The five mages spun around all as one. Er was sporting a hideous grin. He executed a mocking bow in Anar's direction, and instantly a deluge of magical projectiles of various sizes and colors descended upon the fugitive prince. Anar dodged, avoiding the most primitive of them, and disintegrated the rest with quick waves of his hands. His palms began to ache.
Anar snatched his sword and hurled it into the air. The blade hung over his head, shimmering crimson with sunlight. Anar could not stand storing energy for his spells in his own body, and the sword was perfect for this purpose – a kind of semi-sentient golden spindle.
Let's test your wits, thought Anar, and went on to the next act of the show. At his command, a cloud of dry earth soared into the air. Taking refuge in this dusty pit, Anar produced a small mirror from his pocket and waited. Not ten seconds had passed when a matte pink bundle of energy stuck out from the wall of earth like a mole's snout. It stuck its head out and immediately ducked back from a swift kick of counter-magic. There was a pained scream, followed by an explosion.
"Idiots, indeed!" Anar observed.
"Cease! He's got a mirror!" Er roared at his subordinates.
In the next second, adroitly slinking between the clumps of earth, a stream of darkness zipped towards Anar's mirror. The Alae barely had time to fling the amulet away – the moment the stream caught the mirror, both disappeared, leaving behind a cloudlet of glitter.
The wall was no longer necessary, and Anar hardly hesitated before hurling it at the mages. Without giving them a moment to recover, he folded his hands together like a little box, whispered the magic words, and opened them again as if releasing a large butterfly. The lookout mage was torn to pieces, literally smeared on the surface of his own defensive sphere. The untimely deceased's neighbor fared no better than the sentry...
Another of his companions was met with a slightly kinder fate. Upon finding a kink in his defense, Anar opened a small portal over the poor bastard's head just at the moment when the other began to raise his hands, finishing a spell of his own. Weighed down by the magic of the Curtain, the portal immediately slammed shut, slicing the magician's hands off cleanly. The victim howled wildly and doubled over, pressing the stumps to his chest, then shifted into cat form and took to his heels. Anar winced compassionately.
In contrast, Er proved fully deserving of his title of Amialis' best mage. Straining and grunting, he swung his arm in a wide arc, and Anar was horrified to find that all his protective shells slid off him. He didn't even have time to figure out how it happened. Fortunately, his sword immediately called up a wave of brown fog, temporarily preventing the enemy from directing spells at him. Under this shoddy cover, Anar ran to the side and began to weave a new protective sphere. Remembering the recent lessons, the mages were in no hurry to attack.
Meanwhile, some bizarre things were happening behind them. The "marmalade" began to bubble, a vermiform appendage swelling from it. It grew larger, and sank lower and lower. Then it touched the ground, let out a hiss and became shrouded in a cloud of steam. For a moment it lay, pulsing rhythmically, hanging from the ring like a monstrous inflamed appendix, and then began to rapidly turn upwards. Its surface grew taut, forming spots all over. At the top, Anar could see the outlines of two dark disks. Eyes? he thought.
Swinging from side to side, the freshly molded creature suddenly threw its entire mass at one of the mages, entombing him in its fiery belly. The poor wretch didn't stand a chance...
Reinforcements arrived for Er's team. The mages stopped short at a respectful distance – either they holding a mei pause or unsure of whom to attack. Or maybe they just didn't know what to make of the creepy blistering slug.
"Don't just stand there like a bunch of stiffs! That thing is much more dangerous than I am! If you don't destroy it, it'll obliterate half of Rual!" Anar vowed grimly.
In truth, he was no less dumbfounded than they were. After all, standing before him was ar'shant'taash! The mythical monster from his favorite book had somehow thrust itself out of the realm of fantasy and into reality! Gnats flashed brightly and fell like scarlet sparks at taash's... feet? Tentacles? Tail spikes? Now it looked like a translucent caterpillar, lifting itself up on its tail in the midst of a fire lily, whose long, narrow petals licked the ground like burning tongues, scorching the grass and melting stones.
"Don't listen to him! You have the queen's orders!" Er yelled, struggling to make himself heard over the roar of the flames.
Anar threw his hands forward – a powerful gust of wind hit Er in the gut like a battering ram, sending him flying toward taash. The sorcerer's protective sphere turned bright red, blinked and fell away. Gritting his teeth, Anar clenched his fist, turning his enemy's neck vertebrae into whitish dust.
Taash didn't pay the fussing feline sorcerers any mind. It was undergoing an entrancing metamorphosis. New segments kept appearing on its body; its sides were all squirming and shaking, as if an entire fumbling brood of larvae was hidden inside. Then, with a soft hiss, the shell burst. Writhing in a stringy snake dance, taash proceeded to sprout paws – eight graceful, deadly limbs. Agile and powerful. Dark at the base, toward the tips they became dazzling amber needles.
