The wind buffeted her writhing, spitting forms, forcing a few of her to slink low upon the frozen mud of the street. And still the fury within her burgeoned. Her serrated scales running the length of her spines were almost vertical; her tails whipped and reared like seaworms awaiting a fast-descending corpse. Her jaws stretched wide to lock the hinges of her canines, and that horrible wind whipped into the cavern of her mouths, cold and lifeless but hungry all the same. She slashed the ground with her claws. She leapt into the air in berserk rage, only to be flung sideways by the gusts storming down the street.
Murder filled her mind, a word that stood alone, that floated and surged up and down and slid to one side only to swim back to the centre of her thoughts. She could taste that word, its sweet roundness, it slithering tail of sound at the end of its utterance that stung like tart berries in a goat’s belly. Fires licked around it, smoke curled from it, blackening the air. It was a word with a thousand faces and a thousand expressions displaying but the faintest variations of universal dismay.
She wanted to eat that word. Take it by the neck and hold on until all life left it. She wanted to leap upon it after a vicious rush low over the ground. She wanted to eye it venomously, unblinkingly, from nearby cover. She wanted it to stalk her dreams.
And in the midst of this mental tantrum of desire, the cruel door buckled, indifference torn away until its very bones of flat wood and banded bronze quivered as if with ague, and then it swung open.
Witch Hurl converged upon that misshapen eruption of light, and the figure silhouetted within it.
Murder!
Puny bellowed and staggered back. Scaly creatures clung to him, upon his chest, fighting to close jaws on his throat; upon his arms where they writhed like tentacles; another attempting to burrow into his crotch. Blood spurted. He batted at the things, tore them away, flung them in all directions.
His brothers roared. The patrons screamed.
Feloovil, standing behind the bar, hissed a vile curse under her breath.
Nine lizard cats and not one of them much bigger than a house-cat, or a scrawny, worm-ridden barn mouser. But this did nothing to mitigate their viciousness.
Puny clambered back onto his feet. Tiny and the others began swinging their huge weapons. Blades crashed through chairs, tables. Shrieks ended in frothy gurgles as those weapons struck hapless locals. Severed skull-pates knotted with hair spun across the room; limbs flopped, bounced and twitched atop tables or on the muddy and now bloody floor. The lizard cats evaded every blow, spinning, leaping, darting, clawing at everyone.
Feloovil beheld utter carnage from her place behind the bar. She saw two of the brothers struggling to ready a three-handed sword, only to wither to an exploding tabletop, staggering apart, their faces and necks studded with splinters. A cat leapt to wrap itself around the side of one of the brother’s heads, tearing the ear off with its jaws, while the other brother stumbled over a chair that collapsed under him, and as he thumped on the floor, four cats closed in. His scream became a spray.
Then, as if of one mind, the lizard cats spied Feloovil, and all nine suddenly rushed her, leaping over the counter. Their multiple impacts made her stagger back. She screamed as talons raked through her tunic, bit deep into her flesh. Clothes disintegrating under the assault, she was stripped naked in a welter of blood.
Until one cat, seeking to sink its fangs into one of her breasts, instead found savage teeth clamping about its throat. A moment later another cat howled as another mouth, this one from the other breast, caught hold of one of his forelimbs and bit down hard enough to break bones.
All at once, more mouths appeared upon Feloovil’s ample form: upon her shoulders; upon her low-slung belly; her thighs. Another split open on her forehead. Each one stretched wide, bearing teeth sharp as knife-points.
“You damned witch!” Feloovil shrieked from countless mouths. “Get away from me! I am your goddess, you stupid fool!”
In the room before Feloovil and her snarling or yowling attackers, where only a few huddled figures still twitched amidst the wreckage, and only three of the Chanter brothers stood with heaving chests, with weapons draining blood and gore, with lacerations upon their bodies, faces turned, eyes fixed upon the battle on the other side of the bar.
A dead cat, its throat crushed and leaking, hung from Feloovil’s left breast. The cat trapped by the other breast’s mouth, had clawed that swelling of soft flesh into ragged ribbons, and still the mouth held on, masticating to grind through the creature’s forelimb.
The other cats withdrew, crowded on the blood-smeared counter-top, and then from their throats came a wavering, shrill chorus of voices. “She’s mine! You promised! Your daughter is mine! Her blood! Her everything!”
“Never!” Feloovil screamed.
Its ruined limb chewed through, the cat upon her right breast fell away, running three sets of claws down Feloovil’s belly on its way to the floor. She glanced down and stamped on its head, making a crushed-egg sound.
The remaining cats all flinched, barring the dead one hanging from the other breast.
Feloovil’s many mouths all grinned most evilly. “I got rid of you once, Hurl, and I’ll do it again! I swear it!”
“Not you, whore! Her father did that!”
A voice then spoke from the doorway. “And it seems I shall have to do so again.”
The seven remaining lizard-cats all spun round. “Whuffal Caraline Ganaggs! Vile Elder! Leave me be!”
The grey-haired man with the finely trimmed beard, moustache and eyebrows slowly drew off his fox-fur hat. “I warned you, Witch. Now look what you’ve done. Nearly everyone is dead.”
“Not my fault! Blame the Tarthenal!”
“Lies!” bellowed Tiny Chanter. “We was defending ourselves!”
Whuffine studied them. “Begone,” he said. “I have already slain three of your siblings and if necessary, I will do away with the rest of you. It’s this nostalgia,” he added, with an apologetic shrug. “It’s not good me getting nostalgic, you see. Not good at all.”
Growling, Tiny glared about, and then said, “Tiny don’t do getting killed. Let’s go.”
“What about Relish?” asked Midge.
Tiny pointed at Feloovil, “Send her up to the keep after us.”
Feloovil’s mouths twisted into sneers. “Just be glad she ain’t no virgin,” those mouths all said. “Hurl wants herself a sacrifice.”
“No more sacrifices,” said Whuffine, leaning on his walking stick. “It’s my talents with stone what’s done us in here, and so it’s up to me to clean all this up.”
“Then kill that Fangatooth!” shrieked Feloovil.
“No need,” the comber replied. “He’s already dead.”
“Then kill the one who killed him! Away with all sorcerers! I will not again be bound to a witch or warlock!”
Whuffine sighed. “We’ll see. A word or two might be enough to send them on their way. I don’t like violence. Makes me nostalgic. Makes me remember burning continents, burning skies, burning seas, mountains of the dead and all that.” He pointed at the D’ivers. “Witch Hurl, best semble now.”
The lizard cats drew together, blurred and then, in a slithering of spicy vapours, transformed into a scrawny hag of a woman. “Aagh!” she cried, “look at me! My beauty, gone!”
Feloovil cackled with many of her ghastly mouths, while the others said, “You ain’t worth nothing anymore, Witch. You’re banished! Go on, out into the storm! And never come back!”
“Else I kill you for certain this time,” added Whuffine.
“I want my keep!”
“No,” said Whuffine.
“I hate you all!” Hurl hissed, rushing for the door. “Murder will have to wait. Now it’s the other sweet word! Now it’s hate. Hate hate hate hate! This isn’t over, oh no it isn’t-”