Kingdoms of Light

TWENTY-ONE

Cezer and Cocoa were locked deep in conversation. Taj was in the kitchen trying to catalog what edibles remained in the pantry. Samm was busy helping Mamakitty repair a few bare spots on the roof. As for Oskar, he was sitting in his favorite place, dining on bread and a meat roll on the front steps of the house, when an ascending whine pricked his ears. Rising, he cast a puzzled glance in all directions. At the same time he became aware that he was not alone in his perceptions. Similarly intrigued by the peculiar noise, his friends were coming to join him.

The whine ceased with a resounding thump as a tightly packed column of short, stocky, and exceedingly ugly creatures tumbled out of the open sky to land in a clumsy heap in the middle of the lawn. Recovering from their plunge with extraordinary dispatch despite arguing and scrapping among themselves, they gathered together in a milling but disciplined mass that sought a focus for their venomous energy. Multiple eyes shining with malevolence caught sight of the pair of former felines, the giant, and the two figures working on the roof before they came to rest, finally, on the solitary guardian of the front door. Surprised by the abominable apparition, an apprehensive Oskar took an instinctive step backward. His bread roll dangled absurdly from one hand.

A goblinlike figure slightly larger than the rest detached itself from the fractious, squirming mass of its fellows. "So these are the creatures of Evyndd who have been causing us problems. Seeing them makes one marvel at the incompetence of Quoll and the others. Just look at them! You can sense that they don't even know how they did it. They have no lore of their own. Animals! Aided by a simple posthumous transformation spell." His squashed nose twitched. "You can smell their innocence and ignorance. We are dealing with mere afterthoughts here." He grinned most unpleasantly. "Scraps to be swept up and thrown away." When he raised both hands high, so did his one-and-twenty kinfolk. The awful symmetry of the gesture was frightening to behold.

"This won't take long," Kobkale announced confidently. "Give them back their simple animal forms. Then we can be on our way and about the business of reversing this nonsensical, and temporary, flush of loathsome color." He glared contemptuously at the silent house, as if its former occupant could somehow hear the challenge. "The Khaxan Mundurucu do not suffer lightly their hexes to be trifled with."

"Look out!" Oskar yelled as he dove for the wholly inadequate shelter of the modest picket fence that enclosed a struggling flower bed. It was the only cover within reach.

He didn't make it.

It felt as if his insides had suddenly been caught in a wringer, wound and twisted about themselves until they were ready to snap. He tried to gasp, but could no longer feel his mouth. Momentarily suspended in midair, blinded by the flash that had completely enveloped him, every one of his muscles paralyzed, his last thoughts were for Mamakitty and the others. If the Mundurucu were concentrating their malignant energies on him, maybe one or more of his friends would have a chance to escape.

Then he hit the ground.

Panting hard, he discovered that he could roll over. His hands were gone, replaced once more by paws. Fragments of human clothing clung ridiculously to his legs. The Mundurucu had done it, and with seeming ease: he was dog once more.

His fur looked as he remembered it: the same mixture of silver and gray. But something was different. His paws were larger. Much larger, as were the claws that grew from them. He rose on all fours: the ground struck him as being farther away than usual. When he looked back at the rest of himself, he saw a coat that was smoother and less kinked than the one he recalled.

Something roared softly behind him. Turning, he almost jumped out of his skin. An immense lion stood nearby, magnificent in mane and claw, staring back at him in complete bewilderment. Moving up to flank the great cat were a pair of spectacularly muscled female leopards: one with normal leopardish coloration, the other completely black—save for a most peculiar and unlikely white patch on her nose.

"Mamakitty?" He swallowed hard. "Cezer? Cocoa?"

"The Master's enchantment has been expunged," the black leopard replied in the language of humans, "and we have been returned to our previous condition—but with a difference."

"Some difference," growled Cezer. "What's happened to us?"

"We've grown, and not just in size. I suspect it is a consequence of how we grew during our travels, of what we endured, and of what we have learned. All that is reflected in this change. We have—matured." Padding past Oskar, Mamakitty confronted the assembled Mundurucu. They looked uncertain, as if a perfectly familiar, ordinary spell that had worked time and time again had suddenly gone haywire. It was as if a magician who had spent years pulling rabbits out of hats unexpectedly found himself holding a cobra, and was now unsure how to let go of it.