The two mages finally determined their mutual goal. Leaping forward at taash, they rained a waterfall of sharp ice crystals down on it. The monster's flesh grew turbid, in some places even covered with a dark crust, but in the next moment taash shook itself, opened wide its oval maw and breathed such blistering heat upon the mages that their flesh immediately charred and turned grey, with ears and tails burning right off. The most awful, shameful death – the biggest nightmare of any Rualite – was to be buried without the main symbols of their Cat's Essence...
The rest of the sorcerers were huddling together, pronouncing some spell in unison. But taash did not let them finish. Swinging its paws sharply, the tips of its amber claws broke off with a crack and darted towards the cats. There was no salvation: one, two, three mages burst into flames like rag dolls. There was the stench of scorched fur. New ice projectiles flew at taash, but it seemed not to notice them, continuing to hurl tiny blobs of fire and turning its enemies into statues of compressed ash. Gusts of wind wrenched grey flakes from them like shreds of hay from a hay stack...
Forgetting about Anar, the sorcerers had to retreat to the cover of the nearest colonnade. For reasons unknown, taash did not pursue them.
Anar knew that in the next few minutes, perhaps even sooner, the mages would recover and destroy taash collectively. He mustn't miss his chance. He gathered his strength and prepared to go all out. He shifted his hind legs, choosing the best position from which to spring. A tense silence reigned. The singed tamei branches cracked quietly; the singed mages – those that were still alive – groaned. Anar had the bizarre impression that he could hear his own ears turning. He pushed off the ground mightily, shot over the bush and ran. Time dragged on mercilessly, as if Anar had been hit by the Viscous Air spell. It seemed like an eternity passed between the time one paw lifted off the ground and another touched down...
Suddenly taash came to life. Lightning-quick, he slid towards Anar, and upon catching up with him, let out a loud, low, vibrating sound. The glade shuddered, something came crashing down, and the corpse of the nearest mage scattered into ashes. Anar halted so suddenly, for a moment his hind paws were ahead of his front ones. He skidded to the right, and dug his claws into the sod with all his might. Taash loomed over him, the furnace of its mouth slightly opened, enormous and terrifyingly calm. But Anar, hypnotized by the rainbow of flickering flames, couldn't move an inch. Amidst the raging, roaring fire, he seemed to glimpse the face of an old dark-skinned man, grinning slyly and winking. Anar had seen that face before, in the same place he saw taash – on an illustration in his book. The old man – a teacher of the book's protagonists – was kidnapped from Agadar Academy by "evil glowworms" and ultimately rescued from their lair by ar'shant'taash...
Anar blinked, and the vision passed. Shaking off the stupor, he leaped back from taash, who again raised its tentacles threateningly. Anar began to slowly retreat to the side, crossing his paws – tense like coiled springs – and never taking his squinting eyes off his enemy. Taash stayed still.
Suddenly Anar was struck in the back by lightning. Sent tumbling head over heels by the jolt, he used his momentum to roll to the right, past taash. Glancing back, saw that it had launched more of the same fearsome projectiles. Only they weren't aimed at Anar. One tongue of fire crashed into a new strand of lightning sent at Anar, and another scorched the tail of the mage who'd launched it.
Not waiting around to further test his fate or wonder what he'd done to deserve this sudden stroke of fortune, Anar darted towards the entrance to the Catacombs. He was so close... when suddenly some unfathomable force pressed him to the ground with weight of a gravestone.
Dazed and dumbfounded, with a desperate last-ditch effort Anar shifted and got to his feet, clambering up the grooves in the relief of a nearby column. His eyes darted all around, then stopped on the Heretics' Tower. The black colossus seemed to be getting closer, hanging over Anar as if a giant magnifying lens had manifested in the air between them. Anar glanced at the upper section, examining the crooked walls, indented with deep furrows. The top of the tower sparkled in the light of the Eyes like a phial of dark glass. Slightly further down, on the snow-white ring of a balcony, statues of heretics writhed in eternal torment. With wounds instead of claws, their ears and eyes emitted a faint bloody glow.
Anar suddenly noticed that one of the sculptures wasn't deformed in any way. It... she flung her eyes open – eyes of toxic green, burning with fury.
"Amialis..." Anar gasped, plunging his claws into the column behind him in his impotent rage.
He couldn't use sorcery. He simply had nothing to work with, no substance with which to weave a spell. Obeying Amialis' charms, the streams of "raw" magic dissolved in the air – which always gently engulfed his body – suddenly rushed away, splitting off to either side. Anar whispered the usual magical incantations, but nothing happened. He felt as if he were striking and striking steel to flint, trying to light a candle in a room without air. He needed another strategy.
