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.