"I don't know how much the rest of me has matured," Cezer rumbled, deep within a throat that could easily have swallowed whole the house cat he had once been, "but my teeth sure have!" Letting loose with a roar that reverberated through the surrounding trees, and before Mamakitty could caution prudence, he leaped straight at the assembled Mundurucu, covering half the distance between them in a single bound.

Uttering a collective shriek, the panicked Mundurucu scattered. The decision on what to do next having been made for them, Mamakitty and Cocoa followed Cezer into the fray, sending squat bodies flying in all directions. Several of the Mundurucu fled for the cover of the nearest trees.

Something shot out of the bushes to hit Krerwhen, who was in the forefront of the flight, with such force that it snapped her spine. Jerking the limp body off the ground, the forty-foot-long reticulated python that was Samm shook the body like a rag-doll even as a massive coil wrapped itself around the deceased's outraged, poisonous sister Kelfeth. Unobserved by the arriving Mundurucu, the snake-man had quietly slipped off the roof and into the woods to get behind them, only to find himself transformed into the king of all serpents.

Stunned by the ferocity of his companions' counterattack, Oskar stood and wondered how he could best assist in the clash. Starting forward at a trot and then breaking into a run, he resolved that if he could only chomp down on a single Mundurucu leg and hold it in place, he would have done his part.

As soon as he decided to move, it seemed as if he was flying across the ground, clearing whole sections of lawn with each stride. It was only as he leaped into the midst of the fracas that he caught the briefest possible glimpse of himself, reflected in the water of the small fishpond that marked the farthest reach of the old homestead's formal landscaping.

Expecting to see the scrungy, scruggy mutt he had once been, he was startled to find himself looking down at the most enormous wolf-dog that ever there was. He was even bigger than the two leopards, and nearly as massive as Cezer himself. If further confirmation of the "growth" he had undergone was needed, it was plain to see in the terrified eyes of the Mundurucu among whom he landed.

It was only when a furious and badly frayed Kobkale managed to gather a dozen of his brethren together to form a desperate goblinish pyramid, with himself at the apex, that the struggle turned in favor of the intruders. Ringing out across the field of battle, the words of the surviving Clan froze the combatants in their tracks. Hexed into submission, Oskar suddenly discovered he could move only his head. His legs would no longer respond to his commands. His tremendously powerful lupine jaws were stained black with Mundurucu blood.

Surveying the lawn and the fringing forest, Kobkale trembled with fury. No less than half a dozen of his kinsfolk lay dead upon the grass, torn to pieces by wolf fang and cat claw or crushed by the coils of an immense snake weighing hundreds of pounds. That now-paralyzed serpent glared at the nominal leader of the Mundurucu out of unblinking eyes, wishing only to be allowed to wrap a single small coil around the squat body. But Samm had been as thoroughly immobilized as his four-legged friends. Frozen by the hastily scribed spell, he lay motionless on the bloodied lawn.

"Pox upon you!" Kobkale screamed, nearly insensible with rage. "Malisons and murder, blood and bone!" From the assembled hands of the inhuman pyramid, stubby fingers thrust forth at the anesthetized animals. "You're going to die, die, die!" Safe now, protected by his riven incantation, Kobkale hopped down from the crest of his willing but none too stable platform. The rest of the surviving Mundurucu followed close behind him.

Approaching the helpless Cezer, who if free to move could have killed the Mundurucu with a single blow of one massive paw, Kobkale stuck his face inches from that of the disabled lion. Yellow cat eyes glared murder back at the Clan leader.

"Do you know what we're going to do, cat? First we're going to cook and eat your gonads. Then your tongue, and then your eyes, and then your insides, one organ at a time. Only then, maybe, will we let you die." Straightening, he swept his short, thick arms in a wide, all-encompassing arc. "Then, just for the pleasure of it, we're going to lay waste every cat and dog in these miserable lands, so that there will be none and nothing left to remind us of the slaughter you have made here among our kinfolk." Stepping back, he turned to face the house of the wizard Susnam Evyndd.

