The Fathomless Fire by Thomas Wharton

twitching. It was clear he was about to reply with heated words, when suddenly the door flew open. Everyone turned to look at the new arrival, a short, stout man with immense sideburns, a walking stick under one arm. He stamped his feet on the mat and rubbed his pudgy hands together.
    “Cold as a gravedigger’s backside this night, boys,” he announced to the room. “Nearly froze helping the wife furl the bed-sheets.”
    “Thanks for the breaking news, Gilly Sprat,” Kate shouted. “Now shut the door with yourself on this side of it.”
    The man nodded eagerly, turned and gave a shrill whistle. As he was pulling the door closed, a dog came loping in after him.
    Only very large dogs can lope. This was a very large dog, Rowen saw first. Then she saw that the dog had caught sight of Riddle. And Riddle had seen the dog.
    From there things went badly, fast.
    The dog made straight for the cat, but then Riddle was not there and the dog was under Rowen’s chair, barking and snapping at her heels, but that wasn’t the worst of it, because something that hadn’t been in the room a moment before was high up in a corner by the fireplace, something like a very large, scaly bat with outspread wings, shrieking and hissing. And now people were yelling and scrambling over each other to get out of that suddenly unpopular corner, and glasses were shattering and crockery smashing, and Rowen was knocked out of her chair by the dog, and the table went over too, and as she was picking herself up out of a puddle of cream she saw that the bat-thing was gone and the dog was whimpering with terror and scrambling backwards across the floor, because now there was a black horse in the middle of the rapidly emptying room, snorting gouts of red fire from its mouth and nostrils and pawing at the air with its hooves.
    She had to do something.
    The next thing she knew she was standing in front of the frantic, mad-eyed horse, a hot wind in her face, speaking to it in as calm a voice as she could muster through her own fear.
    “It’s all right, Riddle, it’s all right…”
    The horse’s huge eyes rolled about in terror then seemed to see her, focus on her. Parts of its body began to bob and flicker, like shadows cast by a flame wavering in a gust of wind. Then the horse was gone, or it
was
only bobbing shadows of people and things cast by the fluttering candles along the walls. A disembodied tongue of fire hung in the air a moment, then went out suddenly with a
pop
.
    There was a brief hush, in which Rowen could hear her own panting breath.
    People began to pick themselves up off the floor and each other. Kate’s round head rose slowly from behind the counter like the moon, and nearly as pale. The dog and its master were one quivering huddled thing by the door.
    And here was Riddle, a tawny cat again, sitting quietly at Rowen’s side as if he’d never been anywhere else. He licked one of his paws, in a rather unconvincing attempt to look feline. It didn’t help, given that he still had a horse’s ears. After a moment he seemed to realize this. With a blurry flicker, the proper cat’s ears took their place.
    He might have trampled me
, Rowen thought with a shudder, as if only now could she let herself feel the terror of what had just happened.
But he didn’t. He listened
.
    Then she thought,
Grandfather
. She turned, seeking him out in the jumble of bodies and overturned furniture, and saw him picking himself up off the floor, a grimace of pain on his face.
    “Grandfather!”
    “I’m fine, Rowen,” he said, but she heard the strain in his voice and wondered how bad a fall he had taken.
    “Didn’t I tell the lot of you?” croaked Seamus, climbing unsteadily out from under a table. “Didn’t I say mind now, the Deep is vomiting up its evil on our shingle, but you all told me I was cracked, you did…”
    “I’ll crack you all right if you don’t hush your gob,” Kate warned him, patting down her apron with shaky hands as she came