"No Bane?" asked Gregor.
"No Bane. He has retreated toward his own land. The others will find him and regroup their army," said Ares.
It took Gregor a moment to recognize the mouse they placed on the next raft. He looked smaller, more vulnerable, dead. "Is that Cartesian?"
"He died defending the nursery," said Ares. "But the pups are safe."
Gregor felt sadness well up in him. He hadn't known the mouse well, but they had traveled together. Witnessed the nibblers dying at the volcano. Played hide-and-seek with Boots and the mouse pups. He went over and patted the mouse's soft fur before they lowered his body into the water. Ripred had said, "Everyone of significance to you still breathes." By that he must have meant Gregor's family and Luxa. But there were many others who Gregor cared about. Who knew if they were alive or dead?
The rest of the traveling party arrived. Lizzie, Hazard, and Boots were blindfolded and being carried by guards. "No point in giving them nightmares," said Ripred. Gregor thought of the grisly halls and was glad of the precaution.
Ares was best suited to carrying Ripred, so Gregor, his sisters, and Temp joined Vikus on his big gray bat, Euripedes. Solovet was beside them on her bat, Ajax.
"Greetings, Pincess," Gregor heard Boots say behind him. He turned around and saw her peeking at Nike from under her blindfold.
"Greetings, Pincess," said Nike, lifting her black-and-white-striped wings.'
"We are both Pincesses," Boots said with a laugh.
Gregor pulled the blindfold down over her eyes. "Stay in there, you." He turned to Nike. "Good to see you. You coming with us?"
"I am carrying some of the code team," said Nike. Reflex and Heronian climbed on her back. "Daedalus and Min remain here."
"Isn't their job done now?" asked Gregor.
"There's still plenty of information to decipher," Ripred said. "And the code could unexpectedly change."
As they lifted off, Gregor realized there were so many friends he hadn't said good-bye to. Mareth, Dulcet, Nerissa, Aurora -- well, forget Aurora, she was locked in the dungeon with Luxa, and probably cursing him, too. Maybe it was just as well. Even that one good-bye with Howard had drained him. And there were still more painful ones in the hours ahead. He thought his friends would understand.
They flew down the tunnel and out over the Waterway. It twinkled with the flames of the torches on the rafts of the dead. About fifty soldiers on fliers joined them, and there were several mice traveling as well. "Are the mice coming to fight?" Gregor asked Vikus.
"Not these. They have a special purpose. The rats are still receiving information from their spies in the area. We have chosen four lines of communication to sabotage. We will disable a rat who transmits the code, replace it with a nibbler, and feed false information to the rats," said Vikus. Gregor saw a group of soldiers and a nibbler peel off and disappear into the dark.
"There goes the first team now."
"What sort of information will you give the rats?" Gregor asked.
"Lies. We will tell them that our losses are higher than expected, that no force can be assembled to follow them, that you have died due to injuries inflicted by the Bane," said Vikus. "Since the rats do not know we have broken the Code of Claw, they will take these things as truth."
"That's why Ripred wanted to keep it a secret," said Gregor.
"It is the most powerful weapon we have. The difference between losing and winning the war," said Vikus. "The rats will believe they are safe for the moment. But soon we will attack them on the Plain of Tartarus, where they now gather."
"A surprise attack," said Gregor.
"When they are asleep, with no plan for counterattack," said Vikus. "It is our best hope. Regalia still teeters on the brink of destruction. The diggers have created paths to our arena and possibly elsewhere. We destroyed the ones we could find but who knows how many exist? If the Bane lives and the rats attack again, I do not think we can hold the city."
By the time they broke for a rest at the mouth of a tunnel, their party was somewhat diminished. All of the nibbler code transmitters and their guards had left them. The soldiers had stopped at a landing a few miles back. Solovet had not been on the ground more than five minutes when she announced she was going off, too.
"Where?" asked Gregor.
"The spinners are still conflicted about whom they choose to side with. They require my personal guarantee of their safety when the war ends," said Solovet.
