"No one will find us," said Ares. "Sleep if you can."
Although Gregor didn't think he would sleep with his mind so full, he stretched out, anyway. But he must have still been really tired because the next thing he knew, Ares was waking him. They were back on the cliff overlooking the jungle where they had said good-bye to their friends a couple of days ago. The trip must have taken six or seven hours. Ares was beat.
"I must sleep," said the bat. "But it will not be for long."
Ares went right out while Gregor kept watch. He cleaned the water bottles and filled them at the spring. Put on his new shoes and laced them up. Practiced making cuts in the air with Sandwich's sword. What a weapon! It was almost as if he had only to think of a motion and the sword was already there. At first he gave the sword all of the credit. Then he realized he had to give himself some credit as well. Although he was in no danger at the moment, the rager sensation was humming quietly deep inside him. He stopped practicing and it turned off. He started practicing and it came back to life. Could it be that he was finally getting a small amount of control over it? The idea gave him confidence but it was tempered by the memories of past failures. Still, if he could learn to turn that rager switch on and off ... that would be amazing.
Ares awoke after a couple of hours. He caught a fish that they ate quickly. They both drank their fill at the spring.
"Ready?" asked Gregor. He tried to feel as impervious as the knight back in the Cloisters. . "Yes," said Ares. "I am ready for whatever lies ahead. Shall we go back to the Queen?" This is what the previous prophecy had called the volcano that had been the death of the nibblers. It was the last place they had seen both the mice and their rat captors.
"Yeah, let's start there," said Gregor, taking his place on Ares. Ares retraced their path back to the volcano, flying through the tunnels still covered in deep layers of ash. When they came out at the Queen, she was quiet. The mice and the little bat Thalia, whom Ares had laid to rest in the pit where the mice had died, had all been buried under the lava flow. There was no trace of them at all.
It didn't take Ares long to hone in on a destination. He jetted across the large cavern and into a long, low tunnel. Gregor's ears began to catch sounds as well. Screams, shrieks, metal against stone. The air thickened with dust.
Gregor drew his sword, wanting to be prepared for what awaited him. But as they burst out of the tunnel, he gasped and almost lost his grip on his weapon.
Nothing in his experience had prepared him for the sight of a battle between the humans and the rats.
Chapter 4
Ares had blasted straight into the war zone. Gregor's senses were assaulted by what lay before him, beneath him, and all around him.
They were in one of the Firelands' enormous caverns. The battleground was brighter than Gregor had expected because the walls were studded with burning torches held in globs of something. Clay, maybe? He saw an Underlander woman toss a burned-out torch to the ground and replace it with a new one.
Despite the extra light, it was still difficult to see because the army of rats had churned the volcanic dust on the floor into a choking cloud that rose to the ceiling. Bats swirled around Gregor, carrying their human bonds. Most of the humans had drawn swords. Something obscured the faces of the people and the bats. A person flew by and a packet hit Gregor on the chest. "Don you this!" he thought he heard them shout, but he wasn't sure because the cavern was filled with a din of voices. Gregor unrolled the packet and found two face masks, one for him and one for Ares. That's what everybody was wearing. He quickly positioned the bat mask on Ares and slipped his own over his mouth and nose. The mask was stuffy, but using it sure beat inhaling that junk in the air — and it cut down on the reek of blood.
Blood seemed to be everywhere. Dripping off of people, staining bats' fur, pouring out of rat bodies on the ground. It dawned on Gregor that the main goal of each side was to relieve the other of its blood, thereby eliminating it. For a moment, he felt sickened; then he remembered why he was here.
"Do you see Luxa?" he asked Ares.
"No!" replied the bat.
It was next to impossible to find anyone in this mess. It wasn't just the masks that made it difficult. Where they weren't bloodstained, the rats, bats, and humans were coated in dust, making everyone largely unrecognizable. He could fly around for hours looking for Luxa and still not find her. Then his thoughts turned to the Bane. Even in the dust he might be able to see that monstrous figure. But he could not spot any rat that was larger than average.
Gregor was just going to have to keep an eye out and hope for the best. In the meantime, he didn't exactly know how to join in the battle. Should he report to someone? Was there some plan being executed? Because if there was, he couldn't see it. The whole thing just looked like some big free-for-all.
"What do we do?" Gregor said. "Can we jump in anywhere?"
"Anywhere," said Ares.
But even now, even after all he had been through and witnessed, something in Gregor balked at the idea of simply going down and running his sword through a rat. His ambivalence was interfering with his ability to connect with his rager side. He concentrated hard for a second to establish his place in all of this chaos. The reason he must kill the rats, the reason they must die had to do with ... had to do with ... the gasping mice in the pit and his mother lying in the hospital and Boots and those baby mice in the nursery — and Luxa, who must be, had to be somewhere out in this mayhem. It had to do with what had happened, and would happen, not only to him but to those who were not warriors, if these rats were not stopped.
"Down there! By the right wall!" cried Ares.
Gregor could see a woman trying unsuccessfully to rise from the ground. Blood poured from a gash in her leg. A bat hovered over her, slashing at an oncoming rat with its claws.
The buzzing began in Gregor's veins. "Go," he said.
They had never flown in a battle together, Gregor and Ares. The one real battle Gregor had fought in had been with the ants in the jungle. At that time, Ares had been struggling to survive the plague in the hospital in Regalia. But they had trained for hours and hours in the arena and had been in enough tight spots together to know they could count on each other completely.
Ares dove for the charging rat, tipping sideways to allow Gregor the closest possible range. The rat was leaping for the injured woman just as Gregor's sword made contact. His blade severed one of the rat's ears. The rat turned on him with a ferocious hiss.
"That got its attention," said Gregor, as Ares looped back for another attack.
A look of shock crossed the rat's face as it recognized them. Even in this mess, it would be hard to overlook a bat as imposing as Ares with an Overlander rider. "It's the warrior! The warrior!" the rat screamed.