"But first," he fumed softly, "we'll wipe this wretched dwelling and all it contains from the face of the earth, so that it and everything in it that stinks of that beggarly sorcerer are consigned to his soon-to-be-forgotten memory." Raising one hand, he was joined in the gesture by several of his colleagues.

At their chant and urging, a fist-size ball of flame appeared. Drawing back his hand, Kobkale flung his fingers in the direction of the cottage. Obediently, the fire followed the line of his throw, to land on the thatched roof that a human Mamakitty had been so recently engaged in repairing. The dry roofing ignited quickly. Within minutes, much of the cottage was engulfed in roaring flame.

A sudden realization made Oskar struggle harder than ever against his invisible bonds. Taj—Taj was still in the house!

The crackling horror was a delight to the Mundurucu, who clapped their hands and made disgusting comments about the sight as they danced in perverse celebration. Sick at heart, Oskar could only exchange a glance with Mamakitty. In her eyes he saw that she, too, had remembered.

With a splintering roar, the roof caved in, inciting a whoop of satisfaction from the hideous, cackling spectators. Their cries of delight ceased, however, as something was seen to rise from among the ashes. Oskar's lower wolf jaw fell as far as the evil enchantment that held him in place would allow, and even Kobkale was stupefied into silence.

Ascending from the center of the now completely engulfed house was a bird. It was not a canary. Nor was it a hawk, or even an eagle. It had wings of coruscating golden flame burnished with azure and shot through with crimson, a head from which projected long feathers that were tongues of orange incandescence, and eyes that burned with unnatural intelligence and perception. When it fully opened its wings, they overspread the house on either side.

"Firebird!" a terrified Kmotho cried.

His croak of warning was taken up by a dozen other inhuman throats. Unnerved, the Mundurucu looked to Kobkale for leadership. That cunning creature was, however, momentarily paralyzed by the unexpected sight before him. As he strove to consider how best to respond, the firebird that was Taj rose clear of the burning house, swept forward to perch on its still intact forepeak, opened its imposing, effulgent beak, and spat.

To Kobkale's left, the Hairy Kwodd burst into a ball of flame. Shrieking and waving flaming arms, the Mundurucu staggered madly about, finally collapsing onto the picket fence and setting it ablaze. A second Mundurucu was transformed into a flaming torch, and then another, and another. Oskar found that he could move his forelegs and tail. As more and more of the Mundurucu perished, the weaker became the immobilizing hex they had cast.

Retreating to the edge of the forest, Kobkale and his surviving kin gathered themselves for one last stand. But this time, when the most eminent among them raised his arms and began to intone a most horrific rune, even his hideous brethren shrank away from him in horror at the conjuration he was crooning.

Kobkale's desperate chanting had opened the gate into one kingdom of light the travelers had not visited—had not visited because it was as unknown as it was inaccessible, and as feared. No one would go there even if they could. It was a place not of ultimate evil but of ultimate indifference. And its denizens had no love for anything from anywhere else.

From out of the portal to the Kingdom of Black emerged bloated, lumpen shades of unadulterated gloom. They had no faces and, for that matter, no heads. Arms of flaccid blackness dragging the ground, they lurched slowly forward on legs of shadow that reflected neither color nor light.

From his flaming perch, Taj sang at them. Gouts of flame erupted in front of and around each of the figures. Like the light that fell from the sun, these individually hurled conflagrations were absorbed into the dark corpus of each interloper, sucked right up and away much as a sponge would do with water. For all the damage the exalted flame did to their intended targets, Taj might as well have been spewing birdseed.

With a wrench and a wheeze, Oskar felt himself break free of the last of the thaumaturgic restraints. Nearby, he saw that his friends had been similarly released from the pernicious enchantment. Teeth bared, he started toward the cowering knot of surviving Mundurucu—only to find his path blocked by one of the lumbering black shapes. It manifested no overt threat, carried no weapons, and raised no hands in anger. But the hackles rose on his back, and he halted. To step within the grasp of one of those tenebrous shapes, he sensed, would be to vanish forever from the realm of the living.

