Alan Foster - Kingdoms of Light

"It won't happen again," Ratha stuttered.

"It certainly won't." Raising both hands, Kobkale uttered a string of suggestive phrases incomprehensible to prisoners and guards alike. Then, apparently satisfied, he turned and threw himself with ferocious energy into the churning pile of Mundurucu that comprised the Khaxan. Following the arrival of the last of the two-and-twenty, there was a violent implosion that momentarily sucked the startled onlookers forward, a loud phut that sounded like a diabolic entity casually breaking wind, whereupon the Mundurucu vanished. Every one of them. Disappeared, down to the last unkempt hair, exfoliating horn, deeply stained fang, and bilious eye.

Uncertain what to do next, the handful of guards eyed one another in confusion. Then Ratha screamed; a ghastly, quavering sound whose timbre trembled at the very edge of human audibility. She was echoed by her mate Ruut, and finally, though he fought frenziedly against it, by the defiant-to-the-last Quoll.

Very little there was capable of horrifying the fighters of the Totumakk Horde, but what unfolded before their eyes on that open platform near the topmost floors of Castle Burgoylod caused even the most hardened among them to recoil in terror.

Writhing and twisting, emaciated black worms began to emerge from the convulsing bodies of the three prisoners. Wracked with pain, they collapsed to the hard stone, every muscle in their bodies twitching and spasming, causing them to jerk and flop about like gaffed fish. Too lost in agony even to scream, they lurched and quivered like that for some time, until finally, mercifully, they lay still. Not black worms but the axons, the actual nerves, had erupted from their bodies. Now these lay in stagnant, lifeless coils about the motionless corpses of three former servants of the Khaxan Mundurucu.

Even in death, the red eyes of a certain maniacal marsupial seemed to burn with hatred for everything living that was not a quoll.

Cezer and Cocoa were locked deep in conversation. Taj was in the kitchen trying to catalog what edibles remained in the pantry. Samm was busy helping Mamakitty repair a few bare spots on the roof. As for Oskar, he was sitting in his favorite place, dining on bread and a meat roll on the front steps of the house, when an ascending whine pricked his ears. Rising, he cast a puzzled glance in all directions. At the same time he became aware that 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.