Anar mentally called upon his rucksack. A short crimson wand immediately appeared in his fingers. The wand didn't need to draw energy from external sources; it was already brimming with it. Anar had spent plenty of time "preserving" his best spells into various objects, thus saving them for a rainy day. He activated the wand... but this too was no use. Instead of fiery tongues, the stupid stick only conjured up a cloudlet of pink fog.
"How the dog are you doing this..." hissed Anar.
Amialis sneered malevolently. She was getting ready to unleash another spell – the magical energy she'd called up hovered about the former queen like glowing ghosts. She threw her hand forward and an explosion thundered behind Anar. A blue flash lit up the surrounding area, and taash roared again, only this time its roar sounded distant and somehow cracked, more like a dying yawl. The temperature dropped sharply; Anar's shoulder grew covered with frost.
He looked at his mother again – her back arched, she was clinging to a low golden parapet. Her lips were moving, whispering something. Her figure below the waist was obscured by the darkness. Further behind Amialis, something was stirring. It could have simply been her tail, but to Anar it suddenly seemed like his mother was a marionette in a children's puppet theater, hanging from the finger of some gigantic black hand. No, not simply hanging, but joined with it as one. This monstrous handler's juices nourished her, imparted her with a power that downright radiated from every fiber of her figure, contorted in its quest for blood...
With a sudden, convulsive movement, Amialis stood up straight, her bewildered eyes darting from side to side. She took one step back... and disappeared. Just gone. Instantly. Completely. It was as if the black puppeteer had decided to stop the show and withdrew his hand, certainly not stopping to ask his puppet's opinion on the matter.
Amialis' magic disappeared with her. Having been "spared" unexpectedly, Anar cautiously loosened his grip on the column. He limped over to the entrance to the Catacombs, then turned. The glade where he had left taash and the mages was hidden under a thick cap of icy fog. Above it, over the black edge of the forest shone Alasais' Eyes – perfectly round and struck-through by the bare tops of two tall trees, creating the illusion of pupils. It was a good omen – a memento from his superstitious tribe.
***
Aniallu approached one of the columns and turned its surface into a mirror. She examined herself fastidiously from the tips of her ears to that of her tail. Finding no flaws, she smiled contentedly at her reflection, situated herself next to her packed rucksack, and opened a book while waiting for Anar.
As she suspected, the wait would be long. She was finishing up the last pages of The Music of Leaves by the time Anar emerged from the darkness. He looked disheveled and bewildered.
"What happened? Are you OK?" asked Alu, jumping to her feet.
"Yeah. I feel great. Incredible! Fantastic!" Anar informed her; he sat down on the floor and licked his paw anxiously. "She tried to kill me!"
"She? Amialis? What happened?"
"Nothing. Everything's all right now," Anar panted, taking on bipedal form. "My mother and my aunt really didn't want to let me go. And there were... priests... mages and... and a monstrous fiery beast from my book! From the same book where I read about the nguu."
"What about Kad? Where is she?" Aniallu recalled.
"At the height of bliss," Anar scowled.
"He's... dead?"
"No! He's now the personal slave of Queen Alara. Why didn't you tell me you'd talked to her?"
"Because I didn't. I've never even met her. How did she know I was here?! Tell me everything," she asked.
And Anar told all: about his conversation with Queen Alara, about the slave, about his escape from home. When he got to ar'shant'taash, a wide grin spread over Aniallu's face.
"What book did you read about him in?"
Instead of answering, Anar got the book out, opened it and handed it to the tal sianae. Alu's grin grew even wider.
"This isn't a book."
"What is it then?" Anar went around to look over her shoulder at the pages. Had they gone blank again? But no – the lines were in place.
"It's a diary," Alu turned to face him, but Anar only raised his eyes questioningly. "It's a kind of notebook where you write down your impressions of the day. What happened and how you felt about it at the time."
"Something on the order of The Walls of Life of our rulers," Anar concluded. "But they're hidden away... deep in the Forbidden Catacombs. But this diary of yours... it's stupid! Trusting your secrets to paper!"
"That's why the letters hide inside the pages. And no one but the owner can make them come out."
"But they do for me, and I don't even try."
"Of course. It's your diary!" Aniallu laughed, shoving the notebook into the stunned Anar's hands. "Your diary from life before Rual. Yes, yes, the main character is you! But we won't discuss your past feats now; we've got to get out of here. I'm not exactly in the mood to meet Amialis..."
"Then let's go!" Anar commanded.
Aniallu grabbed her rucksack briskly.
She lit a small yellow flame in a nook above her head and the two Alae left, waving goodbye to Kad's statue. It was the first time Anar saw it with the covering removed. It was Alu – with a predatory Rual nose, elongated eyes, and ears twice as big as in real life.