Kingdoms of Light

to come back out the way they went in. In that event, you must be ready for them.'

Ratha nodded, one hand falling to caress the red metal of her sword. She stood close to Ruut as the morggunt rose into the air. Circling to gain altitude, it was visible for several minutes before, at its rider's urging, it straightened out and disappeared over the rim of the gorge, heading northwest.

Turning, Ruut considered the moonbow. Falling water was clearly visible through the wide bands of diffuse color. Reaching out, he waved one waxen hand through the edge. It came away damp, without penetrating to unimaginable realms beyond.

Disgusted, he looked away. 'We can make a camp in the shelter of the trees, and there is plenty here for the morggunts to eat.' He tapped the crossbow now slung against his back. 'If they show themselves here again, we will take out their legs.'

Ratha nodded agreement. 'The giant first, since we don't know which one is the familiar. Aim for his ankles. The others we will take in turn.'

'And if they don't come back out, we will go in after them.' Ruut was feeling more and more confident. 'From the Mundurucu, Quoll will acquire for us the means of following.' Striking out suddenly with one hand, he snatched a salamander from its resting place among the rocks, popped it into his mouth, and chewed noisily, spitting out small bones one after another.

His kin and companion watched enviously. 'That reminds me: I'm hungry, too.'

'A tidbit.' Plucking the small, now bloodless skull from between his lips, Ruut cast it absently aside as he glanced back over his shoulder. 'As Quoll said, the Mundurucu will want only one or two to question before they dispose of them. The rest will be ours, to drink at our leisure.'

Contemplating the vision, Ratha felt better. As viewed through her red-stained thoughts, the anticipation was delicious.

SEVEN

There was much to see in the place where their swift journey through the moonbow had deposited them, and much to think about, but what struck Oskar immediately after the light and color was the heat. Compared to the damp coolness at the base of the Shalouan Falls, the air was as brutally hot as it was dry. Around them in all directions stretched a gravel plain dotted with plants the likes of which he had never seen before. Some were twisted together like entwined ropes, while others grew straight up toward the sky, with thorny branches that grew out at right angles to the trunk. A third group of large growths resembled the cracks that formed on the surfaces of thinly frozen ponds, while the flowers that bloomed on them in spite of the temperature sprouted their own shade leaves.

Not only was it hot, he realized, but in this place at least, natural color had returned to all their surroundings. Gradually he became convinced that they were no longer in the world, heretofore the only one he and his companions had ever known, but in another. As the initial shock of their unexpected transposition began to wear off, he remembered their murderous pursuers. Whirling about, he sought the pale, malign faces of the black-caped morggunt riders and the pinched, feral smirk of Quoll. Neither was present to leer back at him. There were only his friends and traveling companions, standing dumbstruck as himself beneath a scorching scarlet sky.

Color. Wherever they were, whatever the name of this fiery place, it had color. Colors such as he had never been able to see out of dog eyes. So this was what humans meant when they spoke of the color of something. To one who had lived knowing only the limited hues available to his canine kind and then the grayness of the world as cursed by the Mundurucu, it was more than a revelation. It was a whole new kind of being, like tasting a dozen novel food flavors all at once. The hex of the Mundurucu had not reached here, or had never taken hold. Glorious it was to experience a world saturated with bright hues, so profound as to be almost blinding. Wonderful also it was to realize that, however great their power, the Mundurucu were not omnipotent. There was only one thing wrong.

Magnificent as the coloration was, it was all variations of the same color.

Everything—sky, ground, plants, the line of flat-backed beetles clustering around fallen fruit, the distant hills, the clouds scudding turgidly overhead—was suffused with redness. The beetles were pink and cerise; the rotting melon-size fruit into which they were burrowing, bright-skinned as fresh cherries; the distant hills, frozen in permanent sunset even though the sun was still high overhead and it was far from eventide. Carmine blossoms sprouted from maroon tree limbs, while through the sky a gaggle of shocking pink grouse groused a raucous route toward the eastern horizon. Even his friends had acquired a distinctive roseate cast.

'You look like you've been in an accident,' he told Mamakitty. Naturally darker of color than any of them, her skin appeared as if viewed through blood-stained glasses.

'You should see yourself,' she shot back testily. 'All red and pink streaks. And pull in your tongue. I know it's hot, but remember that we don't have to pant anymore. We get to sweat instead.'

'I prefer panting—it is a far more elegant way of dealing with elevated body temperature.' Cezer was sipping from his water bag. In the absence of commonplace mountain and forest streams, the water they carried with them had suddenly assumed real importance.

Of them all, Samm, with his mottled, patterned skin, had taken on the most interesting appearance. 'You look like you were designed instead of born,' Taj commented. The songster was fortunate in having a relatively uniform skin tone. In this place it was no more striking than a pale reddish tan.

'Where are we?' Kneeling, the tip of her scabbard scraping the hard ground, Cocoa fought down the urge to go and chase the beetles. Instead, she picked up a handful of red-tinged pebbles. They filled the delicate bowl of her palm with more than gentle warmth, and she quickly cast them aside. 'Not anywhere near the Eusebian Gorge, I'll wager.'

'Nor anywhere known.' Mamakitty studied their surroundings, searching for signs of life. 'I believe we have gone into the rainbow.'

'It being formed of moisture, I would've thought the inside of a rainbow would be cooler than this.' Reaching up to caress his forehead, Samm marveled silently at the unfamiliar perspiration that beaded his skin.

'We're inside color, not moisture.' Oskar squinted at the sky, his bushy eyebrows affording him some protection from the unrelenting glare. 'We fell into the near end, which is red, and were carried by a current of red all the way up and over and down the other side—where I am guessing we fell out. Which I suppose explains the restricted variation in the coloration of our surroundings.'

'Is this enough to take back with us, do you think?' Cocoa tried to grasp a handful of red air, with no success.

Mamakitty shook her head. 'Even if we knew how to confine some of it, I don't see how it could be sufficient. The Mundurucu hex stole all color from our world, so we must somehow get all of it back. How we are to do that I still haven't figured out.'

Silence greeted her observation until Oskar avowed, 'I once saw Master Evyndd break up ordinary light into rainbows with a special piece of glass he called a prism. If ordinary white light contains all colors, then that is what we must bring back to our world.'

To his dismay, Cezer found himself agreeing with the other man. 'You make good sense, snot-nose.' He gestured with one hand. 'Trouble is, we are entirely in the red here. I see no ordinary, or white, light in this place.'

'Then we must search until we find it,' Mamakitty declared firmly. 'And along the way, we must look for a means to capture and carry some of it back with us after we have found it, in the event our water bags do not serve.' She kicked at the hardscrabble ground with one foot. An awkward place for a cat to go to the bathroom—but not, she reminded herself, a human. 'It is fortunate only I emptied my bag, or else we should be in truly desperate circumstances.'

'Maybe,' Cocoa wondered hesitantly, 'we should leave this place and look farther afield in our own world. Maybe we should try harder to acquire color from the whole rainbow that spans the gorge.'

'A fine notion.' Eager to return home, Cezer was in ready agreement. 'Taj, you're the one who led the way in here. Now you can show us the way back.'