tear at her sanity. Hold— ON !
    Then the nothingness closed about her in a vast and horrible wrapping of utter blackness. Despairing, she lost consciousness.

It was hot, as if she lay on the hearth of some furnace breathing in the stifling heat of the blast. Tallahassee tried to edge away from that heat, unaware as yet of anything else. She opened her eyes.
    Sun—so blazing that it made an instant glare about her. With a little cry, Tallahassee shrank back, her hands over her eyes to shield them. It was hot, and she was lying under the sun—where? Her thoughts began to stir feebly, throwing off the torpor left from those last nightmare minutes.
    Still shielding her eyes, she dug her elbows painfully against a hard surface on which she lay, levering up the forepart of her body, making herself look around.
    Immediately before her was an outcrop of rock. And on its surface she could pick out a pattern deep-eroded by time into just faint lines. She crawled to that rock, lifting sand encrusted hands for its support in order to gain her feet. Then she turned, giddy and sick, feeling as if each labored movement might send her sailing out again into that dark void. Her dulled mind jibbed at even thinking of that—place.
    More rocks beyond. Or were those long-ago quarried stones built into a piece of tumbled wall? But at their foot.…
    Tallahassee stifled the scream in her throat, made herself blink, and blink again, to be sure she really saw that body stretched out on rock and sand.
    The stranger lay face down, arms flung out above the head. In one hand was grasped the ankh, in the other the rod. They no longer pulsed with light. Or