Alan Foster - Kingdoms of Light

A streak of feline duskiness shot past him, heading straight for the nearest intruder from the Kingdom of Black. It was Mamakitty. "No!" he snarled at her. Either she didn't hear, or she didn't care. With a single spring, she was on the creature.

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.

"Yum! I was right," the Red Dagon rumbled. "Things of other colors do taste different than those that are red and orange!" From atop the busy upper lip, the voice of Mamakitty could be clearly heard.

"Like I said, fssst —I keep my promises!"

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 to think. I remembered something Master Evyndd had once said—that in sorcery and magic, it's a black cat that commands the darkness, and not the other way round. That it is a magic that should be inherent and inherited within me. I had to find out. So I embraced the blackness, and to, I found it a comfortable enough place—though I wouldn't want to live there." She paused meaningfully. "There was nothing else but to try the thing."

Cezer's huge, heavy paw reached out to ruffle the fur on the back of her head. "We shouldn't be here if you hadn't, Mamakitty."

"What happened to you after you were swallowed up by the blackness?" Cocoa was plainly enthralled by her friend's experience.

The long muscles of Mamakitty's powerful back and shoulders were starting to unkink. "Though I found myself in a land where there was no light at all, I discovered almost immediately that I felt perfectly at home. You see, I had been trying hard to think of who, or what, might help us in our hour of need. I remembered a promise I had made, near the start of our quest to find the white light. A promise is a powerful thing." She eyed each of them in turn.

"Do you remember what the Red Dagon said when I swore that if it let us go free, one way or another, I would bring to its attention something that was not red or orange?"

Cocoa's eyes widened slightly. "It said to call out to it, and whatever kingdom of color we were residing in, it would come."

The black-furred head nodded. "But for it to respond, I had to be standing not in our world but in a kingdom of color. That's why I jumped that visitant from the Kingdom of Black. I didn't know if doing so would take me where I wanted to go. Fortunately, it worked."

Samm hissed in consternation. "If your ploy had failed, you could have been lost to us forever, or killed."

Her response took the form of a resigned shrug. "Better to be trapped in a kingdom where all black cats are ultimately welcome than to die at the hands of vermin like the Mundurucu."

Cocoa frowned. "I see how you were able to bring the Red Dagon to our aid, but how was it able to return to its home?"

Mamakitty turned to her, grateful to be able to talk again cat to cat. "By the same incomprehensible means it used to journey here from the borderland between the kingdoms of Red and Orange. How a mountain can make itself travel through space and time I do not know, any more than I understand how it can drink down the ever-flowing volume of an entire river without becoming saturated. I know only that, having tasted its fill of new colors, the Red Dagon went home." Her expression turned wistful. "I hope it will be happy now, with nothing to quaff again but red river."

"I think it will," Cezer rumbled contentedly. "It will always be able to taste the memory of other colors. Bitter colors, as the Mundurucu must have been, but that shouldn't matter to it. I don't imagine that the palate of a mountain is particularly cultivated."

After a while, fatigue took the place of exultation. Carrying water in their mouths, the animals were able to extinguish the small fires that flaming, fleeing Mundurucu had set around the house. Only one blaze, at the edge of the forest, threatened to get out of hand, and Taj dealt with that by setting an exceedingly precise backfire.