"I will rejoin you in two days' time on the Plain of Tartarus. If you battle before then, do not forget that your weakness is your left side."
And then she took off on Ajax with Gregor's old bodyguards, Horatio and Marcus, flanking her on their bats. It was just like her to up and go with nothing more than a combat tip.
It turned out they were making camp for a while. Ripred and Vikus had their heads together, poring over maps. Lizzie, Reflex, and Heronian were busy decoding messages that came in on bats. Nike, Ares, and the two remaining guards and their bats took turns patrolling the area. Boots, Temp, and Hazard were playing one of their games in Crawler.
Gregor was left to his own devices. He went deeper into the tunnel and practiced with his sword and dagger. His back was still sore, but he didn't think he would even notice it in battle. It felt good to use his muscles. When he was warmed up, he added in his echolocation, running through the tunnel in darkness and then striking points on the walls and ceiling. It was very freeing not to be constantly worried about his batteries running out.
After about a half hour he was good and loose. He decided to try to get Ripred to spar with him for a while. Maybe he could use a break from those maps. But when Gregor reached the mouth of the tunnel, no one was doing anything. All of the activity had stopped.
"What's going on?" asked Gregor.
"We just intercepted a message. The rats know of Solo vet's trip to the spinners. They mean to ambush and kill her," said Ripred.
"How do they know?" Gregor asked. "Did they spot us?"
"No. One of the spinners must have leaked the information. Perhaps a lowly soldier, perhaps the queen herself. Their loyalties are very divided," said Vikus. He looked calm, but his skin had a strange gray cast.
"We'll go after her. Ares and me. We can overtake them. We've got, like, fifty soldiers with us and--" Gregor began.
"No, boy. We can't," said Ripred.
"But she's got next to zero backup. You're just letting her fly to her death?" said Gregor.
"Yes. We are. We must," said Vikus, as if trying to convince himself.
"Okay, I don't know what's going on. I mean, I don't even like Solovet, but I'm not going to just sit here and let her die!" said Gregor.
"You have to, Gregor!" Lizzie said. "Don't you see? If we rescue her they'll know we've broken the code."
"What?" asked Gregor.
"The only way we could have read the message is if we had broken the code. If they find that out, there will be no surprise attack, because they will instantly change their rendezvous point. All of the lies we are planting will be suspect. And they will issue a new code immediately that may take weeks to break," said Ripred.
"But you found out about the rats attacking from the river and you acted on that," said Gregor.
"That was simple to explain. They were so close; we had only to send some scouts up the river and pretend to discover them. This is entirely different," said Ripred.
"She would not want us to try to save her," Vikus said hoarsely. "Not at this price."
"But... maybe we could ... maybe we could make it look like we were just going after her, anyway," Gregor suggested. "That wouldn't be suspicious."
"Wouldn't it? If she had wanted to travel with an army she would have traveled with an army. One showing up at the eleventh hour will point directly to the breaking of the Code of Claw," said Ripred.
Gregor was still not quite ready to accept this. "There must be something we can do."
"There is," Ripred said. "We can sit h
ere and wait."
***
CHAPTER 22
So Gregor sat and waited as the seconds went by. Not with the urgent ticks he had heard so often since the war began, but with slow deliberate ones that had long silences between them.
The code team continued decrypting messages. They couldn't afford to be idle no matter what the circumstances. Boots, who didn't really know what was going on, fell asleep on a pile of blankets. Temp and Hazard resumed their discussion in whispers. But Gregor, Ripred, and Vikus seemed suspended in time as they waited for word of the ambush.
"Maybe they missed them," thought Gregor. "Or there was a fight and Solovet, Marcus, and Horatio were able to hold their own and escape." Why not? They were on bats and were excellent soldiers. But whenever Gregor sneaked a glance at Vikus's ashen face, he felt that this would not be the case. He wished he hadn't said that thing about not liking Solovet. He didn't, though. How could he after her involvement with the plague and her throwing him in the dungeon, and Ripred's warning that she would never let his family go? In a way if she died it would probably be easier for Ripred to get his family home. Of course, if what -they had said about Luxa being in power after the war was true, Gregor was sure she would send his family home, no matter what her grandmother said. Wouldn't she? He was glad he still had Ripred's promise as a backup.
