rolling of its neck. If it was a piece of the action the guards wanted, then a piece of the action they would get.
'Yah!' she shouted, at the same time ramming her heels into its flanks and pushing its neckhorn forwards. With a snort, the bamfcat responded, galloping forwards and through the junkyard gate.
Through, because there was no need for Kali to bother opening it. Or rather, the bamfcat didn't need her to — because as it galloped forwards it demolished the entranceway in much the same way it had demolished the yard, ramming the gates with its armoured head and ripping them clean away from their hinges. As a result, twin sheets of wood arced through the air of the alleyway, flipping and spinning into the path of the patrolling guards.
'Wha — ? Oh, bloody huuurk!' one of them cried as half the gate smacked him in the face, flooring him, while the other, ducking to avoid the second half, swiftly drew his sword and advanced. But then he saw the bamfcat, and stopped. The bamfcat saw him, too, and roared into his face so strongly that his hair streamed back from his scalp. It was difficult to describe the colours the guard's face went, and the only change in colour about his person that could be pinpointed with any accuracy was that of his trousers. He slopped away.
Kali galloped the bamfcat down the alley and out, emerging onto Anclas Way, Scholten's main thoroughfare to its eastern gate. It, too, remained busy despite the night hour — was thronged, in fact, with revellers, tradesmen and, most of all, pilgrims returning from their visits to the cathedral. But as the bamfcat galloped forth, skidding into a turn on its wet cobbles, the area did its best to empty itself as fast as it could.
Kali ignored the screams and cries of alarm, the bodies falling through windows, the collapsed stalls and the rolling trinkets and fruit, and the bamfcat ignored the various objects thrown by some braver members of the crowd that bounced off its armour. Both of them ignored — completely — the cries of a number of startled guards that they should immediately halt.
A moment later, scattering those same guards in their path like ninepins, they exited the closing city gate.
Free at last of Scholten, Kali reined the bamfcat forwards. Towards a horizon that was tinged white and red from the glow of ice and volcanoes. Towards the mountains that formed the ridge of the world. Towards Merrit Moon.
Chapter Ten
It took Kali two days to reach the World's Ridge Mountains, but even without rest and at the sustained and full gallop to which she subjected her seemingly inexhaustible mount, the journey should have taken longer. The bamfcat, it seemed, was something more than just an armoured horse.
She couldn't put her finger on how it happened, where it happened or even precisely when it happened, but now and again in their journey, the world about them seemed suddenly to blur. This was not simple acceleration on the bamfcat's part — had it been she would have at least felt greater wind resistance — but a rather disorientating case of simply being in one place one second, another the next, as if unbeknownst to herself she had actually nodded off for part of the ride. The biggest hint that something unusual was happening was when they reached the town of Fayence, where, after such a blur, the startled faces of the locals were tantamount to what they might have been had mount and rider appeared right in front of their noses, out of thin air. Odd, that, because as far as Kali knew that was precisely what they'd just done.
Those faces were nothing, though, compared to the looks that followed when, during the brief hiatus, the bamfcat decided to feed. One moment the worgle was happily rolling along the main street in front of them, and the next the rodent was snapped up by a lizard-like tongue the length of two men, the furry ball hooting in panic as it was sucked in and devoured in a single swallow. A dozen of its startled brethren flared like toothbrushes and bounced away, trying to avoid its fate, but the bamfcat's lengthy tongue slipped into every nook and cranny and snapped them up in rapid succession, Fayence's worgle population suffering a devastating blow in seconds.
Kali didn't question how the bamfcat did what it did or how it fuelled itself, however, because it got her where she needed to be and faster than she would have dreamt possible. But with Munch having had such a head start, they still had a lot of ground to make up. Thankfully, the journey so far had been the easy part, and the hard part was yet to come — and with some luck it would slow the bastard down. Kali looked up as they began to near the mountains, and felt the same sense of awe and insignificance that she always did when she came within riding distance of the range. Yes, if anything was going to slow Munch down, the mountains would.
Accessible only at the southern tip of the Sardenne Forest, the World's Ridge Mountains loomed massively ahead and above of her, a forbidding wall of rock that in places seemed to reach higher than the sky. Not just rock, either — the lower peaks of the range were dotted with live volcanic craters that belched lava onto their tortuous slopes, while the upper peaks were sheer faces of ice, glistening white in stark contrast to the orangey-reds of the fires below. Where the two met, and clashed, great steaming geysers blasted upwards, periodically disintegrating the ice and causing it and the rock behind to crumble and fall, the avalanches creating a roar that seemed to be that of the mountains themselves. No one knew what lay beyond the World's Ridge, and if anyone had ever attempted to traverse it, they had not returned. Like the Sardenne Forest, it was a barrier to the inhabitants of the peninsula, but in this case one that daunted even Kali, and she wondered, on occasion, whether there was anything to be made of the fact that the barrier was composed of earth, air, fire and water — the four elements themselves.
They reached the lower slopes, and the bamfcat slowed as it began to climb. It sniffed at her and then at the air, apparently picking up a human scent, and so Kali allowed the animal to lead her, negotiating gorges, precarious trails and natural rock bridges over bubbling streams and billowing pools, hot from the mountains' insides.
At least for part of the way. During the past few days, the bamfcat, apart from being inexhaustible, had manifested an absolute absence of reluctance to do anything it was asked, but after almost a day and a half climbing beyond the foothills there came a point which even the bamfcat would not go further. As she watched the beast's nostrils flaring, Kali suspected why. Wafted down to them from the higher slopes on the occasional blast of bitter, whistling wind, came a stench that could only belong to whatever denizens called these mountains home. The stench was utterly feral, bestial, so strong it was almost sickening. Of all the sights, sounds and smells that they had encountered on their journey, Kali didn't know why this, of all things, should unnerve the bamfcat, but perhaps the inhabitants it sensed were its racial enemy, or perhaps even its natural predator in the place from where it had originally come. She wondered whether the beast that had become her new companion hailed originally not from the Drakengrats but from these mountains — or even beyond.
But that was a question for another time. For now it didn't really matter because the animal had served her well — had got her here when no other beast possibly could — and she had no right to push it any further against its will, even if such an act would be physically possible.
Kali found a suitable spot and dismounted, stripped the bamfcat of its saddle and then slapped the beast on its flanks.
It didn't go anywhere.
'What?' Kali said. 'Don't tell me you're going to wait for me?'
The bamfcat flipped out its tongue, perhaps searching in vain for worgles, then hung its head, saying nothing.
'You're not going to be here when I get back, and we both know it. So go.'
The bamfcat snorted and lifted its head to stare dolefully at her. There was a certain insanity its eyes that she found disturbingly familiar — and quite comforting.
'Okay, fine!' Kali relented. 'Stay there — but something further up has obviously given you the spooks so don't try to follow me, okay?'
Kali left the saddle but flung the saddlebags over her shoulder. She started to climb, hesitated, then turned and patted the beast three times on its neck. 'I'll… see you when I get back,' she said.
She continued on alone, the foothills behind her, the true slopes of the World's Ridge rising precipitously before her. Snow covered the ground at her feet in increasingly larger and thicker patches, but here and there pools and rivulets of lava broke through the rocks and stained the whiteness, making it seem as if the jagged landscape was slowly haemorrhaging. She climbed higher and, despite the lava, the temperature dropped considerably, and while she had been too intent on getting here to feel the cold until now, Kali was forced to dig into Blossom's