A streak of feline duskiness shot past him, heading straight for the nearest intruder from the Kingdom of Black. It was Mamakitty. "No!" he snarled at her. Either she didn't hear, or she didn't care. With a single spring, she was on the creature.

And then, just like that, she was gone.

Off to his right, Oskar heard Cocoa wail in dismay. Samm emitted a passionate hiss of despair. But from the congregated Mundurucu, there rose whoops of delight accompanied by a surge of revitalized, depraved laughter.

"Now then," growled a rejuvenated Kobkale, "as soon as this malign firebird has been reduced to a small, burned-out cinder, we will deal with the rest of you as I promised. Boiled cat and fried cat, cat filleted and buttered, cat loin with wolf-dog fritters. That'll be our supper, with strips of sautйed snake for a side dish, and firebird drumsticks for dessert." He started forward, taking care to use the odious dark shapes he had called forth for cover as he advanced.

Something made him pause and glance upward. A look of puzzlement crossed his face. One by one, he was joined by the rest of the Mundurucu. Tilting back his head and shading his eyes, Oskar found himself squinting in the same direction. There came a noise. First a noise, and then the screaming.

The crimson mountain that fell out of the dull gray sky was notable not so much for its size as for its unexpected familiarity. A startled Oskar recognized it immediately: there was no mistaking those enormous vermilion eyes, the supercilious rocky lips. And there, too, wonder of wonders, was Mamakitty, clinging to the edge of the upper lip, one arm wrapped tightly around a projecting spear of stone. With the other hand she was waving wildly at her friends. The warning was unnecessary: they had already begun to scatter.

Caught entirely unawares by the astonishing apparition, the stupefied Mundurucu failed to react fast enough. Plummeting down through the clouds, which tried but failed to get out of its way, the red-tinged mountain landed in their midst with a resounding boom that reminded Taj of a whole storm's worth of thunderbolts all rolled up together and set free at one go. Dust and debris filled the air as a sizable section of forest opposite the charred ruins of Susnam Evyndd's abode was instantly flattened.

Half the surviving Mundurucu died then and there. Shrieking as they scattered in every direction, the others were picked off one by one, sucked down an enormous and inescapable stone gullet. Humping about like a gigantic clod of motile clay, the red-tinged mountain slurped them up with lips of glistening gneiss, like a corpulent anteater making a leisurely meal of its tiny prey. Indiscriminate in its appetite and urged on by Mamakitty, it swallowed the bewildered, stumbling visitants from the Kingdom of Black as enthusiastically and effortlessly as it did the surviving Mundurucu.

"Yum! I was right," the Red Dagon rumbled. "Things of other colors do taste different than those that are red and orange!" From atop the busy upper lip, the voice of Mamakitty could be clearly heard.

"Like I said, fssst —I keep my promises!"

When the last of the Khaxan Mundurucu had been expunged from the earth, pancaked by the hungry Red Dagon or snatched screaming into its inscrutable maw, Mamakitty jumped down from her perch on the upper lip to land on what remained of Susnam Evyndd's badly abused lawn. Naturally, she landed on her feet. As Oskar and the others rushed forward, they could see her lips working as she whispered to the red-eyed, river-drinking mountain that had for all eternity occupied the border between the Kingdom of Red and the Kingdom of Orange. Before they could reach her, there was a mighty whooshing of displaced air and earth. When they opened their eyes again, rubbing dust from them, the Red Dagon was gone. But not the great raven cat who had arrived with it.

Bouncing with delight, Mamakitty's companions surrounded her, rubbing their sides against hers and making contact muzzle to muzzle. A jubilant Samm embraced her lovingly, and had to be reminded to ease off so that she could breathe. Flaming softly so as not to singe his friends, Taj fluttered down on great fiery wings from his perch at the front of the house. The massive supporting timber crashed inward moments later, exhaling a brief, transitory cloud of sparks.

"What happened to you?" Oskar stepped back from his old friend, who was unable to suppress a pantherish grin. "When you jumped that dark intruder and disappeared into it, I thought we had smelled the last of you for sure!"