Solovet. No, he could not pretend he liked her. Still, there had been moments along the way when she had treated him decently enough. When he'd landed in Regalia she'd been the first person to reach out and touch him, taking his hands in a gesture of welcome that had felt genuine. She had protected him by insisting he be trained, and now he knew that if she hadn't he would be dead. And she'd given him her own dagger. He fingered the hilt guiltily, thinking of how she was under attack without it. At least he had tried to go after her, despite his feelings for her. He hoped whoever broke the news to Luxa would mention that. Maybe she wouldn't hate him quite so much.
After a couple of hours, Heronian said quietly, "We have received word. All three humans and their fliers were killed in the ambush."
Ripred ran a paw over the diagonal scar on his face. "Well, I have this to remember her by."
So Solovet had given Ripred that scar. When? During a war between the humans and the rats? During a sparring match they'd had for fun? Gregor thought about how Solovet had left all kinds of scars, on rats, on her family, on the Underlanders' frail attempts at peace.
Ripred turned to Vikus. "That's the way she always said she wanted to go."
"Fighting." Vikus's lips formed the word but no sound came out.
"Yes, fighting. Not on some sickbed but with her sword in her hand," said Ripred.
Gregor tried to think of something consoling to say to Vikus, but he was never good at this stuff. Howard was, Luxa was, but all of the words he came up with seemed trite and empty. It was even more difficult because while he knew Vikus must have loved Solovet -- they'd probably been married for, like, forty years or something -- he also knew they had fought a lot. Their ideas on how to handle problems were totally different: Solovet calling for force, Vikus for working things out. When he discovered his wife's role in the plague, Vikus had been crushed. But he must have loved her, because he was utterly stricken now.
Hazard came over and kneeled next to Vikus, slipping his hand into his grandfather's. Vikus gave it a squeeze but didn't say anything.
"Sorry about your grandma, Hazard," Gregor said. He could manage that. "You okay?"
"Yes. In truth, I do not know how to feel. Solovet rarely spoke to me. I don't think she cared for me. Perhaps it was because she and my father hated each other so much," said Hazard with his usual frankness.
The words were simple and without malice, but their effect on Vikus was immediate and devastating. Solovet and Hamnet. All of the awful family history between his wife and his son -- the tragedy at the Garden of Hesperides, Hamnet's mad flight from Regalia, the anger that passed between them in the jungle, losing Hamnet not once but twice.
Vikus made a strange sound in his throat. His hand went toward his cheek, then fell to his side. "Vikus? You all right there?" Ripred asked. Vikus tried to answer but the words that came out of his mouth were thick and garbled. "Doctor!" Ripred called at once. "Get a doctor in here!".
Ripred continued to talk to Vikus, pushing his nose right up into his face, urging him to stay calm. In less than a minute a doctor had flown in, taken one look at Vikus, dumped something down his throat, and had him loaded onto a bat.
Hazard hung on the doctor's sleeve. "What's wrong with my grandfather?"
"He is having an attack. We must get him back to Regalia," said the doctor.
"Is he going to be okay?" asked Gregor. His voice sounded almost as young as Hazard's. Half of Vikus's face had gone slack and Gregor realized he couldn't move it. It was scary to see him like that. Gregor didn't want Vikus to leave him. He didn't want to lose the one Underlander whom he knew had always had his best interest at heart.
"We will do all we can," said the doctor, and the bat took off.
"A stroke," said Ripred. "I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner. This last year has been murder on him."
"Was it what I said? About my father?" Hazard asked worriedly.
"Goodness, no. It would have happened with or without your words. Now you go back and, I don't know, see if you can't help with the code, okay?" said Ripred. Hazard obeyed. When he was out of earshot, Ripred whispered to Gregor, "Probably not the best time to have brought up all that business with Hamnet. But he would have been thinking about it, anyway."
