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.
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.
'Like I said,
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