Mamakitty's smile widened, showing teeth that were startlingly white in her ebon jaws. "There was no time to think. I remembered something Master Evyndd had once said—that in sorcery and magic, it's a black cat that commands the darkness, and not the other way round. That it is a magic that should be inherent and inherited within me. I had to find out. So I embraced the blackness, and to, I found it a comfortable enough place—though I wouldn't want to live there." She paused meaningfully. "There was nothing else but to try the thing."

Cezer's huge, heavy paw reached out to ruffle the fur on the back of her head. "We shouldn't be here if you hadn't, Mamakitty."

"What happened to you after you were swallowed up by the blackness?" Cocoa was plainly enthralled by her friend's experience.

The long muscles of Mamakitty's powerful back and shoulders were starting to unkink. "Though I found myself in a land where there was no light at all, I discovered almost immediately that I felt perfectly at home. You see, I had been trying hard to think of who, or what, might help us in our hour of need. I remembered a promise I had made, near the start of our quest to find the white light. A promise is a powerful thing." She eyed each of them in turn.

"Do you remember what the Red Dagon said when I swore that if it let us go free, one way or another, I would bring to its attention something that was not red or orange?"

Cocoa's eyes widened slightly. "It said to call out to it, and whatever kingdom of color we were residing in, it would come."

The black-furred head nodded. "But for it to respond, I had to be standing not in our world but in a kingdom of color. That's why I jumped that visitant from the Kingdom of Black. I didn't know if doing so would take me where I wanted to go. Fortunately, it worked."

Samm hissed in consternation. "If your ploy had failed, you could have been lost to us forever, or killed."

Her response took the form of a resigned shrug. "Better to be trapped in a kingdom where all black cats are ultimately welcome than to die at the hands of vermin like the Mundurucu."

Cocoa frowned. "I see how you were able to bring the Red Dagon to our aid, but how was it able to return to its home?"

Mamakitty turned to her, grateful to be able to talk again cat to cat. "By the same incomprehensible means it used to journey here from the borderland between the kingdoms of Red and Orange. How a mountain can make itself travel through space and time I do not know, any more than I understand how it can drink down the ever-flowing volume of an entire river without becoming saturated. I know only that, having tasted its fill of new colors, the Red Dagon went home." Her expression turned wistful. "I hope it will be happy now, with nothing to quaff again but red river."

"I think it will," Cezer rumbled contentedly. "It will always be able to taste the memory of other colors. Bitter colors, as the Mundurucu must have been, but that shouldn't matter to it. I don't imagine that the palate of a mountain is particularly cultivated."

After a while, fatigue took the place of exultation. Carrying water in their mouths, the animals were able to extinguish the small fires that flaming, fleeing Mundurucu had set around the house. Only one blaze, at the edge of the forest, threatened to get out of hand, and Taj dealt with that by setting an exceedingly precise backfire.

But they could do nothing for the house itself, for the dwelling that had been their home since before any of them could remember. The wooden part of it, together with all it contained, had burned to the ground. As for the portion that remained in the cavern beyond, the heat had reached into every nook and crevice once occupied. Nothing combustible had escaped the conflagration, including the wizard's study, his library, and much else of inestimable value. With its destruction, the memory of Susnam Evyndd would perish forever from the Gowdlands. His accumulated writings and lore, an incalculable wealth of arcane knowledge—all had been lost.

"Well, that's done, then, and nothing for us to do about it." Flopping down heavily onto the burned and bloodied lawn, Cezer stuck out his tongue and began to clean himself.

"Perhaps not quite entirely." Mamakitty was looking at Oskar. "Haven't you begun to wonder about your own recently transformed self, Oskar?"

His response reflected his confusion. "In what respect is the question asked?"

"Look at us." She gestured with a forepaw. "Samm is gifted with greater strength than ever, myself with the ability to dictate to the darkness. Taj has become the mythic firebird, able to command the flames. Cezer has become truly a king of beasts, and Cocoa the master of lean power." Yellow eyes peered searchingly into his own. "What about you, Oskar? What is your gift, beyond the ability to inspire a few trees in a far place? Wherein lies your newly given forte in this world?"

He shrugged diffidently. "I don't know. To be this wolf-creature, I suppose."

