The Cat claws through the fabric of reality and leads Smith and Jones into the Umbra, refusing Smith's plea to retrieve his Childer first.

Once in the Umbra, C,S&J find themselves at somewhat of a loss about how to get from Alamut to the orbiting “satelite” of Ninja-vampires of tenth generation (the Assamites' glorious “Sahid-1”). They've learned from the experience with Teddy that moving through the Umbra involves homing in on some emotional resonance, so they try to attune to an emotion of fanatic elation which they feel will connect the wandering mountain of the Assamites to the flying undead pyramid that is the culmination of their insane master plan.

But while trying to do this emotional atunement thing, Magenta finds herself sucked into a nearby miasma of strong emotion, the spiritually resonant remnant of some long-ago battle. When a fanatic sword-weilder comes at her, she evades him by ducking into his emotions, and gets sucked into them.

Smith tries to extract Magenta from her entanglement, but he too gets drawn in, and the pair find themselves re-living some ancient battle to defend an Indian fort from a rebel attack. Again and again they experience these events, always with slight variations, moving back and forth along this timeline to change its course and try to break out of this karmatic bog. Meanwhile, the frustrated Cat circles them, reluctant to engage lest it too be sucked into the mess.

Finally, perhaps through pure reality-attrition or some brilliant move by the Cat, they break free and limp back to Alamut.

Allowing the Cat to lead them this time, they set off again. This time the Cat uses its unerring tracking instincts to laboriously trace Theodore's exact route through the Umbra, including all the detours, and they witness the wave of destruction sweeping across the earth - Tenth Night is raging across the globe, about to sweep all the way back to Sahid-1 - and then they come across the orbiting Pyramid of vampires itself.

The Cat lets them out of the Umbra and into the vaccum of space, phasing them into material reality practically on top of the components of Sahid-1. They then proceed to engage the (in)human pyramid in melee combat!