men attempting to calm it.
'Easy, easy,' the rotund thing that must have been Blossom said, and somewhat surprisingly the beast quietened. 'There — ya see what I mean?'
'Bloody 'ells, you wasn't kiddin'. Where'dya find this fing?'
'Drakengrat Mountains. Came out o' nowhere an' got caught in the sweepnets o' the roob 'erders. Crippled five of 'em afore they managed to rope it. Me bro' didn't know what else to do so brought it to me.'
'Bloody 'ell, Blossom. You know what it is?'
'Not a clue. You?'
'I've never seen anything like it in my life.'
'You've never seen anything like it?'
'Never seen anything like it in my life.'
'Make a nice addition to your menagerie, eh? Fifty full silver an' it's yours.'
'You're 'aving a larf. Twenty.'
'Forty.'
The two men might never have seen anything like it, but Kali had. Seen and heard, once, and from a distance. And she would, in fact, be doing the man who was currently offering thirty full silver a very big favour by taking it off his hands. Slowhand, unfortunately, had left her nowhere near enough money to join in the bidding and that left her only one way of acquiring it. She debated some distraction to draw the two men away — even contemplated clobbering them both with a rusty horseshoe that lay on the muddy ground — but Blossom was clearly eager to sell the only sellable thing he had and the bartering was over before she knew it. Conveniently for her, part of the price was a tankard in the local tavern and, as the men departed wiping spit-slimed hands, she suddenly found that she had the now quiet junkyard to herself.
At least briefly. One second she could hear Flash's comatose wheezing and the next it seemed that she had somehow timeslipped back to the Great War and Scholten was again being blitzed by elemental bombs. The noise and the thudding made her pause for a moment, until she realised its cause. The tavern nearby — the one where Blossom had taken his punter to seal the deal — was the Knotted Noose, and the Knotted Noose was the home of the Hells' Bellies. Kali imagined the scene and cringed — the only tavern that sober people avoided bursting to life as customers entered its doors, its resident dance troupe dropping their pies and pounding gleefully to the stage to entertain the audience they never had. Great gods, she could hear the cannon-like snapping of their garters now…
The horror that was within the Knotted Noose would, however, work to her advantage, as Kali suspected that in the next few minutes she would be making rather a lot of noise of her own. Because breaking in a bamfcat was going to be far from easy.
A real live bamfcat, she thought. No one had ever got near one before, and whatever turn of events had led to this specimen being caught in the herders' nets was a fluke indeed. Bamfcats were found nowhere on the peninsula other than around the higher slopes of the Drakengrat Mountains, but the sheer incongruity of their presence there, together with their utter difference to the other indigenous species, had before now led her to wonder whether they were native to those mountains at all. Had someone or something brought them from elsewhere at some point in the past? Or had they, for some reason, migrated themselves? And if so, from where?
Wherever it was, they had evidently needed protection there. Approximately one and a half times the size of a normal horse, the bamfcat resembled such a beast in all but one very important respect — it was heavily armoured. It didn't wear armour, it was just the way it was built. Great plates of a glistening black shell-like material curved around its flanks, haunches, back and shoulders, and where the plates did not cover, on its legs and those parts of its body that needed flexibility, its hide was composed of a shiny, hard and knobbly substance that Kali could only equate to dried and bubbled tar. But as its defences went, that was not all. On the rear of its legs, all the way up the crest of its neck and down along its nose, the bamfcat grew sharp protrusions that were and were not quite horns, by the look of their slightly layered appearance retractable or extendable as a situation might demand. One thing was sure, it would win no beauty contests, despite its big green eyes.
'Easy, boy,' Kali said as she eased into the shed to undo the beast's tethers. 'Or should that be girl?'
There was a low, rattling rumble of indeterminate response. It would have to do as an answer because there was no way Kali was going to check. Slowly — very slowly — she eased it out of the tackroom into the yard, whispering in its ear, 'Tell you what, why don't I call you boygirl? And boygirl, guess what? We're going for a little ride…'
Her statement was a little premature she knew because, before she could ride anywhere, she had two practicalities to overcome. The first was that there was no way any ordinary saddle was going to fit this thing, but she solved that by plucking two from the tackroom wall, slinging one above and below and using both sets of straps to circle the bamfcat's girth before cutting the main parts of the lower saddle away. The second was a matter of height — it would take a ladder to climb on the bamfcat's back — but that solved itself when she realised that she already had a ladder — the bamfcat itself.
Kali took a deep breath, muttered more soothing words to the beast and then ran up the horns on its legs. Throwing herself onto its back, she immediately grabbed another horn on its neck — the closest thing she had to reins.
As she'd suspected, it was the wisest thing she could do. All the accoutrements necessary for a ride might have been in place, but there was no telling that to the bamfcat. The sensation of being mounted obviously a novel one to the beast, for a second it stood there simply stunned, and then decided that it didn't like the development at all. And then all hells broke loose.
The bamfcat ceased its rattling rumble and instead roared a roar that drowned out the thudding of the Hells' Bellies, beginning to leap around the junkyard and spinning round and round in an attempt to throw its unwanted passenger from its back. Kali could do nothing but hang on for dear life, her hands clenched around the bamfcat's neck horn, thighs jammed against its flanks. At first she didn't find it too much of a challenge — the places she'd been, she was used to clinging to things — but what concerned her was how long she could maintain her grip — and how long, if at all, it would be before she succeeded in calming the beast. The bamfcat certainly didn't make things easy, deciding, when Kali refused to budge, that if it couldn't dislodge her with leaps and bounds, then it would do so with the aid of whatever lay around the junkyard, first impacting with and demolishing the tackroom and then having a go at the stables, where at that very moment Flash was just coming round. The emaciated nag sprang up, wheezing with terror, and began to run around the junkyard in hopeless circles, searching for an exit, before collapsing again. Kali, meanwhile, did the best impression of a circus performer she could, avoiding the bamfcat's protestations by dodging anything that threatened to crush her, throwing her legs over one side of the beast then another, at one point slipping under and over its girth, and at another lying flat on her back without a grip to pass beneath an overhanging beam that would otherwise have decapitated her. It seemed, for what felt like an eternity, that the bamfcat was never going to surrender its independence, but then, unexpectedly, it began to slow. A few more feeble bucks and leaps followed, together with a half-hearted brush against the collapsed ruins of the tackroom walls, but finally the beast was reduced to a few spasms that were little more than afterthought, and then to a begrudging standstill.
The thing stank overpoweringly of the sweat that oozed thickly from between its plates, but Kali knew that after what she'd just endured she was hardly in a state to win any floral competitions herself. This appeared to be no bad thing. The bamfcat turned its head towards her, eyes dolefully taking in the rider that had beaten it and, with a long and disgusting snort, sucked in the scent of its new owner.
'Good boygirl,' Kali said, patting it heavily. She smiled as the bamfcat rattle-rumbled, because this time it sounded more like a purr. 'Good, good boygirl.'
It was time to go. Kali manoeuvred the bamfcat towards the passage out of the yard but then reined it back. On the other side of the gate she could hear the voices of two patrolling guards, who, despite the continuing thudding of the Bellies, were bemoaning the fact that it was too quiet in the backstreets, and how they'd each give coin for a little piece of the action. Especially if they could lay their eyes — and other parts of their anatomy — on the girl who was meant to have scarpered from the cathedral. She was a tasty little piece by all accounts. Running around in her drawers, too. A bit of all right. Worth a stuffing.
Really.
Be careful what you wish for, boys, Kali thought. She smiled and patted the bamfcat soothingly, prompting a