"That is a consequence of the magic, not a commanding of it." She continued to stare at him. "In my recalling and my rushing, I remembered something else Master Evyndd once said. Something about dogs, and what they truly mean to the house, and to the home."

Tongue lolling as he panted, he shook his head in bemusement. "I don't follow you, Mamakitty."

"I speak of that which is magically inherent in each of us, thanks to the wondrous ministrations of the Master Evyndd." She stepped to the side. "Go and lie in your favorite place, Oskar."

Wolf brows drew together. "You mean, on the stone stoop by the front door?" When she nodded, he shrugged a second time and loped off to comply. He did not wish to argue with her, and had nothing else to do anyway.

Pacing around an ever-tighter loop, he finally reached that mystic moment known only to settling dogs, whereupon he laid down, head to tail, and with a sigh of contentment closed his eyes. They blinked open not long thereafter, though, as a brightness filled them.

It came from all around him. No, he corrected himself. It came from within. From within him. Soft and warm it was, with a fragrance of old fireplaces and hot stoves, of running water splashing in a sink and food baking in an oven, of well-worn furniture and fresh linen. It was the essence not of house but of home—which, as those who are privy to such secrets know, are two entirely different things.

Behind him, within the ardent radiance that emanated from himself, the abode of Susnam Evyndd was restoring itself. Curtains and walls, carpets and floors, windows and collapsed chimneys, all became as they once had been, reborn from the depths of his dog soul and memory. When all was at last once again as it once had been, his jubilant companions padded and slithered and hopped over to rejoin him.

"I don't understand." Oskar was gazing in astonishment at the miraculous resurrection he had unaccountably wrought. "What happened? What did I do?"

"It's an enchantment that resides within your transformed self," Mamakitty told him. "I thought it might be so. Don't you understand, Oskar? It's a thing you keep safe within you at all times. I heard the Master say it often, always with sincerity and feeling. 'Home is where the dog is,' he used to say."

"So we have a home again. That's a good thing." Cocoa gazed in contented astonishment at the reborn dwelling.

"You all do," Taj agreed, "but what about me?"

Mamakitty considered the vigorously radiating firebird, at once new legend and old friend. "You do present a problem, friend Taj. I don't think your old cage would suit you, and I don't believe I could sleep comfortably within a house knowing that you were dozing above me on a wooden and flammable roof. Surely we can find you a nice, cozy, incombustible cave that connects to the main cavern in the rocks and exits separately to the outside."

The firebird nodded sagely. When it did, flecks of flame fell like shorn whiskers from the underside of its blazing beak. "That should do me well enough. Speaking of doing, what are we to do with ourselves, now that we have carried out the Master's wishes and restored color to the Gowdlands?"

"Time enough to decide such matters." Cezer yawned enormously, his great leonine jaws gaping wide. "I'm not concerned with the immediate future, since I intend to spend it sleeping and eating. And maybe doing other things long put off." He lifted an eyebrow in Cocoa's direction. For once, she did not respond with insult or sarcasm. Observing the eye contact and correctly interpreting its significance, a host of conflicting emotions rushed through Oskar. He fought down the choking sensation in his throat. Magic or no, some things were not destined to be. Love was one intangible even the strongest sorcery could not always put right.

"Odd as it may sound, I think Cezer is correct." Mamakitty inspected the renewed edifice approvingly. "We can't exactly go wandering into the nearest village in these bodies. Perhaps, with time and careful perusal of Master Evyndd's restored store of knowledge, we can learn how to switch more efficiently between our animal natures and our human selves." Tilting back her head, she began to yowl.

It was a striking ballad of joy and triumph that she sang, one famous among cats. Cezer and Cocoa joined in. So did Samm, hissing euphoniously, his metronomically weaving head keeping time to the music. Taj, of course, had no difficulty participating, individual bursts of fire bursting forth from his throat as he warbled sonorously, singing fireworks as well as harmony, a veritable symphony of light and sound unto himself.

It was only when Oskar joined in, throwing back his head and letting out a piercing, crockery-rattling howl, that the others hastily ceased their chanting. The wolf-dog had always been able to carry many things, but a tune was not among them.

In addition to matters of the heart, there are some things even great magic cannot fix.