"People recover from strokes, though. Right?" Gregor asked.
"Some do. With time," said Ripred. He didn't seem to want to continue the conversation.
The cave seemed very vacant without Solovet and Vikus. "Now what?" said Gregor.
"Now I need a human who can command. Mareth's back in Regalia...." said Ripred. He sent for Perdita. When she arrived, he got right to the point. "Solovet's dead. Vikus is disabled. You just became the acting head of your army."
Perdita looked shocked and then conflicted. "There are others with more seniority."
"I don't want them. I want you," said Ripred. "I need someone we can all trust." Ripred began to go over the battle plan with Perdita, leaving Gregor to deal with the double tragedy on his own. First Solovet, then Vikus. Although Vikus might recover. If he didn't...Gregor's thoughts turned to Luxa again. He slipped the photo of them in the museum from his pocket and tried to think of happier times, but it was no good. He kept visualizing her face at the moment he had told them to lock her in the dungeon. He couldn't stand that being the last thing between them. He got a strip of code and asked Lizzie for a marker. She was writing with a quill and ink. "The markers all dried out," she said. She dug a red one out of her backpack. "You might get a few more letters out of this one. If you get the tip wet."
Gregor spat in the cap of the marker, closed it, and let it sit a minute. He would have to make his note short. He thought about writing it in the Code of Claw, but if the rats intercepted it, they would know it was broken. He settled on using the marks from the Tree of Transmission. That would make it seem a little more private somehow. After a couple of minutes he opened the marker and tested it. The results were faint but legible. He wrote:
LUXA
/ |/ / | | | /. | / |.|/ | / | . | | | . / / / . | | | . / | | //. | | | .
"Go ahead," he thought. "Write it. You'll be dead before she even reads it. And anyway, it's true."
/. | / | / / | | . | | | / | / / / /.
GREGOR
The last few words were too hard to read. Gregor nicked his index finger on his sword and wrote over them with a thin, smeary line of blood. There.
It wasn't much of a letter. He felt stingy using just thirteen words. But even if he'd had boxes of markers, what more would he have said? Maybe explained better why one of them had to live. So both of them could. So one of them would remember the other
as they went through life. That it wasn't going to be him, so it had to be her. And he had to be able to think of her growing up and doing things and someday being happy if he was going to be brave enough for his last moments with the Bane. Luxa was smart. She'd figure out what he meant. He hoped.
Gregor rolled up the message and gave it to Lizzie to deliver to Luxa in Regalia.
"Why don't you give it to her yourself?" asked Lizzie.
"Because she's really mad at me right now," said Gregor. "She'll read it, though, if she thinks it's from you. Besides, you'll probably go back before I do." Lizzie agreed to take it. Gregor wondered if Lizzie would hate him, too, when she found out he'd been lying to her all along about the prophecy.
Gregor announced he was going to practice some more and went back into the tunnel. Then he just lay down on the stone floor with his head propped against a rock. He didn't feel like sword fighting, so he turned off his flashlight and clicked. His echolocation ability was improving by leaps and bounds. He could see so much -- the jagged edges of the ceiling, individual pebbles on the floor, even small details in the rough surface of the walls. He experimented using different sounds -- coughing, humming, whistling. In a quiet moment, he realized that even the sound of his own breathing could send images back to him. He felt comforted, because that meant as long as he was alive he would be able to see.
His heart rate slowed and he dozed, slipping in and out of sleep, alternating between dreams and images of the tunnel. Fear crept into his dreams. He was lying helplessly on his back, when a rat appeared over him, then another, then he was surrounded by their faces. Gregor shook his head to awaken only to find he hadn't truly been asleep. The rats were still looming over him, and they were real.
Without even attempting to rise, Gregor yanked his sword from his belt and sliced the air over his body to protect it. The rats fell back, giving him a chance to spring to his feet. By this time his dagger was out and he was about to start killing, when the voice reached his brain: "Stop, Overlander!"